Narrative - Narrative Fallacy

Narrative Fallacy

Narrative appears to exist in all human societies, ancient and modern, and has been argued to be the most fundamental form of sensemaking for humans to understand their experience. Narrative thus seems to be not simply the creation of the storyteller. It seems to be an expression of inherent relationships in the human mind, which people use to make sense of the world by constructing it as narrative. This predisposition for narrative involves a danger, however, of what has been called the narrative fallacy. This fallacy consists of a human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for compact stories over complex data sets. It is easier for the human mind to remember and make decisions on the basis of stories with meaning than to remember strings of data. This is one reason why narratives are so powerful and why many of the classics in the humanities and social sciences are written in the narrative format. But humans read meaning into data and compose stories, even where this is unwarranted. In narrative inquiry, the way to avoid the narrative fallacy is no different from the way to avoid other error in scholarly research, i.e., by applying the usual methodical checks for validity and reliability in how data are collected, analyzed, and presented.