Legible Forager Stories
To prevent dominators from taking over bands, early human foragers used language and weapons to empower a talky collective to coordinate to watch for and then punish moves toward such takeovers. This capacity was then also used to enforce other norms. However, once this power center existed, it created incentives for alliances to form to grab this power, to suppress rivals and control others. Though such powers had to be used and justified via the appearance of helping the band, and enforcing norms.
Over eons this incentive induced the evolution of abilities to join and control this talky collective, and to use it toward desired ends. In particular, it induced the evolution of abilities of alliance speakers to convince listeners that they understood the nature, plans, and motives of particular band members even better than such folks understood themselves, or their associates understood them. Which could then convince listeners that speaker policy recommendations would be best for such folks, their associates, or the band. It also wouldn’t hurt if such persuasion efforts impressed and flattered listeners in the process. Though actually listeners wouldn’t have to be so much convinced as cowed into not overtly doubting or opposing such stories, out of fear of retaliation.
This induced the evolution of abilities of talky collective alliances to work together to tell vivid compelling memorable stories, both fictional and reality-based, especially about people and their nature, plans, and motives. Especially stories that made it easy to judge if such people intended to violate key norms, or to act in ways to help or hurt the band. So easy in fact that story listeners might feel that they and story tellers could actually judge such things better than could the people who were the target of the stories, or their associates. Such stories didn’t need to be that realistic, except about key connections between characters and their norm-related inclinations. Realism can reasonably be compromised in order to make stories vivid, compelling, and memorable.
This theory predicts that our media, policy, and fiction stories will tend to make characters very legible, especially re norm violations. Such stories will tend to neglect complexities like the reactions of other parties, at least when such complexities obscure key relations between character features, motives, and norm violations. It also predicts that fiction will often reveal things to readers that characters and their associates can’t tell about themselves. And it predicts paternalistic policies which assume that the policy analysts better understand people’s problems than they themselves do. All of which seems roughly right.
This resonated with me, though perhaps for somewhat personal reasons.
When I was younger, I had much more confidence in explanations. I tended to believe that people generally understood their own motives, that institutions knew what they were doing, and that social problems had reasonably clear causes and solutions. Age has steadily eroded that confidence.
Part of that comes from having lived abroad and then returned home. Part comes from spending years managing people. Part comes from raising children and discovering that even siblings raised in the same household can respond very differently to the same incentives, encouragement, and constraints. And part comes from simply getting older and accumulating examples of people surprising themselves.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that we understand each other nearly as well as we think we do. Most people seem to have mixed motives, incomplete self-knowledge, and a remarkable capacity to rationalize their actions after the fact. Yet much of our media, politics, and policymaking proceeds as if motives are obvious and legible.
What I found intriguing about this post is the suggestion that our appetite for simplified stories may not be an accident. Perhaps we are drawn to narratives that make people easier to read because such stories once served an important social function. The challenge, of course, is that modern societies are far more complex than a foraging band.
As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of claims that journalists, activists, managers, experts, or policymakers understand people's interests better than those people understand themselves. Not because expertise is worthless, but because human beings seem far more opaque than our stories allow.
Interesting insight. Does seem to be truthy. I was wondering again today as I do from time to time why people are so susceptible to story telling. People will fall for a compelling story even if it contradicts the observable facts. Cohesiveness of the talky collective does seem to explain this as cohesiveness is more important than being factually correct when the most serious threat is from ones fellow societal members when resources are in short supply.