The Science of Stories An Introduction to Narrative
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The Science of Stories
An Introduction to Narrative Psychology
János László
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First published 2008 by Routledge
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© 2008 Psychology Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
László, János.
The science of stories : an introduction to narrative psychology / János László.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0–415–45794–1 (hardcover
ISBN 978-0–415–45795–8 (pbk.)
1. Psychology--Biographical methods. 2. Discourse analysis, Narrative--
Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF39.4.L37 2009
150.72’2--dc22
2008002878
ISBN 0-203-89493-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 978-0–415–45794–1 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0–415–45795–8 (pbk)
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Contents
Illustrations x
Introduction 1
The nature of narratives 1
Narrative analysis 3
Preliminary on scientific narrative psychology 4
1 Foundations of narrative psychology 7
The narrative nature of human knowledge 7
Narratology 10
The referentiality of narrative 11
The reference of therapeutic narratives 13
History as narrative 13
Science as narrative 14
Narrative causality 15
Hermeneutic composition 16
The role of time in narrative 16
Genre-specific particularity 18
Genre archetypes 18
Narrative canons 19
Narrative comprehension 22
Narrative speech acts 24
Narrative perspective 24
Psycho-narratology 26
Summary 27
2 The place of narrative in psychology 29
Psychology: natural and/or social science 29
Knowing reality and/or understanding narrative 30
The problem of complexity of phenomena: narrative as complex pattern 32
The issue of complexity in the theory of evolution 34
Evolution and cultural evolution 35
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vi Contents
Space and narrative 35
Time and narrative 36
Intention and action in narrative 36
The archaeological paradigm in psychology 39
Narrative as medium of historical-cultural psychology 40
Narrative psychology as cultural and evolutionary psychology 41
Summary 42
3 Narrative psychology and postmodernism 43
Modernity and postmodernity 45
Postmodernism and psychoanalysis 46
Narrativity as constraint on meaning construction 48
Narrative literature and narrative psychology 49
Narrative psychology as psychology of meaning 51
Summary 52
4 Narrative psychology’s contribution to the second cognitive
revolution 54
Forerunners of narrative psychology in experimental and social
psychology 55
Bartlett and the psychology of meaning 56
The problem of meaning in experimental social psychology 58
Socio-cultural aspects of psychological meaning 60
Communication and cognition 61
Narrative psychological approach 63
Social cognition and narrative psychology 66
Summary 68
5 On representation 69
Experience as a representational form 72
An interlude: one more time on literature 74
Returning to the forms of representing experience 75
Allusion 76
The formulation and return of experience in narratives 78
Dissemination of representations 79
Narrative spreading 82
Summary 84
6 Theory of social representations 86
The functions of social representations 89
The processes of social representations 1: anchoring 90
The processes of social representations 2: objectification 91
The relationship of social representations theory with traditional theories
of social psychology 92
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Contents vii
The empirical study of social representations 97
The use of the narrative train of ideas in social representations
research 99
How narrative approach contributes to the explanatory potential of social
representations 104
Identity and social representation 106
Personal identity 107
Social identity 108
Group identity and the representation of the social world 108
Group identity as the demarcation of group boundaries 110
Summary 115
7 Identity and narrative 116
McAdams’ model for analysing autobiographies 117
Barclay’s model for analysing the coherence of autobiographical
narrative 118
High ego: Complex ideology, more questioning 119
High ego: Integrated imagos 119
The roots of knowledge about the self 121
Narrative ideas in the research on self-development 122
Trauma and narrative 124
Therapeutic narratives 125
Life story as a social construct 126
Life stories or stories from life: significant life events 126
Summary 128
8 Language and soul 129
Language and world view 129
Linguistic forms and forms of thinking 130
Content analysis 131
Language and personality 131
Language and situation 132
The automation of content analysis 133
Targeted interviews 134
Narrative interview 135
Summary 137
9 Narrative psychological content analysis 138
Characters and their functions 138
Control of spatial-emotional distance 141
Narrative perspective 142
The role of time in the narrative 145
Narrative evaluation 148
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viii Contents
Narrative coherence 150
Psychological interpretations of self-reference 151
Negation 152
The computerization of content analysis in narrative psychology 153
Reliability and validity studies of the narrative content-analytic
programs 154
What do we measure when testing validity? 154
Summary 154
10 Social memory and social identity 156
Types of explanation 156
History, narrative, identity: construction and reality 158
Social, collective and cultural representation 159
Collective memory and social representations 159
Group narrative and identity 161
National identity in the mirror of history 163
National identity and historical narrative 163
Two examples: study of Hungarian national identity in the light of folk-
historical narratives and of history books 168
Methods of analysis 169
Life trajectory of a nation 170
Folk-historical schemes 172
What was missing from the stories 174
Group agency and responsibility 174
Further steps towards the automated narrative psychological content
analysis 175
The representation of common history 176
Summary 177
11 Roots and perspectives of scientific narrative psychology 179
Appendix 184
On Lin-Tag (www.mtapi.hu/Lin-Tag) 184
Linguistic operationalization of the programs 186
Linguistic operationalization of the perspective forms 188
Linguistic operationalization of the approach–avoidance dimension 190
Validity and reliability studies with the programs 191
Reliability studies of the program modules 193
Validity studies of the program modules 193
Studies with the narrative perspective module 193
Validity study of the emotion regulating function of the narrative
perspective module 194
Studies with the Approx-Change program 197
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Contents ix
Validity tests of Approx-Change program in clinical and normal
samples 197
Validity tests of the Approx-Change module in the stratified normal
sample 198
References 207
Index 225
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Illustrations
Figures
5.1 The conceptual space of social psychology 73
7.1 Life story model of identity 119
7.2 Autobiographical remembering: narrative constraints 120
10.1 Positive and negative events in Hungarian history according to the
frequency of recall 171
A.1 The process of program development 185
A.2 Outlines of the the operation of Lin-Tag 187
Tables
5.1 Views on representation 70
5.2 Strength of cognitive and ecological factors affecting dissemination
of knowledge 81
6.1 Types of mediating and representing psychoanalysis 88
10.1 Characteristics of communicative and cultural memory 161
10.2 Clusters of good and bad events in Hungarian history 172
10.3 Agency in Holocaust stories 175
10.4 Results of the history school book analysis 176
11.1 Relation of scientific narrative psychology to other approaches to
narratives 180
A.1 Linguistic codes of the narrative perspective algorithm 189
A.2 Sample description 191
A.3 Performance of the self-narrative perspective module 193
A.4 Relative frequency of the narrative perspective forms in the
stratified normal sample 195
A.5 Relative frequency of narrative perspective forms in narratives of
five different life episodes 196
A.6 Correlations between the frequencies of perspective forms and the
measures of coherence and stability of emotional experience 196
A.7 Reliability of the Approx-Change module 197
A.8 Relative frequencies of APPROX and AVOID codes in the
autobiographical episodes 198
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Illustrations xi
A.9 Frequency of APPROX and AVOID codes and their co-occurrence
(APPRAVOID) in the matched samples 199
A.10 The relation between the total of approach and avoidance
expressions in the Achievement and the Loss stories
(APPRAVOID) and personality questionnaire scores 201
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Introduction
Narrative psychology evolved in the late twentieth century. It has had at least
five different strands or paradigms since its inception. The term ‘narrative psy-
chology’ was introduced by Theodor Sarbin’s influential book (Sarbin 1986b),
which declared narrative to be the ‘root metaphor’ for psychology, and sug-
gested that qualitative studies exploit this metaphorical value. Another book
from the same year, Jerome Bruner’s Actual Minds, Possible Words (1986),
explored the ‘narrative kind of knowing’ in a more empiricist manner. Around
the same time, Dan McAdams (1985) developed a theoretical framework and
a coding system for interpreting life narratives in the personological tradi-
tion. By that time, stories, their production and comprehension became one
of the central targets of mainstream scientific psychology (e.g. Bobrow and
Collins 1975; Mandl et al. 1984; Rumelhart 1975; Thorndyke 1977) as opposed
to their earlier sporadic occurrence (the most notable classic example is Sir
Frederick Bartlett’s (1932) work on remembering). And last but not at least, the
linguistic qualities of narratives such as structure and word selection became
objects of personality and social psychological research in James Pennebak-
er’s works (Pennebaker 1993; Pennebaker et al. 1997a). I will deal with all of
these approaches in due course. However, the major objective of this book is to
outline a project of narrative psychology, which draws on the scientific tradi-
tions of psychological study, but adds to the existing theories by pursuing the
empirical study of psychological meaning construction. Our contention is that
scientific narrative psychology opens a new perspective on complex phenom-
ena such as cultural and evolutionary dimensions of personality, personal or
social identity and group life.
The nature of narratives
Narratives are generally conceived as accounts of events, which involve some
temporal and/or causal coherence (Hoshmand 2005). Narrative is not the only
possible form of human communication. Communicative manifestations are
characterized by a boundless diversity of speech acts, and even if we consider
the discourse genres of monologues alone, we have, in addition to narrative, argu
mentation, description and explanation, just as we have a wide range of mental
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Introduction
constructs for analysing the organization of observation and experience besides
episodic or story schemas. Nonetheless, as Barthes (1977) writes:
narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy,
drama, comedy, mime, painting, … stained-glass windows, cinema, comics,
news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of
forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it
begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been
a people without narrative. … Caring nothing for the division between good
and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it
is simply there, like life itself.
(Barthes 1977: 79)
More cogently, Hardy (1968: 5) has written: ‘we dream in narrative, daydream
in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise,
criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative’.
This ‘omnipresence’ of narrative is explained by the fact that narrative accounts
are embedded in social action. Events become socially visible through narratives,
and expectations towards future events are, for the most part, substantiated by
them. Since narratives permeate the events of everyday life, the events themselves
become story-like too. They assume the reality of ‘beginning’, ‘peak’, ‘nadir’ or
‘termination’. This is how people experience events, and we all record them in
this way. Thus, in this very important sense, our life goes on its way in terms of
stories, whether we simply tell our self or create it in an active fashion.
In the past few decades it has been recognized more and more intensively in
the social sciences and the humanities that social knowledge and social thinking
are characterized by some sort of distinct type of narrativity. One of the leading
representatives of the narrative approach in psychology, Jerome Bruner (1986,
1990, 1996) makes a distinction between two natural forms of human thinking.
These two cognitive modes organize our experiences and construe reality in dif-
ferent ways. One of them is the paradigmatic or logical-scientific mode, which
works with abstract concepts, construes truth by means of empirical evidence
and methods of formal logic, and while doing so, it seeks causal relations that
lead to universal truth conditions. The other, more ‘mundane’ mode of think-
ing is the narrative mode, which investigates human or human-like intentions
and acts, as well as the stories and consequences related to them. What justifies
this mode is life-likeness rather than truth, and it aspires to create a realistic
representation of life. Bruner (1986) illustrates the two types of causality as
follows:
The term then functions differently in the logical proposition ‘if x than y’,
and in the narrative recit ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ One leads
to a search for universal truth conditions, the other for likely particular con-
nections between two events – mortal grief, suicide, foul play.
(Bruner 1986: 11–12)
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Introduction
In other words, narrative thinking aspires to make sense or to establish
coherence.
The most obvious forms of narrative thinking are stories told by professional
authors and the man in the street. With a subtle sense Bruner (1986: 14) notes
that there are two kinds of psychological domain, or, as he puts it, two land-
scapes emerging concurrently in stories. The landscape of action comprises the
arguments of action: actor, intention or goal, situation, means, etc. The other
domain, the landscape of consciousness expresses what the participants of the
action know, think and feel, or what they do not know, think and feel. At the
same time, the concurrent presence of these two landscapes of narrative assumes
that fully fledged stories do not merely give an account of what has happened but
they involve a lot more than that: they also outline the psychological perspective
of events. The ability to elaborate action, the inevitable presence of time (see
Cupchik and László 1994), perspective (László and Larsen 1991) and the way
time and perspective are handled make narrative a kind of a ‘natural tool’ for
making a distinction between action, emotion and thought so that these compon
ents can be reintegrated (see Bruner and Lucariello 1989: 77–79).
For the same reason, Bruner and Lucariello (1989) stress the creative nature of
narrative:
a developed narrative, then, is not simply an account of what happened, but
implies much more about the psychological perspectives taken toward those
happenings. Accordingly, one deep reason why we tell stories to ourselves
(or to our confessor or to our analyst or to our confidant) is precisely to ‘make
sense’ of what we are encountering in the course of living – through narrative
elaborations of the natural arguments of action.
(Bruner and Lucariello 1989: 79)
In essence, we make sense of our life by telling stories, because ‘There is no such
thing psychologically as “life itself”… In the end it is a narrative achievement’
(Bruner 1987: 13). Like Ricoeur (1984–1989) and Flick (1995), Bruner construes
the interrelationship of life, construction and interpretation as a circular mimetic
process: ‘Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative’ (Bruner 1987: 12).
Narrative analysis
Traditionally, narratives are analysed in social sciences in three distinct ways.
Formal-structural analysis initiated by the Russian formalists focuses on the role
that linguistic and discourse structures play in conveying meaning. In psychology
this approach prevails in cognitive studies of story production and comprehen-
sion. Content analysis is directed to the semantic content and tries to quantify
it. In psychology, of course, psychological contents are classified and measured.
Major limits of both analytic tools are, first, the uncertainty of the external valid
ity of the constructs derived from them, and second, blindness to the context
where structures or semantic contents occur. This latter flaw prevents formal-
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