How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [94]
FROM PATTERN-SEEKING TO STORYTELLING
Humans are pattern-seeking animals who seek and find causal relationships in our physical and social environments. The process is called learning. As we have seen, sometimes we get it right (Type 1 and 2 Hits—not believing a falsehood and believing a truth) and sometimes we get it wrong (Type 1 and 2 Errors—believing a falsehood and rejecting a truth). But we do much more than this. We do not just process environmental data like a computer, spewing out cold, hard facts. We tell stories about it. Humans are storytelling animals.
In his book How to Argue and Win Every Time, the mediagenic attorney Gerry Spence explains that one of the reasons he is so successful is that he does not speak to the jury like a lawyer, with all the legalese and law-school language spouted by most Ivy League—trained attorneys. Spence talks to them conversationally. He tells them stories. In one case, he began his closing statement with a story about a cocky young man who wanted to show up his wiser elder. His plan was to capture a small bird in his hand, approach the old man and ask him if the bird was alive or dead. If the old man said “dead,” he would let the bird go. If the old man said “alive,” he would crush the life out of the bird. Either way he would show up the old man. So the young man captured a small bird, approached the old man, and asked him if it was alive or dead. “The bird’s life,” replied the old man, “is in your hands.” Spence says he won that case because the jury understood that the story was a metaphor for the life of his client, which they held in their hands. His point was not that telling good stories wins court cases. It was that humans can relate to stories better than they can to pure logic or objective facts. It is simply easier to keep track of a complex argument if it includes people, places, and events rather than propositions, syllogisms, and symbolic logic.
Psychologists, in search of ultimate why answers to human behavioral questions, have discovered this fact about storytelling as well. Through a series of clever experiments Peter Wason discovered that when students are presented with traditional problems in logic, which they normally have a difficult time in solving, they improve significantly if these same problems are presented in the form of a story, especially a story involving people and relationships in which the students are to detect cheating and rule breaking in social contracts. Cosmides and Tooby review subsequent experiments that corroborate Wason’s findings, demonstrating that “human reasoning is well designed for detecting violations of conditional rules when these can be interpreted as cheating on a social contract.” They conclude that this is the result of an evolved mechanism because “social exchange behavior is both universal and highly elaborated across all human cultures—including hunter-gatherer cultures—as would he expected if it were an ancient and central part of human social life.”
Anthropologist Misia Landau, in a fascinating study of the evolution of storytelling, believes that “the central claim of narratology is simply that human beings love to tell stories.” But she goes further, arguing that stories are not just about our reality, they help create our realities:
Narrative, then, is … a defining characteristic of human intelligence and of the human species. Related to this assumption … is the idea that we have certain basic stories, or deep structures, for organizing our experiences. Each deep structure comes in many versions and in several different modes. For example, the Cinderella story is embedded not just in fairy tales but in novels, films, operas, ballets, and television shows. Some narratologists, stressing the central role of narrative in human experience, would further argue that we have not only different versions of stories but different versions of reality which are shaped by these basic stories.
Origin myths