Understanding and Predicting Social Events: The Effects of Narrative Construction on Inference Generation

Abstract

Evidence suggests that stories are used universally to describe a series of events (e.g., Barthes, 1977). One reason for this universality may be that narrative construction aids in understanding and predicting social events: Narrative structures provide information about what can be expected in a given situation—as well as what might go wrong. In a series of experiments, we explored the inferential advantage of narrative by examining whether narrative goals facilitate the ability to make explanatory and predictive inferences among novel and familiar social stimuli. Using both explicit and implicit measures, we found that individuals instructed to construct a story from a sequence of events were more likely to draw both explanatory and predictive inferences from the events than those using other organizational strategies. This suggests that narrative construction may be an adaptive strategy to explain the causes of past events and to anticipate future happenings.