Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

Bietti, Lucas M.; Tilston, Ottilie; Bangerter, Adrian

doi:10.31219/osf.io/4an6t

Cited by 27 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 120 publications

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“…However, stories are universal and ubiquitous in human life now and on the timescale of evolution. Anthropological work with hunter-gatherer communities links storytelling to reproductive success and group cooperation [8,9]: the ability to share warnings of danger, explain routes to resources, and exchange social information, in places and times beyond one's immediate experience, clearly would have enhanced survival outcomes. In modern society, people spend on average 20% of their awake time watching television or reading [10], and billions of dollars per year are poured into cinematic and novelistic pursuits, reflecting the high motivation of people across the globe to consume stories for pleasure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What can narratives tell us about the neural bases of human memory?

Lee

Bellana

Chen

2020

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

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Narratives are increasingly used to study naturalistic human memory and its brain mechanisms. Narratives-audiovisual movies, spoken stories, and written stories-consist of multiple interrelated and temporally unfolding events which are rich in semantic and emotional content. These characteristics drive intersubject neural synchrony in the default mode network, where abstract situation models are represented and reinstated. Medial temporal lobe structures interact with the cortical subregions of the default mode network to support the encoding and recall of narrative events. Narrative memories are frequently communicated across individuals, resulting in the transmission of experiences and neural activity patterns between people. Recent advances in neuroimaging and naturalistic stimulus analysis provide valuable insights into narrative memory and the human memory system in general. Highlights * Both encoding material and retrieval tasks can vary in terms of their narrative-ness. * Narratives drive inter-individual neural synchrony in the default mode network. * Continuous narratives are segmented and remembered as discrete events. * Narrative event representations are reactivated in the default mode network during recall. * Communication induces converging narrative memory and neural activity across people.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What can narratives tell us about the neural bases of human memory?

Lee

Bellana

Chen

2020

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

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“…The advent of storytelling as a cultural trait perhaps could be coupled together with the passage of genes for actions. The cultural evolution of successful stories (which couple with actions that provide a fitness advantage) could lead to a thriving society [46]. Imagining stories or the ability to invent fictions indeed comes with a cognitive cost.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective narratives catalyse cooperation

Gokhale

Bulbulia

Frean³

2020

Preprint

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Humans invest in fantastic stories -- mythologies.Recent evolutionary theories suggest that cultural selection may favour moralising stories that motivate prosocial behaviours.A key challenge is to explain the emergence of mythologies that lack explicit moral exemplars or directives. Here, we resolve this puzzle with an evolutionary model in which arbitrary mythologies transform a collection of egoistic individuals into a cooperative. Importantly, in finite populations, reflecting relative to contemporary population sizes of hunter-gatherers, the model is robust to the cognitive costs in adopting fictions. This approach resolves a fundamental problem across the human sciences by explaining the evolution of otherwise puzzling amoral, nonsensical, and fictional narratives as exquisitely functional coordination devices.

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“…The universal conversational activity of storytelling has an important adaptative function that relates to the interpersonal transmission of survival‐relevant information. Moreover, storytelling allows people to make sense of uncertain or novel situations, and it facilitates social cohesion (Bietti, Tilston, & Bangerter, 2018). Rumours, which are a narrative expression of the knowledge of human beings, are “unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation that arise in contexts of ambiguity, danger or potential threat and that function to help people make sense and manage risk” (DiFonzo & Bordia, 2007b, p. 13).…”

Section: Specificity Of Rumour Transmissionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a socially situated rumouring: Historical and critical perspectives of rumour transmission

Pelletier

Drozda‐Senkowska

2020

Social & Personality Psych

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Rumours are an ubiquitous feature of people's social life and one of the oldest topics in social psychology. Rumours, which tend to spread during crisis situations, allow people to mitigate unpleasant feelings and construct a meaning of the surrounding world. Rumour transmission has been associated with a number of specific individual (e.g., anxiety, personal involvement) and situational (e.g., ambiguity, uncertainty) characteristics and studied with the serial reproduction paradigm (Allport & Postman, 1947) in laboratory settings. The main criticism of rumour research has been its focus on primarily individual-level analyses in an attempt to explain a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the classic serial reproduction paradigm tends to omit the essential properties of interpersonal interactions and communication processes. Despite the recent and rapidly growing trend of social network methods in social and behavioural sciences, rumour research could also include a finer analysis of individuals' social characteristics and the related complexity of real-life communication processes.Therefore, the integration of a socially situated approach to rumour transmission might be especially relevant for rumour research and promising for the study of other social phenomena by extension.Rumours are a pervasive feature of people's social life. All people have been confronted by idle conversation in their surroundings that was later revealed to be largely or even completely false. Such inexact or false hearsay can relate to daily concerns or major societal issues. Rumours about the supposed perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City spread throughout the world within a few hours of the

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Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

Cited by 27 publications

References 120 publications

What can narratives tell us about the neural bases of human memory?

What can narratives tell us about the neural bases of human memory?

Collective narratives catalyse cooperation

Towards a socially situated rumouring: Historical and critical perspectives of rumour transmission

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