The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

Author:Will Storr [Storr, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008276935
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2019-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

3.7

Moral outrage isn’t the only primal social emotion that’s responsible for the pleasure of storytelling. Evolutionary psychologists argue we have two wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible. Wanting to get along and get ahead of them sounds like a recipe for dishonesty, hypocrisy, betrayal and Machiavellian manoeuvring. It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.

Getting ahead means gaining status, the craving for which is a human universal. The psychologist Professor Brian Boyd writes, ‘Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.’ And we need it. Researchers have found that people’s ‘subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.’ In order to manage their status, people ‘engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities’. Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.

Humans are interested in the status of themselves, and others, to an almost obsessional degree. Studies of gossip in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes find that, just like the stories that fill the newspapers of great cities and nations, it’s dominated by tales of moral infractions by high-status people. Indeed, our preoccupation with the subject stretches back deep into our animal pasts. Even crickets keep a tally of their victories and failures against cricket rivals. Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird’s status.

If many animals are similarly status-obsessed, our special interest in it comes partly because human hierarchies are not static but fluid. We have this in common with chimpanzees who, along with bonobos, are our closest cousins. We can infer from this closeness that any habits we share with them probably stretch back to the ancestor we have in common and with whom we split between five and seven million years ago. Chimpanzee alphas have a lifespan at the top of about four to five years. Because status is of existential importance (benefits for chimps and humans include better food, better mating opportunities and safer sleeping sites) and because everyone’s status is always in flux, it’s a near-constant obsession. This status flux is the very flesh of human drama: it creates running narratives of loyalty and betrayal; ambition and despair; loves won and lost; schemes and intrigues; intimidation, assassination and war.

Chimpanzee politics, like human politics, runs on plots and alliances. Unlike so many other animals, chimpanzees don’t only fight and bite their way to the top, they also have to be coalitional.

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