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The Forum: The Pleasures and Perils of Storytelling

Discussion & Talk

(NO WATERMARK) Teacher reading a story to her class (March 1955)   (Please Credit: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)

30/01/2016 GMT

The Pleasures and Perils of Storytelling

BBC World Service - The Forum, The Pleasures and Perils of Storytelling

Are we hard-wired to look for stories and is that inappropriate for 21st Century? With psychologist Raymond Mar, business consultant Thaler Pekar and science writer Philip Ball.

Almost everyone loves a story - in fact, you could argue that we all do our best to turn any sequence of events into a narrative. But in our ever more complex world, our inclination to look for narratives may not be an advantage. When it comes to making sense of complex systems, say, a nation’s economy or the human body, our propensity for story-telling can become a snare, a trap which may incline us to see a narrative when none exists. 

Bridget Kendall is joined by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, whose research explores whether the habit of reading fiction may help hone our social skills; business consultant Thaler Pekar, who seeks out persuasive stories and teaches people how best to share them; and science writer and broadcaster Philip Ball, who explains that if complex data defies simple analysis, we probably need to abandon a narrative and look for a completely different kind of thinking.

(Photo: Children sit around a nanny reading a story. Credit: Getty Images)

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