Applied narratology. Theory, Methods, and Analysis of Social and Political Narratives: How Stories Shape Power, Identity, and Reality

CHAPTER 2. THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF WORLD-VIEW

How we perceive information, how we imagine the world, and how we reproduce it in our minds

A person becomes what they believe.

A person lives not in a world of facts, but in a world of images, emotions, and interpretations that their brain assembles into a coherent picture of reality. Over the last half-century, numerous studies and discoveries have explained how and in what way narratives influence human behaviour. We will present a few of the simplest and most accessible.

Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio, working on the psychology of memory, proposed the idea of a so-called dual-coding system. Humans have two primary systems for perceiving information – visual and verbal. Working in parallel, these systems create independent representations of what is seen and heard. At the final stage – the level of long-term memory – the information received through them either assigns a name to a seen image or, conversely, selects an image, a mental picture, for a name.

But there is a peculiarity: the surrounding reality created and remembered in consciousness in this way can, with equal probability, belong either to the real world or to the imagined one. And this entire system together represents what is commonly called a world-view. Core life positions, beliefs, ideals, and behaviour depend on it. A world-view gives human activity a meaningful and purposeful character, and it is within this presented system that a person tries to find their place.

Over time, with the reproduction of accumulated information in memory, various changes occur. Information becomes distorted, can be interpreted in different ways, and can ultimately be transformed into something else. And it is important to know this if we consider two concepts. The first concept is perception of the world. Perception of the world is expressed in moods, feelings, and actions; that is, it has an emotional-psychological basis. The second concept is understanding of the world – a cognitive-intellectual conception, the level at which a doctrine of the surrounding world is represented. At the moment a person visualises their representation of the surrounding world, their perception of the world (emotional-psychological) transitions to a level where it becomes their understanding of the world (cognitive-intellectual doctrine). That is, by changing the perception of the world, by influencing the main channels of information – auditory and visual – we can change the understanding of the world of any person.

In the not-so-distant past, all sense organs participated in forming this picture of the world in relatively equal measure. But the world has changed. The main information channels today are sight and hearing. And sometimes only sight or only hearing. The information received through them can relate either to the past or to the future. A gap has emerged between the information received and the time of its event-based relevance. Looking at the screens or listening to the radio, people are unable to realistically assess the prospects, depth, or detail of the plot being described or shown. A person sees a world based on the perception permitted to them or the information presented to them. This is the peculiarity of today’s process of perception of the world, influencing the understanding of the world of millions of people.

The picture of the world is constructed on a directive basis. Today, in the human brain, there are digitised and edited images. The danger is that it is often impossible to verify their authenticity in real time, and, by and large, the brain does not care about all these limitations and verifications created by civilisation. In order to remain relevant and concerned exclusively with its own safety, the brain is content with what a person sees and hears right now.

The next study concerns the ability to persuade people. How is it that an emotion, which is not always logical, becomes a more compelling argument for trust and persuasiveness than logic in cause-and-effect explanations? What is going on? How does this happen? It’s all about hormones.

Along with sex hormones, oxytocin is one of the main hormones regulating social life. It helps maintain and strengthen bonds, and helps people feel others’ emotions. If oxytocin is administered nasally, people begin to better understand the moods of those around them, become highly receptive to signals and stimuli for establishing good relationships, and become more trusting. Participants in an experiment more often found the people shown to them to be trustworthy enough to share personal information with them. Oxytocin is also released when people experience care and trust, which motivates interaction and strengthens the capacity for empathy. If you need to convince someone of something, it is enough to evoke sympathy, and by modelling this emotional impact, you can motivate people to perform certain actions.

Scientist Paul Zak studied ways to ‘hack’ the oxytocin production system without using medication, in order to get people to engage in specific cooperative actions. He conducted a simple experiment: at a charity event aimed at raising donations, two groups of participants were shown two different videos. The first video contained footage forming a formalised narrative, facts, and messages. In the second video, the same facts and images were assembled into the form of a dramatic narrative and accompanied by emotional text. After watching the second video, the audience donated significantly more money, even though the information in both videos was identical. That is, you can guide people to perform certain, even irrational, actions by modelling their emotions.

Thus, if attention requires emotion, then to believe requires empathy. To the common aphorism ‘You can’t trust anyone,’ one might add the comment ‘… including yourself.’

With the introduction of functional MRI, research into brain activity reached a completely new level. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson from Princeton University measured a woman’s brain activity using fMRI. The measurements were taken while the subject told a personal story that moved her to five other people. It was discovered that in these subjects, the same brain areas were activated and responded in the same way and at the same moments as in the storyteller herself. Based on this, Hasson concluded that when people remember something, dream, or are struck by ideas, specific neural patterns begin to work in the brain. And for the brain, in this sense, there is no difference whether it happened to the person themselves, they read about it somewhere, or someone told them about it.

Very often in their behaviour, people act as they have been told, accepting the storyteller’s experience as their own. When a group of test subjects with no special military experience is asked to disarm a simulated explosive device, everyone looks for the blue and red wire because they have seen it in movies hundreds of times. Seeing a luminous oval object moving across the night sky, most people think of aliens, because that is the only thing they have been told about luminous oval objects moving across the sky. By understanding how the brain creates a world-view, we gain, for the first time, the opportunity not only to manage the attention of others, but also to reclaim power over our own stories.

CHAPTER 3. THE ENERGY CONCEPTION OF THE BRAIN

Laziness and misunderstanding do far more harm in the world than malice and treachery.

What really matters is what happens in us, not to us.

A person rarely realises that most of their life is governed not by decisions, but by economy. Not economy of money, but economy of energy. The brain is structured so that its main task is not to seek truth, but to expend as few resources as possible while maintaining the ability to survive and navigate.

This is precisely why a person so often lives by ready-made stories. Narrative is not an error of thinking, but its energetically advantageous form. A story allows the brain not to think anew, not to recalculate the world each time, but to use an already assembled model of reality.

Marcus Raichle, the founder of the so-called default mode network theory, explains that the brain is continuously engaged in constructing an internal model of the surrounding world. The model the brain creates, as a prediction, helps it anticipate and prepare for events. As long as predictions come true, the brain does not engage attention. Attention is always costly and energy-intensive. But if something happens that does not match the prediction, a person will inevitably pay attention to it.

And so it is with everything. In ordinary life, a person implements existing behavioural programs and uses them to construct their world-view. When necessary, we are more willing to adjust existing forms and scenarios or accept ready-made ones than to create new ones. It is this energy conception that the brain follows, persistently yet imperceptibly.

For the brain, its functioning is a kind of business. And business is the art of working with limited resources. In the brain’s case, the limited resource is energy. A person constantly needs energy for the ‘production’ of life. In the animal world, and indeed in the human world, their own ‘food chains’ are constructed to solve the energy problem.

People, without noticing it themselves, approach new thoughts cautiously and, moreover, are very, very frugal with their imagination and brain function in general. A person, in a certain sense, protects it, but in a peculiar way. For example, they make greater use of so-called worldly wisdom or habits born of past experience or the teachings of the older generation.

Or, for example, a person might sincerely say that they are too lazy, that they are satisfied, and offer a multitude of various explanations and arguments for the complexity of a problem. The difficulties a person perceives are, in themselves, the best justification for their inaction. People are not willing to pay for change, but they cannot admit this to themselves. Because it’s not even that they don’t want change, but that their brain doesn’t want it. It may seem incredible, but the visual centres of the brain consume such a colossal amount of energy that it is difficult to imagine.

Depending on their readiness to think and act, and in decreasing order of this readiness, people can be conditionally divided into three groups: those who actively manage what is happening, those who observe and understand what is happening, and those who are surprised by what is happening. That is, if you meet someone who is constantly surprised by events, you can confidently assume that they are not ready to change anything, even in what surprises them. Patient observation requires more energy, while creation and management are the pinnacle of energetic extravagance. But it is precisely this energetic extravagance that is the condition and source for human development.

Development begins where you decide to take an energetically disadvantageous step – to think, to doubt, to reassemble meaning. It is at this point that narrative ceases to be an automatic program and becomes a tool of choice. This is where applied narratology begins.

CHAPTER 4. APPLIED NARRATOLOGY: HOW THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH MEANING EMERGED AND WHAT IT MAKES POSSIBLE

A person understands themselves only through the story they tell about themselves.

Applied narratology emerged at the moment it became clear: understanding a story does not liberate a person if they continue to live inside it. It was necessary not only to see and explain narrative, but also to learn how to work with it: to change it, reassemble it, make it fit for life.

This chapter is devoted to how applied narratology arose, how it differs from the other two approaches, and why it is becoming one of the key disciplines of the twenty-first century.

The History of Development and Formation of Applied Narratology: From Analysis to Action

Applied narratology is the youngest and most dynamic branch of narrative disciplines. It works not with texts, and not only with perception, but with life stories that shape behaviour, decisions, relationships, and identity.

It is a discipline that says: if life is a story, then it can be reassembled, transformed. If a story creates decisions, then decisions can be changed by changing the story. If a person feels stuck in a situation, then it is not life that is stuck, but the plot.

To understand the power of applied narratology, one must trace the path from its philosophical roots to modern methods. Its history is not a single line, but a confluence of three powerful streams that long existed separately: philosophical, psychological, and cultural-linguistic. It was only at the end of the twentieth century that they converged, giving birth to the approach now used by leaders, psychologists, coaches, managers, educators, social strategists, and individuals seeking to reshape their own lives.

Philosophical Roots of Applied Narratology (1940s—1970s)

When Western thought first recognised that a person lives within stories, mid-twentieth-century philosophers began to ask a new type of question: ‘What is the ‘I’? Is the ‘I’ truly immutable, or can it be created through narrative? Can a person change by changing the story about themselves? What happens when a person loses their plot?’

These questions were radical for an era in which a person was still understood through fixed essences (‘character’, ‘nature’, ‘temperament’). Key figures emerged without whom applied narratology would not exist.

Paul Ricœur laid the foundation for the future discipline. He asserted: ‘A person understands themselves only through a story, and identity is a process of constant retelling.’ That is, the ‘I’ is not static, not fixed, not given once and for all; it changes along with the interpretation of experience. This is the very root of the applied approach: if identity is a story, it can be reconstructed.

For Jean-Paul Sartre, freedom is the necessity of writing one’s own plot. He put it differently: ‘Man is condemned to be free,’ and freedom is the duty to create one’s own story, even if it is frightening. In his philosophy, there is no ready-made plot. There is choice. And choice is the point where a story is created. This idea would become the basis of applied narratology: a person should not wait for permission for a new story. They must decide upon it.

Albert Camus: the absurd as the rupture between the need for a story and the absence of meaning. Camus describes a state that in applied narratology is called ‘narrative collapse’. When a story no longer explains life, the existing plot ceases to function, a person feels a loss of meaning, the previous developmental plan crumbles; a new one has not yet been created. Camus wrote about this through the metaphor of Sisyphus. Today, applied narratology works precisely with such states, when the old plot is exhausted.

Psychotherapeutic Origins (1950s—1980s)

Therapists long thought that a client came to them with feelings or behaviours. But by the 1970s, it became obvious: the client comes with a story that makes those feelings and behaviours inevitable. For example: ‘It’s always like this with me’; ‘I’m guilty because…’; ‘If I speak up, I’ll be rejected’; ‘I’m strong, so I have no right to cry’; ‘I must save others.’ These stories are stronger than facts. And almost always they lie deeper than the pain.

Virginia Satir. The family as a factory of stories. Satir saw that people do not live in isolation. They live within ‘family narratives’ passed down like programs: ‘In our family, we don’t complain’; ‘We must be resilient’; ‘Love must be earned’; ‘All the men in our family are like that’; ‘Our women always endure’; ‘Success breeds envy – better not to stand out.’

These lines became life scripts that a person later accepted as their own. Satir was the first to suggest: ‘to change your life, you need to change the family story within yourself.’ This idea would later be incorporated into applied narratology.

Carl Rogers and the Humanistic Tradition. A story as a way to hear oneself. Rogers showed that a person changes when they first tell ‘a story in which they are allowed to be themselves.’ Not to be right. Not to be convenient. Not to be defensive. But to be honest.

This is the moment when the old story first cracks. Applied narratology would later use this effect: a new story begins where a person first speaks the truth.

Jacob Levy Moreno and Psychodrama. A story brought to the stage. Moreno did something brilliant: he allowed a person to ‘act out their story.’ When a person sees their story from the outside, they understand that it was created, and that it can be changed. This was the first prototype of a future method: the story is not fate, but a construction.

Linguistics and Cultural Studies (1950s—1980s)

While psychotherapists worked with personal stories, cultural scholars studied large collective plots: myths, ideologies, symbols, rituals, political narratives, mass culture. And they made important discoveries: Roland Barthes in Mythologies showed that advertising and politics are stories that create an emotional truth. Michel Foucault analysed discourses – ‘stories of power’ within which a person lives, often without noticing. Claude Lévi-Strauss showed that myths are universal cognitive structures.

All of them pointed towards one idea: a story is not a personal, but a social phenomenon. And if a society has a story, it can be changed. This idea would later give rise to applied social narratology. Applied narratology did not appear as a new theory, but as a response to a human necessity – the necessity of escaping a story that no longer works.

It became possible at the moment when philosophy provided a language for identity, psychotherapy provided access to personal experience, and cultural studies provided an understanding of the power of collective plots.

From that point on, narratology ceased to be mere description. It became a practice. It is from this moment that the conversation begins, not about what a narrative is, but about how to live with it and what to do with it.

CHAPTER 5. APPLIED NARRATOLOGY TODAY

People do not resist change – they resist stories in which they no longer have a place.

In the twenty-first century, it became obvious: change no longer begins with instructions, strategies, or skills. Specialists in organisational change encountered the same problem: classical tools could not explain why people remain for years in the same plot, even when circumstances and facts have long since changed. But this primarily concerned business.

For example: an employee considers themselves ‘insufficiently competent’, although objectively they are successful. A manager is convinced they must ‘control everything’, even though this has long ceased to work. A person in their personal life repeats the same scenario, even as relationships change. An organisation clings to an outdated image of itself that hinders progress.

This is precisely why applied narratology ceased to be a narrow specialised approach and became a practice without which it is impossible to work with development, leadership, and social processes. Specialists began to understand that the problem is not in knowledge or skills, but in the story that a person or system tells about itself. Thus emerged the idea of working not only with behaviour, but also with what precedes behaviour – with narrative.

Thus, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, applied narratology ceased to be a set of ideas and turned into a discipline used by educators, marketers, politicians, coaches, leaders, HR specialists, psychologists, and social designers.

The Influence of Narrative Psychotherapy: The Transition to a New Discipline

When the question ‘Why does a story work?’ turns into ‘How can it be rewritten?’, a critical moment arrives: structuralists explained how texts are constructed; cognitivists explained how the brain creates stories; psychotherapists explained how a story affects feelings. But no one explained the main thing: ‘How do you purposefully create a new story that one can live by going forward?’