The Biology Behind Why We Like Stories

Here’s an idea: What if I told you that the reason we all identify with similar media is because of an ancient system within human biology?

Jung spoke of the collective unconscious: the idea that story templates are similar across all the world’s cultures. For example, the most famous “story template” is the one described by Joseph Campbell as the “Hero’s Journey”. You’ve probably heard about this one in school — it is the baseline of most mythologies and is even used as a writing structure for some popular contemporary works. While I won’t get into the details of it here, it does beg the question: how do so many cultures follow the same style of storytelling? Why don’t people in Polynesia write exclusively in crime noir, or people in Norway write slice of life?

The answer is in our biology. Because we have similarly wired brains, we all react in a similar emotional range to things that we see. For example, someone taking candy from a baby would make most people angry, because we all have the built in biological function of wanting to protect a baby. These similar emotional responses add up to similar story responses, as at the end of the day a story is just a series of emotions compounded together in an entertaining way.

Of course, there’s one problem. While we all identify stories the same way — we recognize that Star Wars and Harry Potter are works of fiction — we do not like these stories in the same capacity. This difference in aesthetic preference is likely more so related to the learned experience rather than the genetic one. As I mentioned, its a range — a range that’s likely influenced by where you are in life, how your parents treated you, what items/objects/symbols are important to your personal life, etc. etc. I also think people’s life experiences decide how deeply they want to process an artistic work, with some people choosing to only look at these things on a surface level while us weirdos tend to overanalyze everything. This biological versus learned experience in storytelling is something that I’ve found really useful to think about when writing stories of my own.

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