Why Story Matters: The Fitness Enhancing Strategies in Storytelling

Abstract

Did storytelling in ancestral society help individuals to accrue fitness benefits? Here I explore what benefits storytelling brings to the storyteller and the audience respectively from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Early human societies did not have the large number of technological innovations that we have that let us accomplish more and more in ever less time; time was relatively precious to ancestral humans. In this context, the emergence of "storytelling" presents a quandary. Why did people organized such collective activities and why did they spend time listening to the content of stories?