Anticipating the future: How narrative goals affect *explanatory and predictive *inferences

Evidence suggests that stories are used universally to describe a series of events (Barthes, 1977). One reason for this universality may be that narrative aids in understanding and predicting social situations. Narrative structures provide information about what can be expected in a given situation---as well as what might go wrong. In a series of four experiments, I explored the inferential advantage of narrative by examining whether narrative goals facilitate one's ability to make explanatory and predictive inferences among social stimuli. Using both explicit and implicit measures, I found that when individuals are instructed to create a story from a sequence of events, they are more likely to draw both explanatory and predictive inferences from the given events than when they are given other organizational goals. This initial investigation suggests that narrative construction may be an adaptive strategy used to explain the causes of past events and anticipate future events.