The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  Today, like then, the social emotions that are roused by story motivate us to act. Because we can’t jump into a cinema screen and throttle the villain ourselves, the urge to act compels us to keep turning the page or watching the screen until our tribal appetites have been satisfied.

  Selfless versus selfish is storified as hero versus villain. We’re wired to find selfless acts heroic and selfish deeds evil. 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 interests before that of the tribe’.

  Even pre-verbal babies show approval of selfless behaviour. Researchers showed six- to ten-month-old infants a simple puppet show in which a goodie square selflessly helps a ball up the hill while a baddie triangle tries to force it down. When offered the puppets to play with almost all these children chose the selfless square. Psychologist Professor Paul Bloom writes that ‘these were bona fide social judgements on the part of the babies’.

  Further evidence of the universality of the selfless–selfish moral axis comes from story. Theorists have also detected these patterns in myth and fiction. The mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the hero’s ultimate test as selflessly ‘giving yourself to some higher end … When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.’ Meanwhile, the story theorist Christopher Booker writes that ‘the “dark power” in stories represents the power of the ego … [and] is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests at the expense of everyone else in the world.’

  These emotional responses exist as neural networks that can be activated whenever they detect anything, in the environment, that has the rough shape of tribal unfairness. This leaves storytellers free to trigger them in any number of ways. It doesn’t have to be a strictly archetypal pattern of selfless hero versus selfish villain. In the opening sequences of The Grapes of Wrath we feel outraged not about a human, but a terrible drought that drives the noble, hardworking Joad family out on the perilous road. It’s not fair that this is happening to them. We root for them as they battle on towards California. We crave the natural justice of their safety.

  In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf plays with these instincts delicately. When Clarissa ponders the ‘question of love’ she has a memory of an old friend, Sally Seton, ‘sitting on the floor with her arms around her knees smoking a cigarette’ and asks herself ‘had not that, after all, been love?’ At this point we feel our social emotions jolting. It has the inescapable quality of gossip – this is a very interesting new development about Clarissa Dalloway. When we hear their long-ago kiss was ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life … The whole world might have turned upside down!’ we feel gently outraged that this love was unable to find true expression – it’s not fair! We sit up in the narrative. We care.

  Less subtle is Dancer in the Dark, a screenplay by Lars von Trier that pounds relentlessly on these same tribal instincts. It tells of a poor Czech immigrant, Selma Ježková, who lives with her son in a caravan at the bottom of a policeman’s garden. Selma has a degenerative eye condition. She’s going blind. She knows that her son, Gene, has the same hereditary condition and if he’s not operated on before he turns thirteen, he’ll also lose his sight. In order to pay for his operation, Selma saves all the money she can from her dangerous job at a metalworking factory. At great risk to herself, she keeps her failing eyesight a secret. When her disability becomes obvious, and she breaks a machine, she’s fired. Luckily, she has almost enough to pay for Gene’s operation. But then her policeman landlord, in whom she’s confided, steals her money.

  Watching Dancer in the Dark, I became so engorged with caveman emotion at this raw and inordinate expression of selfish versus selfless, I’d have gladly stepped into the screen and clubbed him to death. That I was desperate to enact his punishment is, once again, no accident. Just as our storytelling brains are wired to valorise pro-social behaviour, we’re designed to love watching the anti-social suffer the pain of tribal comeuppance. These darker instincts are also evident in children. Another psychologist’s puppet show starred an evil, thieving puppet who was struggling to open a box. A second puppet tried to help the villain whilst a third puppet – the punisher – jumped on the lid, slamming it shut. Even eight-month-olds preferred to play with the punisher. Brain scans reveal that the mere anticipation of a selfish person being punished is experienced as pleasurable.

  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,’ writes Professor of English Literature William Flesch. ‘Because it is costly, and because bearing those costs is heroic, altruistic punishment is a common characteristic of heroes.’ Heroes in archetypal stories are selfless costly signallers. In the face of great personal peril, they kill dragons, blow up Death Stars and rescue Jews from Nazis. They satisfy our moral outrage, and moral outrage is the ancient lifeblood of human storytelling.

  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 storytelling brain. We almost can’t help but care. Selfish versus selfless is also the shape of most human gossip: studies reveal that, not only is gossip universal, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics, most of it concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.

  All this reveals why the fundamental drive of our films, novels, journalism and plays is the dramatic question. Whether the protagonist we’re gripped by is Lawrence of Arabia or a rude dad in some school-gate tittle-tattle, what we ultimately want to know is its answer – who is he? The surprising discovery that’s been waiting for us, at the destination of our long journey into our evolutionary past, is that all story is gossip.

  3.7

  Moral outrage isn’t the only primal social emotion that’s responsible for the pleasure of storytelling. 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. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible. Wanting to get along and get ahead of them sounds like a recipe for dishonesty, hypocrisy, betrayal and Machiavellian manoeuvring. It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.

  Getting ahead means gaining status, the craving for which is a human universal. 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.’ And we need it. Researchers have found that people’s ‘subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.’ In order to manage their status, people ‘engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities’. Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.

  Humans are interested in the status of themselves, and others, to an almost obsessional degree. Studies of gossip in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes find that, just like the stories that fill the newspapers of great cities and nations, it’s dominated by tales of moral infractions by high-status people. Indeed, our preoccupation with the subject stretches back deep into our animal pasts. Even crickets keep a tally of their victories and fail
ures against cricket rivals. Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that 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.

  If many animals are similarly status-obsessed, our special interest in it comes partly because human hierarchies are not static but fluid. We have this in common with chimpanzees who, along with bonobos, are our closest cousins. We can infer from this closeness that any habits we share with them probably stretch back to the ancestor we have in common and with whom we split between five and seven million years ago. 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, better mating opportunities and safer sleeping sites) and because everyone’s status is always in flux, it’s a near-constant obsession. This status flux is the very flesh of human drama: it creates running narratives of loyalty and betrayal; ambition and despair; loves won and lost; schemes and intrigues; intimidation, assassination and war.

  Chimpanzee politics, like human politics, runs on plots and alliances. Unlike so many other animals, chimpanzees don’t only fight and bite their way to the top, they also have to be coalitional. When they reach the heights, they need to adopt a policy of sensitive politicking. Lashing out at those beneath them risks triggering revolt and revolution. ‘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. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because a gang of low-status males has conspired against them.

  Precisely these patterns of status play haunt human lives and stories. The story theorist Christopher Booker writes of an archetypal narrative form in which low-ranking characters ‘below the line’ conspire to topple the corrupt and dominating powers above it. ‘The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level,’ he writes. ‘It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world again.’ 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.’ This same combination of characteristics is required in chimp alphas, whose place on top depends on their balancing straightforward dominance with a will (or at least its appearance) to protect those lower on the ladder.

  But if a protagonist learns these four values of heroism at the end of the story, and is therefore rewarded with the ultimate prize of tribal status, that’s not how they begin. When we meet them, they’re frequently low in the hierarchy – vulnerable, reluctant, trembling in the shadow of Goliath. Just as for our cousins the chimpanzees, our empathy with these underdogs comes naturally. 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 reward. Because they’re us.

  If this is true, it would also explain the odd fact that, no matter what our level of actual privilege, everyone seems to feel unfairly lacking in status. Biographer Tom Bower writes that Prince Charles is among the chronically dissatisfied, a condition that perhaps isn’t helped by his association with billionaires. ‘During a recent after-dinner speech at Waddesdon Manor, Lord Rothschild’s Buckinghamshire home, Charles complained that his host employed more gardeners than himself; fifteen against his nine.’ No matter who we really are, 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.’

  As much as we might feel like the beloved Oliver Twist, we’re also wired to despise the cruel higher-status Mr Bumbles that surround us. Even when they’re not actually deserving of our wrath, as Dickens’s pompous workhouse boss surely is, we naturally dislike them. When people in brain scanners read of another’s wealth, popularity, good looks and qualifications, regions involved in the perception of pain became activated. When they read about them suffering a misfortune, they enjoyed a pleasurable 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.

  This was a small study, but consistent with other findings. Besides I’m not sure we really need neuroscientists to tell us that we struggle to empathise with higher-status people. We often feel all too comfortable mocking and bullying politicians, celebrities, CEOs and Prince Charles when, as hard as it can be to fathom, they’re actually no less human than us.

  Status play, like moral outrage, permeates human storytelling. It’s hard to conceive of an effective story that doesn’t rely on some form of status movement to squeeze our primal emotions, seize our attention, drive our hatred or earn our empathy. A study of over 200 popular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels found the antagonists’ most common flaw was an ineffably chimpish ‘quest for social dominance at the expense of others or an abuse of their existing power’.

  Jane Austen was a master of such tales. When we meet ‘handsome, clever and rich’ Emma Woodhouse, we’re motivated to keep reading by a desire to see her yanked down. Meanwhile, Mansfield Park tells of low-status Fanny Price whose struggling mother sends her to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Shortly before her arrival, as Lady Bertram is fretting that poor Fanny will ‘tease’ her ‘poor pug’, Sir Thomas girds himself to expect ‘gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions and a very distressing vulgarity of manner’.

  He’s also concerned that she’ll start thinking of herself as at one with her high-status cousins. Sir Thomas wishes for ‘a distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up: how to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and how, without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram.’ While he hopes his daughters will refrain from treating Fanny with arrogance, ‘they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights and expectations will always be different.’ If we weren’t on Fanny’s side before Sir Thomas’s pronouncements, we are when we hear them. He’s talking about us. We’re Fanny Price. And we’re fucking outraged.

  3.8

  William Shakespeare’s King Lear shows what happens when humans undergo a nightmare even more dreadful than ostracisation. 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, a form that frequently shows how hubris – which can be viewed as the making of an unsound claim to status – can bring personal destruction. Such tales were told repeatedly by the Ancient Greeks and, of course, form real-life narratives that play out continually in chimp troops and human tribes. These dramatic status reversals have probably been part of our existence for millions of years.

  King 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.

  It 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 test. The more they adore him, the better the reward. In the defective reality that Lear’s brain creates for him, he’s the unrivalled, beloved and never-to-be-disputed king of everything around him. Lear naturally accepts the reality of the world with which he’s presented. His neural models predict he’ll consistently be treated with reverence and deference. This flawed model, which of course feels absolutely real and true, causes him to make mistakes that critically damage his ability to control the external world. When his manipulative daughters Regan and Goneril respond to his love test with extravagantly sycophantic oaths of boundless love, he doesn’t question them. Why would he? They’re simply reflecting the reality his brain’s models are predicting. It would be like questioning the shining of the sun or the singing of the birds.

  But Lear’s third daughter, his favourite Cordelia, refuses to play. When she says she loves him no more or less than any daughter loves her father, she puts herself in conflict with his precious models. He responds as we all do, when our most sacred identity-forming beliefs are challenged. He pushes back. First, he threatens her: ‘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’.