Five Reasons Why Fiction Is Critically Important In Human Culture (pt 2)

See yesterday’s post for Reasons 1 through 3.

REASON FOUR: SOCIAL/POWER STRUCTURES

In all of this, there may be some interesting things going on with our background psychology. Some monkey scientists (as in scientists who study monkeys, not, you know, unusually inquiring and intellectual monkeys) have suggested that when monkeys groom each other, it’s not actually primarily about hygiene and keeping parasites/pests down after all: the act of grooming, they suggest, plays an important social role because there seem   to be interesting ‘rules’ at play about who gets to groom whom and for how long—the more important you are, the more grooming you attract.

Basically, this act of grooming has been equated to a form of social monkey gossip—and about two-thirds of human communication is thought to be gossip, not necessarily in the negative, stigmatised sense, but in the sense of telling stories about what other people are doing.

Think about that for a second. Up to two-thirds of all human communication is us telling each other stories about what we and other people are doing. That’s a lot of stories being used every day as social glue, to keep us connected and informed about each other.

Of course, the other function of gossip, beyond conveying facts and linking us with those around us, is navigating power. Sometimes ‘gossip’, or stories about real people, can be used to challenge existing power structures or hierarchies, and sometimes it can be used to reinforce it. Likewise, stories in general have the same ability to either challenge or affirm existing power structures.

This is because, like it or not, storytelling seems to hold a position of power in human society.

To test this theory, researchers sought out populations in southeast Asia and assessed them both for the number of esteemed storytellers they contained, and also the degree of cooperation displayed by the population.

The camps that had a greater number of esteemed storytellers were indeed found to be more cooperative overall. Additionally, these storytellers weren’t lubricating the wheels of society without any benefit to themselves: storytellers were found throughout the various populations surveyed to    be preferred social partners, and to be more likely to be the recipient of shared food.

As a flow-on benefit from this, they were found to have on average an additional 0.5 surviving children compared to non-storytellers.

Now, this is only one study, and the researchers themselves noted that further longitudinal studies would be needed to really affirm these findings, but it does at least strongly suggest that storytellers hold a position of power in society. This doesn’t just apply to hunter-gatherer societies, of course: check out any A-list of celebrities in the contemporary western world and you’ll find it chock full of people whose job it is to tell stories, whether that be through writing them, acting them, or telling them through other means (‘a day in the life of’ reality-style TV, anyone? That’s just another kind of gossip story!).

We’ve known throughout history how powerful stories can be; that’s why the printing press was such a disruptive piece of technology. Not only did it make stories in general accessible to the public, it made the specialones, the religious ones, things that could no longer be controlled by a small group of powerful people—and by making these stories public, it took away some of the power from the people who, previously, had been the storytellers.

If you’re still feeling skeptical about the power of stories, you just have to look at the history of storytelling technology, and how it was received by society at the time of its invention. It’s not just the printing press that was considered highly disruptive to polite society: literally every development in the way stories are told to the public was initially decried as a horrible, immoral, and corrupting.

The invention of the novel was derided as a lewd and inappropriate use of one’s time. Then, with the improvement of printing presses and cheap paper, as well as access to cheaper distribution, came serialisation: the release of stories one chapter at a time in magazine, periodicals, or even as cheap-quality paperbacks in their own right. The outcry over this was even more vocal, with detractors commenting that this was ‘not the right way’ to indulge in reading, as it wasn’t a ‘mere healthy recreation’ like cricket, conversation or backgammon.

Serial reading, people: Not A Healthy Recreation.

Then of course came movies and television, still today considered ‘lower’ forms of storytelling by much of society (if only because we haven’t perfected the next wave of storytelling technology yet).

Huxley made his opinions on these new ‘talkies’ clear, with John the Savage in Brave New Worldrecoiling in disgust at the ‘feelies’ he is taken to see.

Bradbury was similarly scathing of the television, shown clearly in his novel Fahrenheit 451, where the installation of large, window-sized screens (which are essentially TVs showing soap operas) has stripped the population of its will to learn anything.

See also the various ‘banned books’ movements throughout history, which have sought to remove from public circulation reading material that they felt encouraged negative behaviour—in many cases, code for ‘challenged existing social narratives’.

Stories clearly have power, or we wouldn’t be afraid of them.

REASON FIVE: EMPATHY 

Strangely, though, what it seems that stories mosthave the power to do is make us better people.

It’s true that stories, particularly group narratives, can have tremendously negative impacts (consider the stories told by racist hate groups, for example), but stories also have the power to shape society for the better.

Despite the continued existence of some detractors (who, I can only imagine, are either not big readers themselves, or else are reading mostly books with themes that encourage them to become worse versions of who they are), a wide range of studies have shown pretty convincingly that consuming stories—reading, in particular, sorry to disappoint—actually makes us more understanding of others, more empathetic, and generally better-quality human beings.

There’s a trick here, though: the kind of story you consume matters.

Generally speaking, when we say that consuming stories can make you a better person, we’re talking about narratives, actual stories with characters and a beginning, a middle and an end.

Narrative non-fiction certainly exists (memoirs, biographies, etc.), and we are probably fairly safe to assume that the generalisations made about fiction apply to narrative non-fiction as well… but generally the research deals more simply with just ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.

So, when I say that stories have the power to make us better people, the research suggests I’m talking about fiction specifically: made-up stories about events that didn’t actually happen in the real world exactly as they’re stated, stories told through the lens of a particular and identifiable character.

So what can consuming fiction do for our souls?

Generally speaking, consuming fiction is a great way to develop our ‘theory of mind’. A ‘theory of mind’ (sometimes capitalised as Theory of Mind) is the ability we have to recognise that other people think different thoughts to ourselves; our inner life is not the inner life of every person we meet.

Consuming fiction is known to help develop this ability because it gives us practice in observing how people other than us think in a close, intimate way not usually possible with regular people (look, I know I talk to myself a lot, but if you sat in a room listening to me, you still wouldn’t be getting the same kind of access to my inner thoughts as you would if I were a character in a story).

This brings us to the first important point: sorry, everyone, but reading really is superior to other ways of consuming stories in this particular aspect, if only because of our storytelling conventions. In visual media, it’s hard to be ‘in the head’ of the character we’re following; it’s cheesy and unrealistic to have a movie full of voiceovers giving us the character’s thoughts and inner monologue.

In books, on the other hand, this is all perfectly acceptable. We’re used to seeing the character’s thoughts written there on the page, as though we had a magical little connection directly with their brain.

So reading fictional stories can improve our theory of mind. What else can it do?

A 2014 study found that reading fiction generally (as opposed to reading non-fiction) lowered racial bias: after reading the stories provided to them, participants were less likely to assign random photos of racially-ambiguous faces to particular races based solely on their facial expressions (before reading, there’d been a distinct correlation between the face showing a negative emotion, and the participant labelling it as not-the-same-race-as-themselves). After reading the stories, people were more likely to see similarities between ‘people like themselves’ and ‘people like the ones in the story’.

They were also more likely to behave empathetically in real-life situations, such as when the researcher “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens nearby. (The participants who reported being ‘highly absorbed’ in the story were about two times more likely to help than participants who reported not being particularly engaged with the story /stories they’d read.)

So this is the next key point: we need to be ‘highly absorbed’ with what we’re reading. This is because of what I mentioned before about knowing something intellectually andknowing it emotionally: if you’re just skimming, you’re absorbing the story only on an intellectual level, rather than engaging emotionally with it.

(And look, I know it’s really, really hard to engage emotionally with something if you’re a slow reader. I’m genuinely sad to report that I don’t have a solution here, except to say that, as with any other skill, practice really can improve your reading speed.)

And finally, a 2013 study wanted to investigate for-realsies whether some types of books increase empathy better than others, and what they found is that books that are all about the interior narrative of the character, all about experiencing the world the way someone else does, promote empathy best. (Totally shocking, right?)

Books that don’t seek to promote the interior life of the characters have little to no impact on the reader’s natural levels of empathy.

(The way the researchers said it was that literary stories promote empathy better than popular fiction or non-fiction, but given their definition of ‘literary stories’ was ‘narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts, I think us genre fans can rest assured that there are plenty of ‘literary’ offerings in the genres we love as well—romance and a lot of young adult stories are often quite ‘interior’ as well.)

This all seems nicely logical, of course, so well done them for proving it with science.

Stories tell us where we’ve come from; stories tell us who we are; and stories tell us who it’s possible to be. In short, stories give us our identity, forging a sense of belonging, and creating meaning in our lives. And now you have five excellent reasons ready to pull out next time someone challenges you that creating and reading fiction isn’t important 🙂

Excerpted from Laurens, A (2018). How To Theme. Inkprint Press, Australia.