Goal

Humans have remarkable potential for personal self-actualization and collective achievement. One barrier to flourishing is our social divisions. Spend millions of dollars and millions of hours to demonize those with different views, not only leads us further from individual fulfillment, but prevents us from building cohesive social connections. Academics have attributed these divides to many features, but overlooked is the rise of data in everyday lives. We humans evolved to understand the world – and each other – through stories, and yet now perceive each other through the lens of countless statistics. We seem to believe that if we simply gave people enough facts, it would convince people to embrace others across differences, but this interdisciplinary proposal explores the power of narrative, bringing together psychologists, philosophers, historians, mythologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists and authors to pursue these goals:
1. Explore the role of narratives in history and philosophical thought
2. Understand the power of narratives in the human mind (how does the mind and brain understand stories)
3. Uncover how the structure of narrative connects to the capacity of human connection (which stories bridge divides and why)
4. Develop a scalable intervention so people can tell and reach each other's stories.

Opportunity

Authors and poets have long used stories to bridge the philosophical gap between other minds. Scientists are only now realizing how much our minds are driven by narrative, and work has revealed how narratives provide personal benefits--but narratives can also provide *interpersonal* benefits, building empathy and theory-of-mind. Recent work is also exploring ways to new ways to build understanding across moral divides, but this work under-appreciates the psychological power of narrative. In a world of filled with facts and big data, this idea aims to reconnect humanity with our narrative roots, and use that grounding to connect across human differences.

Roadblocks

Despite the importance of narrative in our lives, scientists often think of stories as too "squishy" for serious study. Yet recent work with natural language processing is revealing the structure of stories, both through conceptual themes and emotional trajectories. Providing a large funding initiative for researchers to explore the power of narratives and how they can help bridge "the problem of other minds" could help overcome this stigma, and make the science of human flourishing via narrative mainstream science. The interdisciplinary of the study of narrative can also be a challenge, getting people to talk to each other across fields.

Breakthroughs Needed

Projects will have to provide a much deeper understanding of the structure of narratives. There are some conceptual reviews of narrative (e.g., 7 basic plots) and some reviews of the evolutionary root of our narrative minds (e.g., on the origins of stories), and some recent work looking at the affective dynamics of stories (e,g., in computer science). What is needed is a way of combining these initial research streams together.
It is also necessary to connect those who study narrative with those who study ways to bridge the divide. In other words, we must bridge both methods and content of scholars. I believe this is possible because the ultimate goal of this research project is not only to reveal new basic knowledge about the structure of mind and its cultural creations (i.e., stories), but also to bridge divides and build social connection between people. Given the importance of this goal for society, many will be motivated to join.
Finally, it is essential to develop scalable interventions, to translate the scientific work with something that can impact society. By looping in authors and technology developers who have already reached millions, I believe we can achieve these goals.

Key Indicators of Success

Key indicators of success would be the development of new methods for studying narratives at a large-scale, and the development of overarching theories that make sense of narrative and human cognition from diverse perspectives – this would include connections with psychology, philosophy, mythology. As evidence of these new theories, there would be publications in scientific journals and popular press books.
New understandings of how to bridge divides--incorporating narratives--and concrete interventions/strategies for using these understandings to foster human connection across differences. Ideally, these interventions would be implemented at a large-scale, such as integrated with social media platforms.

Additional Information

Reviewers/Collaborators:
Jamie Pennebaker (e.g., https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58.8591&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
Jonah Berger
Happy to talk more if you're interested in the general idea!