The Stuff of Stories
"[...] a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways [...]" — Will Storr
Storr’s theory of story is grounded in the psychology of our ancestral environment. Communities enable members to coordinate on achieving goals that are broader than themselves: hunting a mammoth, harvesting a field, building an engine. To do so, communities depend on norms, shared ideals of how things should be done.
Yet self-interested defection could allow individuals to get ahead at the expense of other community members. The evolutionary answer, Storr argues, is status. Status acts as a currency which the social organism uses to regulate itself, preserving homeostasis. The economy of status celebrates the selflessness of putting the interests of the community above one’s own. Conversely, it looks down on defection, sanctioning it.
There’s also proportionality to the communal thermostat. Practice that is consistently, dramatically selfless will beget more status than more ordinary acts. Gross violations of community norms might call for ostracization, less so minor slips. The nuance goes further. Community members who enjoy high status will be more heavily sanctioned when they stray, in contrast to comparatively lower-status members. The stakes are higher, and so are the standards.
Yet the ebb and flow of reputation is regulated entirely by the individual actions of community members. In order for the social currency to work, like any currency, it must matter to the individual parties which transact in it. They must all care about it, value it, in order for it to be genuinely worth anything. In contrast to man-made currencies, we are individually wired to recognize and participate in the economy of status. This currency is backed by nature, not government.
The participant in this social economy has two complementary responsibilities, to inform the status of others and to pursue their own. The former refers to playing their role in ensuring that the status tally is in accord with the extent to which community norms are observed by fellow members.
Storr traces story back to gossip, and explains core features of stories as facilitators of their status management function. First, there’s an urge to get a comprehensive read of social episodes, most of which come through second-hand accounts due to scale. What did they do? What did they say? What did they think? In order to assess how they fare in relation to community norms, we need to become aware of the details of how they behave. Gripping stories exploit our disproportionate urge to track behavior that is charged with social implications, keeping our curiosity slightly short of satiated.
Second, in our drive to understand who they really are, change is a reliable path to interest. The deepest social features, those concerning character, values, or morals, are made especially salient in changeful times. Crises force behaviors that are revealing of true selves, and ears perk up. Monotony might simply not generate challenges that are colorful enough to disambiguate between different ways of relating to the community.
This curiosity and sensitivity enable participation in the collective management of political capital, which itself grants status when done in accord with norms. Only by having a sufficiently accurate picture of how members act can you start embodying the self-regulating functions of the community. Beyond that, one can use one’s imperfect model of the members and one’s imperfect model of the norms to make imperfect judgement calls about the validity of status allocation under a given culture. If there’s enough coherence to these, these judgement calls might messily add up, in the extreme, to a cause for praise or outrage.
Especially satiating to this ancestral psychology, Storr argues, is the character arc of an individual with a specific error in their model of how things should be done, that is hammered home through unrepresentative experiences growing up. In owning their mistake and selflessly folding on their view in favor of community norms, they might get us to root for them. Alternatively, they might get us to hope for some form of retribution.
Curiosity and sensitivity are conducive to upward mobility because they can enable moderation practice that is calibrated, and so itself commendable. But story itself be valuable through its didactic aspect. You get to think through demanding circumstances, can weigh in on someone else’s approach to things, and get a sense of how it fares in the world.
Finally, there are intricate games we play that riff on the structure of status play. There are cultures in which norm-breaking in restricted ways is vividly the norm. There are cultures in which refraining from participating in status management is itself praiseworthy. And we so often find ourselves in overlapping communities of incommensurable currencies and ‘illegible credentials.’