ABSTRACT
People make sense of their lives by thinking about themselves and the events around them in story form (Bruner 1990). Narratives, considered here to be synonymous with stories, organize events into a framework that establishes causal relationships between the story's elements over time; hence, by their very structure, narratives focus on individuals' motivations and goals (Sanfey and Hastie 1998). In a narrative, a person's actions are evaluated in the context of achieving his/her goals (Pennington and Hastie 1986). Stories provide us with the reasons for why things happen and why people engage in particular behaviors. For example, I understand my father's love of 1941 automobiles through his boyhood stories about growing up during World War II, when cars stopped being manufactured and adolescents were allowed to drive.
