![]() Indeed, writers seem to possess a certain magic of storytelling-but anyone can learn the tricks of the trade. You read a passage of prose and it raises your arm hairs, makes your blood tingle, gets your heart racing suddenly you’re swept up in the experience of beautiful writing. In the real world, all of this community support gives the children of the storyteller a small but real survival edge.It is hard to measure the art of storytelling, but you know good storytelling it when you see it. Significantly, in the resource sharing game, it was storytellers who were likeliest to be recipients of rice. Another potential explanation is that the rest of the community is inclined to look favorably on the storyteller’s family and extend help when needed in the form of childcare, pitching in to look after a sick family member, or even offering financial or material support when necessary. One reason for that is obvious: if you’re popular - and storytellers are - you’re more likely to have a partner. 53 more living children than other people. “Storytelling is a costly behavior,” write the researchers, “requiring an input of time and energy into practice, performance and cognitive processing.” But the payoff for making such an effort is big: When the investigators looked at family groups within the 18 camps, they found that skilled storytellers had, on average. Of course, nothing captures natural selection quite like the number of babies any one person has, and storytelling confers that benefit too - at least on the tellers. Remarkably, storytellers were chosen over people who had equally good reputations for hunting, fishing and foraging - which at least suggests that human beings may sometimes prize hearing an especially good story over eating an especially good meal. ![]() Of the 857 people who were named, those who had been designated as good storytellers in the previous experiment were nearly twice as likely to be chosen as those who weren’t. ![]() In the second experiment, 291 people in the same 18 camps were asked to name a maximum of five people in their own community with whom they would be happy to live. It is impossible to say definitively that the two were connected, but the fact remained, as the researchers wrote, that “Camps with a greater proportion of skilled storytellers, were associated with increased levels of cooperation.” The more good storytellers in a village, in other words, the more generous people were. But the actual total changed camp-to-camp, with every 1% advantage in the number of good storytellers in any community associated with a 2.2% increase in the amount of rice given away in the game. Perhaps not surprisingly, the subjects kept an average of 62.6% of the rice tokens for themselves. (At the end of the experiment, all of the rice was distributed to all of the villagers according to the choices the subjects had made.) All of the subjects made their decisions privately, in the presence of only the researchers. They were told they could either keep all of the tokens or give as many as they wished to any or all of up to 12 other residents of the camp the researchers secretly chose. Now, a new study in Nature Communications, helps explain why: storytelling is a powerful means of fostering social cooperation and teaching social norms, and it pays valuable dividends to the storytellers themselves, improving their chances of being chosen as social partners, receiving community support and even having healthy offspring.Ī different 290 people in the same camps were then asked to play a resource allocation game, in which people were given up to 12 tokens, each of which could be exchanged for about an eighth of a kilo of rice. The Agta are hardly the only peoples who practice storytelling the custom has been ubiquitous in all cultures over all eras in all parts of the world. And if you were a child in the Agta community - a hunter-gatherer population in The Philippines’ Isabela Province - you’d have grown up on the story, and on many others that teach similar lessons. You can learn a lot from a tale like that - about friendship, cooperation, empathy and an aversion to inequality. So the wild pig carried him down to the sea, where they could race forever, side by side, one in the water, one on the land. One day, however, the seacow hurt his legs and could run no more. ![]() ![]() The wild pig and seacow were best friends who enjoyed racing each other for sport. Odds are, you’ve never heard the story of the wild pig and the seacow - but if you’d heard it, you’d be unlikely to forget it. ![]()
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