Stories of Lemurs and Robots - The Social Origin of Story-Telling

This chapter discusses narrative intelligence in the context of the origins of primate (social) intelligence. The relationship between social intelligence and narrative intelligence is outlined, with a particular emphasis on 1) the phylogenetic origins of primate (narrative) intelligence, and 2) the ontogenetic origin of autobiographical stories. The chapter is based on the assumption that in order to fully understand the importance and role of narrative in human intelligence one needs to draw attention to 'where stories come from', i.e. addressing whether story-telling can be linked to communication mechanisms that are evolutionary older but served a similar function, under which conditions and constraints story-telling capacities might have evolved, to what extent narrative intelligence is linked to social intelligence, etc, see Read and Miller (1995). This chapter will address some of these questions on the origin of narrative in primates and hopes to complement research that focuses on the particular structure and role of narrative in humans, e.g. (Turner, 1996). Since the ontogenetic (developmental) aspects of story-telling are discussed in more detail elsewhere, e.g in (Engel, 1995/1999; Nelson, 1986), this chapter focuses on selected research in primatology and autobiographical memory. The Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis (NIH) is explained, according to which the evolutionary origin of stories and narrativity was correlated with increasing social dynamics in primate societies, in particular the need to communicate about third-party relationships. Human narrative intelligence might have evolved because the structure of narrative is particularly suited to communicate about the social world, although in present human societies narrative and social-telling is used in a variety of contexts where social matters and communication might not necessarily be central (cf. narrative in arts, advertisement, entertainment etc.). After an introduction and discussion of the NIH, the possible implications of narrative intelligence research for understanding autism, and autism therapy are discussed. It is argued that narrative technology can potentially meet the social and cognitive needs of young primate story-tellers. The chapter concludes by outlining requirements for artificial socially intelligent storytellers.