A Cognitive Module for Stories: Reasoning Improves With Stories of Personal Struggle

We make the case that stories are a universal trait and a relevant selection criteria for mates. Given the apparent influence of evolutionary pressures on reasoning performance, such as with detecting cheaters (Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992) or illness (Taylor, 2017), we sought to explore how reasoning differs from story perception in three experiments. Our participants received either social contract or abstract scenarios (Cosmides, 1989; Gigerenzer & Hug; 1992; Markovits, 2013; Wason, 1968) or a five-sentence story depicting a personal struggle that culminated in a rule about overcoming that struggle. Half of the participants chose from four options to logically test the rule and half selected which of the four options would complete the story in a satisfying way. In experiments 2 and 3, we used only the personal struggle stories and rules, this time inducing a conflict between a satisfying conclusion and the logic of the rules half the time and aligning with the climax of the story with the logic half the time. We found that participants could consistently reason as well or better than with social contract scenarios and, when asked to complete the stories, did so in a way that was consistent with a heroic reward for a likable protagonist or a punishment for an unlikable protagonist. Critically, our findings diverged appropriately from reasoning when instructions prompted logical solutions, suggesting that their story perception was a different process from reasoning. We cannot yet say the extent to which this story process has been influenced via evolutionary pressures, although we conclude it is a promising avenue for consideration.