Why People Tell Stories

ALL AROUND THE WORLD, EVERYWHERE AND EVERYDAY, PEOPLE TELLS STORIES. They tell stories to explain things they don't understand. They tell stories to remember. They tell stories to engage with others. But, overall stories, and why people tell them can not be boiled down to one definitive thing. These experts will try and explain the many reasons we tell stories:

"Investigators asked 297 people across 18 villages in... two communities to vote for the best storytellers in their group. There was no limit on the number of people they could name. The votes in each of the camps were tallied, with higher overall scores taken as an indicator of a camp with more and better storytellers.

A different 290 people in the same camps were then asked to play a resource allocation game, in which people were given up to 12 tokens, each of which could be exchanged for about an eighth of a kilo of rice. They were told they could either keep all of the tokens or give as many as they wished to any or all of up to 12 other residents of the camp the researchers secretly chose."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the subjects kept an average of 62.6% of the rice tokens for themselves. But the actual total changed camp-to-camp, with every 1% advantage in the number of good storytellers in any community associated with a 2.2% increase in the amount of rice given away in the game. The more good storytellers in a village, in other words, the more generous people were."

Kluger, Jeffrey. “How Telling Stories Makes Us Human: It's a Key to Evolution.” Time, Time, 5 Dec. 2017, time.com/5043166/storytelling-evolution/.

In a landmark 1944 study, 34 humans – Massachusetts college students actually, though subsequent research suggests they could have been just about anyone – were shown a short film and asked what was happening in it. The film showed two triangles and a circle moving across a two-dimensional surface. The only other object onscreen was a stationary rectangle, partially open on one side. Only one of the test subjects saw this scene for what it was: geometric shapes moving across a plane. Everyone else came up with elaborate narratives to explain what the movements were about. Typically, the participants viewed the triangles as two men fighting and the circle as a woman trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle. Instead of registering inanimate shapes, they imagined humans with vivid inner lives. The circle was "worried." The circle and the little triangle were "innocent young things." The big triangle was "blinded by rage and frustration.

Rose, Frank. “The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 June 2017, www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/.

Burney, Ryan. “Why Do People Tell Stories? – Curiosity Never Killed the Writer.” Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, 22 May 2017, curiosityneverkilledthewriter.com/why-do-people-tell-stories-687078411e8c.