Why We Tell Stories

We tell stories not just for communication, but also for conflict resolution.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• Stories have two main roles: to communicate and to resolve conflicts.
• Human brains are particularly suited to remembering stories.
• Children learn the structure of language from stories.

Danish author Karen Blixen writes: “Stories have been told as long as language has existed, and without stories the human race would have perished, just as it would have perished without water."

Why do we tell stories? One answer is that stories are good communicators of knowledge, and another is that stories can be used for conflict resolution. Psychologist Jerome Bruner writes: “ln human beings, with their astonishing narrative gift, one of the principal forms of peacekeeping is the human gift for presenting, dramatizing, and explicating the mitigating circumstances surrounding conflict-threatening breaches in the ordinariness of life.” For example, if you have done something questionable and you present a convincing story about why you behaved the way you did, chances are that social reactions will be milder.

Sharing stories is also a way of keeping peace and this may be an evolutionary explanation for why stories are meaning-making and why our memories are so closely tied to them. Stories act as a social glue. When stories are repeated often and take the form of myths, they act as cultural carriers. All cultures have myths about how the universe was created and who has power over natural phenomena. The function of myths is to be carriers of shared knowledge. They are an excellent way to preserve the hard-earned experiences of others. Their narrative form makes them easy to remember, which increases their transferability.

When a close friend of mine, in his 60s, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it largely in stride. But he said: “Now I've finally learned how the world works and how everything is connected, and I've learned to appreciate good literature and good wines. The sad thing is that when I die, all this learning will be lost. It is a great waste of knowledge. My children and everyone else in the next generation will have to repeat all my mistakes before they learn the same things.” I don't know if it would have comforted my friend that his stories (he was a brilliant storyteller) were a way of passing on what he had learned.

There is a strong case to be made that human brains are particularly suited to remembering stories. It does not matter for understanding whether the story stands for something real or whether it is purely imaginary. It is the interaction between the elements of the story that determines its meaning. Once you understand how a story is connected, it is easy to remember.

As a child, you can't help but learn how stories work. A study by psychologist Peggy Miller shows that children are constantly exposed to a variety of stories in their daily lives—from their parents or in conversations between adults. In her taped material from working-class Baltimore, she counted an average of eight and a half stories per hour—one story every seven minutes. Three-quarters of these are told by mothers. A quarter of them are about what the child is doing or has done. Through social interaction with adults, children create their memories by shaping them into stories. This realization should be enough to re-evaluate the role of stories in pedagogy.

Bruner even goes so far as to say that children learn grammatical patterns from how stories are created. First of all, stories require "agents" who have goals for their actions. They do not have to be human beings, but animals, mythical creatures, or fairy tale characters are also described as agents. Secondly, a story marks what is expected behavior of an agent and what is surprising. Language is used to draw attention to the important, the unusual, or the unexpected.

Third, a story must be told from someone's perspective. The choice of first or third person obviously affects how the story is experienced, but the important thing here is that the child learns very early on that language has tools—such as pronouns and tenses—to capture different perspectives. The ability to take on different perspectives is a fundamental part of a child's language development. It is only when the child can see the world from someone else's perspective that full linguistic communication can occur. It is only then that the child understands that what is "us" to one person is "them" to another.

A further aspect is that the stories are often based on analogies where one story is projected onto another. The fables of Aesop and the parables of the Gospels are typical examples. The understanding of parables is based on the same cognitive mechanisms as the understanding of metaphors: the structure from one domain of knowledge is transferred to another.