Familiar Story Structures Possess an Evolutionary Edge in Memory

Human beings demonstrate a universal impulse to share and consume stories. Over generations of transmission, within and across cultures, stories have evolved, with some story structures surviving better than others. Here, we investigate the factors theorized to guide this selection. Across three studies, our project tracks the evolution of stories in real time as participants tell and retell a story for 5 days in a row. Each study varies the structure of the initial story to manipulate its familiarity and structure. We predict that stories with familiar structures will survive better across retellings. Study 1 tracks the evolution of a story with no recognizable structure using novel story structure metrics. Study 2 compares the evolution of a story with structure and without structure. Study 3 compares the evolution of a familiarly structured story with an unfamiliarly structured story. Results show that all stories become more structurally stable across retellings, with stories moving in a consistent direction (i.e., towards a consistent final form). Stories with more familiar structures show greater evolutionary stability: They are modified less than both unstructured (Study 2) and unfamiliar stories (Study 3), and are either consistently more structurally stable across retellings (Study 2) or start out more stable in earlier retellings (Study 3). By the last generation of recall, people show greater agreement in their recall of more familiarly structured stories than unfamiliarly structured stories (Study 3). This suggests that familiar stories with structural integrity have an evolutionary edge over unfamiliar structures, surviving better in people’s memories.