The Problem With Stories
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Thomas Wells argues that human minds default to understanding the world through narrative structures that impose human-meaningful explanations on events, even when phenomena are better explained through mindless causal processes. While empirical science represented humanity’s breakthrough in escaping this “fairy tale epistemology,” stories continue to dominate contemporary thinking on issues from evolution to climate change, blinding us to reality and generating mass conflict.
Drawing on Jerome Bruner’s framework, Wells identifies three defining features of stories—human-meaningful causation, narrative cohesion over verifiability, and conventional surprise—that distinguish them from empirical argument. He demonstrates how this story mindset fuels conspiratorial thinking, politicizes complex phenomena like COVID-19 and climate change, and creates a fundamental tension in democratic politics where elected officials must navigate between real-world competence and election-winning storytelling, with potentially fatal consequences.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Stories vs. Causal Reality
Human minds evolved to understand events through narratives with meaningful intentions, but the world operates through mindless processes indifferent to human meaning.
Three Defining Features
Stories consist of human-meaningful events, rely on narrative cohesion over verifiability, and incorporate conventional surprises that confirm rather than challenge existing patterns.
Complex Phenomena Resist Stories
Markets, pandemics, and climate change involve emergent causal processes that cannot be adequately grasped through narrative frameworks, despite human actions being causally relevant.
Politics Amplifies Story Bias
Politicians must manage complex institutions requiring process-driven thinking while winning elections through compelling stories, creating a dangerous tension between competence and communication.
Brexit as Cautionary Tale
The UK’s 2016 referendum demonstrated how story-focused campaigns defeat argument-focused ones, leading to governance decline and potentially hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
Awareness as Intervention
Recognizing our narrative framing bias enables critical self-review and collective accountability, though stories will inevitably persist given human cognitive limitations and evolutionary history.
Master Reading Comprehension
Practice with 365 curated articles and 2,400+ questions across 9 RC types.
Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Narrative Epistemology’s Dangerous Dominance
The central thesis contends that humanity’s evolutionary reliance on story-based thinking creates a fundamental cognitive mismatch with reality. While empirical science offers tools to understand mindless causal processes, narrative frameworks continue to dominate public discourse on complex phenomena, from evolution denial to climate activism, generating conflict and undermining effective governance through the imposition of human-meaningful explanations on inherently meaningless processes.
Purpose
Diagnostic Critique with Practical Stakes
Wells writes to diagnose a pervasive epistemological problem undermining contemporary public discourse and democratic governance. By explicating the structural features that distinguish stories from empirical arguments, he aims to raise awareness of our cognitive framing bias and its consequences, from conspiracy theories to political dysfunction. The essay advocates for increased consumption and production of process-driven analysis while acknowledging the limits of individual cognitive reform given our evolutionary inheritance.
Structure
Problem Definition → Diagnostic Analysis → Case Studies → Prescriptive Conclusion
The essay opens by contrasting narrative thinking with scientific understanding, then systematically defines stories through Bruner’s framework before demonstrating their epistemological inadequacy. Wells progresses through escalating domains where stories fail—from natural phenomena to complex social systems to interpersonal life—before examining politics as the critical interface where this cognitive bias produces measurable harm. The Brexit case study and mortality statistics ground the abstract argument in concrete consequences, leading to modest prescriptive recommendations acknowledging human cognitive limitations.
Tone
Soberly Critical, Analytically Rigorous & Cautiously Pragmatic
Wells adopts a measured philosophical tone that balances intellectual rigor with accessibility, employing clear examples to illustrate abstract epistemological claims. The writing demonstrates critical distance from common intuitions while avoiding dismissive condescension toward those who rely on narrative thinking. Self-aware moments—like acknowledging his own use of stories to argue against stories—add intellectual honesty. The conclusion’s pragmatic modesty, recognizing human cognitive constraints while still advocating incremental improvement, reflects philosophical realism about the limits of rational reform.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
Click each card to reveal the definition
Build your vocabulary systematically
Each article in our course includes 8-12 vocabulary words with contextual usage.
Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
Tap each card to flip and see the definition
The practice of analyzing complex phenomena by breaking them down into simpler constituent parts, often criticized for missing emergent properties.
“A systems can be understood through reductionist methods like using microscopes to examine smaller parts.”
Referring to the modern synthesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution with genetics, explaining adaptation through natural selection acting on genetic variation.
“The objectively superior neo-Darwinian account of adaptation by natural selection has officially displaced premodern stories.”
The quality of seeming reasonable or probable; in narratives, internal coherence rather than empirical verification determines acceptance.
“Narratives are substantially self-referential since they are assessed by their plausibility, rather than their verifiability.”
A logical error where people judge the probability of two events occurring together as more likely than either alone, often due to narrative coherence.
“The conjunction fallacy is a nice example of this in action: if someone tells you a detail in story, it must be relevant.”
Economic policies focused on reducing government spending and deficits, often involving cuts to public services; here used as an election-winning narrative.
“David Cameron’s 2010 government adopted the ‘austerity story’: the engaging and election-winning story that the previous government had caused the financial crisis.”
In a manner lacking planning, order, or direction; randomly or by chance rather than through deliberate design.
“Given the limits and quirks of our haphazardly evolved human psychology, it is not reasonable to expect all that much rational consistency.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, stories are assessed primarily by their internal coherence rather than by empirical verification.
2What does Wells identify as the primary reason markets have historically been distrusted?
3Which sentence best captures Wells’ view on the role of human intentions in complex social phenomena?
4Evaluate these statements about Wells’ analysis of the Brexit referendum:
The Leave campaign’s story-focused approach gave it an advantage over the argument-focused Remain campaign.
Wells argues that Brexit resulted primarily from voters’ failure to understand economic data about EU membership.
The referendum’s aftermath included the displacement of competence-based governance norms by storytelling priorities.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Wells’ view on the prospects for overcoming narrative bias in human cognition?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Wells uses this term to describe humanity’s default cognitive framework for understanding reality through stories that impose human-meaningful explanations on events. Unlike empirical epistemology, which tests claims against evidence, narrative epistemology assesses understanding based on internal coherence and plausibility. This mode of thinking evolved over tens of thousands of years and continues to dominate our minds despite the availability of superior scientific methods for grasping complex causal processes.
Drawing on Jerome Bruner’s framework, Wells identifies three defining features that separate stories from empirical arguments: stories present events as meaningful in human terms with intentional actors; they rely on narrative cohesion (how well elements hang together) rather than external verification; and they incorporate conventional surprises that confirm rather than challenge expectations. Empirical arguments, by contrast, systematically test claims against evidence and explain phenomena through the interaction of mindless or unintentional causal processes.
The hermeneutic circle refers to the self-referential logic of narrative coherence, where particular events are explained in light of the larger story, and the story is interpreted in light of its events. This circular interpretive process makes narratives substantially self-validating since they are assessed by how well their elements fit together internally rather than by external verification. Wells uses the conjunction fallacy as an example: if someone includes a detail in a story, we assume it must be relevant to the narrative, even when this violates probability logic.
Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.
This article is rated Advanced due to its sophisticated philosophical vocabulary, complex theoretical argumentation, and requirement for understanding abstract epistemological concepts. It presumes familiarity with terms like “empiricism,” “reductionism,” and “emergent properties” while developing nuanced arguments about cognitive bias and democratic governance. The article demands not just literal comprehension but the ability to trace connections between evolutionary psychology, political dysfunction, and methodological debates across multiple domains from natural science to social policy.
Wells uses Brexit to demonstrate the real-world consequences of narrative dominance in democratic politics, particularly the structural advantage story-based campaigns enjoy over argument-based ones. The referendum exemplifies his broader thesis by showing how the victory of storytelling over factual analysis led to measurable governance decline, including the replacement of competent managers with storytellers and the displacement of expertise norms. The reference to 250,000 preventable deaths grounds his abstract philosophical argument in concrete human costs, demonstrating that stories don’t just mislead—they kill.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
