Storytelling and evolutionary psychology

With one hand I (implicitly) praise the Gopnik family, with the other I take it away. Rarely do I have the pleasure of reading a piece in the popular press that overlaps with my area of expertise, is completely fatuous, and is very effectively taken down in the comments. Thus it is with this claptrap (NB: when I read it, it had only 7 comments).

Adam Gopnik is critical of a book that suggests that storytelling is adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. I have not yet read the book, and for all I know the book itself is bubble-headed. But it supports a view to which I am sympathetic. Of course, whenever you are doing theoretical psychology, you must be careful not to fall into the trap of telling just-so stories. Or at least try. You have a limited ability to determine what psychological factors might be adaptive and what might not. But there are educated guesses you can make. Gopnik is not dismissive of all speculative evolutionary psychology – he praises a book on the evolutionary origins of gossip. He just thinks the idea that storytelling is adaptive is BS.

Here are some of the reasons why Gopnik thinks this idea is not just wrong, but “seems too absurd even to argue with,” and my responses:

The interesting questions about stories, which have, as they say, excited the interests of readers for millennia, are not about what makes a taste for them “universal,” but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones, and whether the good ones really make us better people, or just make us people who happen to have heard a good story.

I think these are both interesting questions. Also interesting, and related, is: if stories make us better at all, do good ones make us any better than bad ones? Is there really a fact of the matter that one is interesting and the others aren’t? Anytime there is a cross-cultural human tendency, it is a matter of some interest to those of us who are interested in innateness and evolutionary psychology.

“The only way to find out is to do the science,” Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that “the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems” and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don’t. He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn’t trade tales—or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn’t.

Finding some cultures that lacked storytelling would be an ideal way to have “meaning,” but it’s not the only way. I’m guessing tool use is adaptive, but good luck trying to find a culture of humans that didn’t use tools and died out so that you can make the comparison. Non-storytelling cultures may have all died out long ago. If a trait is cross-cultural and can be established to be useful in living past your reproductive years or in successful reproduction, that may be the best evidence we can have that that trait is adaptive.

Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn’t?

As a commenter pointed out, Europe may have rejected religious storytelling, but of course they haven’t rejected storytelling. I’m pretty sure Europeans still read novels, go to the theater, go to movies, go to puppet shows, go to operas, go to ballets, watch TV, pretend play with their children, tell stories to their children, play video games. Etc. The hypothesis, as I take it, certainly doesn’t specify that it the storytelling must be religious. As Gopnik seems to understand with his next claim.

And if these claims seem almost too large to argue, the more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

First of all, this actually wasn’t falsified as it was articulated. The thesis is not a contradiction. It actually wasn’t falsified at all, but if it was, it took a few sentences of Gopnik’s. If this refutes the hypothesis, then certainly it weakens his other point. English professors, after all, do not deal exclusively in religious storytelling. Moreover, and more importantly, do English professors reliably consume more stories than the rest of us? They may have read more highbrow literature than most people. But there are plenty of other kinds of stories. Again, crappy novels, movies, TV, videogames, etc. Even pornography! Are we sure that English professors are the people who spend the most time consuming stories? I have friends outside of academia who spend broad chunks of their lives watching movies. An English professor’s job also involves reading a lot of criticism, grading papers, prepping for classes, sitting on committees. They also frequently read novels for reasons other than engaging with a story, e.g., looking for historical references or references to other works, etc. That may well be an entirely different experience, and one might suspect a less adaptive one, than engaging in a story for the sake of a story.

Also, it may well not be the case that the more storytelling one consumes, the more ethical one is, but rather one needs just a certain amount in one’s life to be a more competent social actor and more ethical person. Anything above and beyond that point might just be gravy.

You just don’t like the enterprise, and are territorial on behalf of your tribe, that of book readers and literary critics! I hear a resentful science-minded reader insist. Would you ever allow a book of evolutionary psychology applied to art not to be entirely fatuous? Actually, yes. Robin Dunbar’s “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,” from a few years back, for instance, had a thesis and a sharp one: that primates groom each other not to pick out nits, which do not really trouble them, but as a form of gossip, a way of exchanging social information—who grooms who for how long tells who’s up and who’s down. This primate grooming and the “gossip” that it entails actually produce brain-opiates; they’re our monkey junk. Since human groups are roughly three times larger than other primate groups, tactile gossip was no longer enough to produce the opiates that make social existence tolerable, even pleasant, for primates. We started talking as a way of gossiping and grooming each other at a remove, so to speak—and, indeed, to this day, almost all talk, before it is communication, is gossip and grooming: “He said what?!” “They fired who?” We have to invent very natural unnatural situations—classrooms where everyone faces front, usually under the threat of more or less brutal discipline—to get people to use language for learning outside the gossip-context. This thesis may or may not be true, but it has the excitement of a theory that surprises: it’s a good story.

And it is exactly in that excitement that the real relation of stories and science might be found. Good stories are strange. What strong scientific theories, even those crafted in pop form, have in common with good stories is not some specious universality. It’s that they make claims so astonishing that they seem instantly very different from all the other stories we’ve ever heard. Good stories are startling. A sensitive, educated man is mad with lust for an eleven-year-old girl! Yikes! (Or, Yuck! Which is the same reaction with a slightly different sound.) lt isn’t Miss Havisham who is turning him into a gentleman? It ‘s that convict all the way back from the first chapter? Are you serious? This power to astonish is true even of seemingly long or esoteric stories that no one is said to read: the way to Swann’s house and the way to the Guermantes house turn out to have been the same way all along? It took us so long, and so many long sentences, to find that out—but it was worth it.

Good scientific theories are always startling, too. The narrative excitement of the great scientific theories, far from residing in their reassuring simplicity, lies in their similarly radical exclusions, their shocks: Everything in the whole universe is instantly attracting everything else! Everything! The big earth is dully pulling the apple and the apple is pluckily pulling on the earth. If you raced in your carriage as fast as you could and your friend raced in his carriage alongside yours as fast as he could, there would be absolutely no way for either of you to tell if you were both moving really fast or both just completely standing still! Really. No way at all. But—and here’s the weirdly special sequel, Relativity II—if you went really, really, really fast, so that you were almost moving at the speed of light, and your friend just stayed in his carriage, time would actually slow down all around you! You’d end up younger than he. Or consider this story: the Archbishop of Canterbury is actually the offspring of a little fox with pointy ears that lived in a tree! (The idea, by the way, that evolution is not a “good story” is so bizarre as to be incredible to anyone who knows the history of the reception of evolutionary theory; it was such a good story that, published by Darwin in November, by Christmas every half-educated person in England was telling it, in shock or excitement.) Or simply consider this story: locked inside the nucleus of each little invisible atom is a force so vast it can destroy an entire city!

Now, those are stories worth pitching; the suits stand up when they hear them, and say, My God, we must make that! (Or test that in a lab, or tell that to our students, which is the same thing.) And the story that everything is, one way or another, give or take a turn or two, really sort of like a story? The suits in the meeting where this story about stories is offered fidget: “Yeah? Right. And, uh, then? It’s all stories? Yeah, I get that, but … where’s the, uh, drama?” Good science is more like Proust than Mr. Popper’s Penguins; its stories startle us with their strangeness, but they intrigue us by their originality, and end by rewarding us with the truth, after an effort. It is the shock good stories offer to our expectations, not some sop they offer to our pieties, that makes tales tally, and makes comtes count. The story that tells us only that we like all kinds of stories lacks that excitement, that exclusionary power, which is the only thing that makes us want to hear stories at all.

Emphasis mine. The idea that aesthetic properties of scientific theories are relevant to their worth is an interesting one and surely I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand. But. The sole difference he cites between the gossip hypothesis and the storytelling hypothesis is that the gossip hypothesis is more aesthetically pleasing. Surely the aesthetic properties of scientific hypotheses are not the only ones that matter. Maybe, just maybe, the degree to which a hypothesis tracks truth is also kind of important?