PSYC 332 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Joan Didion, Anthony Giddens, Episodic Memory
18 Dec 2018
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Chapter 8
The Stories We Live By
Introduction:
• 300 years ago the ‘novel’ emerged in Western Europe
• By tracking over time how people perform as social actors and what they want
and value as motivated agents, the novel expresses how characters change,
as well as how they remain the same, over the course of seconds, minutes,
days, years, and decades
• The modern novel aims to convey what William James described as the
stream of human consciousness flowing over time
• Modern sense of selfhood – people tend to see themselves as multifaceted,
complex entities who develop over time and who are responsible, in a
fundamental sense, for their own development
• They perceive their lives as projects that they must work on, seeking to
explore, develop, fulfil, control, regulate, improve, and understand themselves
over time
• Who am I? You are a novel – protagonist of your story (autobiographical
author)
• Anthony Giddens: “A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor—
important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep
a particular narrative going”
• Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Storytelling:
• Human beings told stories long before the advent of the novel – in the form of
folktale, legend, myth, fairytale, history, epic, opera, motion picture, television
sitcom, biography, joke, personal anecdote
• We expect stories to
▪ entertain, educate, inspire, and persuade
▪ to keep us awake and to put us to sleep
▪ to make us feel joy, sadness, anger, excitement, horror, shame, guilt,
and virtually any other emotion we can name
▪ to help us communicate with each other
▪ to explain things that are difficult to understand
▪ to cause us to wonder about things that seem so simple
▪ to clarify and to obfuscate
▪ to make the mundane sacred and the sacred mundane
▪ to help us pass time
▪ to distract us
▪ to get us focused
▪ to tell us who we are.
• Stories are universal – they teach us how to be human
• Jerome Bruner:
1. Paradigmatic expressions of human thought
▪ Trying to explain how the world works through logic, empirical proof,
theories and carefully crafted arguments
▪ Every effort to figure out how things work on the physical and chemical
world
▪ Paradigmatic inquiry aims to reveal the truth
2. Narrative mode of human thought
▪ People create stories about intentional agents who pursue goals
over time
▪ Story begins with an intentional motivated agent
▪ Explain why people do what they do
▪ Story exhibits verisimilitude – “lifelikeness”, human plausibility
▪ Humans typically feel that they understand what other humans do
when they understand their motivations
▪ They do not work well to explain the physical and chemical world or
even biologically – thus important to develop critical thinking
skills/analytical strategies
• Cognitive scientist, Raymond Mar – lifetime exposure to good fiction is
positively correlated with social skills and empathy, controlling for education
and intelligence
Children’s Stories:
• Cardinal features of narrative:
▪ The story portrays a sequence of events spread out over time
▪ The story involves an intentional agent – the hero
▪ Build up a kind of suspense and then to resolve the tension in the end
• Children’s stories are often based on lived experiences – contribute to their
evolving autobiographical memory
• Across the preschool years, they make significant advances in their ability to
recall particular episodes from the recent past and to describe those events to
others
• Autobiographical authorship depends on (and derives from) motivated
agency. If a child does not “get” the idea that people are motivated agents,
then he or she will not be able to tell good stories about lived experience
• Autistic children often display deficits in both theory-of-mind abilities and self-
storytelling skills – do not fully understand or appreciate human motivation
• Autobiographical memory and self-storytelling develop in a social context.
• Parents prove children with “scaffolding” for the development of memory and
narration
• By the age of 3, children are actively engaged in co-constructing their past
experiences in conversations with adults
• By the end of the preschool years, they are able to give a relatively coherent
account of their past experiences, independent of adult guidance.
• Studies of parent– child conversations show that the particular ways in which
mothers and fathers talk to (and with) their young children have a strong
impact on the development of autobiographical memory and self-narration
• Mothers tend to encourage daughters, more than sons, to share emotional
experiences, including especially memories of negative events that produced
sadness
• Girls use more emotion words than boys in their autobiographical
recollections and their stories tend to be richer in context and meaning
• A key parental variable in the research literature on children’s stories is
conversational elaboration
• Parents with an elaborative conversational style ask their children to reflect
and elaborate upon their emotions, thoughts, and desires.. Studies have
consistently shown that mothers who employ elaborative conversational styles
with their children do indeed encourage their children to explore their
experiences in greater depth, resulting in the children’s development of richer
autobiographical memories and more detailed stories about themselves.
• By contrast, parents who show a more restricted conversational style focus
more on the description of behaviour rather than the exploration of inner
experience. They may dismiss their children’s feelings or show relatively little
interest in pursuing the emotional dynamics of their children’s experiences.
Conversely, a more restricted style of conversation on the part of mothers is
associated with less articulated personal narratives in children
• Mothers of securely attached children tend to use more elaborative and
evaluative strategies when reminiscing with their children
• Securely attached children may in turn be more responsive than insecurely
attached children in the conversations they have with their mothers about
personal events
• Five-year-olds typically know that stories are set in a particular time and
place, and involve characters (agents) who act on their desires and beliefs
over time. They expect stories to conform to a conventional story grammar or
generic script concerning what kinds of events can occur and in what order.
• Stories are expected to have a definite beginning, middle and end
• The ending is supposed to provide a resolution to the plot complications that
developed
• If a story does not conform to conventions such as these, children may find it
confusing and difficult to remember, or they may recall it later with a more
canonical structure than it originally had.
Becoming the Author: The Emergence of Narrative Identity
• Emerging adulthood – Erik Erikson’s stage of identity “Who am I?
• Catcher in the Rye - you may begin to notice glaring discrepancies between
how you typically behave in one set of social contexts versus how you act
around your close friends versus your parents.
• Young people may exhibit different identity statuses
• To be in the status of identity achieved is to have thoroughly examined
different options available to you, then committed yourself to self-chosen
values and goals for the future.
• Young people in the status of moratorium are still exploring ideological and
occupational options; they have yet to commit.
• By contrast, those in the status of foreclosure never really explored their
options but instead committed themselves to values and occupational goals
that were presented to them early on in life, perhaps by their parents.
