Stories Teach Us about How the World Works

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happened yet. When Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth can’t stop washing her hands after killing King Duncan and cries, “Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!” we learn not only about the remorse of a single fictional character, but also about the emotional consequences of murder…A good story has a moral that applies not just to this world but also to other worlds that we might find ourselves in.

The reason we recount Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac on Mount Moriah is not just to add to our inventory of facts about Abraham and his family; it is surely to learn a lesson about loyalty to God in whatever situation we find ourselves. In that sense, storytelling requires that we do something that is way beyond the capabilities of any nonhuman animal. It requires that we use our understanding of our world’s causal mechanisms to build whole alternative worlds to think about.

Storytelling helps us to imagine how the world would be if something were different. This is clearest in science fiction: Authors help readers readers imagine alternative worlds with life on other planets or drugs that guarantee happiness or robots that take over the world. But many other kinds of stories also involve alternative worlds, especially stories we tell ourselves. You might imagine, for instance, that you’re a rock star. What would the consequences be? To find out, you can consult your understanding of how the world works and draw out the effects that being a rock star would cause. For one, you’d probably stay in fancier hotels, drive around in limousines, and spend a lot of time signing autographs…Thinking about alternative possible worlds is an important part of being human. It is called counterfactual thought, and you can see that it depends on our capacity to reason causally…Why do we so naturally tell stories that require reasoning about counterfactual worlds?

Perhaps the main motivation is that it allows us to consider alternative courses of action. We are very comfortable thinking about what the world would be like if we did something differently—if we changed our hairstyle, bought a new lawn mower, or sold our house and bought a yacht. And because we can think about such hypothetical actions, occasionally we actually pursue them. A thinker who can’t conceive of a new hairstyle is not going to go out and get one (at least not intentionally). And a thinker who can’t conceive of a bill of rights or a new kind of vacuum cleaner is not going to get one of those, either. The ability to think counterfactually makes it possible to take both extraordinary and ordinary action.