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On the origins of narrative

Storyteller bias as a fitness-enhancing strategy

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Abstract

Stories consist largely of representations of the human social environment. These representations can be used to influence the behavior of others (consider, e.g., rumor, propaganda, public relations, advertising). Storytelling can thus be seen as a transaction in which the benefit to the listener is information about his or her environment, and the benefit to the storyteller is the elicitation of behavior from the listener that serves the former’s interests. However, because no two individuals have exactly the same fitness interests, we would expect different storytellers to have different narrative perspectives and priorities due to differences in sex, age, health, social status, marital status, number of offspring, and so on. Tellingly, the folklore record indicates that different storytellers within the same cultural group tell the same story differently. Furthermore, the historical and ethnographic records provide numerous examples of storytelling deliberately used as a means of political manipulation. This evidence suggests that storyteller bias is rooted in differences in individual fitness interests, and that storytelling may have originated as a means of promoting these interests.

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Correspondence to Michelle Scalise Sugiyama.

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Michelle Scalise Sugiyama is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation develops an alternative to Freudian literary analysis and its derivatives by examining six of Hemingway’s women characters in terms of the adaptive problems relevant to their sexual histories and circumstances. Also an affiliate of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, she is currently pursuing empirical research on the ways in which narrative structure and content have been shaped by adaptive problem solving.

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Sugiyama, M.S. On the origins of narrative. Human Nature 7, 403–425 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02732901

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02732901

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