The Science of Stories

An Introduction to Narrative Psychology

János László

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415457958
• eBook ISBN: 9781134048403
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

The Science of Stories explores the role narrative plays in human life. Supported by in-depth research, the book demonstrates how the ways in which people tell their stories can be indicative of how they construct their worlds and their own identities.

Based on linguistic analysis and computer technology, Laszlo offers an innovative methodology which aims to uncover underlying psychological processes in narrative texts. The reader is presented with a theoretical framework along with a series of studies which explore the way a systematic linguistic analysis of narrative discourse can lead to a scientific study of identity construction, both individual and group.

The book gives a critical overview of earlier narrative theories and summarizes previous scientific attempts to uncover relationships between language and personality. It also deals with social memory and group identity: various narrative forms of historical representations (history books, folk narratives, historical novels) are analyzed as to how they construct the past of a nation.

The Science of Stories is the first book to build a bridge between scientific and hermeneutic studies of narratives. As such, it will be of great interest to a diverse spectrum of readers in social science and the liberal arts, including those in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies and history.

1
Foundations of narrative psychology

The narrative nature of human knowledge

When modelling cognitive and memory processes, though by no means on the basis of some social constructivist position, Schank and Abelson (1995:1) argue for the narrative nature of all human knowledge. They state that ‘Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences’, and ‘New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories’. With intuitive insight Schank and Abelson derive nearly any knowledge – from facts to beliefs – from storytelling and story understanding. In this framework, lexical items, words, numbers, even grammar itself can be investigated in the context of stories. Schank and Abelson (1995) question the traditional cognitivist model of human consciousness (cf. Newel and Simon 1972), in which humans work as information-processing machines, and the task of the human mind to prove theorems and solve problems. They point out how atypical these phenomena are in everyday life: ‘very few people spend time trying to prove theorems … and when they do, they don’t ordinarily talk about it’ (Schank and Abelson 1995:15). However, this idea again implies a semantic distinction between an abstract, theore ical argument and everyday thinking, which precisely reflects the difference between natural and communicative logic mentioned by Moscovici and Bruner’s paradigmatic versus narrative thinking mentioned in the Introduction. Without doubt, Schank and Abelson (1995) explicitly give preference – at least as far as everyday human things are concerned – to the latter type of thinking. Schank and Abelson’s new theory can be viewed as a further refinement of their earlier model of human memory and understanding based on episodes or scripts (Schank 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977), which was essentially meant to question Tulving’s (1972) dual memory system (an episodic, story-like, or semantic, conceptual model) that was fairly influential at that time. Although these two authors are interested in the cognitive construction of stories and the memory effects of story telling, their observations concerning the social context of storytelling and the concept of narrative framework have far-reaching social implications. When they state that understanding means ‘mapping your stories to mine’, they actually refer to a cognitive constraint that ‘we can only understand things that relate to our experiences’ (Schank and Abelson 1995:17). However, this cognitivist statement, which is somewhat trivial in this narrow sense, implies that people can tell only stories that are in some relationship with relatable experiences of other people. It does not simply suggest that stories should be shared socially, but it also addresses the issue as to how stories change in a given society or culture and how they are distributed in them; or even, what is the relationship between story and reality. Referring to the famous scene in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall (1977), in which the male and female leading characters tell their analyst two different stories about how energetically, frequently or regrettably infrequently they make love, Schank and Abelson do not simply state that ‘we and our audience shape our memories by the stories we tell’, but they hasten to add that stories interpret the world, and we can see the world only as is allowed by our stories (Schank and Abelson 1995:60).

Nevertheless, our stories are not merely our own personal – mental or verbal – narratives. Common experience in a culture or society takes shape in common stories or story frames. Every society has its own ‘historically crystallized stories’, and although individuals may view them from different aspects and create different stories out of the same experienced event, culture informs all its members of the set of possible story frames. This fact has been proved by several decision-making experiments which have shown that selection among the possible sets of decisions is closely related to making a choice from the set of possible stories that can be spun around an event or action (Abelson 1976; Pennington and Hastie 1992; Wagenaar et al. 1993). Even autobiographies are social constructs (Gergen and Gergen 1988; Nelson 1993), and they are created in the light of local conditions as a function of several different narrative possibilities. It is hard to see this set of story frames in any other way other than as a culturally valid naive psychology, everyday thinking, or – as Bartlett (1932) viewed it – the social framework of rationality. The role of narrative in psychology as a meaning configuration that has some significance beyond associative organization has been raised by several outstanding scholars of the twentieth century. For Bartlett, Binet, Janet or Blonsky, narrative represented the fundamental non-associative organizing principle of mental life. They viewed the logic of these stories as social logic and story memory as social memory, though in different ways. For them, narrative was a metatheory of theoretical assumptions on mental life, as well as the subject matter and the means of carrying out research work on memory processes.

Heider’s (1958) naive psychology assigns goals to the movement of objects and shows the role of intentionality in perception. Heider applied the categories of inten tionality and other perceptual categories arising from the tale entitled The Fox and the Raven (for instance, the raven possesses the cheese, the fox is not able to get the cheese – for more on this, see Heider 1958:53–55) in his cognitive balance theory, and explained action in his attribution theory in a way that he was at the same time trying to find out what sort of rules are used to create ‘conceptually good forms’ or, as would be stated today, coherent stories. A decade later, when writing a critique of reductionist and homeostatic approaches to the Heiderian theory, Abelson (1968) suggested that we should return to Heider’s naive psychology, and he outlined the foundations of an independent psycho-logic. A close descendant of this psycho-logic, the theory of narrated knowledge proposed by Schank and Abelson (1995) (see also Harvey and Martin 1995) comprises all the advantages of this earlier train of thought, but it also exhibits some of its shortcomings. One of the shortcomings is that although he acknowledges that stories can give rise to constructs, he denies that stories themselves have a construed nature.

Another reductionist element in the model proposed by Schank and Abelson (1995) is that they simplify narratives to stories. As a result, they introduced the metaphor of an information-generating machine, though they did suggest that human consciousness should not be viewed as a problem-solving machine. The former lacks any experience-like aspect that is made possible, however implicitly, by Bruner’s narrative approach. This is a rather ironic development, for it was precisely Abelson (1975) and Schank (1986) as scientists doing work in artificial intelligence theory that played a leading role in having experience-like representations ‘carried’ by narrative recognized by others.

It has to be emphasized here that the narrative paradigm not only can offer a special kind of cognitive logic for intentional actions, thoughts and emotions but also is capable of handling experiences such as emotions, images, time or perspective that have not been treated conceptually thus far. When we read a story, not only can we understand the time and place of actions but also we can imagine the scene and the protagonist. And when we read, for instance, that the protagon ist’s wife has died, we do not simply understand that he is in mourning for her but we are also caught up by the feeling of mourning (see Oatley 1992). Jerome Bruner (1986) explains reader involvement by linking the mental states of the characters of a narrated event to the reader through perspectivization. This kind of ability to involve the recipient is utilized most effectively in literature. As noted by Vygotsky (1971), literature captures unconscious, floating, undefined emotions in social relationships, and thereby it can be regarded as the ‘social technique of handling emotions’.

However, this capacity of narrative is not limited to literary narratives; they are equally valid for the real life of social groups when they perform joint activities and view their own actions as experience. Consider the notion of collective experi ence and allusion introduced by Mérei (1949). As the imitation of the sound of a fire-engine among kindergarten children evokes the entire experience of the firefighter game played the day before on the basis of a certain part for whole mechanism, literary narratives can also create the direct intimacy of collective experience in a conscious dimension through reference.

However, narratives can be defined not just in the way discussed so far, that is, as the carrier and the ingredient of creating meaning and reality on a social-cognitive basis. In psychology, the research on narratives covers the way in which stories work on the one hand, and several psychologically interpreted forms and functions of narratives on the other, which can be derived from the role that narratives play in people’s lives.

Psychologists interested in narratives insist that the psychology of man can be fully unfolded from stories (Bower 1976), or rather, there is no human experience that could not be expressed in a narrative form (Jovchelovitch 1995).

Other authors maintain that narrative is the most important tool for integrating practical experience in life and creating coherence (Stein and Policastro 1984; Sutton-Smith 1976). In the psychological literature, Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976) demonstrates the idea very well that stories provide a structure, a form for the unconscious desires and anxiety of individuals, thereby fostering the development and integration of the self. The story of Little Red Riding-Hood for instance includes all the characteristic fears and the basic dynamics of the Oedipus complex in 3–5-year-old children. Children who live through similar stories of power and love unconsciously in their own life identify with Little Red Riding-Hood, and may experience oedipal struggles. As a result of overcoming their troubles together with Little Red Riding-Hood they may be able to strengthen their selves that have been shattered by the oedipal tragedy (Bettelheim 1976). In experimental psychology the classic work of Bartlett (1932) shows that a story can give meaning to an otherwise nonsensical detail, and the comprehension and memory-based reconstruction of stories are governed by the quest for sense.

Narratology

Psychology can borrow a number of notions and analytic methods from the research project of narratology for the study of narratives. Narratology was orga ized as an independent research school in structuralist literary theory in the 1960s, so for quite a time its subject matter comprised the structural analysis of narrative forms of representation. In the past few decades narratology has become a so-called multidisciplinary field at the intersection of several branches of science where, in addition to structural analyses, special attention is given to the interpretation of stories and to the analysis of their cognitive and ideological functions. The emergence of narratology was symbolically marked by the 1966 special issue of the journal Communications, in which Roland Barthes argued for the universality and omnipresence of narrative.

In order for a representation to qualify as a narrative, be it mental or linguistic-semiotic, it must have two basic properties: it must have some sort of a reference and some sort of a temporal structure. Labov and Waletzky (1967, 1997) have recognized that simple narratives told by everyday people can be used to derive the formal features of narrative and to establish its individual components. In a series of interviews they had their subjects tell some episodes of their lives in which their life was in some danger. Although the original goal of the authors was to find a correlation between the social features of the narrators (their social status, residence, age, nationality, etc.) and the structure of the narrated story, the analysis led to some apparently general conclusions.

Labov and Waletzky (1967, 1997) view narrative from the point of view of a referential function, that is, they conceived of narrative as a procedure to put past personal experience into words in which narrators coordinated linguistic sequences with the sequence of events that had taken place. They derive the property of narrative that they believe to be the most important one, temporal order, from this referential function. Their minimal criterion for narrative is that it should include at least two consecutive, temporally related event sequences. In their view the term narrative can be used only to describe a sequence of events, in contrast to any other arrangement of events, which includes stories told in a way that is compatible with the original chronological order of the referred event. Needless to say, the world of narrative is richer by far than this narrow, one could say, minimalist definition. We do not even need to turn to the narrative theory of great storytellers like Dostoyevsky or Kafka or the Russian formalists to see this; it is enough to recall our own everyday stories in which we present events in an order that is different from the original sequence, using temporal leaps and return ing back to earlier events, so that we can arouse interest and maintain tension. Obviously, Labov and Waletzky were also aware of all this. The definition they used in their research reflects their endeavour to trace more complex narrative forms back to simpler, basic cases, to fundamental components, so their analysis was aimed at basic cases. However, even this rather limited definition of narrative leaves a number of questions open. For example, it does not include any rules as to the boundaries of narrative. When there are several episodes in a story, we have to rely on our intuition to decide whether it comprises one single narrative or several narratives that are linked in some way.

The logical consequence of placing the focus on the relationship between narrative and the told events, on linear temporal order, was that Labov and Waletzky, unlike Propp (1968) who analysed the structure of Russian magic tales by identifying units of plot, or Colby (1973) who used the word as the unit of analysis in investigating Eskimo folk tales, took the clause as the smallest unit of analysing narrative. In their method they distinguished three types of clauses or narrative units. Certain sequences, so-called free clauses, can be moved freely within the text without affecting the meaning or the course of events of a given story. There are restricted clauses that can be moved forwards or backwards within their immediate context as long as the displacement does not violate the temporal order of the origina...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Foundations of narrative psychology
• 2 The place of narrative in psychology
• 3 Narrative psychology and postmodernism
• 4 Narrative psychology’s contribution to the second cognitive revolution
• 5 On representation
• 6 Theory of social representations
• 7 Identity and narrative
• 8 Language and soul
• 9 Narrative psychological content analysis
• 10 Social memory and social identity
• 11 Roots and perspectives of scientifc narrative psychology
• Appendix
• References
• Index