The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

by Will Storr

General Murray, who complains, ‘I can’t make out if you’re bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted.’ ‘I have the same problem, sir,’ replies Lawrence

His theory of control – that you got what you wanted with vain rebelliousness – has been proven right. And so he becomes yet more vain and rebellious. He’s accepted into the tribe.

Stories such as this are like life itself, a constant conversation between conscious and subconscious, text and subtext, with causes and effects ricocheting between both levels. As incredible and heightened as they often are, they also tell us a truth about the human condition. We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the

world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.

They’re about flawed selves being offered the opportunity to heal.

The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly needs.’

Story time is compressed time. An entire life can be told in the space of just ninety minutes and still somehow feel complete. It’s this compression that’s the secret of arresting dialogue.

3.6 As we move through the plots of our lives, we’re not only struggling against unruly, unpredictable and unhelpful versions of self.

We’re also fighting to manage powerful drives that are wired deeply into us. These are the products of human evolution.

It’s testament to the powers of the storytelling brain that many psychologists argue that human language evolved in the first place in order to tell tales about each other.

Gossip is a universal human behaviour, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics.

Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality.

An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in sixty worldwide groups found they shared these rules: return favours, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on ‘don’t put your

own selfish interes...

that of the ...

This ‘altruistic punishment’ of tribal villains is a form of what’s known as ‘costly signalling’. It’s ‘costly’ because it’s difficult to achieve and hard to fake and a ‘signal’ because its purpose is to influence what other members of the tribe think of them. ‘The heroes and heroines of narrative are those who pay the costs of defending the innocent and who punish defectors,’

In many of our most successful stories, moral outrage is triggered in the early scenes. Watching a selfless character being treated selfishly is a drug of enchantment for the tribal brain. We almost can’t help but care.

fundamental drive of our films, novels, journalism

all story is gossip.

Evolutionary psychologists argue we have two wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate.

The psychologist Professor Brian Boyd writes, ‘Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.’

not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird’s status.

Chimpanzee alphas have a lifespan at the top of about four to five years. Because status is of existential importance (benefits for chimps and humans include better food,

because everyone’s status is always in flux, it’s a near-constant obsession.

‘The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherently unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group,’ writes the primatologist Professor Frans de Waal.

The necessary characteristics to become a human hero mirror those necessary for a chimpanzee to rise to a position of dominance. At the happy ending of an archetypal story, Booker writes, a ‘hero and heroine must represent the perfect coming together of four values: strength, order, feeling and understanding.’

A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more. I suspect this is why we so easily identify with

underdog heroes at the start

of the story – and then cheer when they finally seize their just rewar...

no matter what our level of actual privilege, everyone seems to feel unfa...

to the hero-making brain we’re always poor Oliver Twist: virtuous and hungry, unfairly deprived of status, our bowls bravely offered out: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

spike in their brain’s reward systems. Similar findings have been revealed by researchers at Shenzhen University. Twenty-two participants were asked to play a simple computer game, then told (falsely) they were a ‘two-star player’. Next, in a brain scanner, they were shown pictures of various ‘one-star’ and ‘three-star’ players receiving what looked to be painful facial injections. Afterwards, they claimed to have felt empathy for all the injectees. But their scans betrayed the lie: they only tended to experience empathy for the lower status ‘one-star’ players.

we struggle to empathise with higher-status people.

Shakespeare understood that there’s nothing more likely to make a person mad, desperate and dangerous than the removal of their status. The play is a tragedy,

Lear is a canonical example of a story in which

the right external change strikes the right character at the right moment and thereby ignites a drama that feels as if it has its own explosive momentum. Its plot serves specifically to shatter its protagonist’s deepest, most fiercely defended identity-forming beliefs. Just like the story of Charles Foster Kane, its ignition point and subsequent causes and effects are the seemingly inevitable consequences of its protagonist’s flawed model of the world.

all begins as an ageing Lear, heralded by trumpets, announces he’ll divide his kingdom between his three daughters, its spoils being distributed in accordance to how well they perform in a love ...

But Lear’s third daughter, his favourite Cordelia, refuses to play.

‘Mend your speech a little, lest it

may mar your fortunes.’ When she refuses, he disowns her: ‘I disclaim all my paternal care.’ Cordelia will now forever be ‘a stranger to my heart and me’.

His theory of control had it that, to successfully manipulate his environment, all he had to do was issue orders. And this wasn’t just a silly idea he could cast off when he realised it was false. It formed the very structure of his perception.

It was the world he experienced as real. He saw evidence for its truth everywhere, and rubbished and denied any counter-knowledge, because that’s exactly what brains

It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that ‘reality’ is wrong.

As Professor William Flesch writes, ‘We may hate the villain, but our hatred is meaningless. We want him unmasked to people in his world.’

The story provided them with a heroic narrative of the world in which they were god’s chosen people whose rightful homeland was Jerusalem. It filled the exiles with a sense of meaning, righteousness and destiny.

Yahweh. They didn’t deny it. But what could be done? He knew he had to somehow draw his people back together; to run

Professor of English Martin Puchner.

‘Ezra’s reading created Judaism as we know it.’

Some of our oldest recorded stories transmit such

rules. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which pre-dates Ezra’s story by more than a thousand years and even lends it its episode about a worldwide flood, tells of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, has forgotten that status should be earned. In its first section, the gods send down a challenger, Enkidu, to humble him. King Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends. Together they bravely take on the monster of the forest, Humbaba, using superhuman effort to slay