WEBVTT

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Okay, David, let's do that all again really quick.

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Damn it.

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At least I didn't do that with the episode.

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Um Yeah.

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All right, yeah.

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This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual evolutionary psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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David, um do you ever tell stories?

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I do, uh, all the time.

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In fact, in pretty much any conversation, I'll probably insert one story or another into

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the conversation.

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And don't you?

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Um uh I'll try to.

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Um I'm not that uh I I'm not that good of a storyteller.

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Oh you don't give yourself enough credit, Dave.

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Oh thank you, David.

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Um why are we why are we even talking about this though?

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Uh well that is the subject of today's podcast, among others.

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We're here with Michelle Sugiyama, uh an expert on the evolutionary

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psychology of stories, why we find them interesting and memorable, what

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social purposes stories are tailored to.

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This is a really fun and wide-ranging conversation.

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Not only did we talk about stories, we we also talked about the various things that they

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touch upon, like language, communication, cooperation, politics, um,

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even uh nomenclature and our names for things and why they might correspond to the

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practical affordances of those things.

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Yeah.

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And uh I like how Michelle was even from the outset, sort of qualified that what she was

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doing was not storytelling per se, but uh but using that as a vehicle into cultural

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transmission.

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But but uh yeah, we proceeded to shoehorn her anyway into mostly about stories.

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But yeah.

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Totally.

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But uh but also, you know, uh as a gateway for understanding how people gain knowledge

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about their local ecology and all the different strategies people use for gaining uh and

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transmitting knowledge.

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Um so you know, I touched on, you know, song as as well as stories and mnemonics and

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pedagogy, uh all the all these as you know, different ways uh for people to transmit

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important knowledge.

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Yeah And in some cases, manipulate people.

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You know, there's always that too.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Well, on that note, uh, here's a little song and then you'll hear a story.

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Yep.

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Enjoy.

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I understand your work in uh several different ways, but

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one way to approach it is just very very simply.

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You study storytelling.

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Um and is that a fair characterization or is that a gross abuse

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in characterizing what you do?

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Um, I would say that's probably how I'm best known, right?

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Because that's what I started with.

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But I actually studied cultural transmission, um, what I characterize as the logistics of

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cultural transmission.

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So how um hunter-gatherers actually um maintain and

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transmit the communal knowledge base over time because these are oral cultures, right?

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So they they use oral means.

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And so storytelling is the first one that I looked at, and it's what most of my research is

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on.

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But I also look at other means of knowledge and skill acquisition, so

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song, dance.

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I haven't I haven't done so much work on dance, but I've looked at song um and then also

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games and sports um as a means of you know physical skill acquisition and also teamwork,

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you know, coordination um of of effort.

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Um and so I I my view is that the a lot of the

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behaviors that Western scholarship characterizes as arts and leisure in

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hunter-gatherer societies, these are basically forms of pedagogy.

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They're they're strategies that enable people to acquire um requisite knowledge and

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skill sets um in you know in their local environment.

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Oh I've also started looking at nomenclature.

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Sorry.

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Um this is the new rabbit hole that I'm going down.

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Um so basically I look at these behaviors in terms of the the skills that they enable

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people to develop or the knowledge that they encode.

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And um A lot of names um in hunter gatherer societies are

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um they they encode ecological knowledge.

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So they they reference, so for example, animal names, they reference something about that

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animal's behavior or its morphology, something that's distinctive about that animal, unique

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to that animal.

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Um, and place names encode information about you know what the site looks like.

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Um And then oh the I just did a study on the the names of the months

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in um so foragers use lunar calendars.

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Um they they don't call them month months, they call them moons, right?

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So they have different names for the moons of the year.

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Um and uh these moons, these names encode information about

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um resources that are used at that time of the year, you know, the main resource, or

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um weather conditions that constrain economic activity or make certain activities possible.

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So I mean there's there are moons that are called snowshoe moon.

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Okay, so that's when when you're hunting, you gotta go hunting on snowshoes, right?

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And um and this is it's widespread um cross-culturally.

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So in the study I just looked at the calendars of I can't remember how many I think it was

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about 80 cultures.

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And I made predictions about what kind of information the names would encode.

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And sure enough, it was there.

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So again, you know, plant and animal resources, weather conditions, and also like modes

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of travel to to get to the resources.

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So information about um, you know, the the the ice um icing up or the

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ice melting, because that affects whether you can travel by canoe or, you know, things like

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that.

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So that's that's my new thing.

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That's really cool and interesting.

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Do you think that's just a byproduct of the of communication in general?

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And that the goal of communication is to put s an idea in my head into your head.

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And if we don't have a pre established sound to designate that idea, um, the best

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I can do is to point to other things related to the idea.

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So if there's this I'm trying to get you to think of a bird and we don't have the word bird

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that's been pre established, I might say, Oh, it's the thing that flies, the flying thing.

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right?

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Or if I'm if I'm talking about a particular bird, I might say it's the blue flying thing,

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right?

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Or if I'm trying to, you know, point to a particular place and we don't have a

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pre-established word for that place, I'll say, oh, it's the place with the water, right?

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And so could it be that this nomenclature has simply arisen out of the need to

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communicate and coin new words for things that will be recognized by the listener, or is

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there something more to it than that?

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No, I think that sounds plausible, right?

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That you the names are basically descriptive.

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Um I haven't looked as closely at animal names and um place names as I have at the moon

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names.

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Um but yeah, so that that place thing you know and some like Athabascan languages, they

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have really detailed descriptions of a place.

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Um and the ethnographers who study this say that yeah, it's so you can identify it.

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When if you haven't seen it before and you're out, you know, traveling and you come across,

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it's like, oh, that's the place where the water falls over the rocks and go whatever.

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You know, it's it's very, very descriptive.

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So when you're there, it's like, ah, yeah, that's that's the place that they talked about

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in the story, or that the name, you know, references.

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Um yeah, so it probably started like that.

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Yeah, just just descriptive.

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Um I would bet that it also makes the words easy easier to learn.

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So if you don't already know know the word and you're trying to guess at what it it means,

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you have a much easier time guessing if the word itself conveys information about the thing

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it's describing.

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And so that might aid in the uh ease of of transmission of of the word itself.

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Well, I mean they do double duty, right?

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You get the name of the animal, but you also get some information about the animal or the

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place or whatever it is.

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It's I think it's efficiency because of course these are oral cultures.

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And so um you have to remember the knowledge.

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And the more efficiently you can remember it, then you know that's less taxing on your

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memory.

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That that frees up space in memory, basically.

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Um so there's a lot of that going on.

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I think efficiency is a good way to put it.

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Cause I was also thinking, like, it'd be really weird if we all came upon a rock and I was

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like, this is Larry.

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Like you'd all be like, well, why are you giving this specific rock a name at all?

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And I think like the reason why that's funny, of course, that you know, obviously it's not

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an agent, but it's also that when we name something, we have an implicit model that the

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reason why we're doing that is for functional affordances, communicative reasons.

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And so we're not expecting that we will ever make an inference or learn anything about this

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rock specifically.

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Right.

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And so I think like in a in a modern Western scientific perspective, we have

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names for places that know that that are more multifunctional than

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than anyone ever gets used.

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So like a particular river, if we name it like, I don't know, David, the David Pinshoff

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River, that might be for some scientists to study the hydraulics of it, for some people to

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fish on it.

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And we give it that name because that's a one-size-fit-all label for it.

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But if we're all just fishing for it, then maybe we just call it and we all we only get

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around by like canoe.

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We might just say like the river that requires a canoe to cross it.

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And from a hydrological perspective, from a scientific perspective, that might seem like

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trite and simple.

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But if if if the three of us only have our fish and it's useful to know about the

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affordances of a canoe, that label is a maximally efficient, Michelle, as you say.

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So like I actually wonder, um, sometimes when I hear uh names

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of places that are very unifunctional, like the place where the buffalo are, for example,

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it sounds almost uh like primitive and like the very icky colonial way, like even to my

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ear, which I you know I admit, like I'm just like, oh, that seems really weird.

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But it actually makes sense if you're thinking from uh uh a group of people who are trying

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to efficiently communicate the level of detail that's relevant for their purposes of

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dealing with that river, right?

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Exactly.

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I have an example that sort of makes that point.

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So, um, and I forget what group this is, but there's an Aboriginal Australian group that

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they don't classify emus as a bird.

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They don't put them with birds.

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And um they they classify them with kangaroos.

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Well, why is that?

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Well, it's a large game animal, delicious.

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Um, it's terrestrial, It's locomotion is basically on two legs.

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They have really powerful legs, right?

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And so it's a very practical organizational schema, right?

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It's you you don't really need to know from you know from a hunter-gatherer perspective,

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you don't need to know that the emu is genetically related to the cock two or um you know

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some other you know bird.

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What you need to know is um you know what animals are good for hunting and what are their

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morphological traits that interfere with you, you know, that of that constrain your ability

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to catch them.

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And so um it's it's not an inferior system to the Western system.

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It's a different system.

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Um and it's based on economic need, right?

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Or economic constraints.

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Yeah.

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In the same way a tomato is a f a vegetable, right?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, it's it's functionally not sweet.

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Yeah, it's actually, of course.

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It's it's plant food.

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Right.

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That's interesting.

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Yeah.

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And also by getting back to nomenclature, by naming a place, you are implying that it's

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important, right?

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So um getting back to the bird example that or animals, um, some animals, and I

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think this uh the same I this is Aboriginal Australia, um, but it's probably true all over

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the place.

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Some animals aren't they don't name them, they don't bother because it's not important.

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It's not important, you know, in the diet.

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It's not important as a cue of you know some other resource.

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It just has no function for them economically.

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So it's like, oh yeah, that's just you know a gray bird or a brown bird or whatever, you

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know, but it's uh it doesn't have its own name.

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It's closer to the it's a thing, end of the perspective.

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Yeah, it's something out there.

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Yeah, yeah, we don't care.

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Yeah, interesting.

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It reminds me a lot of um Tom Scott Phillips's perspective on language.

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Uh uh we had him on the podcast uh a while ago, and he has basically argued that uh there's

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this kind of outmoded view of what language is, where it's a code that you send, and then

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the code gets uh you know deciphered by the recipient, and we have different codes that

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stand for different things.

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Uh, and that in reality, uh communication is much more social and grounded uh in

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folk psychology and the informative intentions that we uh expect other people to have,

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uh, and the possible reasons for communicating that other people might have, or the goals

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that they might have uh in changing the mental states of the speaker.

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And so he views language as much more of a uh uh a technology for uh social cooperation and

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coordination than it is an explicit code where X stands for Y, you know, Z stands for

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Q or whatever.

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It's more, you know, what does this person want?

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What does this person likely believe?

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What are their uh uh likely expectations about uh the situation we're in, and how can I

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sort of uh triangulate on what they're trying to get me to think based on all of these

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cues?

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It's kind of like an inference to the best explanation uh uh uh view of

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language rather than a a deciphering a code um view of

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language.

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I'm curious if you if you buy that way of thinking uh and if that uh fits in with with your

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perspective.

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Well that this might be an indirect answer, but I was reading something this morning that I

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think speaks to that.

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It's a um it's the an interview with a blackfoot elder who was

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um who had you know knew the lore of the people and he was interviewed in I think 85.

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And so um it starts with their creation story.

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So I need to grab the book real quick.

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Um but um I there's just like a couple sentences that I think get at this point.

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Okay, I'll be right back.

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Yeah.

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And David, while we're waiting for my show that was very well, that was very oh wow, that

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was much faster than I expected.

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I was just reading it this morning.

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So this is the book.

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I don't know if you can the sun came down.

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The sun came down.

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Yeah.

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Okay.

00:14:38.310 --> 00:14:44.080
Um so so their creator being is Sun, he's called Sun Creator, And so he

00:14:44.080 --> 00:14:46.640
creates a mate for himself, the moon.

00:14:46.720 --> 00:14:49.600
And then they have children who are the big dipper.

00:14:50.160 --> 00:14:54.160
Um, and so um, let's see, I gotta find the page.

00:14:54.240 --> 00:14:54.480
Sorry.

00:14:54.560 --> 00:14:56.960
Okay, go ahead and have your conversation while I find the page.

00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:01.520
I was gonna say, just while Michelle's looking for the page, I think for me, David, too,

00:15:01.680 --> 00:15:07.680
the Tom's uh emphasis is also just then relevant to like what we focus when we

00:15:07.680 --> 00:15:13.550
study, Because if you focus on the code, then you think that the the

00:15:13.550 --> 00:15:18.750
study of language primarily is what is the code and how does the code work.

00:15:18.910 --> 00:15:24.430
Whereas if you emphasize the social nature, the hard part of language is what are the

00:15:24.430 --> 00:15:27.870
representations that are being exchanged.

00:15:28.270 --> 00:15:34.030
And the code, in some sense, takes a back seat to what what

00:15:34.030 --> 00:15:40.000
is the Instead of worrying about the grammar structure, you worry about, well,

00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:45.680
what consequence does that statement have on my representation of events, for example?

00:15:45.760 --> 00:15:49.120
And it changes sort of the shift in what part of the psychology you focus on.

00:15:49.520 --> 00:15:49.680
Right.

00:15:49.760 --> 00:15:53.680
And it and it strays away from this idea that there's like a one-to-one mapping between

00:15:53.680 --> 00:15:59.520
word and definition or phrase and meaning that is fixed rather than a constantly

00:15:59.520 --> 00:16:05.370
evolving uh uh use of different communicative strategies that will uh depend very strongly

00:16:05.370 --> 00:16:06.810
on the communicative context.

00:16:06.970 --> 00:16:11.210
And one word can mean a very different thing in one context compared to another context.

00:16:11.290 --> 00:16:15.770
And one utterance could can be interpreted very differently dependent depending on the

00:16:15.770 --> 00:16:18.890
nature of the situation we're in, my facial expressions, my tone of voice.

00:16:19.050 --> 00:16:23.290
That can all dramatically change the inferences that get made about what my informative

00:16:23.290 --> 00:16:24.170
intentions were.

00:16:24.330 --> 00:16:27.540
Uh uh but anyway, we're we're we're back to to Michelle now.

00:16:28.340 --> 00:16:29.460
Okay, I found the passage.

00:16:29.940 --> 00:16:34.180
So okay, so you know, Creator Son has, you know, created a mate for himself, Moon, and then

00:16:34.180 --> 00:16:34.900
the children.

00:16:35.140 --> 00:16:38.500
And so the story says, Creator Son became a teacher now.

00:16:38.660 --> 00:16:42.260
He taught the mate what she had to do in her job as a maker of their place.

00:16:42.340 --> 00:16:43.380
He taught the little one.

00:16:43.540 --> 00:16:44.980
They only have one child at this point.

00:16:45.220 --> 00:16:48.740
He taught the little one to help the both of them in whatever the work was.

00:16:49.220 --> 00:16:53.380
Um so you know, they're basically teaching them what their role is, you know, in in the

00:16:53.380 --> 00:16:54.660
world in which they live.

00:16:54.900 --> 00:17:00.890
Um and he's then it says mostly he had to pull each one along and make motions to show

00:17:00.890 --> 00:17:06.490
what it had to do as there wasn't any language just at that particular time and then

00:17:06.490 --> 00:17:11.130
language emerges and so um i think this sort of speaks to the point of you know what is

00:17:11.130 --> 00:17:17.020
language for right it's it's to show people what to do um and um and do that in a

00:17:17.020 --> 00:17:18.300
very efficient manner, right?

00:17:18.380 --> 00:17:18.940
What's your role?

00:17:19.100 --> 00:17:20.220
What what do we need?

00:17:20.380 --> 00:17:21.820
Um how can you help?

00:17:21.980 --> 00:17:23.740
Um what's your contr contribution?

00:17:23.900 --> 00:17:28.940
Um how do we make this group work right efficiently um economically?

00:17:29.180 --> 00:17:33.660
Um anyway that just sort of blew my mind when I read that to think of language as oh it's

00:17:33.660 --> 00:17:34.700
for teaching.

00:17:35.260 --> 00:17:35.740
Yeah.

00:17:35.970 --> 00:17:37.250
Yeah, it's super cool.

00:17:37.410 --> 00:17:43.170
Um i it seems like there's a parallel there between the information efficiency

00:17:43.170 --> 00:17:49.010
of nomenclature and how it tries to help the listener triangulate on the informative

00:17:49.010 --> 00:17:50.290
intentions of the speaker.

00:17:50.450 --> 00:17:55.890
And uh story storytelling, which you argue is a similar kind of uh efficient mode of ins

00:17:56.290 --> 00:17:57.170
information transmission.

00:17:57.250 --> 00:18:02.370
So in what way is storytelling um a more efficient way of transmitting, say,

00:18:02.560 --> 00:18:06.880
ecological knowledge to you than just uh listing the facts to you?

00:18:07.600 --> 00:18:12.560
Um look the the structure of of stories is uh it's called narrative, right?

00:18:12.720 --> 00:18:18.320
Narrative structure is um it it maps really neatly onto the agency

00:18:18.320 --> 00:18:19.200
detection system.

00:18:19.360 --> 00:18:24.240
And I think actually that it probably is part of the agency detection system.

00:18:25.120 --> 00:18:30.250
It's the part, it's the it's the part of the system that organizes information about events

00:18:30.250 --> 00:18:32.810
and actions in the world and represents them.

00:18:33.130 --> 00:18:38.170
So it's probably a really, really ancient cognitive faculty that we share with other

00:18:38.170 --> 00:18:38.810
animals.

00:18:39.530 --> 00:18:43.450
And so if you look at a story, what is it consider what do you what are the ingredients of

00:18:43.450 --> 00:18:43.770
a story?

00:18:43.850 --> 00:18:45.530
What do you need in order to make a story?

00:18:45.690 --> 00:18:51.210
You need characters, events and actions, setting, sequence, and conflict and

00:18:51.210 --> 00:18:51.770
resolution.

00:18:52.330 --> 00:18:56.440
Characters are agents, you know, they're they're entities capable of goal-directed action.

00:18:56.680 --> 00:18:58.600
Um, events and action.

00:18:58.680 --> 00:19:03.880
Well, actions are um are of happenings that are performed by agents, so they're

00:19:03.880 --> 00:19:04.760
goal-directed.

00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:10.920
Events are non-goal-directed happenings, things that happen like tsunamis, floods, right?

00:19:11.160 --> 00:19:13.000
Um, there's no agency involved.

00:19:13.160 --> 00:19:18.120
Um, setting is the set of ecological conditions under which the happenings take place.

00:19:18.360 --> 00:19:24.090
Sequence is the causal and temporal relationships between happenings, and

00:19:24.090 --> 00:19:29.130
conflict is obstacles that agents encounter in the course of trying to pursue their goals,

00:19:29.370 --> 00:19:35.210
and resolution is the outcome of the strategies that they use to try and solve those

00:19:35.210 --> 00:19:35.610
problems.

00:19:35.770 --> 00:19:39.370
And that's basically what our agency detection system does for us, right?

00:19:39.450 --> 00:19:45.080
We can identify agents, make inferences about their goals, and understand their

00:19:45.080 --> 00:19:47.400
actions in terms of oh, they're trying to achieve this goal.

00:19:47.480 --> 00:19:48.680
Oh, look, they ran into a problem.

00:19:48.840 --> 00:19:51.320
Oh, what solution did they come up for that with that?

00:19:51.480 --> 00:19:54.680
Um, and so it's it's essentially the same thing.

00:19:54.920 --> 00:20:00.600
Um, so that makes stories a story a very memorable format because it's how we

00:20:00.600 --> 00:20:06.520
process information about agents and actions and events in the world and the and the

00:20:06.520 --> 00:20:12.330
ecological conditions that constrain um goal-directed action and events

00:20:12.410 --> 00:20:17.690
too, because if the story is set in outer space, then it's highly unlikely that a flood is

00:20:17.690 --> 00:20:18.650
going to occur, right?

00:20:18.810 --> 00:20:23.690
So the setting constraints the possible actions that can take place.

00:20:24.330 --> 00:20:25.610
So that makes it memorable.

00:20:25.690 --> 00:20:31.530
But then humans use all sorts of tactics and techniques to make stories

00:20:31.530 --> 00:20:37.260
more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and therefore more memorable.

00:20:38.060 --> 00:20:43.580
They use there's a lot of so in oral culture, storytelling is a

00:20:43.580 --> 00:20:44.380
performance.

00:20:44.940 --> 00:20:46.780
It's a very active thing.

00:20:47.340 --> 00:20:53.020
And performers use various tactics, like I said, to you know engage the

00:20:53.020 --> 00:20:53.740
audience.

00:20:54.860 --> 00:21:00.170
This is in FSYC, it's known as extensive communication, or

00:21:00.650 --> 00:21:02.330
some people use the term mother-ese.

00:21:02.890 --> 00:21:05.610
I think that's I think ostensive communication is better.

00:21:06.090 --> 00:21:09.770
Linguists call it the paralinguistic features of language.

00:21:09.930 --> 00:21:15.610
So things like modulation of the voice, the use of facial expression, and

00:21:15.610 --> 00:21:17.370
gestures, things like that.

00:21:17.530 --> 00:21:19.450
And so storytellers do this.

00:21:19.930 --> 00:21:23.530
And it it makes the story a lot more exciting.

00:21:24.580 --> 00:21:28.180
It holds people's attention and it makes it more memorable.

00:21:28.420 --> 00:21:33.700
Also, a lot of stories in hunter-gatherer societies have rather

00:21:33.700 --> 00:21:36.420
graphic elements.

00:21:37.060 --> 00:21:42.900
You know, very violent things will happen, and those are very salient too, both

00:21:42.900 --> 00:21:44.180
emotionally and attentionally.

00:21:44.340 --> 00:21:45.220
We remember them.

00:21:45.540 --> 00:21:51.380
I came across an account a while back of an Aboriginal Australian person who said, Yeah,

00:21:51.460 --> 00:21:55.150
our stories are all about you know rape and murder and all this because it makes it them

00:21:55.150 --> 00:21:56.110
easier to remember.

00:21:56.270 --> 00:21:57.870
But I can't remember where I read it.

00:21:57.950 --> 00:21:59.470
Um, and I forgot to mark it.

00:21:59.710 --> 00:22:04.830
Um, but um, but yeah, they're that that's obviously very emotionally engaging.

00:22:04.910 --> 00:22:08.910
So still you know, stories about the ancestors have them doing all sorts of atrocious

00:22:08.910 --> 00:22:09.310
things.

00:22:09.470 --> 00:22:11.710
Um, the San people talk about this too.

00:22:11.790 --> 00:22:15.550
That oh yeah, you can't you can't behave like the ancestors did, you know, they did

00:22:15.550 --> 00:22:16.590
horrible things, right?

00:22:16.750 --> 00:22:18.910
But the story, but you remember the stories.

00:22:19.150 --> 00:22:24.880
Um I could go on, but um anyway, so there's yeah, I can have a question about that.

00:22:24.960 --> 00:22:26.080
Yeah, so sorry, go ahead.

00:22:26.320 --> 00:22:27.040
No, go ahead.

00:22:27.280 --> 00:22:29.200
Um uh do you think it's a byproduct?

00:22:29.360 --> 00:22:35.360
So I mean, do you think the proper domain is I need to tell you, Michelle, about things

00:22:35.360 --> 00:22:39.600
that have happened, or at least when we can talk about things, there's this cool

00:22:39.600 --> 00:22:43.600
opportunity where I can tell you about things that you didn't personally experience.

00:22:43.840 --> 00:22:49.600
And the proper domain is the things that are violent or have high

00:22:49.600 --> 00:22:55.530
costs or benefits are really important to you because they're about real things.

00:22:55.930 --> 00:23:01.530
Is it that stories that are fictional, the ones that are memorable

00:23:01.770 --> 00:23:07.690
and stick, they're they're remembered because the proper domain of that is the

00:23:07.930 --> 00:23:12.890
real life cost benefit, and when it's higher cost or benefit, that's um,

00:23:14.000 --> 00:23:17.040
you know that so you did you see what I'm saying?

00:23:17.120 --> 00:23:23.120
So it's sort of that the um you're registering, oh yeah, this is a good story, not

00:23:23.360 --> 00:23:29.280
because it's entertaining, it's that entertaining is derivative of this is an

00:23:29.280 --> 00:23:35.120
important real life thing to know about or pay attention to, and what entertainment

00:23:35.120 --> 00:23:40.410
is is uh a byproduct of um the

00:23:40.410 --> 00:23:46.250
registering of the um evolved reaction to information that if it were

00:23:46.250 --> 00:23:48.410
true, how important would it be?

00:23:48.810 --> 00:23:50.970
Um, if that makes sense.

00:23:51.450 --> 00:23:54.090
Um yeah, and I think that's that's partly true.

00:23:54.250 --> 00:23:58.820
Um store hunter gatherer stories are about things in the local environment.

00:23:58.900 --> 00:24:01.060
Um, so things that you would naturally be interested in.

00:24:01.140 --> 00:24:06.980
So for example, etiological animal tales are about animals, important animals in the local

00:24:06.980 --> 00:24:07.460
environment.

00:24:07.620 --> 00:24:13.620
So so you and they identify distinctive traits of, you know, the animals,

00:24:13.700 --> 00:24:18.820
um, their diet, their habitat, uh, their behavior, life history, you know, how many

00:24:18.820 --> 00:24:21.380
offspring they produce, these sorts of things.

00:24:21.540 --> 00:24:26.530
Um, but also children are told, you know, pay attention to these stories, right?

00:24:26.610 --> 00:24:27.250
They're important.

00:24:27.490 --> 00:24:28.610
They'll teach you.

00:24:29.090 --> 00:24:31.010
So there's both things going on.

00:24:31.410 --> 00:24:37.090
You know, the stories are about things that, yes, we are biased to be interested in.

00:24:37.970 --> 00:24:41.570
But the children are also, you know, I mean, you know how little kids are.

00:24:41.650 --> 00:24:43.250
Sometimes they can't sit still, right?

00:24:43.650 --> 00:24:44.610
They have all that energy.

00:24:44.690 --> 00:24:49.490
And so, you know, you you get the scolding from you know, parents and and elders, you know,

00:24:49.650 --> 00:24:51.570
you know, sit still, pay attention.

00:24:51.800 --> 00:24:55.000
Um, so yeah, so both things are I think are at play.

00:24:55.240 --> 00:24:59.000
Yeah, and it's certainly not I mean to to counter what I'm saying, it's certainly not true

00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:04.920
that um the system is for reality in the sense of a very bland version of the

00:25:04.920 --> 00:25:09.560
prediction would be if you know a story's false, you just you just dump it.

00:25:09.720 --> 00:25:12.520
And obviously that's not true at all.

00:25:12.680 --> 00:25:17.320
We're very interested in things we know, quote unquote, we know to be fiction, we know to

00:25:17.320 --> 00:25:17.960
be made up.

00:25:18.040 --> 00:25:20.600
In fact, that's often what makes a good story.

00:25:20.840 --> 00:25:25.210
So that at least simple version of that account is not correct.

00:25:25.450 --> 00:25:27.210
So it's this really interesting thing.

00:25:27.290 --> 00:25:30.810
And I think, you know, there are many people have written about or questioned this question

00:25:30.810 --> 00:25:34.890
of why are we so interested in things we know at the outset?

00:25:35.050 --> 00:25:37.610
I'm going to tell you a story that's not true, right?

00:25:37.770 --> 00:25:43.690
Um, on a very simple pass, you would imag you could one could imagine a prediction where

00:25:43.690 --> 00:25:48.970
an evolved organism would not be interested at all and not even want to hear about a

00:25:49.080 --> 00:25:52.840
fictional story, yet we seem to be designed completely the opposite way.

00:25:54.600 --> 00:26:00.360
Yeah, well there are um yeah that the fiction is really a

00:26:00.360 --> 00:26:02.200
big it's complicated.

00:26:02.360 --> 00:26:08.360
Um but um but one strategy I don't know if it's a strategy might be not the

00:26:08.360 --> 00:26:08.760
right word.

00:26:08.840 --> 00:26:14.690
I don't know if this is conscious or unconscious but um In hunter-gatherer culture, and not

00:26:14.690 --> 00:26:18.610
just hunter-gatherer cultures, but oral cultures, but I'll just focus on hunter-gatherer

00:26:18.610 --> 00:26:18.930
cultures.

00:26:19.090 --> 00:26:24.210
There's this widespread belief in what the anthropologist Richard Nelson calls distant

00:26:24.210 --> 00:26:24.290
time.

00:26:24.530 --> 00:26:27.010
That's his translation of the Quayukon word for it.

00:26:27.170 --> 00:26:29.410
Other anthropologists call it myth time.

00:26:29.650 --> 00:26:30.690
There's various names for it.

00:26:30.770 --> 00:26:32.850
In Aboriginal Australia, it's the dreaming.

00:26:33.380 --> 00:26:34.500
That's their word for it.

00:26:34.980 --> 00:26:39.700
Other people call it the time of the ancestors, the time of the animal people.

00:26:40.100 --> 00:26:45.860
So this is an indistinct period, you know, long, long ago, when the world was different

00:26:45.860 --> 00:26:46.580
than it is today.

00:26:46.740 --> 00:26:48.660
So that's it, that's a premise, right?

00:26:48.980 --> 00:26:51.460
And things happened that are no longer possible.

00:26:51.620 --> 00:26:53.940
Things like talking animals, right?

00:26:54.180 --> 00:26:55.380
And so that's understood.

00:26:55.540 --> 00:26:57.940
Okay, this is not necessarily true of the world today.

00:26:58.100 --> 00:27:00.250
This is true of the distant time, right?

00:27:00.730 --> 00:27:04.650
But nevertheless, the descriptions of animal behavior, the descriptions of the land, the

00:27:04.650 --> 00:27:07.850
hydrology, the topography, those are accurate, right?

00:27:08.090 --> 00:27:13.770
So the only fictional thing is that, okay, the animals talk like humans do.

00:27:14.170 --> 00:27:19.610
They may engage in you know behaviors that humans engage in that you know that in real life

00:27:19.690 --> 00:27:21.050
that animal doesn't do.

00:27:21.690 --> 00:27:27.530
But on that point, I think a lot of what we Westerners perceive as fiction

00:27:27.840 --> 00:27:32.000
or counterfactual reasoning might actually be analogical reasoning.

00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:36.400
So, for example, in one of these, you know, distant time stories, if they talk about, you

00:27:36.400 --> 00:27:39.040
know, beaver getting married, beaver looking for a mate.

00:27:39.200 --> 00:27:40.880
Well, beavers do mate.

00:27:41.440 --> 00:27:46.160
They, I mean, and so when you talk about them getting married or being married, maybe

00:27:46.160 --> 00:27:47.760
that's a metaphor, right?

00:27:47.920 --> 00:27:49.440
Not it's not a fiction.

00:27:49.600 --> 00:27:54.160
Um, and so that's something that I sort of want to, you know, explore more.

00:27:54.320 --> 00:27:59.650
Um, uh, but um, but it seems possible that that's possibly what's going on in a lot of

00:27:59.650 --> 00:28:00.450
these cases.

00:28:00.610 --> 00:28:05.410
Um and if you think of it that way, then fiction really isn't as fictional as as we think.

00:28:05.490 --> 00:28:09.490
Um, you know, these so-called myths and and you know, fictional tales.

00:28:09.650 --> 00:28:15.090
Um the amount of fictional information in there is is not that large and it's

00:28:15.090 --> 00:28:15.730
quarantined.

00:28:15.810 --> 00:28:19.300
It's like, oh, this this was true in the distant time, not true today, right?

00:28:19.860 --> 00:28:25.140
Um, yeah, so and then the other the other thing about fiction, because it's you know, I

00:28:25.140 --> 00:28:28.740
think your comment begs the question, well, well, why tell fictional stories in the first

00:28:28.740 --> 00:28:29.060
place?

00:28:29.300 --> 00:28:32.980
Um, and I think that's because um it offers flexibility.

00:28:33.220 --> 00:28:38.980
So if your group's um you know combined uh personal experience

00:28:38.980 --> 00:28:44.150
doesn't have an exemplar that addresses a particular teaching need, you know, you have the

00:28:44.150 --> 00:28:45.590
need to teach a lesson, right?

00:28:45.830 --> 00:28:51.110
Well, then you can, you know, based on your understanding of your local environment, you

00:28:51.110 --> 00:28:54.550
can construct a story that will, you know, serve that need.

00:28:54.710 --> 00:29:00.390
Um, or you can modify an existing story, you know, personal experience story, um, to tailor

00:29:00.390 --> 00:29:05.430
it, you know, better, make it more suitable for teaching the lesson at hand.

00:29:05.590 --> 00:29:07.750
Um, so it gives you that flexibility.

00:29:07.910 --> 00:29:13.140
Um, yeah, And then again, you can also include then things that um you know violate our

00:29:13.140 --> 00:29:15.380
expectations, like you know, talking animals, right?

00:29:15.460 --> 00:29:16.420
That that's salient.

00:29:16.500 --> 00:29:21.940
Um, you know, Pascal Boy's work on um, you know, why religious ideas, you know, stick

00:29:22.020 --> 00:29:25.620
because of, you know, there's a few counterfactual elements that violate our natural

00:29:25.620 --> 00:29:26.980
ontological categories.

00:29:27.140 --> 00:29:29.940
So it so that serves as a mnemonic device as well.

00:29:30.100 --> 00:29:35.860
Um, so it just offers you lots of opportunities, um, you know, the the ability to create

00:29:35.860 --> 00:29:36.340
fictions.

00:29:36.630 --> 00:29:36.790
Yeah.

00:29:36.870 --> 00:29:42.870
I mean, I think uh even as simple as a motor command, in order for me to move my arm

00:29:42.870 --> 00:29:46.710
and not hit my computer, there's actually a lot of counterfactuals running in my head.

00:29:46.950 --> 00:29:51.270
And so those counterfactuals are all things that aren't even being done, but they're just,

00:29:51.350 --> 00:29:54.070
you know, models of what would happen in the world.

00:29:54.150 --> 00:30:00.150
And one can argue that a lot of what fiction is, is it's false in the sense of it

00:30:00.120 --> 00:30:05.000
didn't happen, but it's a description of a counterfactual world that you can still learn a

00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:08.920
lot from or get an inference out of, in the same way, my brain is getting an inference,

00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:12.280
don't move my put my arm here, because if I do, I'll hit the computer.

00:30:12.600 --> 00:30:18.520
So the the I think the naive view that we only listen to things that are true is clearly

00:30:18.520 --> 00:30:22.840
wrong because you can still learn a lot from something that didn't happen.

00:30:22.920 --> 00:30:28.890
And in fact, in order to even relate to the world effectively, even at

00:30:28.890 --> 00:30:34.650
a very simple motor level, we must at some level represent possible

00:30:34.650 --> 00:30:40.330
states of the world that haven't yet happened or that, and consequently model what would

00:30:40.330 --> 00:30:42.250
the consequences be if that happened.

00:30:42.410 --> 00:30:47.930
And one could view fiction as its representations that are rich

00:30:48.250 --> 00:30:54.060
for these inferences that have some implication for setting my own s uh

00:30:54.300 --> 00:30:55.580
cognitive system, right?

00:30:55.660 --> 00:30:59.740
Like you're gonna tell me something that I'm gonna learn a lesson from to put it simply.

00:30:59.820 --> 00:31:04.380
Um and I think that's intuitive, but I but I think it's worth explicitly sort of saying

00:31:04.540 --> 00:31:10.460
that it's something can be false or maybe that's even the wrong way to put

00:31:10.460 --> 00:31:10.700
it.

00:31:10.860 --> 00:31:13.180
Um it it can't happen.

00:31:13.340 --> 00:31:14.060
Yeah, exactly.

00:31:14.140 --> 00:31:14.300
Yeah.

00:31:14.540 --> 00:31:17.660
The you can learn a lot from something that is hypothetical.

00:31:18.050 --> 00:31:18.690
Yes, yes.

00:31:18.770 --> 00:31:19.250
It's yeah.

00:31:19.330 --> 00:31:23.170
So um, you know, stories, fictional stories have been characterized as thought experiments,

00:31:23.250 --> 00:31:23.410
right?

00:31:23.490 --> 00:31:27.330
They they a lot of fictional stories address the question, what might happen if?

00:31:27.730 --> 00:31:30.690
And and and if that happened, how would I deal with that, right?

00:31:30.770 --> 00:31:31.970
What's a possible solution?

00:31:32.370 --> 00:31:36.210
Like the example I like to use in um my class is Jurassic Park.

00:31:36.530 --> 00:31:40.130
What might happen if humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, right?

00:31:40.210 --> 00:31:41.330
What problem would that lead to?

00:31:41.810 --> 00:31:47.420
Um and you know, unlikely to happen, but but still, you know, we do encounter um ecological

00:31:47.420 --> 00:31:52.540
problems i mean new developments in the um animal kingdom that we have to deal with right

00:31:52.620 --> 00:31:58.140
that that cause trouble for us um I was just learning about the um the lone star tick you

00:31:58.140 --> 00:32:03.500
guys heard about this no oh it's a it it causes um

00:32:03.900 --> 00:32:09.660
one of its it's it's horrific um so it causes people to have allergies

00:32:09.660 --> 00:32:14.690
to meat Um, I mean, really, yes, I've heard of this, yes.

00:32:15.010 --> 00:32:17.890
And um, yeah, and and it's spreading due to climate change.

00:32:18.050 --> 00:32:23.090
It used to be, I think, just in the south in the real real humid climates, but now it's

00:32:23.090 --> 00:32:27.170
spreading uh as far as Maine and as far west as Iowa.

00:32:27.490 --> 00:32:33.260
And um, yeah, so um it's Lyme disease is nothing compared to this this

00:32:33.260 --> 00:32:34.700
tick, um what it does to you.

00:32:34.780 --> 00:32:40.060
And and I mean and not just it doesn't make it doesn't just cause a a profound, you know,

00:32:40.140 --> 00:32:46.060
really intense allergic reaction to meat, but anything like if you have beef tallow in your

00:32:46.060 --> 00:32:47.500
lotion, you can have a reaction.

00:32:47.580 --> 00:32:48.460
You know, things like that.

00:32:48.540 --> 00:32:50.380
It's just um yeah.

00:32:50.460 --> 00:32:51.020
So anyway.

00:32:52.860 --> 00:32:54.300
Not dinosaurs, but ticks.

00:32:54.380 --> 00:32:54.540
Yeah.

00:32:55.710 --> 00:33:00.030
I can imagine, you know, um someone for the people for the ethical treatment of animals

00:33:00.190 --> 00:33:00.590
spreading this.

00:33:00.990 --> 00:33:05.710
I was gonna say vegan, vegan uh bioterrorism or whatever.

00:33:05.870 --> 00:33:06.030
Yes.

00:33:06.110 --> 00:33:08.030
Um, but yeah, no, that's right.

00:33:08.110 --> 00:33:09.630
There's a lot of lessons in Jurassic Park.

00:33:09.710 --> 00:33:13.310
Like your scientists were so worried about doing thinking about if they could, they didn't

00:33:13.310 --> 00:33:14.510
stop and think about if they should.

00:33:14.590 --> 00:33:16.830
You know, that comes up, that gets that meme is everywhere.

00:33:16.990 --> 00:33:20.030
So yeah, no, no, you you can learn a lot from a fictional story.

00:33:20.110 --> 00:33:20.270
Yeah.

00:33:20.590 --> 00:33:20.830
Sure.

00:33:20.910 --> 00:33:21.070
Yeah.

00:33:21.150 --> 00:33:25.020
I mean it reminds me um to bring back another episode of the one we had with Tay Deg

00:33:25.180 --> 00:33:31.100
Quillian, where he's basically arguing that um counterfactual reasoning is at the core of

00:33:31.180 --> 00:33:35.820
uh causality or judgments of causality in general, that we literally cannot understand what

00:33:35.820 --> 00:33:38.460
causes what without counterfactual reasoning.

00:33:38.540 --> 00:33:43.980
And and what causality is at its core is just a correlation between two things across

00:33:43.980 --> 00:33:45.740
counterfactual worlds.

00:33:45.900 --> 00:33:51.740
Um, and so if we need to have any understanding of what causes what, which is obviously

00:33:51.900 --> 00:33:56.510
uh crucial for any kind of you know uh uh biological fitness related goal.

00:33:56.670 --> 00:33:58.830
Uh you need counterfactual reasoning.

00:33:58.910 --> 00:34:03.550
Uh uh it's you can't uh tie it apart from from uh causal thinking in general.

00:34:03.950 --> 00:34:04.350
Right, right.

00:34:04.590 --> 00:34:07.870
Hypothesis formation is you know involves counterfactual reasoning, right?

00:34:08.030 --> 00:34:08.270
Yeah.

00:34:08.510 --> 00:34:10.830
This this might possibly explain, right?

00:34:11.150 --> 00:34:11.470
Yeah.

00:34:11.950 --> 00:34:13.630
So you have to test it to find out, yeah.

00:34:13.880 --> 00:34:14.040
Yeah.

00:34:14.680 --> 00:34:14.920
For sure.

00:34:15.160 --> 00:34:15.320
Yeah.

00:34:15.400 --> 00:34:20.840
The little engines in our head that are modeling the world, the reality is poor

00:34:21.160 --> 00:34:22.360
to populate it.

00:34:22.440 --> 00:34:27.960
And so something you've experienced or a story or a hypothesis I generate from it

00:34:28.200 --> 00:34:32.920
can very easily correct what otherwise might be overdetermined, right?

00:34:33.320 --> 00:34:38.310
Um, so like if I'm a kid and I drop something, I don't know if it's that every time I drop

00:34:38.310 --> 00:34:41.830
something, it falls straight down, or if there was an art that was an artifact of a

00:34:41.830 --> 00:34:43.510
particular moment in time.

00:34:43.750 --> 00:34:48.870
But if I have a model that pits those two apart, then I can test it and then I can be more

00:34:48.870 --> 00:34:52.550
confident my inferences going forward that, oh no, it actually wasn't that the wind was

00:34:52.550 --> 00:34:53.350
blowing straight down.

00:34:53.430 --> 00:34:57.030
It's that more or less every time I drop something, it'll fall straight down, unless

00:34:57.030 --> 00:34:58.630
there's countervailing things.

00:34:58.790 --> 00:35:01.990
That's hard to do because the world's complicated and overdetermined.

00:35:02.070 --> 00:35:05.200
So if you have a model that can make it's like science, right?

00:35:05.280 --> 00:35:09.120
This is the Allison Gopnick point that like there is a sense in which our internal

00:35:09.120 --> 00:35:13.440
representational causal systems are like scientific hypotheses.

00:35:13.520 --> 00:35:15.040
There is a kernel of truth to that.

00:35:15.120 --> 00:35:21.120
Um the in the sense of um getting the model right in part involves figuring

00:35:21.120 --> 00:35:26.800
out how what are the con what how you test that with the stuff you have at hand, like

00:35:26.880 --> 00:35:28.720
drop the rock again, see what happens.

00:35:29.600 --> 00:35:30.160
Right.

00:35:30.870 --> 00:35:31.190
Yeah.

00:35:31.350 --> 00:35:36.950
Um, so we we've talked a lot about you know what the receivers of stories might gain from

00:35:36.950 --> 00:35:37.830
the stories themselves.

00:35:37.990 --> 00:35:42.310
That is, the stories might contain useful ecological knowledge, it might help them learn

00:35:42.310 --> 00:35:47.990
about important causal relationships, uh, it might contain uh threat relevant

00:35:47.990 --> 00:35:50.550
information that captures their attention.

00:35:50.710 --> 00:35:55.590
Uh so these are all reasons why receivers might be interested in listening to a story.

00:35:55.800 --> 00:36:00.040
But uh I I'm I'm kind of interested in the other side of the equation, which is what the

00:36:00.040 --> 00:36:01.800
producers of the stories benefit.

00:36:01.960 --> 00:36:05.240
Because I think this is an increasingly important perspective that's being taken in

00:36:05.240 --> 00:36:06.440
cultural evolution research.

00:36:06.520 --> 00:36:10.120
We talked about this in the episode with Pascal Boyer, is that it's important to understand

00:36:10.120 --> 00:36:15.160
what the producers of a of a cultural variant uh gain from its production as well as what

00:36:15.160 --> 00:36:16.840
the uh consumers of it gain.

00:36:16.920 --> 00:36:20.200
So so why should I bother telling you a story at all?

00:36:20.280 --> 00:36:21.960
What do I get out of the deal?

00:36:22.610 --> 00:36:25.970
Yeah, I think I characterize storytelling as a form of cooperation.

00:36:26.050 --> 00:36:27.890
It's an information exchange.

00:36:28.130 --> 00:36:31.010
And the storyteller benefits in lots of ways.

00:36:31.570 --> 00:36:35.570
First of all, if you're telling stories to your kin, your children, your uh nieces,

00:36:35.730 --> 00:36:39.410
nephews, whatever, you're increasing their chances of surviving, right?

00:36:39.650 --> 00:36:45.410
Um, if you're telling stories to um people who aren't um you know that

00:36:45.410 --> 00:36:49.860
closely related to you, you're still establishing a cooperative relationship, right?

00:36:50.020 --> 00:36:51.620
You're you're doing a favor for them.

00:36:51.780 --> 00:36:55.620
So that's going to motivate them to you know be inclined to do favors for you.

00:36:55.860 --> 00:37:01.860
And um and then you're also establishing um uh your reputation as a cooperative person.

00:37:02.020 --> 00:37:04.900
This person is generous, they share their knowledge with others.

00:37:05.060 --> 00:37:10.820
Um so I basically I think cooperation explains it um, you know, on on pretty much, you

00:37:10.820 --> 00:37:12.020
know, multiple levels.

00:37:12.450 --> 00:37:12.850
Interesting.

00:37:12.930 --> 00:37:17.250
I mean, might it also serve a signaling function that I'm I'm the type of person who's

00:37:17.410 --> 00:37:19.250
number one, like a good communicator.

00:37:19.410 --> 00:37:20.450
I'm I have a good memory.

00:37:20.530 --> 00:37:22.130
I can remember useful bits of information.

00:37:22.290 --> 00:37:25.970
I can communicate the most relevant bits of that information to you, which makes me a more

00:37:25.970 --> 00:37:27.410
useful conversation partner.

00:37:27.570 --> 00:37:31.410
I mean, we we frequently get in conversations where the person talks about irrelevant

00:37:31.410 --> 00:37:35.650
things that aren't of interest to us, and we uh judge that person as a poor conversation

00:37:35.650 --> 00:37:39.760
partner and might might want to uh not have a cooperative uh relationship with that person

00:37:39.760 --> 00:37:42.080
and favor someone else in the social marketplace.

00:37:42.240 --> 00:37:46.720
Um exactly yeah it makes you valuable as a put you know cooperator.

00:37:46.960 --> 00:37:47.280
Interesting.

00:37:47.520 --> 00:37:48.720
Yeah as an alliance member.

00:37:48.800 --> 00:37:49.040
Yeah.

00:37:49.120 --> 00:37:50.880
Yeah I want to work with that person, right?

00:37:51.280 --> 00:37:53.120
You know, he or she knows a lot, right?

00:37:53.200 --> 00:37:54.400
Or they know a lot.

00:37:54.560 --> 00:37:57.840
Um and um so they're you know a useful source of information.

00:37:57.920 --> 00:37:59.520
You know that's it's a benefit to me.

00:37:59.600 --> 00:37:59.920
Yeah.

00:38:00.240 --> 00:38:00.400
Yeah.

00:38:00.640 --> 00:38:01.440
I like that David.

00:38:01.520 --> 00:38:06.480
And I also like I often when I hear those hypotheses, I used to think they were kind of

00:38:06.480 --> 00:38:11.710
silly because uh and I don't anymore, but I want to clarify a counter uh

00:38:11.870 --> 00:38:16.030
understanding of it that I think is wrong, which is sort of the idea is that the reason why

00:38:16.030 --> 00:38:21.070
they're storytelling and the reason why you communicate is because there's this benefit to

00:38:21.070 --> 00:38:26.510
doing it where if you're good at it, then you you get some benefits.

00:38:26.670 --> 00:38:31.620
But I think uh a more sophisticated version is the

00:38:32.820 --> 00:38:38.660
opportunity to communicate in this way opens up more

00:38:38.900 --> 00:38:42.180
opportunities for all of the above, right?

00:38:42.420 --> 00:38:48.100
Where you get agents get the benefits of hearing about things that they didn't

00:38:48.100 --> 00:38:54.100
directly experience, but then all the costs of being bad at that or the benefits

00:38:54.100 --> 00:38:56.990
of being good at it then subsequently follow.

00:38:57.150 --> 00:39:02.030
And then there's like con uh there's partner selection effects as well, right?

00:39:02.110 --> 00:39:06.270
In the in the sense of it's analogous to sort of like, well, why do we have arms?

00:39:06.430 --> 00:39:08.990
It's because we can like, you know, pick fruit.

00:39:09.230 --> 00:39:13.870
But once we can pick enough fruit to share it, you're going to prefer people who are better

00:39:13.870 --> 00:39:14.990
at it or worse than it.

00:39:15.150 --> 00:39:18.270
But it's not that you have arms to pick better people or worse people.

00:39:18.430 --> 00:39:24.060
It's that you can pick arms and the fact that you've got and you want to pick good people

00:39:24.060 --> 00:39:25.820
and bad people and you put those two together.

00:39:25.900 --> 00:39:31.580
And I think the same thing is true for like telling stories, um, which is that it it

00:39:31.580 --> 00:39:37.340
creates opportunities for everybody when it goes well, when it's in a beneficial way.

00:39:37.580 --> 00:39:42.620
But then consequently, if you're bad at it, that's an uh uh um a cost as well.

00:39:43.270 --> 00:39:43.430
Right.

00:39:43.590 --> 00:39:46.230
And not everybody tells stories in hunter-gatherer societies.

00:39:46.310 --> 00:39:48.070
There are people who specialize in it.

00:39:48.310 --> 00:39:52.470
And um, and there though it tends to be people who are good at it, right?

00:39:52.710 --> 00:39:56.550
Um, but um it's it's a recognized social role.

00:39:56.710 --> 00:40:00.070
Um, and so a person who's not good at it, well, they might specialize in something else,

00:40:00.150 --> 00:40:00.310
right?

00:40:00.390 --> 00:40:04.310
Oh, I I I can't be a good storyteller, I can't remember all that knowledge, but but I can

00:40:04.310 --> 00:40:06.310
be a good um healer, right?

00:40:06.390 --> 00:40:07.670
So I'll, you know, I'm good at that.

00:40:07.750 --> 00:40:12.060
I I understand, you know, plants and their medicinal properties, so I'll do that, right or

00:40:12.140 --> 00:40:16.300
okay I'm a I'm a good hunter okay I will just focus on that and you know providing food for

00:40:16.300 --> 00:40:22.220
my my people be very generous um and um yeah no I've recently I've been reading a lot of um

00:40:22.220 --> 00:40:28.220
what I call um emic ethnographies so accounts of culture by you know people members of

00:40:28.220 --> 00:40:33.740
that culture um and um and what's one of the things that I'm

00:40:33.740 --> 00:40:39.350
learning is that um I thought everybody who was old was considered an elder, but elder is

00:40:39.430 --> 00:40:43.670
is like a role, and not everybody you you're not considered an elder just because you're

00:40:43.670 --> 00:40:44.070
old.

00:40:44.230 --> 00:40:46.230
Um, it's because you know things.

00:40:46.470 --> 00:40:50.870
Um, and you know, you're in some sort of leadership role because of your knowledge.

00:40:51.030 --> 00:40:55.110
Um, there might be other elders who, you know, specialize in other things, like probably a

00:40:55.110 --> 00:40:58.310
healer would be considered an elder um at a certain age.

00:40:58.390 --> 00:41:02.630
Um, but it's really a reference to um this role that they provide.

00:41:02.790 --> 00:41:07.520
They're um they're they're basically knowledge keepers they're the people they're the

00:41:07.520 --> 00:41:13.280
librarians and the teachers and the scholars all rolled into one they take on the

00:41:13.280 --> 00:41:18.240
responsibility of um maintaining the communal knowledge base and seeing that it's

00:41:18.240 --> 00:41:24.160
transmitted to the next generation so it doesn't get lost right um so um so

00:41:24.240 --> 00:41:29.110
yeah it's storytelling is one of many things that you know a person can specialize in in

00:41:29.110 --> 00:41:29.830
their group.

00:41:29.990 --> 00:41:34.390
Um and so the trick is to find what you're good at and make yourself useful in that way,

00:41:34.470 --> 00:41:35.750
right, to your group.

00:41:36.070 --> 00:41:36.310
Yeah.

00:41:36.470 --> 00:41:40.870
I think there's like a kind of implicit thing in our evolved psychology that people feel

00:41:40.870 --> 00:41:44.870
reluctant to, for example, publicly speak or they feel shy.

00:41:45.190 --> 00:41:50.070
Um and I think that, and I don't think you just get that in like a context where there's a

00:41:50.070 --> 00:41:51.910
race stage in like a PA system.

00:41:51.990 --> 00:41:56.640
Like I think, you know, even kids become shy when they have to speak in front of groups of

00:41:56.640 --> 00:41:56.800
people.

00:41:56.880 --> 00:42:00.960
Like I don't think it's restricted to Western electronics, right?

00:42:01.120 --> 00:42:06.960
Um and that I think implies that, among other things, that there's a

00:42:06.960 --> 00:42:10.320
representation of am I publicly speaking right now?

00:42:10.560 --> 00:42:15.840
And there's an acknowledgement of the possible benefits and costs of doing so, where it's

00:42:15.840 --> 00:42:19.730
very much a a David Pinsafian point of it's coordination, right?

00:42:19.810 --> 00:42:24.530
It's like there's going to be very possibly high benefits, but possibly high cost if this

00:42:24.530 --> 00:42:28.930
goes wrong, because I've got joint attention on me, multiple people.

00:42:29.330 --> 00:42:35.090
And there clearly seems to be a slot in our brains for am I speaking,

00:42:35.250 --> 00:42:39.570
you know, even right now, like Michelle, if we were it was just the three of us in the Zoom

00:42:39.570 --> 00:42:44.100
call, we might be acting a bit differently than we are, knowing that this will be

00:42:44.100 --> 00:42:45.780
represented by other people.

00:42:46.100 --> 00:42:51.620
Um so there really seems to be this slot for public presentation mode

00:42:51.780 --> 00:42:54.180
that's different than um than not.

00:42:54.420 --> 00:42:59.780
And that really suggests that this has been an enduring part of our EEA in a in a way.

00:43:00.100 --> 00:43:00.580
That's interesting.

00:43:01.380 --> 00:43:01.700
Yeah.

00:43:01.780 --> 00:43:07.730
Um yeah there's a um in uh in the ethnographic record there are accounts of

00:43:07.810 --> 00:43:13.570
like what makes a good leader, like a good headman, and um oratory skill is one of the the

00:43:13.570 --> 00:43:14.770
big, big ones, right?

00:43:15.010 --> 00:43:16.770
Being a a good public speaker.

00:43:16.850 --> 00:43:17.890
Um, rhetoric, right?

00:43:17.970 --> 00:43:19.650
Being able to persuade the people.

00:43:19.970 --> 00:43:25.960
Um, and um and yeah, no, I've I've come across accounts of like um elders who um you know

00:43:26.040 --> 00:43:30.920
an anthropologist or linguist or whatever wants to interview them to um or invite them to

00:43:30.920 --> 00:43:35.640
speak you know at some sort of gathering about you know the traditions and they're hesitant

00:43:35.640 --> 00:43:37.320
to do it, they don't want to do it.

00:43:37.480 --> 00:43:42.360
Um and so it's that that shyness, that um you know, fear of public speaking or whatever,

00:43:42.440 --> 00:43:43.720
you know, what what's gonna happen to me?

00:43:43.800 --> 00:43:44.840
What if I say the wrong thing?

00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:46.600
What if the I'm not convincing?

00:43:46.680 --> 00:43:47.800
What if people don't like me?

00:43:47.960 --> 00:43:50.360
There's all that you know at play as well.

00:43:50.520 --> 00:43:56.390
Um, and so um, so yeah, um being able to yeah, speak in in front of an audience is

00:43:56.390 --> 00:43:58.310
a real gift, a real skill.

00:43:58.630 --> 00:43:59.190
Yeah, interesting.

00:43:59.270 --> 00:44:02.390
Yeah, I mean i there's there's the risk of yes saying the wrong thing or offending

00:44:02.390 --> 00:44:07.430
somebody, uh, but there's also the more banal risk of just being boring, of just wasting

00:44:07.430 --> 00:44:09.190
people's time and attention.

00:44:09.590 --> 00:44:13.190
Because when you think I mean, time is a limited resource and attention is a limited

00:44:13.190 --> 00:44:13.510
resource.

00:44:13.590 --> 00:44:17.670
You know, cognitive scientists say that we can hold and working memory around seven

00:44:17.670 --> 00:44:21.920
different concepts or seven different ideas or pieces of information, which means that um

00:44:22.160 --> 00:44:28.080
if I take more of the collective resource of attention, that is uh uh inflicts opportunity

00:44:28.080 --> 00:44:32.560
costs on all of the other potentially more valuable things we could be paying attention to.

00:44:32.800 --> 00:44:36.640
We have all sorts of pejorative terms for people who take too much attention, you know,

00:44:36.800 --> 00:44:39.760
show-offs, attention whores, crybabies, whatever.

00:44:39.920 --> 00:44:45.120
And I think that i uh is analogous to a kind of greed, where if there's, you know, a a

00:44:45.120 --> 00:44:49.790
communal resource, let's say food, uh, and I'm already pretty well fed and I'm just

00:44:49.790 --> 00:44:53.230
hoarding it and taking it a lot of that food and not leaving enough for other people.

00:44:53.310 --> 00:44:54.910
I'm kind of greedy and selfish.

00:44:55.070 --> 00:44:57.310
The same is true of attention as a limited resource.

00:44:57.390 --> 00:45:02.430
If I'm taking too much uh of the communal resource of attention without providing any

00:45:02.430 --> 00:45:06.910
offsetting benefits to other people, I could be viewed as a greedy, selfish person.

00:45:07.420 --> 00:45:12.940
And so there's just the reluctance, I think, to take this communal resource of attention

00:45:12.940 --> 00:45:17.820
without being confident that one can provide offsetting benefits to it.

00:45:18.220 --> 00:45:18.460
Yeah.

00:45:18.700 --> 00:45:24.620
On that point, in hunter gatherer societies, there are rules for when the

00:45:24.620 --> 00:45:29.900
most important cultural stories are told, what we would call myths, the foundational, the

00:45:29.900 --> 00:45:33.580
things that are considered really important for people to learn and for you know to pass on

00:45:33.580 --> 00:45:34.700
to the next generation.

00:45:35.100 --> 00:45:40.930
And in temperate climates where you have harsh winters and long winter nights,

00:45:41.090 --> 00:45:42.610
that's when those stories are told.

00:45:42.690 --> 00:45:47.810
And it's very practical because economic activity is really low, right?

00:45:47.890 --> 00:45:52.210
People can't go out hunting because of the animals are hiding or they migrated.

00:45:52.370 --> 00:45:53.970
Plus, it's difficult, right?

00:45:54.050 --> 00:45:57.330
The air and ground conditions are very harsh.

00:45:58.690 --> 00:46:00.930
And people tend to gather indoors to keep warm.

00:46:01.010 --> 00:46:02.770
And so you have all this leisure time.

00:46:02.850 --> 00:46:05.820
And so that's used for education, right?

00:46:06.060 --> 00:46:10.540
Um, people have the attention to spare, they have the time to sit and listen to stories.

00:46:10.620 --> 00:46:16.380
And and stories, I mean, there are story um like epics um that took

00:46:16.380 --> 00:46:18.780
multiple nights to recount.

00:46:18.860 --> 00:46:23.100
I mean, some people say like a week or two um to recount the whole story.

00:46:23.260 --> 00:46:26.860
Um and the storytelling would go all on all night and then they would just pick it up the

00:46:26.860 --> 00:46:27.500
next night.

00:46:27.660 --> 00:46:30.940
Um so yeah, it takes a lot of a lot of attention, a lot of time.

00:46:31.100 --> 00:46:34.140
Um, and so um hunter gatherers manage that efficiently.

00:46:34.630 --> 00:46:35.590
Lord of the Rings.

00:46:35.670 --> 00:46:36.150
Yeah.

00:46:36.390 --> 00:46:36.710
Yeah.

00:46:37.830 --> 00:46:38.230
Right.

00:46:38.470 --> 00:46:38.870
Right.

00:46:39.110 --> 00:46:43.830
Michelle, I just want to ask a meta question, which is like the science of storytelling is

00:46:43.910 --> 00:46:48.710
and I know you've been again, you do more than that, but you're we're we're we're talking

00:46:48.710 --> 00:46:52.390
about cultural transmissions for this vehicle of storytelling, at least for now.

00:46:52.630 --> 00:46:58.630
Um is the cognitive science of stories or storytelling respected

00:46:58.790 --> 00:47:01.190
or even an area of research?

00:47:01.460 --> 00:47:07.380
um kind of proper because uh one can imagine sort of

00:47:07.380 --> 00:47:13.380
like play kids kids and women's stuff sort of gets poo-pooed from a from like a uh

00:47:13.380 --> 00:47:15.140
historical perspective.

00:47:16.900 --> 00:47:22.260
Does the psychology of storytelling get its due attention and

00:47:22.260 --> 00:47:26.260
deference from the perspective of this is a really important thing?

00:47:27.060 --> 00:47:28.820
Do you mean now, today?

00:47:29.230 --> 00:47:33.870
Uh yeah, now now, currently, and also, you know, in your in during your career, like was it

00:47:33.870 --> 00:47:34.270
difficult?

00:47:34.510 --> 00:47:40.190
Are there a lot of people who are studying storytelling from a cognitive cognitive science

00:47:40.190 --> 00:47:41.070
perspective?

00:47:41.470 --> 00:47:47.230
Do cognitive scientists who are who are more um traditional or psychologists

00:47:47.310 --> 00:47:51.630
uh understand that there's even something to study, that that kind of a thing, yeah.

00:47:52.120 --> 00:47:53.160
Um there are a few.

00:47:53.320 --> 00:47:57.800
Um uh Raymond Maher comes to mind and and Keith Oatley, but I think he's retired now.

00:47:57.960 --> 00:48:01.240
Um they look at um storytelling from a theory of mind perspective.

00:48:01.400 --> 00:48:05.320
Um, but no, generally, no, there's actually not a lot in Ev Psych.

00:48:05.800 --> 00:48:10.520
Um and I I often think I'm regarded as oh the the the little lady who studies storytelling,

00:48:10.600 --> 00:48:11.720
isn't she cute?

00:48:13.160 --> 00:48:19.080
Um but um but back in the 60s and 70s, and I think going into the 80s,

00:48:19.370 --> 00:48:22.810
there was a ton of research on narrative in cognitive science.

00:48:22.970 --> 00:48:27.050
And that's where when I was talking about the structure of narrative, it's interesting,

00:48:27.210 --> 00:48:31.770
literary scholars and cognitive psychologists agree on the basic structure of narrative,

00:48:31.930 --> 00:48:32.250
right?

00:48:32.810 --> 00:48:36.410
But I literary scholars are completely unaware of this body of research.

00:48:36.490 --> 00:48:39.530
And I think you know, cognitive psychologists who study narrative don't really pay

00:48:39.530 --> 00:48:41.130
attention to literary studies.

00:48:42.170 --> 00:48:45.240
But um, but but then it kind of died out.

00:48:45.320 --> 00:48:47.560
I don't I don't think there's a lot of people doing it now.

00:48:47.720 --> 00:48:53.320
Um but anyways, it was it was um the research was focused on um sort of outlining story

00:48:53.320 --> 00:48:56.840
grammars, that's what they call them, but basically the the structure of narrative.

00:48:57.080 --> 00:49:02.760
Um but um yeah, I don't know of a lot that's going on um nowadays um

00:49:03.240 --> 00:49:05.080
you know in cognitive science.

00:49:05.320 --> 00:49:05.720
Yeah.

00:49:06.120 --> 00:49:11.210
Um do uh humors often contain jokes and humor and laughter?

00:49:11.370 --> 00:49:15.850
Uh I know I I'm I'm personally interested in uh the evolutionary psychology of humor.

00:49:15.930 --> 00:49:18.330
I have a working paper uh that's under review.

00:49:18.410 --> 00:49:22.170
I'm curious um what the role of humor is in storytelling.

00:49:23.050 --> 00:49:24.330
It's demonic, right?

00:49:24.490 --> 00:49:26.250
If a story's funny, you remember it.

00:49:26.410 --> 00:49:30.860
Um so to give you an example, because I've been researching the you know the Blackfoot

00:49:30.860 --> 00:49:33.900
Nation because I just you know went to some of their sites.

00:49:34.060 --> 00:49:38.940
Um and um there's this story I've I've encountered four different versions of it you know

00:49:39.100 --> 00:49:45.100
collected by four different individuals um and and the stories it's the same basic story so

00:49:45.100 --> 00:49:50.850
their um one of their important um story beings is called

00:49:50.850 --> 00:49:51.490
old man.

00:49:51.570 --> 00:49:55.170
It's Nappy in in Blackfeet um in their language.

00:49:55.810 --> 00:50:00.450
But he's sort of a trickster and a creator, well not a creator figure, like a transformer

00:50:00.450 --> 00:50:00.770
figure.

00:50:00.850 --> 00:50:02.690
So he he made changes to the world.

00:50:03.090 --> 00:50:05.330
The world existed but then he changed it in certain ways.

00:50:05.410 --> 00:50:10.000
And he and he's credited with teaching the people how to make a living in, you know, in in

00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:11.200
the on the plains.

00:50:11.440 --> 00:50:17.200
Um anyway, so one day old man is walking along stream bank and he sees um some berries in

00:50:17.200 --> 00:50:17.920
the water, right?

00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:18.560
Berries.

00:50:18.720 --> 00:50:20.640
So he dives in to get the berries.

00:50:21.120 --> 00:50:21.840
No berries, right?

00:50:21.920 --> 00:50:26.320
So he just keeps diving in, diving, and finally he ties a rock around like his neck or some

00:50:26.320 --> 00:50:31.040
part of his body so he can stay down longer and he just he exhausts himself and and you

00:50:31.040 --> 00:50:32.960
know, you know, no luck, no berries.

00:50:33.170 --> 00:50:35.890
And so um at this point he's really pissed off.

00:50:35.970 --> 00:50:39.730
And uh so he climbs out of the water, he lays down on the bank, you know, in the shade to

00:50:39.730 --> 00:50:39.890
rest.

00:50:40.050 --> 00:50:44.690
He lays under under this bush and he looks up, and there are the berries.

00:50:44.850 --> 00:50:49.490
And so now he's super, super pissed off, and he takes a stick and he just starts whacking

00:50:49.490 --> 00:50:50.850
away at the bush, right?

00:50:50.930 --> 00:50:52.290
And the berries fall off.

00:50:52.370 --> 00:50:56.370
And the story ends with, and that's how Nappy taught us how to harvest berries, right?

00:50:56.530 --> 00:51:02.360
So it's this funny image, right, of this this and one of his incarnations is a coyote

00:51:02.600 --> 00:51:06.760
he you know he can transform himself so I get this visual image of you know like the coyote

00:51:06.920 --> 00:51:12.760
and roadrunner cartoons do you guys know those yeah um of you know the coyote just um

00:51:12.840 --> 00:51:17.320
you know and taking the stick and beating this poor bush um and then just ironically it

00:51:17.320 --> 00:51:22.360
turns out to be the most efficient way of harvesting the berries um anyway so trickster

00:51:22.360 --> 00:51:24.370
stories typically use humor.

00:51:24.530 --> 00:51:29.170
Um, the trickster, you know, his plans back just like the coyote, you know, his plans

00:51:29.170 --> 00:51:34.290
backfire, um, and he ends up being humiliated um or punished in some way.

00:51:34.370 --> 00:51:35.490
And and it's funny.

00:51:35.570 --> 00:51:38.930
Um, and it kind of balances the darkness because some of the things he does are really

00:51:38.930 --> 00:51:39.250
dark.

00:51:39.410 --> 00:51:40.770
Um, you know, the trickster.

00:51:41.010 --> 00:51:46.610
Um, and um, and so it just increases the salience, right, of of the story.

00:51:46.690 --> 00:51:50.130
It is funny, so you remember it, and you want to tell it to other people to make them

00:51:50.130 --> 00:51:51.010
laugh, right?

00:51:51.730 --> 00:51:53.340
Um super interesting.

00:51:53.500 --> 00:51:58.700
I I think it's it's consistent with my model of what humor is, which is it's about um

00:51:58.860 --> 00:52:03.260
mix-ups between two things that are costly for the person who mixed them up.

00:52:03.420 --> 00:52:07.020
In this case, it would be a mix-up between actual berries and a reflection of berries in

00:52:07.020 --> 00:52:11.740
the water, or a mix-up between a way of expressing anger and an effective way of harvesting

00:52:11.740 --> 00:52:12.220
berries.

00:52:12.300 --> 00:52:16.110
And these mix-ups are humorous because they're very costly for the person that's uh

00:52:16.110 --> 00:52:17.070
undergoing them.

00:52:17.150 --> 00:52:21.550
Uh and what we laugh to signal that there's been a mix-up and that I know that you know

00:52:21.550 --> 00:52:24.270
that there's been a mix-up, and you know that I know that there's been a mix-up, so we can

00:52:24.270 --> 00:52:25.950
diffuse uh its costs.

00:52:26.030 --> 00:52:30.590
And it's um it's cool to know that there's at least some ethnographic support for it.

00:52:30.750 --> 00:52:35.470
I know there's uh other uh cool support for it in that uh classic story uh from Napoleon

00:52:35.470 --> 00:52:41.220
Chanyon, where uh he tries to gather a genealogy of all the people in the community

00:52:41.620 --> 00:52:43.620
and he tries to get everyone's name and how they're related.

00:52:43.780 --> 00:52:47.860
And then and they and they give him all these hilarious uh profane names on blanking on

00:52:47.940 --> 00:52:49.300
what the specific ones were.

00:52:49.540 --> 00:52:49.860
Yeah.

00:52:50.260 --> 00:52:52.900
Full of like bestiality and you know stuff like that.

00:52:53.380 --> 00:52:53.540
Yeah.

00:52:54.020 --> 00:52:54.340
Uh-huh.

00:52:54.660 --> 00:52:54.900
Yeah.

00:52:55.540 --> 00:52:55.940
Yep.

00:52:56.180 --> 00:53:00.340
Um yeah, and it's and another element to trickster stories is um you know the humor is

00:53:00.340 --> 00:53:06.310
often ridicule, right um the trickster is is ridiculed um and that's um a s

00:53:06.550 --> 00:53:11.750
a social sanctioning tactic it's a it's a uh it's a strategy used to um

00:53:11.990 --> 00:53:16.630
keep people from you know breaking you know violating social norms or um getting you know

00:53:16.710 --> 00:53:21.190
too high opinion of themselves right becoming overly dominant um it's it's a leveling

00:53:21.190 --> 00:53:26.630
mechanism yeah um and so trickster stories also teach they have lessons about proper and

00:53:26.630 --> 00:53:31.360
improper social behavior cool All right.

00:53:31.600 --> 00:53:32.240
Very interesting.

00:53:32.400 --> 00:53:35.280
Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on songs.

00:53:35.440 --> 00:53:37.040
Is it the same as the story take?

00:53:37.120 --> 00:53:41.040
Is it that music is an effective way of transmitting information?

00:53:41.200 --> 00:53:45.040
But then, you know, if so, it sort of leads to the question of why do we often like music

00:53:45.040 --> 00:53:47.520
that has no uh w words in it?

00:53:47.680 --> 00:53:50.480
Um so I'm curious what what your take is on on song.

00:53:50.880 --> 00:53:52.000
Yeah, I don't study music.

00:53:52.160 --> 00:53:54.080
You know, I I I've only looked at song.

00:53:54.240 --> 00:54:00.030
Um so I got interested in song because um a lot of um uh stories, particularly etiological

00:54:00.030 --> 00:54:04.510
animal tales, um have the the animals have a song that's associated with them.

00:54:04.590 --> 00:54:10.190
They sing a little song, and the song references um some distinctive you know feature of

00:54:10.190 --> 00:54:13.710
that animal, um its habitat, what it eats, something like that.

00:54:13.950 --> 00:54:17.310
And um the song serves kind of as a catchphrase.

00:54:17.390 --> 00:54:19.630
Um, and the analogy I like to use is the Simpsons.

00:54:19.790 --> 00:54:22.750
Someone pointed out that all the characters, all the main characters on The Simpsons,

00:54:22.990 --> 00:54:26.670
except for um Lisa, um have a catchphrase.

00:54:26.750 --> 00:54:28.440
All right, so Homer's is though.

00:54:28.840 --> 00:54:32.760
Marge's is not really a phrase, but um uh Mr.

00:54:32.840 --> 00:54:34.840
Burns is excellent, right?

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:36.520
Um and so it's a mnemonic, right?

00:54:36.600 --> 00:54:40.120
It's a it's a way of remembering something distinctive about that character, right?

00:54:40.520 --> 00:54:40.680
Mr.

00:54:40.760 --> 00:54:43.000
Burns is, you know, the he's greedy, right?

00:54:43.640 --> 00:54:44.600
Excellent, right?

00:54:45.080 --> 00:54:50.510
Um and um and and these songs um they're um they they serve a similar function, right?

00:54:50.590 --> 00:54:55.070
They they um they enable you to remember something really salient, really, really important

00:54:55.070 --> 00:54:56.030
about that animal.

00:54:56.270 --> 00:55:01.870
Um and um and so these songs, the the animal, when it you know comes onto the scene, it'll

00:55:01.870 --> 00:55:04.830
sing its little song, and and this occurs several times in the story.

00:55:04.910 --> 00:55:09.230
So, you know, it's repeated, right, to make sure you learn, right, what what that animal

00:55:09.390 --> 00:55:10.110
song is.

00:55:10.270 --> 00:55:16.100
Um, but then also in some cultures, um, most notably Aboriginal Australia,

00:55:16.660 --> 00:55:18.740
they have these things called the song lines.

00:55:18.900 --> 00:55:24.340
And these are songs that they're really short and really compressed, but they

00:55:25.380 --> 00:55:31.220
they recount, recount is probably too strong a word, but but they reference an episode

00:55:31.220 --> 00:55:33.620
in an important story in that culture.

00:55:34.020 --> 00:55:37.060
And people will sing them as they travel, as they walk along.

00:55:37.620 --> 00:55:42.690
And so it's kind of a shorthand way of encoding information.

00:55:43.170 --> 00:55:45.330
And it's something that's really easy to do, right?

00:55:45.410 --> 00:55:46.610
You can sing the song.

00:55:46.930 --> 00:55:48.690
And you know, we like to sing.

00:55:49.250 --> 00:55:52.770
And so that encourages repetition, right?

00:55:53.010 --> 00:55:55.410
And that supports memorization, right?

00:55:55.570 --> 00:55:58.210
Retention of the information that's encoded in the song.

00:55:58.610 --> 00:56:02.210
Rituals also have songs in them, and the songs reference.

00:56:02.530 --> 00:56:08.300
So there's again Aboriginal Australia, there are women's ceremonies that involve certain

00:56:08.300 --> 00:56:10.060
plants that you know that are important.

00:56:10.460 --> 00:56:16.460
And the songs reference some aspect of like the processing the processing of that

00:56:16.460 --> 00:56:18.060
plant or the harvesting of that plant.

00:56:18.140 --> 00:56:23.820
So they the songs encode information about basically how to how to find that

00:56:23.820 --> 00:56:27.580
resource, how to harvest it, how to process it, what it's used for.

00:56:27.900 --> 00:56:33.870
And they also have dances that act out the pro the actual physical process of of

00:56:33.870 --> 00:56:34.910
harvesting the plant.

00:56:34.990 --> 00:56:37.630
So you know encoding that in muscle memory.

00:56:38.750 --> 00:56:42.030
So that's that's sort of as far as I've gotten with song.

00:56:42.510 --> 00:56:46.350
I think it bears oh oh no one more Aboriginal Australian example.

00:56:46.750 --> 00:56:49.550
That there's little songs that um adults sing to children.

00:56:49.630 --> 00:56:54.560
They teach the children that basically tell about the animal, um, you know, some important

00:56:54.560 --> 00:56:57.360
thing about the animal, what it what it eats, where you can find it.

00:56:57.520 --> 00:57:02.000
Um, and so children go around singing these songs and they they they're learning

00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:04.400
zoological, you know, information.

00:57:04.800 --> 00:57:07.440
Um That's uh that's really fascinating.

00:57:07.520 --> 00:57:10.320
Um and it and it mirrors a lot of educational practice as well.

00:57:10.960 --> 00:57:11.280
Right, right.

00:57:11.600 --> 00:57:16.160
Very easy for kids to remember stuff if you if you put it in into a song or into a story.

00:57:16.320 --> 00:57:19.440
Um it's just a it's a provenly proven effective strategy.

00:57:19.840 --> 00:57:20.000
Right.

00:57:20.050 --> 00:57:21.410
Like advertising jingles, right?

00:57:21.570 --> 00:57:23.570
I mean you just can't get them out of your head, right?

00:57:24.050 --> 00:57:24.210
Yeah.

00:57:24.370 --> 00:57:24.450
Yeah.

00:57:24.690 --> 00:57:30.370
So I'm curious, like in light of this, do do you view storytelling and song, do you view

00:57:30.370 --> 00:57:36.290
these as as proper adaptations, where the the function is to effectively transmit uh

00:57:36.450 --> 00:57:42.280
information about, say, the ecology or about relationships or threats, um or or

00:57:42.360 --> 00:57:46.440
or to signal you know qualities about the storyteller or the singer or or to or to remember

00:57:46.440 --> 00:57:46.920
certain information.

00:57:47.080 --> 00:57:51.320
Is that are these proper adaptations or I mean another view you could take is that these

00:57:51.320 --> 00:57:56.760
are actually byproducts of adaptations and that as people try to figure out what's the best

00:57:56.760 --> 00:58:00.680
way to communicate this information, what's the best way to remember this information about

00:58:00.680 --> 00:58:01.890
this animal.

00:58:02.050 --> 00:58:05.250
What's the best way to uh get people to remember what I'm telling them?

00:58:05.410 --> 00:58:10.450
What's the best way to like get my kids appropriately afraid of this animal or this plant?

00:58:10.610 --> 00:58:15.250
And in, you know, through processes of trial and error and figuring out what works in

00:58:15.250 --> 00:58:20.770
achieving my goals here and what doesn't, people just hit upon stories and songs as an

00:58:20.770 --> 00:58:23.660
effective way to achieve those uh social goals.

00:58:23.740 --> 00:58:27.900
And then through social learning, people just the the most successful ones get passed on

00:58:27.980 --> 00:58:30.140
and they stick around and people imitate them.

00:58:30.300 --> 00:58:34.780
And it's really more of a byproduct of other social goals rather than an the rather than a

00:58:34.940 --> 00:58:36.380
an adaptation in its own right.

00:58:36.540 --> 00:58:41.180
So do you view these things uh um uh so so which sort of side of the spectrum are are you

00:58:41.260 --> 00:58:44.940
are you more close to in in terms of viewing storytelling and song?

00:58:45.370 --> 00:58:49.130
I think they're inventions that are built on adaptations.

00:58:49.210 --> 00:58:53.450
There are certain cognitive um abilities that you have to have in order to do these things,

00:58:53.530 --> 00:58:56.730
you know, symbolic behavior, language, you know.

00:58:56.890 --> 00:59:00.890
Um, but no, I think that they're inventions, and like you said, they're things that you

00:59:00.890 --> 00:59:03.690
know humans have stumbled upon probably initially, right?

00:59:03.770 --> 00:59:08.570
And then realize, oh, this is really effective, right, for getting people's attention, um,

00:59:08.810 --> 00:59:12.810
for you know, getting them emotionally engaged, getting them to remember, you know, my

00:59:12.810 --> 00:59:13.450
kids, right?

00:59:13.700 --> 00:59:17.860
I need I want my kids to, you know, don't go wandering around in the forest at night, you

00:59:17.860 --> 00:59:18.260
know, alone.

00:59:18.500 --> 00:59:20.660
Um how can I discourage them from doing that, right?

00:59:20.740 --> 00:59:22.180
And so you just hit upon these solutions.

00:59:22.260 --> 00:59:26.900
And I and I think cognitive biases um are involved in this as well.

00:59:27.060 --> 00:59:32.740
Um so hunter-gatherers don't leave um the transmission of important information to the

00:59:32.740 --> 00:59:34.260
winds of cognitive bias, right?

00:59:34.340 --> 00:59:35.940
But they exploit them.

00:59:36.100 --> 00:59:42.020
Um so um, so like counterfactuals, um, you know, including um, you know,

00:59:42.210 --> 00:59:46.850
one or two counterfactual representations, you know, in a story, right?

00:59:47.250 --> 00:59:49.970
You know, about say an animal, like talking animals, right?

00:59:50.130 --> 00:59:53.090
So at some point they probably stumbled across this, right?

00:59:53.650 --> 00:59:58.450
Oh, when I, you know, say characterize the animals as talking, oh, people remember that,

00:59:58.690 --> 00:59:59.010
right?

00:59:59.330 --> 01:00:05.040
Um, and or when I, you know, say that, oh, this this animal person was capable of

01:00:05.040 --> 01:00:08.000
transforming you know him or herself you know into something else.

01:00:08.160 --> 01:00:09.120
Oh, that sticks.

01:00:09.200 --> 01:00:10.320
People remember that.

01:00:10.480 --> 01:00:16.320
Um and so yes, I think that they're um they're in the inventions um built on you know

01:00:16.480 --> 01:00:18.160
already existing adaptations.

01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:18.720
Yeah.

01:00:19.040 --> 01:00:19.280
Yeah.

01:00:19.440 --> 01:00:24.960
It seems like it it ties nicely into um Manvir Singh's work on on subjective

01:00:24.970 --> 01:00:29.610
selection and how cultural evolution often takes the form of people trying things out in

01:00:29.610 --> 01:00:34.250
terms of uh you know uh what is going to successfully serve my goals and what is not, uh

01:00:34.330 --> 01:00:38.890
what is useful, what is not, and remembering the things that are useful uh and effective

01:00:38.970 --> 01:00:40.890
and uh discarding the things that aren't.

01:00:40.970 --> 01:00:46.570
And through this process of selecting the most personally advantageous cultural variants,

01:00:46.650 --> 01:00:49.130
um, cultures evolve in in particular directions.

01:00:49.290 --> 01:00:52.880
That there's there's some inventions that are just objectively good, like stories.

01:00:53.040 --> 01:00:58.160
And those tend to recur in cultures around the world because it's just inherently effective

01:00:58.160 --> 01:01:02.800
at achieving various uh communicative and information transmission functions.

01:01:02.960 --> 01:01:07.760
Um, and so he has argued similar things about shamanism, that it has particular properties

01:01:07.760 --> 01:01:13.760
that are useful in satisfying people's goals um for uh uh healing, for

01:01:13.760 --> 01:01:19.410
um uh uh uh capturing people's attention, signaling uh various uh beneficial qualities uh

01:01:19.410 --> 01:01:23.810
among shamans for uh um there are also political functions to it.

01:01:23.890 --> 01:01:28.130
Uh I'm I'm I'm sort of oversimplifying it, but um, do you do you buy this uh emerging

01:01:28.130 --> 01:01:33.490
perspective that a lot of that a really potent uh driver of cultural evolution is sort of

01:01:33.490 --> 01:01:39.170
instrumental reasoning uh that's seated atop these more basic uh social uh and evolved

01:01:39.170 --> 01:01:39.650
goals?

01:01:40.130 --> 01:01:41.890
Yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense to me.

01:01:42.050 --> 01:01:48.020
Um yeah, it's um okay, we can take our ability to you know reason counterfactually,

01:01:48.180 --> 01:01:53.460
our ability to, you know, our um really sophisticated understanding of cause and effect,

01:01:53.620 --> 01:01:59.220
and we can use those things to envision um solutions to problems um and then you know

01:01:59.380 --> 01:02:00.420
test them out, right?

01:02:00.500 --> 01:02:03.620
And then what what works we keep, what doesn't work, we discard.

01:02:03.780 --> 01:02:05.060
It's like try something else.

01:02:05.220 --> 01:02:05.860
Yeah.

01:02:06.420 --> 01:02:06.980
Cool.

01:02:07.270 --> 01:02:12.470
Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on um the modern environment, which is in many ways

01:02:12.710 --> 01:02:17.510
very different from uh uh a hunter gatherer society or what we think of as the uh a

01:02:17.510 --> 01:02:19.510
variable ancestral environment.

01:02:19.670 --> 01:02:25.670
Um we're obviously uh on um we're using a a recording uh technology

01:02:25.670 --> 01:02:26.070
right now.

01:02:26.230 --> 01:02:30.470
People who are listening to this are listening probably on a podcast app uh on their

01:02:30.470 --> 01:02:31.030
phones.

01:02:31.110 --> 01:02:34.710
Um their phones are connected to the internet and have social media and we're bombarded

01:02:34.710 --> 01:02:37.720
with various stories, both real and fictional.

01:02:37.880 --> 01:02:43.800
Um, do you view the modern environment as presenting us with any um mismatches

01:02:43.800 --> 01:02:49.560
that might be inappropriately uh hijacking our evolved psychology, or do you view the

01:02:49.560 --> 01:02:54.280
modern incarnations of of these stories and songs as continuous with what we might have

01:02:54.280 --> 01:02:56.680
encountered in the ancestral environment?

01:02:57.510 --> 01:02:59.350
I'm just thinking fake news.

01:03:01.590 --> 01:03:07.270
This technology really enables um the greatly enables the

01:03:07.270 --> 01:03:11.430
dissemination of manipulative narratives, right?

01:03:11.590 --> 01:03:16.470
That are you know rooted in self-interest as opposed to helping your group members, right?

01:03:16.790 --> 01:03:20.710
Um I don't study modern storytelling, so I don't really want to say too much about it.

01:03:20.790 --> 01:03:23.430
I don't I don't feel like I have the the expertise.

01:03:23.590 --> 01:03:29.060
Um, But certainly there's a proliferation of what might be characterized as

01:03:29.060 --> 01:03:32.580
nefarious storytelling in today's world.

01:03:33.060 --> 01:03:38.260
Is that just to clarify is the idea that I I think I heard you already answer this, but I

01:03:38.260 --> 01:03:42.980
want to clarify is the idea that in a smaller scale social world, there's monitoring.

01:03:43.140 --> 01:03:48.530
For example, if Michelle, if you're telling us something, we're sort of monitoring the the

01:03:48.770 --> 01:03:54.690
the consequences or and even externalities of the of what your stories are doing

01:03:54.930 --> 01:04:00.770
and if we feel like it's not in our interest over time we're gonna stop listening to you

01:04:01.170 --> 01:04:07.010
but the idea is that if you have a technology for creating representations

01:04:07.010 --> 01:04:12.680
in people far away and distal from you you don't care about what

01:04:12.760 --> 01:04:17.400
consequences it has on them, only insofar as it benefits you.

01:04:17.800 --> 01:04:23.720
So, by in the same way, like a vector of a disease of a mosquito makes it so you don't

01:04:23.720 --> 01:04:26.680
care about the hosts, you know, being able to walk around.

01:04:26.920 --> 01:04:32.920
If the technology is that if I can get something um beneficial by

01:04:32.920 --> 01:04:38.470
saying it, and I'm not so close to you socially, there's going to just be selection for

01:04:38.470 --> 01:04:39.830
more exploitative content.

01:04:39.910 --> 01:04:40.710
Is that the idea?

01:04:40.790 --> 01:04:43.750
That there's not feedback from the social world in the same way.

01:04:44.150 --> 01:04:46.150
I I would say that that makes sense to me.

01:04:46.230 --> 01:04:52.150
Um, yeah, in um, you know, small scale hunter-gather societies, um there are checks

01:04:52.150 --> 01:04:53.670
on antisocial behavior, right?

01:04:53.750 --> 01:04:59.240
So if it people discover that someone's been lying and they've been lying um in a um, you

01:04:59.240 --> 01:05:04.680
know, in a way that serves their interests at the cost of the the the interest of the group

01:05:04.680 --> 01:05:09.960
as a whole, then that person is going to suffer negative, they're going to be sanctioned,

01:05:10.040 --> 01:05:11.160
negatively sanctioned, right?

01:05:11.240 --> 01:05:15.320
They may be um the people just ignore them, they'll stop cooperating with them, they might

01:05:15.400 --> 01:05:16.840
might kick them out of the group, right?

01:05:16.920 --> 01:05:18.200
There are consequences to that.

01:05:18.440 --> 01:05:22.440
On this, on that point, though, um, I was talking about storytelling rules earlier.

01:05:22.600 --> 01:05:27.130
Uh, one of the rules is that when these you know culturally important stories are being

01:05:27.130 --> 01:05:32.890
told, the audience is allowed and typically expected to

01:05:32.890 --> 01:05:37.850
correct the narrator if the narrator deviates from the culturally accepted version?

01:05:37.930 --> 01:05:41.210
So there are checks on accuracy, right?

01:05:41.610 --> 01:05:44.970
And people will say, that's not how it's how it goes, that's not right.

01:05:45.180 --> 01:05:49.180
And then the group will the story will stop and the group will have a discussion and they

01:05:49.180 --> 01:05:51.340
reach agreement on the correct version.

01:05:51.500 --> 01:05:55.900
So that's because you know, um fidelity is a big problem in oral cultures, right?

01:05:56.140 --> 01:06:01.260
Um, because yeah, the the the story the and the information in it could get corrupted or

01:06:01.340 --> 01:06:03.500
could get lost or could get corrupted over time.

01:06:03.660 --> 01:06:09.100
And so um hunter-gatherer societies have um strategies for um maintaining

01:06:09.100 --> 01:06:10.550
fidelity, accuracy.

01:06:10.790 --> 01:06:11.110
That's interesting.

01:06:11.270 --> 01:06:16.310
And and and also, you know, sort of checking the authority of the the narrator, right?

01:06:16.790 --> 01:06:21.990
That's and there's people say like there's um a lot of um anthropologists express

01:06:22.070 --> 01:06:25.430
frustration and ethnolinguists and you know they ask someone to tell a story and they'll

01:06:25.430 --> 01:06:27.190
say I I can't tell that story.

01:06:27.270 --> 01:06:32.470
I I'm not it's I'm not authorized to tell it um because I don't know it well enough, right?

01:06:32.550 --> 01:06:36.920
And there's there's real there are social consequences um to doing that.

01:06:37.080 --> 01:06:43.000
There's a story about an anthropologist who asked an older man in, I forget what group

01:06:43.000 --> 01:06:45.240
it was, to tell a story and he refused to tell it.

01:06:45.320 --> 01:06:47.960
I don't know what his reasons were, but he refused to tell it.

01:06:48.280 --> 01:06:49.080
He knew it.

01:06:49.400 --> 01:06:52.440
But then his daughter stepped up and said, and she was an adult, right?

01:06:52.520 --> 01:06:53.720
She said, I'll tell it.

01:06:53.880 --> 01:06:58.040
So she started telling it, and the father was nearby, and at one point he interrupted her

01:06:58.120 --> 01:07:01.000
and he said, If you're gonna tell the story, tell it right.

01:07:01.240 --> 01:07:02.680
She wasn't telling it right.

01:07:03.240 --> 01:07:07.530
So, yeah, so there are mechanisms um for yeah, controlling these things.

01:07:08.170 --> 01:07:09.130
That's that's really cool.

01:07:09.290 --> 01:07:14.570
I mean it it reminds me a lot of um Dan Sperber's work on cultural attraction and how the

01:07:14.570 --> 01:07:20.250
processes that lead to uh a a a cultural variant being stable or being faithfully

01:07:20.250 --> 01:07:24.330
transmitted from one person to another or from one generation to another are in many ways

01:07:24.330 --> 01:07:28.410
extremely complicated and and cannot be taken for granted or brushed aside because that

01:07:28.410 --> 01:07:30.250
itself is the thing that we want to explain.

01:07:30.410 --> 01:07:33.260
How does an idea remain stable in a culture?

01:07:33.420 --> 01:07:34.220
How does it persist?

01:07:34.380 --> 01:07:35.980
How does it get faithfully transmitted?

01:07:36.060 --> 01:07:40.460
And there are lots of psychological and social processes that we need to investigate to

01:07:40.460 --> 01:07:42.060
figure out uh how that works.

01:07:42.140 --> 01:07:46.060
And so it's an interesting example of that problem that we can't just take for granted that

01:07:46.060 --> 01:07:50.620
a story is going to be faithfully replicated from one mind to another, that there are a lot

01:07:50.620 --> 01:07:56.060
of different social processes that could lead to that failing to occur or that occurring.

01:07:56.510 --> 01:08:01.070
Um, and uh another thing you you mentioned that's that's really interesting to me is the

01:08:01.070 --> 01:08:05.070
use of storytelling for political or manipulative purposes.

01:08:05.230 --> 01:08:09.710
So it may be that you know what my goal could be altruistic if I'm telling a story to my

01:08:09.710 --> 01:08:14.590
kids to get them appropriately uh uh afraid of a particular danger in the environment.

01:08:14.750 --> 01:08:18.420
That's an altruistic goal that I'm trying to help uh my kids.

01:08:18.580 --> 01:08:21.380
Uh, but it's possible that my goal might not be so altruistic.

01:08:21.460 --> 01:08:24.740
I might want to mobilize my group against uh an outgroup.

01:08:24.900 --> 01:08:28.980
I might want to mobilize someone against a leader that I'm in competition with.

01:08:29.060 --> 01:08:33.940
And in so doing storytelling can also be a really useful way of achieving that goal.

01:08:34.100 --> 01:08:40.100
I can mobilize opposition to the hated outgroup by by telling um a a story about how

01:08:40.100 --> 01:08:43.700
they are devious, how they've been, you know, eating children or or whatever.

01:08:43.860 --> 01:08:45.140
And that can be a really effective way.

01:08:46.590 --> 01:08:47.150
Yeah, exactly.

01:08:47.550 --> 01:08:47.710
Sorry.

01:08:47.950 --> 01:08:48.110
Yes.

01:08:48.350 --> 01:08:48.670
I know.

01:08:48.910 --> 01:08:51.550
I know a little too troubling how how close to home this is hitting.

01:08:51.950 --> 01:08:54.270
But yeah, uh they're they're they're eating cats and dogs.

01:08:54.350 --> 01:08:59.070
They're uh you know uh uh using the blood of Christian babies and baking it into their

01:08:59.070 --> 01:08:59.790
matzo, you know.

01:08:59.950 --> 01:09:04.270
You know there there are tons of examples of these stories and um there's interesting you

01:09:04.270 --> 01:09:09.720
know uh work um by Don Horowitz on on how um a lot of ethnic

01:09:09.720 --> 01:09:15.480
riots um start with some rumor about uh a member of an outgroup uh

01:09:15.480 --> 01:09:19.080
committing some horrible atrocity against a member of the in-group.

01:09:19.240 --> 01:09:21.880
And that's often what precipitates violence.

01:09:22.120 --> 01:09:26.760
So have you have you thought about the role of storytelling um for for political or

01:09:26.760 --> 01:09:31.640
coalitional purposes, uh, and whether uh the logic there is the same or whether it's

01:09:31.640 --> 01:09:32.360
different?

01:09:45.510 --> 01:09:47.510
Which is of course a form of storytelling, right?

01:09:47.670 --> 01:09:52.150
Um, so you know, maybe behind the scenes talking to, you know, certain people um and trying

01:09:52.150 --> 01:09:55.750
to persuade them of certain things about, you know, those people over there are evil.

01:09:55.830 --> 01:09:57.830
We really need to do something about it.

01:09:58.070 --> 01:10:03.560
Um, but um, but I haven't come across um reports of people

01:10:03.880 --> 01:10:09.880
um you know telling stories um you know to rile people up um you know as sort of calls

01:10:09.880 --> 01:10:15.640
to action um not like you see in modern environments um yeah um

01:10:16.200 --> 01:10:22.040
is it is it just because um th uh ethnic violence or integroup violence is just more

01:10:22.040 --> 01:10:24.030
rare in these societies.

01:10:24.110 --> 01:10:28.430
And that, you know, if they were to occur more frequently, you might view, might see rumors

01:10:28.430 --> 01:10:33.790
or or uh demonizing narratives precipitating them, or or is it is it some other difference

01:10:33.790 --> 01:10:36.750
between uh uh those two environments?

01:10:37.950 --> 01:10:39.790
Um I I don't know.

01:10:40.110 --> 01:10:43.070
I mean, I there are people do tell war narratives, right?

01:10:43.150 --> 01:10:44.910
They keep they these are oral histories, right?

01:10:44.990 --> 01:10:50.510
They keep track of um you know battles um and who you know who their enemies are.

01:10:50.670 --> 01:10:56.340
And so um these are these stories are told as part of people's training

01:10:56.660 --> 01:11:02.020
because they also include information about tactics that were used and casualties, how many

01:11:02.020 --> 01:11:04.820
people were killed, how many people were involved in the fighting, right?

01:11:05.540 --> 01:11:08.740
And you know what which tactics were successful, which weren't.

01:11:09.140 --> 01:11:15.140
But it's really it's more of an educational thing, a prepar you know, preparation, um,

01:11:15.540 --> 01:11:21.190
not so much um as propaganda, you know, to actually call people to action.

01:11:21.430 --> 01:11:27.350
Um so I that's about all I could, you know, s say to, you know, on the subject.

01:11:27.510 --> 01:11:30.070
Um it's um yeah.

01:11:31.110 --> 01:11:31.350
Cool.

01:11:31.510 --> 01:11:33.510
Yeah, it reminds me of uh Anthony Lopez.

01:11:33.670 --> 01:11:37.670
I mean it might also I mean just to just follow up with David's point, it might be that if

01:11:37.670 --> 01:11:43.380
you look at propaganda, it has this structure, but it's that the base rate of

01:11:43.380 --> 01:11:47.220
propaganda occurring is sort of variable, at least.

01:11:47.300 --> 01:11:52.500
Um, so that if you if you're I think like Amp Anthony has he's got that paper in leadership

01:11:52.500 --> 01:11:57.940
quarterly about making my problem your problem, about sort of demagoguery and the the

01:11:58.180 --> 01:12:04.020
structure of making my interests your interests by telling narratives

01:12:04.020 --> 01:12:05.620
about outgroups, for example.

01:12:06.170 --> 01:12:10.650
There is another dimension to war narratives that might speak to um your question, David,

01:12:11.290 --> 01:12:17.050
which is that in you know recounting past battles, um, I mean some of them are

01:12:17.210 --> 01:12:21.050
the the there they recount atrocities, right?

01:12:21.370 --> 01:12:27.220
And um and so in in so doing that mean they teach people okay what you know, those people

01:12:27.220 --> 01:12:31.780
over there who aren't friendly with us, who are our enemies, um, what they might do to you,

01:12:31.940 --> 01:12:32.260
right?

01:12:32.340 --> 01:12:36.660
And so they instill fear and um, you know, motivate people to be prepared.

01:12:36.740 --> 01:12:41.700
Um, but they, you know, they probably do stir up animosity or, you know, keep they keep the

01:12:41.700 --> 01:12:43.060
animosity going, right?

01:12:43.220 --> 01:12:45.300
Instead of saying, oh, let's make peace with those people.

01:12:45.380 --> 01:12:49.700
It's like, you know, it cut in my grandfather's time, those people did the this to us,

01:12:49.860 --> 01:12:50.020
right?

01:12:50.340 --> 01:12:52.420
And they're just, they are horrific stories.

01:12:53.300 --> 01:12:56.650
But um so so there might be that going on, right?

01:12:56.890 --> 01:12:59.530
Um you can't trust those people over there, right?

01:12:59.610 --> 01:13:01.290
They did these terrible things to us.

01:13:01.530 --> 01:13:02.650
Um, yeah.

01:13:03.130 --> 01:13:03.850
Super interesting.

01:13:04.090 --> 01:13:04.250
Yeah.

01:13:04.410 --> 01:13:10.410
And also makes the relationship between history or at least a a modern version of history

01:13:11.210 --> 01:13:17.050
as a concept versus sort of, you know, um social propaganda.

01:13:17.210 --> 01:13:22.090
The dividing line between those, you know, I think there's there's a lot of scholarship on

01:13:22.090 --> 01:13:25.610
arguing that almost all history is social propaganda in one way or another.

01:13:25.720 --> 01:13:26.200
Um yeah.

01:13:26.520 --> 01:13:26.840
Right.

01:13:27.080 --> 01:13:27.560
Right.

01:13:27.880 --> 01:13:30.040
History is told by the victors, right?

01:13:30.840 --> 01:13:31.160
Yeah.

01:13:31.880 --> 01:13:32.200
For sure.

01:13:33.800 --> 01:13:34.040
Yeah.

01:13:34.200 --> 01:13:37.400
No, it it makes you you wonder, you know, how much of the history is right.

01:13:37.560 --> 01:13:40.600
I mean, I ideally you'd you'd want to triangulate and try to get, you know, multiple

01:13:40.600 --> 01:13:43.960
propagandists at least so you can, you know, figure out what, you know, where the truth

01:13:43.960 --> 01:13:46.040
lies with the different uh propagandists.

01:13:46.200 --> 01:13:50.350
Um but if you only if it's only told by the victors, that that poses a major problem.

01:13:51.390 --> 01:13:55.150
There's one particular horrific account that was witnessed by um I don't know if it was

01:13:55.150 --> 01:13:58.270
European or American, but by a non-native person.

01:13:58.430 --> 01:14:03.070
Um he was he'd hired um some local, you know, native people as guides.

01:14:03.150 --> 01:14:04.430
He was an explorer.

01:14:04.670 --> 01:14:10.540
And um in the course of exploring, wherever they were exploring, um they um

01:14:10.540 --> 01:14:15.180
paused, the the people paused to um they came across some an enemy group and they paused to

01:14:15.180 --> 01:14:15.980
massacre them.

01:14:16.140 --> 01:14:19.420
And this guy, you know, he saw it and he so he reported it.

01:14:19.580 --> 01:14:23.500
So, you know, you can you that that provides somewhat of a check, right?

01:14:23.660 --> 01:14:28.140
Um against um, you know, it addresses the question of, you know, are these accounts

01:14:28.140 --> 01:14:29.020
exaggerated, right?

01:14:29.100 --> 01:14:33.510
Are they are they, you know, propagandistic or are they, you know, truthful?

01:14:33.910 --> 01:14:34.710
Um, yeah.

01:14:35.110 --> 01:14:38.790
A good, a good just to editorialize for a second, a good littness test is probably very

01:14:38.790 --> 01:14:42.950
analogous to like the interpersonal history where like if somebody doesn't think they've

01:14:42.950 --> 01:14:47.590
ever made a mistake, uh, it's probably a good sign that they're not being quite accurate,

01:14:47.670 --> 01:14:47.830
right?

01:14:47.990 --> 01:14:53.270
In the same way of like if you're if you're allergic to saying that my social identity, um

01:14:53.780 --> 01:14:59.540
whatever that is, a country or you know, whatever has never done anything wrong versus, you

01:14:59.540 --> 01:15:04.020
know, probably we've all the history is full of all sides doing horrible things.

01:15:04.100 --> 01:15:07.140
You know, I think that's that's a good litmus test.

01:15:07.220 --> 01:15:11.700
You know, if you think you can't, if if the group you happen to belong to can do no wrong,

01:15:11.780 --> 01:15:16.740
then you're probably it's probably more you're more likely to be the consumer or uh

01:15:17.300 --> 01:15:21.700
continuer of uh of some of this historical propaganda.

01:15:22.100 --> 01:15:22.430
For sure.

01:15:22.590 --> 01:15:24.910
Or if the outgroup can do nothing right, you know, the case.

01:15:25.070 --> 01:15:25.870
Yeah, no, for sure.

01:15:26.190 --> 01:15:26.910
Yeah, exactly.

01:15:26.990 --> 01:15:27.470
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:28.590 --> 01:15:29.710
Um, yeah.

01:15:30.030 --> 01:15:35.870
Um, although I mean I've come across um reports of um, you know, groups that are enemies

01:15:36.110 --> 01:15:38.350
having a very healthy respect for each other, right?

01:15:38.430 --> 01:15:40.910
It's like, oh yeah, those guys are really fierce.

01:15:41.550 --> 01:15:43.230
We try to avoid finding them.

01:15:43.390 --> 01:15:43.550
Yeah.

01:15:43.630 --> 01:15:43.710
Yeah.

01:15:43.950 --> 01:15:44.110
Yeah.

01:15:44.190 --> 01:15:45.710
Respecting and yeah, that's true.

01:15:45.790 --> 01:15:51.620
I I I like that when um uh representing formidability or whether there's a conflict of

01:15:51.620 --> 01:15:57.540
interest but still respecting um um uh an entity with whom you have conflicts

01:15:57.620 --> 01:16:03.380
of interest is a very interesting um thing yeah for sure right it's it's it's in your s

01:16:03.460 --> 01:16:08.900
your interest to have a an accurate assessment of the formidability of the groups around

01:16:08.900 --> 01:16:09.910
you right Right.

01:16:10.150 --> 01:16:13.190
So you can prepare or you know, take take appropriate action.

01:16:13.510 --> 01:16:13.750
Absolutely.

01:16:15.110 --> 01:16:16.070
Run away, run away.

01:16:16.390 --> 01:16:16.710
Exactly.

01:16:16.870 --> 01:16:21.030
Yeah, but it's not necessarily in your interest to have an accurate view of, say, the moral

01:16:21.030 --> 01:16:26.950
character of of your enemy, because that could um you know prevent the uh an attack from

01:16:27.030 --> 01:16:27.990
from being mobilized.

01:16:28.150 --> 01:16:31.830
If people knew that they're just normal people like like us, then no one would join the

01:16:31.830 --> 01:16:32.630
collective action.

01:16:32.710 --> 01:16:37.340
But if they're, you know, horrible, uh wicked uh predators who are hell bent on uh

01:16:37.420 --> 01:16:38.300
exterminating us.

01:16:38.380 --> 01:16:41.900
Well then all of a sudden everyone has a really strong reason to participate in the

01:16:41.900 --> 01:16:42.860
collective action.

01:16:42.940 --> 01:16:45.580
Uh and that helps the collective action uh get off the ground.

01:16:45.900 --> 01:16:49.660
Insofar as we all have common knowledge of that narrative and we expect other people to

01:16:49.660 --> 01:16:53.660
expect other people to uh endorse the narrative, then we can all be more confident that

01:16:53.660 --> 01:16:55.580
we're gonna join in on the collective action.

01:16:56.700 --> 01:16:56.860
Yeah.

01:16:57.510 --> 01:17:00.790
this is why it's good to live in a different culture for a little while.

01:17:01.590 --> 01:17:04.550
You sometimes see the forest from the trees in this respect.

01:17:04.710 --> 01:17:05.030
Yeah.

01:17:05.430 --> 01:17:05.910
Yeah.

01:17:06.150 --> 01:17:06.630
Uh-huh.

01:17:06.870 --> 01:17:09.590
Um so we're we're coming up on an hour and a half.

01:17:09.670 --> 01:17:14.550
I'm I'm curious if there's any topic that that we missed that that you you would have loved

01:17:14.550 --> 01:17:18.310
to talk about or that or that um we should have asked you about.

01:17:18.550 --> 01:17:21.750
Um any area, any stone that we left unturned.

01:17:22.230 --> 01:17:24.310
I think you guys did a pretty thorough job.

01:17:24.550 --> 01:17:26.140
Um thank you.

01:17:26.380 --> 01:17:28.940
We're efficient information transmitters.

01:17:30.860 --> 01:17:31.740
We employ any of the people.

01:17:31.900 --> 01:17:34.220
I'm sure I'll think of something you know 15 minutes from now.

01:17:34.540 --> 01:17:34.700
Yeah.

01:17:34.860 --> 01:17:35.100
Yeah.

01:17:35.420 --> 01:17:39.820
Um, Michelle, can you just tell a little bit about um either just for people who may not

01:17:39.820 --> 01:17:45.580
know, um, do you do field work like with particular groups or do you um have particular

01:17:45.820 --> 01:17:46.780
like do you have books out?

01:17:46.860 --> 01:17:51.180
Like if just people are more interested in you or your work, are there a few sort of

01:17:51.180 --> 01:17:57.150
highlighted emphases uh in terms of like groups you work with or topics that you either in

01:17:57.150 --> 01:18:02.270
the past are currently studying, just to kind of give a highlight reel of things you've

01:18:02.270 --> 01:18:03.470
done or are currently doing.

01:18:04.190 --> 01:18:10.110
One topic I'm um exploring right now is mimicry, which is really pervasive in storytelling,

01:18:10.190 --> 01:18:16.030
in song, in dance, and in games, like games of tag, um, which are really popular in

01:18:16.030 --> 01:18:17.070
hunter-gatherer societies.

01:18:17.150 --> 01:18:20.750
So you have some kids pretending to be the wolves and other kids pretending to be the

01:18:20.750 --> 01:18:23.310
caribou being chased by the wolves, you know, things like that.

01:18:23.550 --> 01:18:28.080
Um But with regard to um, you know, do I do field work?

01:18:28.240 --> 01:18:30.000
You know, what are what's what are my methods?

01:18:30.160 --> 01:18:31.840
Um, I actually have a story about that.

01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:35.680
Um, so um, so I come from literary studies, right?

01:18:35.760 --> 01:18:38.240
I I came to F psych from literary studies.

01:18:38.560 --> 01:18:44.080
And um when I was in my like my first year of grad school, I started wondering, I saw that

01:18:44.160 --> 01:18:47.280
with storytelling, literature, whatever you want to call it, is this is something that all

01:18:47.280 --> 01:18:51.330
humans do, and um they don't need to be taught, you know, how to tell a story.

01:18:51.410 --> 01:18:55.810
Um and I started seeing all these patterns in content, you know, cross-culturally.

01:18:55.970 --> 01:19:00.290
And at the same time and literary theory does not address so I so I started wondering,

01:19:00.370 --> 01:19:05.890
well, how far back in human history does storytelling go and and um in what role did it

01:19:05.890 --> 01:19:07.090
play, you know, when it emerged?

01:19:07.170 --> 01:19:08.290
What what was it for, right?

01:19:08.370 --> 01:19:09.810
Why do people do this thing?

01:19:09.890 --> 01:19:12.850
Um both the d telling stories and listening to stories.

01:19:12.930 --> 01:19:15.680
Um and literary studies doesn't address these questions.

01:19:15.760 --> 01:19:16.720
And I thought that was weird.

01:19:16.800 --> 01:19:18.960
That seems to be pretty fun, you know, fundamental.

01:19:19.120 --> 01:19:23.760
And at the same time, Larry was in the anthropology department, you know, he was in their

01:19:23.760 --> 01:19:28.160
program learning about evolutionary psychology and human evolution.

01:19:28.240 --> 01:19:30.480
And so I thought, oh, well, maybe there's an answer there, right?

01:19:30.560 --> 01:19:31.840
That's the deep past, right?

01:19:31.920 --> 01:19:33.360
Maybe that will tell me something.

01:19:33.680 --> 01:19:38.480
And so but I but I, you know, I so I had to quickly you know read about you know human

01:19:38.480 --> 01:19:41.040
evolution, F PSYC, and get up to speed.

01:19:41.120 --> 01:19:45.630
Um, and but I was I couldn't put my finger on it's like is storytelling an adaptation?

01:19:45.790 --> 01:19:47.150
You know, what what's going on here?

01:19:47.230 --> 01:19:49.390
There's all these patterns, they they're non-random.

01:19:49.550 --> 01:19:51.390
And so I went to talk to Don Simons.

01:19:51.470 --> 01:19:54.590
And so I was telling him this, you know, I see all these patterns, you know, there is you

01:19:54.590 --> 01:19:55.630
know, is this an adaptation?

01:19:56.590 --> 01:20:01.710
And I th I swear to you, I think the only thing he said the whole time was, because I was

01:20:01.710 --> 01:20:04.750
using the word literature because I'm I was in a literary studies program, right?

01:20:04.960 --> 01:20:07.920
And he's like, but Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation.

01:20:08.080 --> 01:20:09.840
And I'm like, but but but there's all these patterns.

01:20:11.040 --> 01:20:13.600
But Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation.

01:20:13.760 --> 01:20:17.680
So after 10 minutes of this, I, you know, thanked him and I left.

01:20:17.760 --> 01:20:19.280
I was very frustrated.

01:20:19.440 --> 01:20:21.840
Um, but and I felt kind of stupid.

01:20:22.080 --> 01:20:26.320
I couldn't communicate to you know him what you know what I was, you know, seeing.

01:20:26.400 --> 01:20:30.080
And and I can't, I can't tell you if it was like three hours later, three days, three

01:20:30.080 --> 01:20:35.550
weeks, but all of a sudden it's like, oh, literature can't be an adaptation.

01:20:35.710 --> 01:20:37.790
Literature is written, right?

01:20:38.510 --> 01:20:42.030
The word literature comes from the Latin literas, letters, right?

01:20:42.190 --> 01:20:44.990
And writing was only invented, you know, 5,000 years ago.

01:20:45.150 --> 01:20:50.350
So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling because for the overwhelming majority

01:20:50.350 --> 01:20:53.310
of our existence as a species, storytelling was oral.

01:20:53.470 --> 01:20:58.360
And so when I put that together with John's, you know, foundational precept, which is that

01:20:58.520 --> 01:21:03.160
in order to elucidate the design of the human mind, you look, you need to observe its

01:21:03.160 --> 01:21:06.440
operation under the conditions under which it evolved, right?

01:21:06.600 --> 01:21:07.800
Hunter-gather societies.

01:21:07.960 --> 01:21:12.040
So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling in hunter-gather societies.

01:21:12.200 --> 01:21:17.430
And lucky for me, one of the among the data that early anthropologists and

01:21:17.430 --> 01:21:19.750
ethnolinguists collected was stories.

01:21:19.830 --> 01:21:25.670
So there's all these collections out there from 100 years ago of hunter-gather

01:21:25.670 --> 01:21:26.070
stories.

01:21:26.150 --> 01:21:27.430
So no, I don't do field work.

01:21:27.670 --> 01:21:28.950
I do archival research.

01:21:29.110 --> 01:21:34.870
I um I piggyback on the research of my my forebears, my ancestors, um,

01:21:35.030 --> 01:21:40.920
my academic ancestors, um, and I do cross-cultural, you know, comparative studies of, you

01:21:40.920 --> 01:21:45.880
know, things like content and formal properties of of storytelling.

01:21:46.040 --> 01:21:48.840
Um, and so that's that's my methodology.

01:21:49.080 --> 01:21:52.200
Yeah, well it's appropriate because it's a story about a story.

01:21:52.440 --> 01:21:53.080
Yeah.

01:21:54.440 --> 01:21:59.800
And I will tell a story about that story, about that story, which is uh we had a wonderful

01:21:59.800 --> 01:22:02.120
guest here on Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

01:22:02.200 --> 01:22:03.880
Her name is Michelle Sugiyama.

01:22:03.960 --> 01:22:05.400
Uh it was delightful to have you on.

01:22:05.480 --> 01:22:07.160
Uh thank you so much for talking to us.

01:22:07.480 --> 01:22:08.710
Thanks for having me guys.

01:22:08.950 --> 01:22:09.670
It's been a pleasure.

01:22:09.910 --> 01:22:10.150
Bye.

01:22:10.230 --> 01:22:11.350
Have a good summer, Michelle.

01:22:11.430 --> 01:22:11.510
Yeah.

01:22:11.750 --> 01:22:12.870
Thanks, you too.

01:22:14.710 --> 01:22:15.910
All right, David.

01:22:16.550 --> 01:22:22.150
Uh we just recorded a uh a previous outro and I

01:22:22.150 --> 01:22:27.990
forgot to record it and there was a lot of we we just we didn't banter in that one did we?

01:22:28.780 --> 01:22:32.380
Uh I think I just said banter, banter, banter, banter.

01:22:32.780 --> 01:22:33.340
Yeah, that'll work.

01:22:33.420 --> 01:22:33.900
That'll work.

01:22:33.980 --> 01:22:34.220
Yeah.

01:22:34.700 --> 01:22:38.700
And and now we're bantering about the lack of banter in the in the in the part that we

01:22:38.700 --> 01:22:39.580
failed to record.

01:22:39.820 --> 01:22:40.060
Yeah.

01:22:41.020 --> 01:22:41.580
It's okay.

01:22:41.980 --> 01:22:42.940
It's all a story.

01:22:43.420 --> 01:22:47.500
Anyway, please subscribe, uh support us on Patreon.

01:22:47.900 --> 01:22:53.900
And um yeah when you're out and about this week, you know, tell a story or

01:22:53.900 --> 01:22:55.420
consume a story.

01:22:55.670 --> 01:23:00.230
And uh and as a qualifier to that, don't don't don't let it don't leave it to the

01:23:00.230 --> 01:23:00.790
professionals.

01:23:00.950 --> 01:23:06.550
Produce one or hear one from an amateur who's probably not uh trying to sell you something.

01:23:07.190 --> 01:23:07.830
Yeah.

01:23:08.390 --> 01:23:09.590
Great advice.

01:23:09.830 --> 01:23:10.390
All right.

01:23:10.550 --> 01:23:12.870
Well, David, uh everybody, thanks for listening.

01:23:12.950 --> 01:23:14.230
David, I'll I'll see you next week.

01:23:14.470 --> 01:23:15.270
I'll see you next week.

01:23:15.510 --> 01:23:15.670
Okay.