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A conversation with Tom Stafford.


Experimental psychologist at the University of Sheffield, Tom is the author of (an essay on stories, story-telling, morality and psychology).

1. For people who haven’t read your essay, could you briefly explain the idea of a Narrative Escape?

A narrative escape is my term for what happens when you realise you are living out a story - it's the point at which you really choose what happens next, rather than just going with the accepted definitions of things. In the essay I talk about the narrative escape in relation to moral choices, and to our enjoyment of stories, and what psychological science has to say about both those things

2. How did you come up with the idea?

It was originally a blog post on . I guess the idea came from pure egocentric reflection - thinking about all the times in my life when I'd being doing something stupid but been too caught up in it to notice, or been so caught up in a film or book that the twist in the story took me completely by surprise. Other people didn't seem to make the same dumb mistakes, or get surprised by obvious plot twists, and I was wondering about why that was.

3. In your essay, you argue that our brains naturally frame events as stories. Can you speculate as to why that is?

Stories are efficient summaries of reality, but that isn't all they are. Stories have an arc, they put constraints on the future - when you've heard the first half there are some things which are more likely in the second, and some less. I'm sure our minds use stories because they describe the way the world is AND because they say something about how the world could or will be.