Abstract
Storytelling has played a major role in human evolution as a mechanism for engineering social cohesion. In large measure, this is because a shared worldview is an important basis for the formation not just of friendships but, more generally, of social communities. Storytelling thus provides the mechanism for the transmission of shared cultural icons and shared histories within a community. That being so, the effectiveness with which stories do their job is likely to be related to the storyteller’s ability to make challenging yet realistic stories without overtaxing the listeners’ abilities to comprehend the narrative. I summarise some of the constraints likely to act on this both in terms of community size and organisation and in terms of cognition, and explore their implications for storytelling.
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Notes
- 1.
Editors’ note: See, also, the Chapter “Analyses of a Virtual World” by Holovatch, Mryglod, Szell and Thurner.
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Acknowledgements
My research is funded by a European research Council Advanced Investigator grant. This article also forms part of the output of the Calleva Research Centre, Magdalen College, Oxford.
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Dunbar, R. (2017). Cognitive and Network Constraints in Real Life and Literature. In: Kenna, R., MacCarron, M., MacCarron, P. (eds) Maths Meets Myths: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Narratives. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39445-9_2
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