Before I write the next post on the Layers of Trust, we have to take a side trip. The purpose of the trip is to explore an idea about how we use story to think and communicate. This idea will shed some light on degrees of trust.
This way of looking at story comes from Roger Schank, an influential researcher in the areas of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s.
His book Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence caused me to see the importance of story in a new way.
Stories help us to interpret the past and predict the future
Basically, Schank says, what we know is stories.
“People remember what happens to them, and they tell other people what they remember. People learn from what happens to them, and they guide their future actions accordingly.”
Our intelligence is essentially our ability to understand what has happened to us well enough to “predict when it might happen again.”ť
“We get reminded of what has happened to us previously for a very good reason. Reminding is the mind’s method of coordinating past events with future events to enable generalization and prediction.”
When we experience an event multiple times, we invent a script so that the next time it happens, we will know what to do. We have scripts for what to do in a restaurant, how to drive to work, and how to make spaghetti.
“A script is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood situation.”
“Scripts are also a kind of memory structure.”
We learn by reconsidering our stories
But what about when we have a new situation? How do we learn?
“We learn from reconsidering experiences we have already had in light of new information.”
To reconsider effectively, we have to be clever in how we label and index our experiences so they can be called up at the right time.
It’s harder to label and index with generalizations and abstractions. There aren’t many categories for many situations. Instead, we store stories which give life to past experience and make events in memory memorable to ourselves and others.
Thus, we learn and answer questions by telling each other stories. We know which story to tell by how they are indexed.
The more indices we have for a story being told, the more places it can reside in memory. This is why we are more likely to remember a story (versus a fact or principle) and to relate it to experience already in memory.
“In other words, the more indices, the greater the number of comparisons with prior experiences and hence the greater the learning.”
Our ability to index our stories is an indication of our intelligence
“What makes us intelligent is our ability to find out what we know when we need to know it. What we actually know is all the stories, experiences, “facts,” little epithets, points of view, and so on that we have gathered over the years.”
“In the end, all we have, machine or human, are stories and methods of finding and using those stories.”
Conversation is essentially responsive storytelling
Conversations strike at the heart of intelligence because they involve reminding.
We understand by getting reminded; we respond to what we have heard by getting reminded of something that was already in our head.
Intelligence is bound up with being able to tell the right story at the right time.
“Storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing. Conversation is no more than responsive storytelling. The process of reminding is what controls understanding and therefore, conversation.”
This post is a very brief summary of Schank on story. But it’s enough to return to the topic of trust and how trust develops between people.
Some other related posts you might find useful:
About David Crankshaw
[...] the last post I described Schank’s idea on intelligence and [...]