We all love a good story and it’s no wonder as it seems our brains are hot-wired to make a story out of virtually anything.
According to scientists our brains are pre-ordained to make order out of chaos, to construct a story out of the debris of facts around us.
Warwick Business School Professor Nick Chater reveals how storytelling comes naturally as experiments have shown how our brains are continually putting order and structure on our environment and experiences.
“Just opening our eyes and surveying the scene in front of us requires an astonishing ability to synthesise order out of chaos,” said Professor Chater on BBC Radio 4’s The Human Zoo.
“The activity on our retinas which is caused by the stimulation of light is just amazingly noisy and amazingly complicated, yet we find order very effectively – the brain is an extraordinary ‘order-finding’ machine.
“People are always trying to impose structure on the environment and there are two structures natural to impose.
“One is causality, so we want to understand what caused what, so the unfolding experience in front of us does not seem like a disconnected jumble, but actually has a logical structure.
“On top of that the world does not just consist of objects acting causally, like dominos knocking each over, but also involves people and people behave because of reason. Therefore we also want to explain human action by what people believe; what their secret motives were, what their intentions were and this is something that is absolutely essential to the idea of stories – that people’s behaviour is explained by hidden reason.”
An experiment on Radio 4 listeners showed how even when not asked people will put order on to chaos. Their task was to simply type out a sentence of mangled words and pass it on to the next person, like a game of Chinese whispers.
“We saw how people imposed order on a pattern even if their task is just to repeat it,” said Professor Chater. “They couldn’t help but re-arrange the letters so they could read the sentence properly. This ability to find order where there is none is something we can’t turn off.”
This bias towards putting things in order may give us a false reading of events like the financial crash, as a series of unforeseen events is now explained by most as being caused by ‘greedy bankers’.
“Our ability to produce stories about why things happened vastly exceeds our ability to predict what happens next,” said Professor Chater, head of Warwick Business School’s Behavioural Science Group. “That is a suspicious sign that we are over-interpreting the world. If you are going to explain the crash then there are many stories about this. It might be about different sectors of the economy, the housing market, bankers or too loose a fiscal policy, but the truth is pretty much nobody saw this coming.
“That is a clue that stories are not really an inevitable consequence of what went before – they are things we are imposing retrospectively.”
But Professor Chater believes that although this bias might produce an unreliable story of the past, it is vital if we are to survive in a chaotic world.
“The general bias to try to see order is a good one,” said Professor Chater. “Without having some structure we just don’t know what to do.
“So it is probably worthwhile for us to be biased towards seeing order in apparent chaos, even when the evidence is flimsy.”
To interview Professor Nick Chater contact:
Email: Nick.Chater@wbs.ac.uk
Tel: 024 765 24506
Warwick Business School has in-house broadcasting facilities for TV and radio. We have an ISDN line for radio and for television interviews we have the Globelynx TVReady network, a list of Warwick experts is available. If you are looking for an expert in an area that is not listed, please contact Ashley Potter. Our ISDN number is 024 7647 1287.
Notes to editors:
Warwick Business School, located in central England, is the largest department of the University of Warwick and the UK’s fastest rising business school according the Financial Times. WBS is triple-accredited by the leading global business education associations and was the first in the UK to attain this accreditation. Offering the full portfolio of business education courses, from undergraduate through to MBAs, and with a strong Doctoral Programme, WBS is the complete business school. Students at WBS currently number around 6,500, and come from 125 countries. Just under half of faculty are non-UK, or have worked abroad. WBS Dean, Professor Mark P Taylor, is among the most highly-cited scholars in the world and was previously Managing Director at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.
Professor Nick Chater joined Warwick Business School in 2010, after holding chairs in psychology at Warwick and UCL. He has more than 200 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. Professor Chater is co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology; and is on the advisory board of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), popularly known as the ‘Nudge Unit’.
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