Children like stories, adults like stories, everyone likes to listen to stories.
Earlier it was gossip, songs, dramas, comics books; now it is video games, movies , etc.
Why do we have an inclination towards listening to stories, that we always have been trying to invent new methods to tell them? What is the anthropological/evolutionary significance?
I like stories! I think peoples love to hear that in another life everything can be beautiful, and there is always a beautiful end of story! which is not true in the real life. Stories are escape from real life may be.
You might be interested in a chapter we (Read & Miller) wrote for an edited volume by Wyer in an Advances in Social Cognition (1995), entitled, "Stories are fundamental to meaning and memory: For social creatures, could it be otherwise?" We argued that for human beings, social knowledge is at the center of the cognitive system, and knowledge of physical objects is understood in terms of their relationship to the social. From this perspective we argued that stories are central to the human cognitive system because they capture the essence of social interaction, the structure of human action. After elaborating on this argument (drawing upon work from anthropology, linguistics, psychology including developmental psychology, primatology, and cognitive science), then we discussed the role of stories in conversations and why the complexity of social interaction drove the development of stories and why they were so significant in human evolution.
We might have evolved a liking for stories because stories are an efficient means of communication, and of transferring information and knowledge. Imagine a society that develops language and wants to have some way of holding on to important information, ideas, beliefs, traditions, etc. A well told story can go a long way to ensure this. In fact, in India, the entire Vedic system was propagated through "Shruti" the vocal means of communication, where the teacher spoke and the student heard and remembered. It was much later that the script was developed. Stories hold information by putting them in context which one can relate to, and that is why we remember stories better than dry statements read in text books.
Psychological perspective highlights, among other things, the potential of fulfilling important human needs.
Baumeister, R. F., Wilson, B. (1996). Life stories and the four needs for meaning. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 4, 322-377.
''Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.''
http://pragmasynesi.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/the-secrets-of-storytelling-why-we-love-a-good-yarn/
Stories create an interest in knowing the process and the end result. Story telling is an art to involve the listener in the talk. That's why story-telling approach is an important part of qualitative research. Through stories researchers try to understand the context of culture through the process narrated by the community members on a specific topic. It helps you to better understand the community perspective as well as the cultural practice followed.
Stories are not equally interesting. We do not like all stories. Some of them are not worth remembering. Those that have proven by being remember for a long time that they were worth remembering are the one we really love. We love them because they reveal us to ourself, this revelation is the joy we feel reading them.
"Story telling is an art to involve the listener in the talk" I agree with Pashant.
One type of story that is not often heard about, is the dilemma tale where the storyteller gives an open ending to their tale and the listeners are invited to give their conclusions.
When I first heard one of these I was astonished by how many ideas people had for the conclusion of the tale. Everyone had heard the story in a slightly different way and brought to it their own experiences.
We like stories because they are entertaining. They also have several other underlying benefits like developing language skills, creativity, thinking process etc. among children. Story telling was used traditionally to share and transfer knowledge, information, ideas, wisdom etc. between generations.Indian epics are an example of this. They have been passed on to varous generations through ages. This is the significance of the story telling, both anthropologically and evolutionary.
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