People love stories about people. We love telling them and we love hearing them. It’s a universal human trait, and that suggests to evolutionary psychologists that storytelling—both the telling and the listening—is actually hardwired into the species. For that to be true, there must be evolutionary advantages to storytelling. And there are. Storytelling is a good way to swap information, for one thing, which allows people to benefit from one another’s experiences. And storytelling is intensely social.
