Chapter 8 - The Stories We Live By

  • ^^Novel^^: extended prose narratives that imaginatively ^^depict the experience of being human^^
  • Modern sense of selfhood: in the modern world, people tend to see themselves as multifaceted, complex entities who develop over time and who are responsible for their own development
  • ^^You are a novel!^^
    • Main character = you,
    • Narrative = your life

Storytelling

  • ^^Paradigmatic expression of human thought^^: how the world works through logic, empirical proof, theories, and arguments

  → Aims to reveal the truth

  • ^^Narrative mode^^ ^^of human thought^^: people create stories about intentional agents who pursue goals over time

  → Aims to explain why people do what they do

  • Verisimilitude: lifelikeness, human plausibility → characteristic of stories
    • Stories teach us how to be human!
  • ^^Exposure to fiction^^ ^^= positively correlated with social skills + empathy^^

Children’s Stories

  • Based on lived experience
    • ^^The stories children tell → contribute to their evolving autobiographical memory^^
  • Autobiographical authorship depends on motivated agency
    • It is developed in a social context
  • ^^Scaffolding^^^^: stimulating the child’s recollection and telling of the past by reminding the child of recent events^^

  → Helps in the development of memory and narration

  • Girls use more emotion words than boys and their stories are richer in context and meaning
  • ^^Conversational elaboration^^: children are asked to ^^reflect^^ and ^^elaborate^^ upon their ^^emotions, thoughts, and desires^^

Becoming the Author: The Emergence of Narrative Identity

  • Young people may exhibit different identity statuses
    • ^^Status of identity achieved^^: the person has thoroughly ^^examined different options^^ available to them, then ^^committed^^ themselves to self-chosen values and goals for the future
    • ^^Status of moratorium^^: young people are ^^still exploring^^ ideological and occupational options (they ^^haven’t committed^^)
    • ^^Status of foreclosure^^: young people ^^never really explored their options^^ but instead ^^committed^^ themselves to values and occupational goals that were presented to them early on in life
    • ^^Status of identity diffusion^^: young people who have ^^yet to explore or commit^^
  • ^^Narrative identity^^^^: internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to provide his/her life with unity, purpose, and meaning^^
    • It is a personal myth: it provides meaning and verisimilitude more than objective truth
    • ^^Milestones^^:

     1. Autobiographical memory: 2-3 years old * Remembering personal events as things that have happened to them 2. Theory of mind: 3-4 years old * Understanding that people are motivated agents 3. Story grammar: 5-6 years old * Understanding of how a story should be structured 4. Cultural script: 10-14 years old * Learning of what a human life typically contains and how the life course is typically sequenced and structured 5. Autobiographical reasoning and advanced storytelling skills: 12-25 years old * Proficiency in deriving personal meanings from autobiographical events

  • ^^The process of constructing a narrative identity is shaped by gender, ethnicity, race, and social class^^

In Search of Self: The Case of Barack Obama

  • Period of identity search

What Life Stories Look Like, And How They Relate to Other Features of Personality

  • 2 ways to conceive of a life story:
    • Thinking of it as the full history of a person’s life
    • Taking the person’s first-person perspective itself
  • ^^Autobiographical memory is inaccurate for details^^ but ^^better at conveying the emotional gist^^ of particular events
  • ^^Infantile amnesia^^^^: the absence of any autobiographical memories from the first 2/3 years of life^^
  • When people repeatedly describe specific events in their lives to others, and when they are reinforced for doing so, the stories of those events tend to be retained and incorporated into a person’s sense of self
  • ^^Self-defining memory^^: vivid, affectively charged, repetitive, linked to other similar memories, and related to an important unresolved theme or recurrent concern in an individual’s life
  • ^^Personal script^^^^: a predictable pattern of emotion and behavior played out over time^^
  • ^^Reminiscence bump^^: people tend to ^^recall^^ a dispropriate number of ^^episodic memories between the ages of 15 and 25 years old^^