Stories Are Behavior, Explained

Stories describe stuff that happens, in patterns that feel understandable to reader/viewers. The more stories we’ve heard, the stronger are our expectations about future stories, and the more we think we understand about what happens. And that’s the bigest difference between fiction and reality: reality is much harder to understand.

The first stories probably only described objective events and actions, including words said. Then stories added descriptions of character feelings and thoughts. Especially evaluative feelings, such as re status and norm violations, which story elements are how interesting, and which story endings are how satisfying.

We now use stories for many purposes, such as to teach, bond, entertain, and show off. We bond together by showing each other how we share similar story evaluations. When we care more about that than about learning about reality, we don’t mind unrealistic stories. Those who complain of story unrealism may seem suspiciously un-bonded.

People in a culture use the stories of that culture to help infer how others evaluate things. The stories of other cultures, who evaluate differently, thus seem wrong and low quality in key ways. Most historical fiction today emphasizes how wrong were past cultures, compared to ours.

Our using stories to infer our culture makes story-tellers especially influential re cultural change. Which makes such people high status in the modern world, where cultural change activists are high status.

The modern world also emphasizes motives as key story elements, in addition to actions, thoughts, and feelings. Sometimes motives are described explicitly, but typically key story patterns evoke standard motive scenarios, without needing to explicitly declare motives. Modern stories tend to give at least two layers of motives to characters, especially villains. Stage and screen depictions of stories are especially able to show multiple motive layers.

In reality, we typically know little about the motives of people around us, and often little of our own motives. Which means we usually have little data with which to judge or critique the realism of story motives. And we are not usually very inclined to so correct. Thus the motives of our stories can drift pretty far from realism. As we illustrate in our book The Elephant in the Brain.