Stories with Michelle Sugiyama
2026-07-08 03:54:46.000 +00:00

Okay, David, let's do that all again really quick. Damn it. At least I didn't do that with the episode. Um Yeah. All right, yeah. This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Actual evolutionary psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. David, um do you ever tell stories? I do, uh, all the time. In fact, in pretty much any conversation, I'll probably insert one story or another into the conversation. And don't you? Um uh I'll try to. Um I'm not that uh I I'm not that good of a storyteller. Oh you don't give yourself enough credit, Dave. Oh thank you, David. Um why are we why are we even talking about this though? Uh well that is the subject of today's podcast, among others. We're here with Michelle Sugiyama, uh an expert on the evolutionary

psychology of stories, why we find them interesting and memorable, what social purposes stories are tailored to. This is a really fun and wide-ranging conversation. Not only did we talk about stories, we we also talked about the various things that they touch upon, like language, communication, cooperation, politics, um, even uh nomenclature and our names for things and why they might correspond to the practical affordances of those things. Yeah. And uh I like how Michelle was even from the outset, sort of qualified that what she was doing was not storytelling per se, but uh but using that as a vehicle into cultural transmission. But but uh yeah, we proceeded to shoehorn her anyway into mostly about stories.

But yeah. Totally. But uh but also, you know, uh as a gateway for understanding how people gain knowledge about their local ecology and all the different strategies people use for gaining uh and transmitting knowledge. Um so you know, I touched on, you know, song as as well as stories and mnemonics and pedagogy, uh all the all these as you know, different ways uh for people to transmit important knowledge. Yeah And in some cases, manipulate people. You know, there's always that too. Yeah, yeah. Well, on that note, uh, here's a little song and then you'll hear a story. Yep. Enjoy. I understand your work in uh several different ways, but one way to approach it is just very very simply. You study storytelling.

Um and is that a fair characterization or is that a gross abuse in characterizing what you do? Um, I would say that's probably how I'm best known, right? Because that's what I started with. But I actually studied cultural transmission, um, what I characterize as the logistics of cultural transmission. So how um hunter-gatherers actually um maintain and transmit the communal knowledge base over time because these are oral cultures, right? So they they use oral means. And so storytelling is the first one that I looked at, and it's what most of my research is on. But I also look at other means of knowledge and skill acquisition, so song, dance. I haven't I haven't done so much work on dance, but I've looked at song um and then also

games and sports um as a means of you know physical skill acquisition and also teamwork, you know, coordination um of of effort. Um and so I I my view is that the a lot of the behaviors that Western scholarship characterizes as arts and leisure in hunter-gatherer societies, these are basically forms of pedagogy. They're they're strategies that enable people to acquire um requisite knowledge and skill sets um in you know in their local environment. Oh I've also started looking at nomenclature. Sorry. Um this is the new rabbit hole that I'm going down. Um so basically I look at these behaviors in terms of the the skills that they enable people to develop or the knowledge that they encode. And um A lot of names um in hunter gatherer societies are

um they they encode ecological knowledge. So they they reference, so for example, animal names, they reference something about that animal's behavior or its morphology, something that's distinctive about that animal, unique to that animal. Um, and place names encode information about you know what the site looks like. Um And then oh the I just did a study on the the names of the months in um so foragers use lunar calendars. Um they they don't call them month months, they call them moons, right? So they have different names for the moons of the year. Um and uh these moons, these names encode information about um resources that are used at that time of the year, you know, the main resource, or um weather conditions that constrain economic activity or make certain activities possible.

So I mean there's there are moons that are called snowshoe moon. Okay, so that's when when you're hunting, you gotta go hunting on snowshoes, right? And um and this is it's widespread um cross-culturally. So in the study I just looked at the calendars of I can't remember how many I think it was about 80 cultures. And I made predictions about what kind of information the names would encode. And sure enough, it was there. So again, you know, plant and animal resources, weather conditions, and also like modes of travel to to get to the resources. So information about um, you know, the the the ice um icing up or the ice melting, because that affects whether you can travel by canoe or, you know, things like

that. So that's that's my new thing. That's really cool and interesting. Do you think that's just a byproduct of the of communication in general? And that the goal of communication is to put s an idea in my head into your head. And if we don't have a pre established sound to designate that idea, um, the best I can do is to point to other things related to the idea. So if there's this I'm trying to get you to think of a bird and we don't have the word bird that's been pre established, I might say, Oh, it's the thing that flies, the flying thing. right? Or if I'm if I'm talking about a particular bird, I might say it's the blue flying thing, right? Or if I'm trying to, you know, point to a particular place and we don't have a

pre-established word for that place, I'll say, oh, it's the place with the water, right? And so could it be that this nomenclature has simply arisen out of the need to communicate and coin new words for things that will be recognized by the listener, or is there something more to it than that? No, I think that sounds plausible, right? That you the names are basically descriptive. Um I haven't looked as closely at animal names and um place names as I have at the moon names. Um but yeah, so that that place thing you know and some like Athabascan languages, they have really detailed descriptions of a place. Um and the ethnographers who study this say that yeah, it's so you can identify it. When if you haven't seen it before and you're out, you know, traveling and you come across,

it's like, oh, that's the place where the water falls over the rocks and go whatever. You know, it's it's very, very descriptive. So when you're there, it's like, ah, yeah, that's that's the place that they talked about in the story, or that the name, you know, references. Um yeah, so it probably started like that. Yeah, just just descriptive. Um I would bet that it also makes the words easy easier to learn. So if you don't already know know the word and you're trying to guess at what it it means, you have a much easier time guessing if the word itself conveys information about the thing it's describing. And so that might aid in the uh ease of of transmission of of the word itself. Well, I mean they do double duty, right?

You get the name of the animal, but you also get some information about the animal or the place or whatever it is. It's I think it's efficiency because of course these are oral cultures. And so um you have to remember the knowledge. And the more efficiently you can remember it, then you know that's less taxing on your memory. That that frees up space in memory, basically. Um so there's a lot of that going on. I think efficiency is a good way to put it. Cause I was also thinking, like, it'd be really weird if we all came upon a rock and I was like, this is Larry. Like you'd all be like, well, why are you giving this specific rock a name at all? And I think like the reason why that's funny, of course, that you know, obviously it's not

an agent, but it's also that when we name something, we have an implicit model that the reason why we're doing that is for functional affordances, communicative reasons. And so we're not expecting that we will ever make an inference or learn anything about this rock specifically. Right. And so I think like in a in a modern Western scientific perspective, we have names for places that know that that are more multifunctional than than anyone ever gets used. So like a particular river, if we name it like, I don't know, David, the David Pinshoff River, that might be for some scientists to study the hydraulics of it, for some people to fish on it. And we give it that name because that's a one-size-fit-all label for it.

But if we're all just fishing for it, then maybe we just call it and we all we only get around by like canoe. We might just say like the river that requires a canoe to cross it. And from a hydrological perspective, from a scientific perspective, that might seem like trite and simple. But if if if the three of us only have our fish and it's useful to know about the affordances of a canoe, that label is a maximally efficient, Michelle, as you say. So like I actually wonder, um, sometimes when I hear uh names of places that are very unifunctional, like the place where the buffalo are, for example, it sounds almost uh like primitive and like the very icky colonial way, like even to my ear, which I you know I admit, like I'm just like, oh, that seems really weird.

But it actually makes sense if you're thinking from uh uh a group of people who are trying to efficiently communicate the level of detail that's relevant for their purposes of dealing with that river, right? Exactly. I have an example that sort of makes that point. So, um, and I forget what group this is, but there's an Aboriginal Australian group that they don't classify emus as a bird. They don't put them with birds. And um they they classify them with kangaroos. Well, why is that? Well, it's a large game animal, delicious. Um, it's terrestrial, It's locomotion is basically on two legs. They have really powerful legs, right? And so it's a very practical organizational schema, right? It's you you don't really need to know from you know from a hunter-gatherer perspective,

you don't need to know that the emu is genetically related to the cock two or um you know some other you know bird. What you need to know is um you know what animals are good for hunting and what are their morphological traits that interfere with you, you know, that of that constrain your ability to catch them. And so um it's it's not an inferior system to the Western system. It's a different system. Um and it's based on economic need, right? Or economic constraints. Yeah. In the same way a tomato is a f a vegetable, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's it's functionally not sweet. Yeah, it's actually, of course. It's it's plant food. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. And also by getting back to nomenclature, by naming a place, you are implying that it's

important, right? So um getting back to the bird example that or animals, um, some animals, and I think this uh the same I this is Aboriginal Australia, um, but it's probably true all over the place. Some animals aren't they don't name them, they don't bother because it's not important. It's not important, you know, in the diet. It's not important as a cue of you know some other resource. It just has no function for them economically. So it's like, oh yeah, that's just you know a gray bird or a brown bird or whatever, you know, but it's uh it doesn't have its own name. It's closer to the it's a thing, end of the perspective. Yeah, it's something out there. Yeah, yeah, we don't care. Yeah, interesting.

It reminds me a lot of um Tom Scott Phillips's perspective on language. Uh uh we had him on the podcast uh a while ago, and he has basically argued that uh there's this kind of outmoded view of what language is, where it's a code that you send, and then the code gets uh you know deciphered by the recipient, and we have different codes that stand for different things. Uh, and that in reality, uh communication is much more social and grounded uh in folk psychology and the informative intentions that we uh expect other people to have, uh, and the possible reasons for communicating that other people might have, or the goals that they might have uh in changing the mental states of the speaker. And so he views language as much more of a uh uh a technology for uh social cooperation and

coordination than it is an explicit code where X stands for Y, you know, Z stands for Q or whatever. It's more, you know, what does this person want? What does this person likely believe? What are their uh uh likely expectations about uh the situation we're in, and how can I sort of uh triangulate on what they're trying to get me to think based on all of these cues? It's kind of like an inference to the best explanation uh uh uh view of language rather than a a deciphering a code um view of language. I'm curious if you if you buy that way of thinking uh and if that uh fits in with with your perspective. Well that this might be an indirect answer, but I was reading something this morning that I

think speaks to that. It's a um it's the an interview with a blackfoot elder who was um who had you know knew the lore of the people and he was interviewed in I think 85. And so um it starts with their creation story. So I need to grab the book real quick. Um but um I there's just like a couple sentences that I think get at this point. Okay, I'll be right back. Yeah. And David, while we're waiting for my show that was very well, that was very oh wow, that was much faster than I expected. I was just reading it this morning. So this is the book. I don't know if you can the sun came down. The sun came down. Yeah. Okay. Um so so their creator being is Sun, he's called Sun Creator, And so he creates a mate for himself, the moon.

And then they have children who are the big dipper. Um, and so um, let's see, I gotta find the page. Sorry. Okay, go ahead and have your conversation while I find the page. I was gonna say, just while Michelle's looking for the page, I think for me, David, too, the Tom's uh emphasis is also just then relevant to like what we focus when we study, Because if you focus on the code, then you think that the the study of language primarily is what is the code and how does the code work. Whereas if you emphasize the social nature, the hard part of language is what are the representations that are being exchanged. And the code, in some sense, takes a back seat to what what is the Instead of worrying about the grammar structure, you worry about, well,

what consequence does that statement have on my representation of events, for example? And it changes sort of the shift in what part of the psychology you focus on. Right. And it and it strays away from this idea that there's like a one-to-one mapping between word and definition or phrase and meaning that is fixed rather than a constantly evolving uh uh use of different communicative strategies that will uh depend very strongly on the communicative context. And one word can mean a very different thing in one context compared to another context. And one utterance could can be interpreted very differently dependent depending on the nature of the situation we're in, my facial expressions, my tone of voice.

That can all dramatically change the inferences that get made about what my informative intentions were. Uh uh but anyway, we're we're we're back to to Michelle now. Okay, I found the passage. So okay, so you know, Creator Son has, you know, created a mate for himself, Moon, and then the children. And so the story says, Creator Son became a teacher now. He taught the mate what she had to do in her job as a maker of their place. He taught the little one. They only have one child at this point. He taught the little one to help the both of them in whatever the work was. Um so you know, they're basically teaching them what their role is, you know, in in the world in which they live. Um and he's then it says mostly he had to pull each one along and make motions to show

what it had to do as there wasn't any language just at that particular time and then language emerges and so um i think this sort of speaks to the point of you know what is language for right it's it's to show people what to do um and um and do that in a very efficient manner, right? What's your role? What what do we need? Um how can you help? Um what's your contr contribution? Um how do we make this group work right efficiently um economically? Um anyway that just sort of blew my mind when I read that to think of language as oh it's for teaching. Yeah. Yeah, it's super cool. Um i it seems like there's a parallel there between the information efficiency of nomenclature and how it tries to help the listener triangulate on the informative

intentions of the speaker. And uh story storytelling, which you argue is a similar kind of uh efficient mode of ins information transmission. So in what way is storytelling um a more efficient way of transmitting, say, ecological knowledge to you than just uh listing the facts to you? Um look the the structure of of stories is uh it's called narrative, right? Narrative structure is um it it maps really neatly onto the agency detection system. And I think actually that it probably is part of the agency detection system. It's the part, it's the it's the part of the system that organizes information about events and actions in the world and represents them. So it's probably a really, really ancient cognitive faculty that we share with other

animals. And so if you look at a story, what is it consider what do you what are the ingredients of a story? What do you need in order to make a story? You need characters, events and actions, setting, sequence, and conflict and resolution. Characters are agents, you know, they're they're entities capable of goal-directed action. Um, events and action. Well, actions are um are of happenings that are performed by agents, so they're goal-directed. Events are non-goal-directed happenings, things that happen like tsunamis, floods, right? Um, there's no agency involved. Um, setting is the set of ecological conditions under which the happenings take place. Sequence is the causal and temporal relationships between happenings, and

conflict is obstacles that agents encounter in the course of trying to pursue their goals, and resolution is the outcome of the strategies that they use to try and solve those problems. And that's basically what our agency detection system does for us, right? We can identify agents, make inferences about their goals, and understand their actions in terms of oh, they're trying to achieve this goal. Oh, look, they ran into a problem. Oh, what solution did they come up for that with that? Um, and so it's it's essentially the same thing. Um, so that makes stories a story a very memorable format because it's how we process information about agents and actions and events in the world and the and the

ecological conditions that constrain um goal-directed action and events too, because if the story is set in outer space, then it's highly unlikely that a flood is going to occur, right? So the setting constraints the possible actions that can take place. So that makes it memorable. But then humans use all sorts of tactics and techniques to make stories more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and therefore more memorable. They use there's a lot of so in oral culture, storytelling is a performance. It's a very active thing. And performers use various tactics, like I said, to you know engage the audience. This is in FSYC, it's known as extensive communication, or some people use the term mother-ese.

I think that's I think ostensive communication is better. Linguists call it the paralinguistic features of language. So things like modulation of the voice, the use of facial expression, and gestures, things like that. And so storytellers do this. And it it makes the story a lot more exciting. It holds people's attention and it makes it more memorable. Also, a lot of stories in hunter-gatherer societies have rather graphic elements. You know, very violent things will happen, and those are very salient too, both emotionally and attentionally. We remember them. I came across an account a while back of an Aboriginal Australian person who said, Yeah, our stories are all about you know rape and murder and all this because it makes it them

easier to remember. But I can't remember where I read it. Um, and I forgot to mark it. Um, but um, but yeah, they're that that's obviously very emotionally engaging. So still you know, stories about the ancestors have them doing all sorts of atrocious things. Um, the San people talk about this too. That oh yeah, you can't you can't behave like the ancestors did, you know, they did horrible things, right? But the story, but you remember the stories. Um I could go on, but um anyway, so there's yeah, I can have a question about that. Yeah, so sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. Um uh do you think it's a byproduct? So I mean, do you think the proper domain is I need to tell you, Michelle, about things

that have happened, or at least when we can talk about things, there's this cool opportunity where I can tell you about things that you didn't personally experience. And the proper domain is the things that are violent or have high costs or benefits are really important to you because they're about real things. Is it that stories that are fictional, the ones that are memorable and stick, they're they're remembered because the proper domain of that is the real life cost benefit, and when it's higher cost or benefit, that's um, you know that so you did you see what I'm saying? So it's sort of that the um you're registering, oh yeah, this is a good story, not because it's entertaining, it's that entertaining is derivative of this is an

important real life thing to know about or pay attention to, and what entertainment is is uh a byproduct of um the registering of the um evolved reaction to information that if it were true, how important would it be? Um, if that makes sense. Um yeah, and I think that's that's partly true. Um store hunter gatherer stories are about things in the local environment. Um, so things that you would naturally be interested in. So for example, etiological animal tales are about animals, important animals in the local environment. So so you and they identify distinctive traits of, you know, the animals, um, their diet, their habitat, uh, their behavior, life history, you know, how many offspring they produce, these sorts of things.

Um, but also children are told, you know, pay attention to these stories, right? They're important. They'll teach you. So there's both things going on. You know, the stories are about things that, yes, we are biased to be interested in. But the children are also, you know, I mean, you know how little kids are. Sometimes they can't sit still, right? They have all that energy. And so, you know, you you get the scolding from you know, parents and and elders, you know, you know, sit still, pay attention. Um, so yeah, so both things are I think are at play. Yeah, and it's certainly not I mean to to counter what I'm saying, it's certainly not true that um the system is for reality in the sense of a very bland version of the

prediction would be if you know a story's false, you just you just dump it. And obviously that's not true at all. We're very interested in things we know, quote unquote, we know to be fiction, we know to be made up. In fact, that's often what makes a good story. So that at least simple version of that account is not correct. So it's this really interesting thing. And I think, you know, there are many people have written about or questioned this question of why are we so interested in things we know at the outset? I'm going to tell you a story that's not true, right? Um, on a very simple pass, you would imag you could one could imagine a prediction where an evolved organism would not be interested at all and not even want to hear about a

fictional story, yet we seem to be designed completely the opposite way. Yeah, well there are um yeah that the fiction is really a big it's complicated. Um but um but one strategy I don't know if it's a strategy might be not the right word. I don't know if this is conscious or unconscious but um In hunter-gatherer culture, and not just hunter-gatherer cultures, but oral cultures, but I'll just focus on hunter-gatherer cultures. There's this widespread belief in what the anthropologist Richard Nelson calls distant time. That's his translation of the Quayukon word for it. Other anthropologists call it myth time. There's various names for it. In Aboriginal Australia, it's the dreaming. That's their word for it.

Other people call it the time of the ancestors, the time of the animal people. So this is an indistinct period, you know, long, long ago, when the world was different than it is today. So that's it, that's a premise, right? And things happened that are no longer possible. Things like talking animals, right? And so that's understood. Okay, this is not necessarily true of the world today. This is true of the distant time, right? But nevertheless, the descriptions of animal behavior, the descriptions of the land, the hydrology, the topography, those are accurate, right? So the only fictional thing is that, okay, the animals talk like humans do. They may engage in you know behaviors that humans engage in that you know that in real life

that animal doesn't do. But on that point, I think a lot of what we Westerners perceive as fiction or counterfactual reasoning might actually be analogical reasoning. So, for example, in one of these, you know, distant time stories, if they talk about, you know, beaver getting married, beaver looking for a mate. Well, beavers do mate. They, I mean, and so when you talk about them getting married or being married, maybe that's a metaphor, right? Not it's not a fiction. Um, and so that's something that I sort of want to, you know, explore more. Um, uh, but um, but it seems possible that that's possibly what's going on in a lot of these cases. Um and if you think of it that way, then fiction really isn't as fictional as as we think.

Um, you know, these so-called myths and and you know, fictional tales. Um the amount of fictional information in there is is not that large and it's quarantined. It's like, oh, this this was true in the distant time, not true today, right? Um, yeah, so and then the other the other thing about fiction, because it's you know, I think your comment begs the question, well, well, why tell fictional stories in the first place? Um, and I think that's because um it offers flexibility. So if your group's um you know combined uh personal experience doesn't have an exemplar that addresses a particular teaching need, you know, you have the need to teach a lesson, right? Well, then you can, you know, based on your understanding of your local environment, you

can construct a story that will, you know, serve that need. Um, or you can modify an existing story, you know, personal experience story, um, to tailor it, you know, better, make it more suitable for teaching the lesson at hand. Um, so it gives you that flexibility. Um, yeah, And then again, you can also include then things that um you know violate our expectations, like you know, talking animals, right? That that's salient. Um, you know, Pascal Boy's work on um, you know, why religious ideas, you know, stick because of, you know, there's a few counterfactual elements that violate our natural ontological categories. So it so that serves as a mnemonic device as well. Um, so it just offers you lots of opportunities, um, you know, the the ability to create

fictions. Yeah. I mean, I think uh even as simple as a motor command, in order for me to move my arm and not hit my computer, there's actually a lot of counterfactuals running in my head. And so those counterfactuals are all things that aren't even being done, but they're just, you know, models of what would happen in the world. And one can argue that a lot of what fiction is, is it's false in the sense of it didn't happen, but it's a description of a counterfactual world that you can still learn a lot from or get an inference out of, in the same way, my brain is getting an inference, don't move my put my arm here, because if I do, I'll hit the computer. So the the I think the naive view that we only listen to things that are true is clearly

wrong because you can still learn a lot from something that didn't happen. And in fact, in order to even relate to the world effectively, even at a very simple motor level, we must at some level represent possible states of the world that haven't yet happened or that, and consequently model what would the consequences be if that happened. And one could view fiction as its representations that are rich for these inferences that have some implication for setting my own s uh cognitive system, right? Like you're gonna tell me something that I'm gonna learn a lesson from to put it simply. Um and I think that's intuitive, but I but I think it's worth explicitly sort of saying that it's something can be false or maybe that's even the wrong way to put

it. Um it it can't happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The you can learn a lot from something that is hypothetical. Yes, yes. It's yeah. So um, you know, stories, fictional stories have been characterized as thought experiments, right? They they a lot of fictional stories address the question, what might happen if? And and and if that happened, how would I deal with that, right? What's a possible solution? Like the example I like to use in um my class is Jurassic Park. What might happen if humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, right? What problem would that lead to? Um and you know, unlikely to happen, but but still, you know, we do encounter um ecological problems i mean new developments in the um animal kingdom that we have to deal with right

that that cause trouble for us um I was just learning about the um the lone star tick you guys heard about this no oh it's a it it causes um one of its it's it's horrific um so it causes people to have allergies to meat Um, I mean, really, yes, I've heard of this, yes. And um, yeah, and and it's spreading due to climate change. It used to be, I think, just in the south in the real real humid climates, but now it's spreading uh as far as Maine and as far west as Iowa. And um, yeah, so um it's Lyme disease is nothing compared to this this tick, um what it does to you. And and I mean and not just it doesn't make it doesn't just cause a a profound, you know, really intense allergic reaction to meat, but anything like if you have beef tallow in your

lotion, you can have a reaction. You know, things like that. It's just um yeah. So anyway. Not dinosaurs, but ticks. Yeah. I can imagine, you know, um someone for the people for the ethical treatment of animals spreading this. I was gonna say vegan, vegan uh bioterrorism or whatever. Yes. Um, but yeah, no, that's right. There's a lot of lessons in Jurassic Park. Like your scientists were so worried about doing thinking about if they could, they didn't stop and think about if they should. You know, that comes up, that gets that meme is everywhere. So yeah, no, no, you you can learn a lot from a fictional story. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I mean it reminds me um to bring back another episode of the one we had with Tay Deg

Quillian, where he's basically arguing that um counterfactual reasoning is at the core of uh causality or judgments of causality in general, that we literally cannot understand what causes what without counterfactual reasoning. And and what causality is at its core is just a correlation between two things across counterfactual worlds. Um, and so if we need to have any understanding of what causes what, which is obviously uh crucial for any kind of you know uh uh biological fitness related goal. Uh you need counterfactual reasoning. Uh uh it's you can't uh tie it apart from from uh causal thinking in general. Right, right. Hypothesis formation is you know involves counterfactual reasoning, right?

Yeah. This this might possibly explain, right? Yeah. So you have to test it to find out, yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. The little engines in our head that are modeling the world, the reality is poor to populate it. And so something you've experienced or a story or a hypothesis I generate from it can very easily correct what otherwise might be overdetermined, right? Um, so like if I'm a kid and I drop something, I don't know if it's that every time I drop something, it falls straight down, or if there was an art that was an artifact of a particular moment in time. But if I have a model that pits those two apart, then I can test it and then I can be more confident my inferences going forward that, oh no, it actually wasn't that the wind was

blowing straight down. It's that more or less every time I drop something, it'll fall straight down, unless there's countervailing things. That's hard to do because the world's complicated and overdetermined. So if you have a model that can make it's like science, right? This is the Allison Gopnick point that like there is a sense in which our internal representational causal systems are like scientific hypotheses. There is a kernel of truth to that. Um the in the sense of um getting the model right in part involves figuring out how what are the con what how you test that with the stuff you have at hand, like drop the rock again, see what happens. Right. Yeah. Um, so we we've talked a lot about you know what the receivers of stories might gain from

the stories themselves. That is, the stories might contain useful ecological knowledge, it might help them learn about important causal relationships, uh, it might contain uh threat relevant information that captures their attention. Uh so these are all reasons why receivers might be interested in listening to a story. But uh I I'm I'm kind of interested in the other side of the equation, which is what the producers of the stories benefit. Because I think this is an increasingly important perspective that's being taken in cultural evolution research. We talked about this in the episode with Pascal Boyer, is that it's important to understand what the producers of a of a cultural variant uh gain from its production as well as what

the uh consumers of it gain. So so why should I bother telling you a story at all? What do I get out of the deal? Yeah, I think I characterize storytelling as a form of cooperation. It's an information exchange. And the storyteller benefits in lots of ways. First of all, if you're telling stories to your kin, your children, your uh nieces, nephews, whatever, you're increasing their chances of surviving, right? Um, if you're telling stories to um people who aren't um you know that closely related to you, you're still establishing a cooperative relationship, right? You're you're doing a favor for them. So that's going to motivate them to you know be inclined to do favors for you. And um and then you're also establishing um uh your reputation as a cooperative person.

This person is generous, they share their knowledge with others. Um so I basically I think cooperation explains it um, you know, on on pretty much, you know, multiple levels. Interesting. I mean, might it also serve a signaling function that I'm I'm the type of person who's number one, like a good communicator. I'm I have a good memory. I can remember useful bits of information. I can communicate the most relevant bits of that information to you, which makes me a more useful conversation partner. I mean, we we frequently get in conversations where the person talks about irrelevant things that aren't of interest to us, and we uh judge that person as a poor conversation partner and might might want to uh not have a cooperative uh relationship with that person

and favor someone else in the social marketplace. Um exactly yeah it makes you valuable as a put you know cooperator. Interesting. Yeah as an alliance member. Yeah. Yeah I want to work with that person, right? You know, he or she knows a lot, right? Or they know a lot. Um and um so they're you know a useful source of information. You know that's it's a benefit to me. Yeah. Yeah. I like that David. And I also like I often when I hear those hypotheses, I used to think they were kind of silly because uh and I don't anymore, but I want to clarify a counter uh understanding of it that I think is wrong, which is sort of the idea is that the reason why they're storytelling and the reason why you communicate is because there's this benefit to

doing it where if you're good at it, then you you get some benefits. But I think uh a more sophisticated version is the opportunity to communicate in this way opens up more opportunities for all of the above, right? Where you get agents get the benefits of hearing about things that they didn't directly experience, but then all the costs of being bad at that or the benefits of being good at it then subsequently follow. And then there's like con uh there's partner selection effects as well, right? In the in the sense of it's analogous to sort of like, well, why do we have arms? It's because we can like, you know, pick fruit. But once we can pick enough fruit to share it, you're going to prefer people who are better

at it or worse than it. But it's not that you have arms to pick better people or worse people. It's that you can pick arms and the fact that you've got and you want to pick good people and bad people and you put those two together. And I think the same thing is true for like telling stories, um, which is that it it creates opportunities for everybody when it goes well, when it's in a beneficial way. But then consequently, if you're bad at it, that's an uh uh um a cost as well. Right. And not everybody tells stories in hunter-gatherer societies. There are people who specialize in it. And um, and there though it tends to be people who are good at it, right? Um, but um it's it's a recognized social role.

Um, and so a person who's not good at it, well, they might specialize in something else, right? Oh, I I I can't be a good storyteller, I can't remember all that knowledge, but but I can be a good um healer, right? So I'll, you know, I'm good at that. I I understand, you know, plants and their medicinal properties, so I'll do that, right or okay I'm a I'm a good hunter okay I will just focus on that and you know providing food for my my people be very generous um and um yeah no I've recently I've been reading a lot of um what I call um emic ethnographies so accounts of culture by you know people members of that culture um and um and what's one of the things that I'm learning is that um I thought everybody who was old was considered an elder, but elder is

is like a role, and not everybody you you're not considered an elder just because you're old. Um, it's because you know things. Um, and you know, you're in some sort of leadership role because of your knowledge. Um, there might be other elders who, you know, specialize in other things, like probably a healer would be considered an elder um at a certain age. Um, but it's really a reference to um this role that they provide. They're um they're they're basically knowledge keepers they're the people they're the librarians and the teachers and the scholars all rolled into one they take on the responsibility of um maintaining the communal knowledge base and seeing that it's transmitted to the next generation so it doesn't get lost right um so um so

yeah it's storytelling is one of many things that you know a person can specialize in in their group. Um and so the trick is to find what you're good at and make yourself useful in that way, right, to your group. Yeah. I think there's like a kind of implicit thing in our evolved psychology that people feel reluctant to, for example, publicly speak or they feel shy. Um and I think that, and I don't think you just get that in like a context where there's a race stage in like a PA system. Like I think, you know, even kids become shy when they have to speak in front of groups of people. Like I don't think it's restricted to Western electronics, right? Um and that I think implies that, among other things, that there's a

representation of am I publicly speaking right now? And there's an acknowledgement of the possible benefits and costs of doing so, where it's very much a a David Pinsafian point of it's coordination, right? It's like there's going to be very possibly high benefits, but possibly high cost if this goes wrong, because I've got joint attention on me, multiple people. And there clearly seems to be a slot in our brains for am I speaking, you know, even right now, like Michelle, if we were it was just the three of us in the Zoom call, we might be acting a bit differently than we are, knowing that this will be represented by other people. Um so there really seems to be this slot for public presentation mode

that's different than um than not. And that really suggests that this has been an enduring part of our EEA in a in a way. That's interesting. Yeah. Um yeah there's a um in uh in the ethnographic record there are accounts of like what makes a good leader, like a good headman, and um oratory skill is one of the the big, big ones, right? Being a a good public speaker. Um, rhetoric, right? Being able to persuade the people. Um, and um and yeah, no, I've I've come across accounts of like um elders who um you know an anthropologist or linguist or whatever wants to interview them to um or invite them to speak you know at some sort of gathering about you know the traditions and they're hesitant to do it, they don't want to do it.

Um and so it's that that shyness, that um you know, fear of public speaking or whatever, you know, what what's gonna happen to me? What if I say the wrong thing? What if the I'm not convincing? What if people don't like me? There's all that you know at play as well. Um, and so um, so yeah, um being able to yeah, speak in in front of an audience is a real gift, a real skill. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I mean i there's there's the risk of yes saying the wrong thing or offending somebody, uh, but there's also the more banal risk of just being boring, of just wasting people's time and attention. Because when you think I mean, time is a limited resource and attention is a limited resource. You know, cognitive scientists say that we can hold and working memory around seven

different concepts or seven different ideas or pieces of information, which means that um if I take more of the collective resource of attention, that is uh uh inflicts opportunity costs on all of the other potentially more valuable things we could be paying attention to. We have all sorts of pejorative terms for people who take too much attention, you know, show-offs, attention whores, crybabies, whatever. And I think that i uh is analogous to a kind of greed, where if there's, you know, a a communal resource, let's say food, uh, and I'm already pretty well fed and I'm just hoarding it and taking it a lot of that food and not leaving enough for other people. I'm kind of greedy and selfish. The same is true of attention as a limited resource.

If I'm taking too much uh of the communal resource of attention without providing any offsetting benefits to other people, I could be viewed as a greedy, selfish person. And so there's just the reluctance, I think, to take this communal resource of attention without being confident that one can provide offsetting benefits to it. Yeah. On that point, in hunter gatherer societies, there are rules for when the most important cultural stories are told, what we would call myths, the foundational, the things that are considered really important for people to learn and for you know to pass on to the next generation. And in temperate climates where you have harsh winters and long winter nights, that's when those stories are told.

And it's very practical because economic activity is really low, right? People can't go out hunting because of the animals are hiding or they migrated. Plus, it's difficult, right? The air and ground conditions are very harsh. And people tend to gather indoors to keep warm. And so you have all this leisure time. And so that's used for education, right? Um, people have the attention to spare, they have the time to sit and listen to stories. And and stories, I mean, there are story um like epics um that took multiple nights to recount. I mean, some people say like a week or two um to recount the whole story. Um and the storytelling would go all on all night and then they would just pick it up the

next night. Um so yeah, it takes a lot of a lot of attention, a lot of time. Um, and so um hunter gatherers manage that efficiently. Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Michelle, I just want to ask a meta question, which is like the science of storytelling is and I know you've been again, you do more than that, but you're we're we're we're talking about cultural transmissions for this vehicle of storytelling, at least for now. Um is the cognitive science of stories or storytelling respected or even an area of research? um kind of proper because uh one can imagine sort of like play kids kids and women's stuff sort of gets poo-pooed from a from like a uh historical perspective. Does the psychology of storytelling get its due attention and

deference from the perspective of this is a really important thing? Do you mean now, today? Uh yeah, now now, currently, and also, you know, in your in during your career, like was it difficult? Are there a lot of people who are studying storytelling from a cognitive cognitive science perspective? Do cognitive scientists who are who are more um traditional or psychologists uh understand that there's even something to study, that that kind of a thing, yeah. Um there are a few. Um uh Raymond Maher comes to mind and and Keith Oatley, but I think he's retired now. Um they look at um storytelling from a theory of mind perspective. Um, but no, generally, no, there's actually not a lot in Ev Psych. Um and I I often think I'm regarded as oh the the the little lady who studies storytelling,

isn't she cute? Um but um but back in the 60s and 70s, and I think going into the 80s, there was a ton of research on narrative in cognitive science. And that's where when I was talking about the structure of narrative, it's interesting, literary scholars and cognitive psychologists agree on the basic structure of narrative, right? But I literary scholars are completely unaware of this body of research. And I think you know, cognitive psychologists who study narrative don't really pay attention to literary studies. But um, but but then it kind of died out. I don't I don't think there's a lot of people doing it now. Um but anyways, it was it was um the research was focused on um sort of outlining story

grammars, that's what they call them, but basically the the structure of narrative. Um but um yeah, I don't know of a lot that's going on um nowadays um you know in cognitive science. Yeah. Um do uh humors often contain jokes and humor and laughter? Uh I know I I'm I'm personally interested in uh the evolutionary psychology of humor. I have a working paper uh that's under review. I'm curious um what the role of humor is in storytelling. It's demonic, right? If a story's funny, you remember it. Um so to give you an example, because I've been researching the you know the Blackfoot Nation because I just you know went to some of their sites. Um and um there's this story I've I've encountered four different versions of it you know

collected by four different individuals um and and the stories it's the same basic story so their um one of their important um story beings is called old man. It's Nappy in in Blackfeet um in their language. But he's sort of a trickster and a creator, well not a creator figure, like a transformer figure. So he he made changes to the world. The world existed but then he changed it in certain ways. And he and he's credited with teaching the people how to make a living in, you know, in in the on the plains. Um anyway, so one day old man is walking along stream bank and he sees um some berries in the water, right? Berries. So he dives in to get the berries. No berries, right? So he just keeps diving in, diving, and finally he ties a rock around like his neck or some

part of his body so he can stay down longer and he just he exhausts himself and and you know, you know, no luck, no berries. And so um at this point he's really pissed off. And uh so he climbs out of the water, he lays down on the bank, you know, in the shade to rest. He lays under under this bush and he looks up, and there are the berries. And so now he's super, super pissed off, and he takes a stick and he just starts whacking away at the bush, right? And the berries fall off. And the story ends with, and that's how Nappy taught us how to harvest berries, right? So it's this funny image, right, of this this and one of his incarnations is a coyote he you know he can transform himself so I get this visual image of you know like the coyote

and roadrunner cartoons do you guys know those yeah um of you know the coyote just um you know and taking the stick and beating this poor bush um and then just ironically it turns out to be the most efficient way of harvesting the berries um anyway so trickster stories typically use humor. Um, the trickster, you know, his plans back just like the coyote, you know, his plans backfire, um, and he ends up being humiliated um or punished in some way. And and it's funny. Um, and it kind of balances the darkness because some of the things he does are really dark. Um, you know, the trickster. Um, and um, and so it just increases the salience, right, of of the story. It is funny, so you remember it, and you want to tell it to other people to make them

laugh, right? Um super interesting. I I think it's it's consistent with my model of what humor is, which is it's about um mix-ups between two things that are costly for the person who mixed them up. In this case, it would be a mix-up between actual berries and a reflection of berries in the water, or a mix-up between a way of expressing anger and an effective way of harvesting berries. And these mix-ups are humorous because they're very costly for the person that's uh undergoing them. Uh and what we laugh to signal that there's been a mix-up and that I know that you know that there's been a mix-up, and you know that I know that there's been a mix-up, so we can diffuse uh its costs. And it's um it's cool to know that there's at least some ethnographic support for it.

I know there's uh other uh cool support for it in that uh classic story uh from Napoleon Chanyon, where uh he tries to gather a genealogy of all the people in the community and he tries to get everyone's name and how they're related. And then and they and they give him all these hilarious uh profane names on blanking on what the specific ones were. Yeah. Full of like bestiality and you know stuff like that. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yep. Um yeah, and it's and another element to trickster stories is um you know the humor is often ridicule, right um the trickster is is ridiculed um and that's um a s a social sanctioning tactic it's a it's a uh it's a strategy used to um keep people from you know breaking you know violating social norms or um getting you know

too high opinion of themselves right becoming overly dominant um it's it's a leveling mechanism yeah um and so trickster stories also teach they have lessons about proper and improper social behavior cool All right. Very interesting. Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on songs. Is it the same as the story take? Is it that music is an effective way of transmitting information? But then, you know, if so, it sort of leads to the question of why do we often like music that has no uh w words in it? Um so I'm curious what what your take is on on song. Yeah, I don't study music. You know, I I I've only looked at song. Um so I got interested in song because um a lot of um uh stories, particularly etiological

animal tales, um have the the animals have a song that's associated with them. They sing a little song, and the song references um some distinctive you know feature of that animal, um its habitat, what it eats, something like that. And um the song serves kind of as a catchphrase. Um, and the analogy I like to use is the Simpsons. Someone pointed out that all the characters, all the main characters on The Simpsons, except for um Lisa, um have a catchphrase. All right, so Homer's is though. Marge's is not really a phrase, but um uh Mr. Burns is excellent, right? Um and so it's a mnemonic, right? It's a it's a way of remembering something distinctive about that character, right? Mr. Burns is, you know, the he's greedy, right?

Excellent, right? Um and um and and these songs um they're um they they serve a similar function, right? They they um they enable you to remember something really salient, really, really important about that animal. Um and um and so these songs, the the animal, when it you know comes onto the scene, it'll sing its little song, and and this occurs several times in the story. So, you know, it's repeated, right, to make sure you learn, right, what what that animal song is. Um, but then also in some cultures, um, most notably Aboriginal Australia, they have these things called the song lines. And these are songs that they're really short and really compressed, but they they recount, recount is probably too strong a word, but but they reference an episode

in an important story in that culture. And people will sing them as they travel, as they walk along. And so it's kind of a shorthand way of encoding information. And it's something that's really easy to do, right? You can sing the song. And you know, we like to sing. And so that encourages repetition, right? And that supports memorization, right? Retention of the information that's encoded in the song. Rituals also have songs in them, and the songs reference. So there's again Aboriginal Australia, there are women's ceremonies that involve certain plants that you know that are important. And the songs reference some aspect of like the processing the processing of that plant or the harvesting of that plant.

So they the songs encode information about basically how to how to find that resource, how to harvest it, how to process it, what it's used for. And they also have dances that act out the pro the actual physical process of of harvesting the plant. So you know encoding that in muscle memory. So that's that's sort of as far as I've gotten with song. I think it bears oh oh no one more Aboriginal Australian example. That there's little songs that um adults sing to children. They teach the children that basically tell about the animal, um, you know, some important thing about the animal, what it what it eats, where you can find it. Um, and so children go around singing these songs and they they they're learning

zoological, you know, information. Um That's uh that's really fascinating. Um and it and it mirrors a lot of educational practice as well. Right, right. Very easy for kids to remember stuff if you if you put it in into a song or into a story. Um it's just a it's a provenly proven effective strategy. Right. Like advertising jingles, right? I mean you just can't get them out of your head, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, like in light of this, do do you view storytelling and song, do you view these as as proper adaptations, where the the function is to effectively transmit uh information about, say, the ecology or about relationships or threats, um or or or to signal you know qualities about the storyteller or the singer or or to or to remember

certain information. Is that are these proper adaptations or I mean another view you could take is that these are actually byproducts of adaptations and that as people try to figure out what's the best way to communicate this information, what's the best way to remember this information about this animal. What's the best way to uh get people to remember what I'm telling them? What's the best way to like get my kids appropriately afraid of this animal or this plant? And in, you know, through processes of trial and error and figuring out what works in achieving my goals here and what doesn't, people just hit upon stories and songs as an effective way to achieve those uh social goals. And then through social learning, people just the the most successful ones get passed on

and they stick around and people imitate them. And it's really more of a byproduct of other social goals rather than an the rather than a an adaptation in its own right. So do you view these things uh um uh so so which sort of side of the spectrum are are you are you more close to in in terms of viewing storytelling and song? I think they're inventions that are built on adaptations. There are certain cognitive um abilities that you have to have in order to do these things, you know, symbolic behavior, language, you know. Um, but no, I think that they're inventions, and like you said, they're things that you know humans have stumbled upon probably initially, right? And then realize, oh, this is really effective, right, for getting people's attention, um,

for you know, getting them emotionally engaged, getting them to remember, you know, my kids, right? I need I want my kids to, you know, don't go wandering around in the forest at night, you know, alone. Um how can I discourage them from doing that, right? And so you just hit upon these solutions. And I and I think cognitive biases um are involved in this as well. Um so hunter-gatherers don't leave um the transmission of important information to the winds of cognitive bias, right? But they exploit them. Um so um, so like counterfactuals, um, you know, including um, you know, one or two counterfactual representations, you know, in a story, right? You know, about say an animal, like talking animals, right?

So at some point they probably stumbled across this, right? Oh, when I, you know, say characterize the animals as talking, oh, people remember that, right? Um, and or when I, you know, say that, oh, this this animal person was capable of transforming you know him or herself you know into something else. Oh, that sticks. People remember that. Um and so yes, I think that they're um they're in the inventions um built on you know already existing adaptations. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it it ties nicely into um Manvir Singh's work on on subjective selection and how cultural evolution often takes the form of people trying things out in terms of uh you know uh what is going to successfully serve my goals and what is not, uh

what is useful, what is not, and remembering the things that are useful uh and effective and uh discarding the things that aren't. And through this process of selecting the most personally advantageous cultural variants, um, cultures evolve in in particular directions. That there's there's some inventions that are just objectively good, like stories. And those tend to recur in cultures around the world because it's just inherently effective at achieving various uh communicative and information transmission functions. Um, and so he has argued similar things about shamanism, that it has particular properties that are useful in satisfying people's goals um for uh uh healing, for um uh uh uh capturing people's attention, signaling uh various uh beneficial qualities uh

among shamans for uh um there are also political functions to it. Uh I'm I'm I'm sort of oversimplifying it, but um, do you do you buy this uh emerging perspective that a lot of that a really potent uh driver of cultural evolution is sort of instrumental reasoning uh that's seated atop these more basic uh social uh and evolved goals? Yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense to me. Um yeah, it's um okay, we can take our ability to you know reason counterfactually, our ability to, you know, our um really sophisticated understanding of cause and effect, and we can use those things to envision um solutions to problems um and then you know test them out, right? And then what what works we keep, what doesn't work, we discard.

It's like try something else. Yeah. Cool. Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on um the modern environment, which is in many ways very different from uh uh a hunter gatherer society or what we think of as the uh a variable ancestral environment. Um we're obviously uh on um we're using a a recording uh technology right now. People who are listening to this are listening probably on a podcast app uh on their phones. Um their phones are connected to the internet and have social media and we're bombarded with various stories, both real and fictional. Um, do you view the modern environment as presenting us with any um mismatches that might be inappropriately uh hijacking our evolved psychology, or do you view the

modern incarnations of of these stories and songs as continuous with what we might have encountered in the ancestral environment? I'm just thinking fake news. This technology really enables um the greatly enables the dissemination of manipulative narratives, right? That are you know rooted in self-interest as opposed to helping your group members, right? Um I don't study modern storytelling, so I don't really want to say too much about it. I don't I don't feel like I have the the expertise. Um, But certainly there's a proliferation of what might be characterized as nefarious storytelling in today's world. Is that just to clarify is the idea that I I think I heard you already answer this, but I

want to clarify is the idea that in a smaller scale social world, there's monitoring. For example, if Michelle, if you're telling us something, we're sort of monitoring the the the consequences or and even externalities of the of what your stories are doing and if we feel like it's not in our interest over time we're gonna stop listening to you but the idea is that if you have a technology for creating representations in people far away and distal from you you don't care about what consequences it has on them, only insofar as it benefits you. So, by in the same way, like a vector of a disease of a mosquito makes it so you don't care about the hosts, you know, being able to walk around. If the technology is that if I can get something um beneficial by

saying it, and I'm not so close to you socially, there's going to just be selection for more exploitative content. Is that the idea? That there's not feedback from the social world in the same way. I I would say that that makes sense to me. Um, yeah, in um, you know, small scale hunter-gather societies, um there are checks on antisocial behavior, right? So if it people discover that someone's been lying and they've been lying um in a um, you know, in a way that serves their interests at the cost of the the the interest of the group as a whole, then that person is going to suffer negative, they're going to be sanctioned, negatively sanctioned, right? They may be um the people just ignore them, they'll stop cooperating with them, they might

might kick them out of the group, right? There are consequences to that. On this, on that point, though, um, I was talking about storytelling rules earlier. Uh, one of the rules is that when these you know culturally important stories are being told, the audience is allowed and typically expected to correct the narrator if the narrator deviates from the culturally accepted version? So there are checks on accuracy, right? And people will say, that's not how it's how it goes, that's not right. And then the group will the story will stop and the group will have a discussion and they reach agreement on the correct version. So that's because you know, um fidelity is a big problem in oral cultures, right?

Um, because yeah, the the the story the and the information in it could get corrupted or could get lost or could get corrupted over time. And so um hunter-gatherer societies have um strategies for um maintaining fidelity, accuracy. That's interesting. And and and also, you know, sort of checking the authority of the the narrator, right? That's and there's people say like there's um a lot of um anthropologists express frustration and ethnolinguists and you know they ask someone to tell a story and they'll say I I can't tell that story. I I'm not it's I'm not authorized to tell it um because I don't know it well enough, right? And there's there's real there are social consequences um to doing that.

There's a story about an anthropologist who asked an older man in, I forget what group it was, to tell a story and he refused to tell it. I don't know what his reasons were, but he refused to tell it. He knew it. But then his daughter stepped up and said, and she was an adult, right? She said, I'll tell it. So she started telling it, and the father was nearby, and at one point he interrupted her and he said, If you're gonna tell the story, tell it right. She wasn't telling it right. So, yeah, so there are mechanisms um for yeah, controlling these things. That's that's really cool. I mean it it reminds me a lot of um Dan Sperber's work on cultural attraction and how the processes that lead to uh a a a cultural variant being stable or being faithfully

transmitted from one person to another or from one generation to another are in many ways extremely complicated and and cannot be taken for granted or brushed aside because that itself is the thing that we want to explain. How does an idea remain stable in a culture? How does it persist? How does it get faithfully transmitted? And there are lots of psychological and social processes that we need to investigate to figure out uh how that works. And so it's an interesting example of that problem that we can't just take for granted that a story is going to be faithfully replicated from one mind to another, that there are a lot of different social processes that could lead to that failing to occur or that occurring.

Um, and uh another thing you you mentioned that's that's really interesting to me is the use of storytelling for political or manipulative purposes. So it may be that you know what my goal could be altruistic if I'm telling a story to my kids to get them appropriately uh uh afraid of a particular danger in the environment. That's an altruistic goal that I'm trying to help uh my kids. Uh, but it's possible that my goal might not be so altruistic. I might want to mobilize my group against uh an outgroup. I might want to mobilize someone against a leader that I'm in competition with. And in so doing storytelling can also be a really useful way of achieving that goal. I can mobilize opposition to the hated outgroup by by telling um a a story about how

they are devious, how they've been, you know, eating children or or whatever. And that can be a really effective way. Yeah, exactly. Sorry. Yes. I know. I know a little too troubling how how close to home this is hitting. But yeah, uh they're they're they're eating cats and dogs. They're uh you know uh uh using the blood of Christian babies and baking it into their matzo, you know. You know there there are tons of examples of these stories and um there's interesting you know uh work um by Don Horowitz on on how um a lot of ethnic riots um start with some rumor about uh a member of an outgroup uh committing some horrible atrocity against a member of the in-group. And that's often what precipitates violence.

So have you have you thought about the role of storytelling um for for political or coalitional purposes, uh, and whether uh the logic there is the same or whether it's different? Which is of course a form of storytelling, right? Um, so you know, maybe behind the scenes talking to, you know, certain people um and trying to persuade them of certain things about, you know, those people over there are evil. We really need to do something about it. Um, but um, but I haven't come across um reports of people um you know telling stories um you know to rile people up um you know as sort of calls to action um not like you see in modern environments um yeah um is it is it just because um th uh ethnic violence or integroup violence is just more

rare in these societies. And that, you know, if they were to occur more frequently, you might view, might see rumors or or uh demonizing narratives precipitating them, or or is it is it some other difference between uh uh those two environments? Um I I don't know. I mean, I there are people do tell war narratives, right? They keep they these are oral histories, right? They keep track of um you know battles um and who you know who their enemies are. And so um these are these stories are told as part of people's training because they also include information about tactics that were used and casualties, how many people were killed, how many people were involved in the fighting, right? And you know what which tactics were successful, which weren't.

But it's really it's more of an educational thing, a prepar you know, preparation, um, not so much um as propaganda, you know, to actually call people to action. Um so I that's about all I could, you know, s say to, you know, on the subject. Um it's um yeah. Cool. Yeah, it reminds me of uh Anthony Lopez. I mean it might also I mean just to just follow up with David's point, it might be that if you look at propaganda, it has this structure, but it's that the base rate of propaganda occurring is sort of variable, at least. Um, so that if you if you're I think like Amp Anthony has he's got that paper in leadership quarterly about making my problem your problem, about sort of demagoguery and the the

structure of making my interests your interests by telling narratives about outgroups, for example. There is another dimension to war narratives that might speak to um your question, David, which is that in you know recounting past battles, um, I mean some of them are the the there they recount atrocities, right? And um and so in in so doing that mean they teach people okay what you know, those people over there who aren't friendly with us, who are our enemies, um, what they might do to you, right? And so they instill fear and um, you know, motivate people to be prepared. Um, but they, you know, they probably do stir up animosity or, you know, keep they keep the animosity going, right? Instead of saying, oh, let's make peace with those people.

It's like, you know, it cut in my grandfather's time, those people did the this to us, right? And they're just, they are horrific stories. But um so so there might be that going on, right? Um you can't trust those people over there, right? They did these terrible things to us. Um, yeah. Super interesting. Yeah. And also makes the relationship between history or at least a a modern version of history as a concept versus sort of, you know, um social propaganda. The dividing line between those, you know, I think there's there's a lot of scholarship on arguing that almost all history is social propaganda in one way or another. Um yeah. Right. Right. History is told by the victors, right? Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. No, it it makes you you wonder, you know, how much of the history is right. I mean, I ideally you'd you'd want to triangulate and try to get, you know, multiple propagandists at least so you can, you know, figure out what, you know, where the truth lies with the different uh propagandists. Um but if you only if it's only told by the victors, that that poses a major problem. There's one particular horrific account that was witnessed by um I don't know if it was European or American, but by a non-native person. Um he was he'd hired um some local, you know, native people as guides. He was an explorer. And um in the course of exploring, wherever they were exploring, um they um paused, the the people paused to um they came across some an enemy group and they paused to

massacre them. And this guy, you know, he saw it and he so he reported it. So, you know, you can you that that provides somewhat of a check, right? Um against um, you know, it addresses the question of, you know, are these accounts exaggerated, right? Are they are they, you know, propagandistic or are they, you know, truthful? Um, yeah. A good, a good just to editorialize for a second, a good littness test is probably very analogous to like the interpersonal history where like if somebody doesn't think they've ever made a mistake, uh, it's probably a good sign that they're not being quite accurate, right? In the same way of like if you're if you're allergic to saying that my social identity, um

whatever that is, a country or you know, whatever has never done anything wrong versus, you know, probably we've all the history is full of all sides doing horrible things. You know, I think that's that's a good litmus test. You know, if you think you can't, if if the group you happen to belong to can do no wrong, then you're probably it's probably more you're more likely to be the consumer or uh continuer of uh of some of this historical propaganda. For sure. Or if the outgroup can do nothing right, you know, the case. Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. Um, although I mean I've come across um reports of um, you know, groups that are enemies having a very healthy respect for each other, right?

It's like, oh yeah, those guys are really fierce. We try to avoid finding them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Respecting and yeah, that's true. I I I like that when um uh representing formidability or whether there's a conflict of interest but still respecting um um uh an entity with whom you have conflicts of interest is a very interesting um thing yeah for sure right it's it's it's in your s your interest to have a an accurate assessment of the formidability of the groups around you right Right. So you can prepare or you know, take take appropriate action. Absolutely. Run away, run away. Exactly. Yeah, but it's not necessarily in your interest to have an accurate view of, say, the moral character of of your enemy, because that could um you know prevent the uh an attack from

from being mobilized. If people knew that they're just normal people like like us, then no one would join the collective action. But if they're, you know, horrible, uh wicked uh predators who are hell bent on uh exterminating us. Well then all of a sudden everyone has a really strong reason to participate in the collective action. Uh and that helps the collective action uh get off the ground. Insofar as we all have common knowledge of that narrative and we expect other people to expect other people to uh endorse the narrative, then we can all be more confident that we're gonna join in on the collective action. Yeah. this is why it's good to live in a different culture for a little while. You sometimes see the forest from the trees in this respect.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Um so we're we're coming up on an hour and a half. I'm I'm curious if there's any topic that that we missed that that you you would have loved to talk about or that or that um we should have asked you about. Um any area, any stone that we left unturned. I think you guys did a pretty thorough job. Um thank you. We're efficient information transmitters. We employ any of the people. I'm sure I'll think of something you know 15 minutes from now. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Michelle, can you just tell a little bit about um either just for people who may not know, um, do you do field work like with particular groups or do you um have particular like do you have books out? Like if just people are more interested in you or your work, are there a few sort of

highlighted emphases uh in terms of like groups you work with or topics that you either in the past are currently studying, just to kind of give a highlight reel of things you've done or are currently doing. One topic I'm um exploring right now is mimicry, which is really pervasive in storytelling, in song, in dance, and in games, like games of tag, um, which are really popular in hunter-gatherer societies. So you have some kids pretending to be the wolves and other kids pretending to be the caribou being chased by the wolves, you know, things like that. Um But with regard to um, you know, do I do field work? You know, what are what's what are my methods? Um, I actually have a story about that.

Um, so um, so I come from literary studies, right? I I came to F psych from literary studies. And um when I was in my like my first year of grad school, I started wondering, I saw that with storytelling, literature, whatever you want to call it, is this is something that all humans do, and um they don't need to be taught, you know, how to tell a story. Um and I started seeing all these patterns in content, you know, cross-culturally. And at the same time and literary theory does not address so I so I started wondering, well, how far back in human history does storytelling go and and um in what role did it play, you know, when it emerged? What what was it for, right? Why do people do this thing?

Um both the d telling stories and listening to stories. Um and literary studies doesn't address these questions. And I thought that was weird. That seems to be pretty fun, you know, fundamental. And at the same time, Larry was in the anthropology department, you know, he was in their program learning about evolutionary psychology and human evolution. And so I thought, oh, well, maybe there's an answer there, right? That's the deep past, right? Maybe that will tell me something. And so but I but I, you know, I so I had to quickly you know read about you know human evolution, F PSYC, and get up to speed. Um, and but I was I couldn't put my finger on it's like is storytelling an adaptation? You know, what what's going on here?

There's all these patterns, they they're non-random. And so I went to talk to Don Simons. And so I was telling him this, you know, I see all these patterns, you know, there is you know, is this an adaptation? And I th I swear to you, I think the only thing he said the whole time was, because I was using the word literature because I'm I was in a literary studies program, right? And he's like, but Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation. And I'm like, but but but there's all these patterns. But Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation. So after 10 minutes of this, I, you know, thanked him and I left. I was very frustrated. Um, but and I felt kind of stupid. I couldn't communicate to you know him what you know what I was, you know, seeing.

And and I can't, I can't tell you if it was like three hours later, three days, three weeks, but all of a sudden it's like, oh, literature can't be an adaptation. Literature is written, right? The word literature comes from the Latin literas, letters, right? And writing was only invented, you know, 5,000 years ago. So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling because for the overwhelming majority of our existence as a species, storytelling was oral. And so when I put that together with John's, you know, foundational precept, which is that in order to elucidate the design of the human mind, you look, you need to observe its operation under the conditions under which it evolved, right?

Hunter-gather societies. So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling in hunter-gather societies. And lucky for me, one of the among the data that early anthropologists and ethnolinguists collected was stories. So there's all these collections out there from 100 years ago of hunter-gather stories. So no, I don't do field work. I do archival research. I um I piggyback on the research of my my forebears, my ancestors, um, my academic ancestors, um, and I do cross-cultural, you know, comparative studies of, you know, things like content and formal properties of of storytelling. Um, and so that's that's my methodology. Yeah, well it's appropriate because it's a story about a story. Yeah.

And I will tell a story about that story, about that story, which is uh we had a wonderful guest here on Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Her name is Michelle Sugiyama. Uh it was delightful to have you on. Uh thank you so much for talking to us. Thanks for having me guys. It's been a pleasure. Bye. Have a good summer, Michelle. Yeah. Thanks, you too. All right, David. Uh we just recorded a uh a previous outro and I forgot to record it and there was a lot of we we just we didn't banter in that one did we? Uh I think I just said banter, banter, banter, banter. Yeah, that'll work. That'll work. Yeah. And and now we're bantering about the lack of banter in the in the in the part that we failed to record.

Yeah. It's okay. It's all a story. Anyway, please subscribe, uh support us on Patreon. And um yeah when you're out and about this week, you know, tell a story or consume a story. And uh and as a qualifier to that, don't don't don't let it don't leave it to the professionals. Produce one or hear one from an amateur who's probably not uh trying to sell you something. Yeah. Great advice. All right. Well, David, uh everybody, thanks for listening. David, I'll I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week. Okay.