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Key points
- Human awareness of time enables experience to have a story structure.
- A recent casual observation suggests simple reinforcement is at play more than narrative self-understanding.
Writing my recent book on the self attuned me to how vastly different the human self is from other animal versions. A particular feature of the human self is that it knows and experiences life as ongoing stories, and so it knows itself as an actor in a story. This is called the narrative self. Dan McAdams’ work has elucidated this crucial aspect of the self.
Narrative is much more than being able to tell a story about what happened today. Daily life is actually experienced in story form. The present is understood in its connections to past and future. What you decide to do now is experienced with those connections. Going for a walk in the park with a potential romantic partner is a matter of executing a lot of muscle movements and making sounds, but it is much more than that. It is likely a story in itself (that you might tell interested friends later, when they ask about your date) and could be part of a much larger story (of your love life).
I’ve always been skeptical about claims of human uniqueness, though that’s partly because I’m extra interested in those. Clearly humans are much more story-oriented than any other animals, not least because we have language, which lets us tell each other the little and big stories of our days and discuss other people’s stories. Most animals live entirely in the here and now, with minimal connection to anything more than a few minutes into the past or future. Nevertheless, how much do animals have this awareness of stories, this narrative self-understanding?
My intuition was that animals might have an early version or precursor, presumably in something very important to them. The top candidate would seem to be the chase. Big animals chase littler animals, who flee. A chase has a narrative structure, ordered in time, causal, typically producing a happier outcome for one than the other. Does it feel like a story to them?
I’ve been observing our puppy for a couple years now (she turned three on Halloween, 2022). She does like chasing. There is a chipmunk who likes to raid the bird feeder, and she tries to catch it, but it can run up the walls of the house and she can’t. Our house has a big wrap-around porch, with gates at both ends that are usually closed. Mabel, the dog, likes to be out patrolling the porch, but the chipmunk eludes her.
One day I was out on the porch with my laptop and she gave chase. I paid little attention, as this is common—but this time it was not the chipmunk. It was a bigger critter, like a small marmot. I first suspected something was amiss because the critter ran around the porch, chased by Mabel. It wasn’t able to climb the walls, so it darted around various porch furniture. It scurried past me and hid behind a big planter.
Mabel chased it and sort of cornered it behind the planter, but then it saw an opening and dashed to the gate. The openings in the metal gate are wide enough for the critter to squeeze through, but not enough for Mabel. It got away. Mabel saw it go and followed it right up to the gate but was stymied.
End of story, right? But Mabel immediately came back to the planter and started sniffing around there. My wife said she’s seen similar actions before. When the prey escapes, the dog goes back to the most recent place she saw it—as if seeking it there might succeed again, as if there might be another one there.
To me, that speaks against the notion that even a chase is experienced as a story, a meaningful sequence of events. The simplest (most parsimonious) explanation would be basic reinforcement. The last time she was at the planter, she was rewarded by finding the critter there, and so when the actual critter escaped into the yard, she just repeated the most recently reinforced behavior. It doesn’t make sense to a story-minded mind like ours, and it suggests she doesn’t understand that the chase, as a story, has ended.
It’s hardly proof. But it has made me question my assumption that animals experience even an intense brief chase as a story.
References
Baumeister, R.F. (2022). The Self Explained: Why and How We Become Who We Are. New York: Guilford.
McAdams, D.P. (2013). The psychological self as actor, agent, and author. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 272-295.
McAdams, D.P. (2019). “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The evolution of narrative identity. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 3, 1-18.
