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Week of 17 December 2018
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The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Jonathan Gottschall

Why we recommend this book

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. Gottschall’s research-grounded account of the evolved human compulsion to construct, absorb, and live by narrative provides the cognitive and evolutionary science that explains why the family money and work narratives are so extraordinarily durable and so resistant to revision through deliberate reasoning alone. His central finding — that the human brain is a story-processing machine before it is a logic-processing machine, and that narrative therefore shapes belief and behaviour at a level below deliberate reasoning — directly explains the most puzzling feature of inherited family financial scripts: why people who intellectually understand that their pricing is too low, their ambition is artificially capped, or their risk aversion is commercially costly nevertheless continue to behave as the script predicts. The narrative is not a belief that can be revised by presenting better information; it is an identity structure that requires narrative replacement rather than logical correction. Gottschall’s account of how stories operate — how they install emotional responses, bypass critical evaluation, and shape behaviour through the felt logic of character and consequence rather than through propositional reasoning — gives the entrepreneurially minded reader both the explanation for the script’s durability and the implication for how revision actually works: the family narrative cannot be argued out of; it must be narrated out of, through the deliberate construction of a revised account of who the entrepreneur is and where they are going.

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