ABSTRACT
Schank and Abelson (1995) argued that virtually all the meaningful social knowledge we acquire is in the form of stories. This claim is probably overstated (Brewer, 1995; Rubin, 1995). Nevertheless, the role of narratives in the acquisition and transmission of information in daily life is undeniable. The content of everyday conversations almost invariably includes stories we tell about ourselves and personal acquaintances, descriptions of books we have read or movies we have seen, and jokes that we tell to one another. Narratives are also invoked in the course of understanding the causes or likely consequences of real and hypothetical social events (e.g., the outcome of a presidential election, or the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir). Persuasive messages and television commercials often stimulate us to imagine the sequence of events that might result from taking a particular course of action. Life itself is in the form of a narrative, consisting of a sequence of temporally related events that we experience as either participants or observers. In short, narratives are fundamental to an understanding of ourselves and of the world in which we live.
