Stories of lemurs and robots - Narrative Intelligence - page 71

symbols that are in themselves meaningless convey meaning such as bodily
grooming does? I argue that narrative structure seems to be particularly suited:
usually a narrative gives a certain introduction of the characters (making con-
tact between individuals, actors, listener and speaker), develops a plot, namely
a sequence of actions that convey meaning (value, pleasurable, unpleasurable),
usually with a high point and a resolution (reinforcement or break-up of rela-
tionships), and focuses on unusual events rather than stereotypical events. In
this way, stories seem to give language a structure which resembles (and goes
beyond) physical grooming, namely replacing physical presence and actions by
the creation of a mental picture of physical actions, providing the stage, actors,
intentions and a storyline. Story-telling also gives more flexibility than social
grooming as to the actors and content of the stories: stories can include peo-
ple that are part of the current audience, as well as absent persons, historical
characters, fictional characters, etc. Stories that are told by a skilled story-teller
(e.g. using appropriate body language, exploiting prosody, and possessing a
rich repertoire of verbal expressions) can give very good examples of the power
of words. The format of a story can provide sensual, emotional, and mean-
ingful aspects to otherwise 'factual' information, e.g. poetry gives numerous
examples of stories that can elicit emotional responses and influence people.
Thus, both story-telling in humans and social grooming in non-human
primates are efficient social bonding mechanisms.
To summarize this section, narrativity , the capacity to communicate in
terms of stories, is regarded as an efficient means to communicate social mat-
ters, and the origin of narratives might therefore have been a crucial mile-
stone in the evolution of primate social intelligence (Read & Miller. 1995: 150)
“It is because of the social, and the need to effectively manage social inter-
actions, that we developed stories - stories made for the cognitively complex
humans that we are. It is our stories that make us human”. According to the
Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis (NIH), the evolutionary origin of stories and
narrativity was correlated with increasing social dynamics in human primate
societies, in particular the need to communicate about third-party relation-
ships. The evolution of the human story-telling mind was possibly correlated
with the evolution of complex mechanisms of social understanding and a com-
plex social field. This suggests that if we intend to develop a socially intelligent
agent (Dautenhahn 1998) which can truly understand and respond to stories
in human-agent interaction, then we need to model at least to a certain extent
social relationships and primate social life. In the following sections we analyze
the primate social field, and in more depth social understanding and the role
of narrative in autobiography.