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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1345480

Narrative as Active Inference: An Integrative Account of Cognitive and Social Functions in Adaptation

Provisionally accepted
Nabil Bouizegarene Nabil Bouizegarene 1Maxwell James D. Ramstead Maxwell James D. Ramstead 2Axel Constant Axel Constant 3Karl Friston Karl Friston 4Laurence J. Kirmayer Laurence J. Kirmayer 5*
  • 1 Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada
  • 2 VERSES Research Lab/Spatial Web Foundation, Los Angeles, United States
  • 3 University of Sussex, Brighton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
  • 4 University College London, London, England, United Kingdom
  • 5 McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    While the ubiquity and importance of narratives for human adaptation is widely recognized, there is no integrative framework for understanding the roles of narrative in human adaptation.Research has identified several cognitive and social functions of narratives that are conducive to well-being and adaptation as well as to coordinated social practices and enculturation. In this paper, we characterize the cognitive and social functions of narratives in terms of active inference, to support the claim that one of the main adaptive functions of narrative is to generate more useful (i.e., accurate, parsimonious) predictions for the individual, as well as to coordinate group action (over multiple timescales) through shared predictions about collective behavior.Active inference is a theory that depicts the fundamental tendency of living organisms to adapt by proactively inferring the causes of their sensations (including their own actions). We review narrative research on identity, event segmentation, episodic memory, future projections, storytelling practices, enculturation, and master narratives. We show how this research dovetails with the active inference framework and propose an account of the cognitive and social functions of narrative that emphasizes that narratives are for the future-even when they are focused on recollecting or recounting the past. Understanding narratives as cognitive and cultural tools for mutual prediction in social contexts can guide research on narrative in adaptive behavior and psychopathology, based on a parsimonious mechanistic model of some of the basic adaptive functions of narrative.

    Keywords: narratives, active inference, narrative identity, event segmentation, episodic memories, Future projections, storytelling practices, Enculturation

    Received: 29 Nov 2023; Accepted: 30 Apr 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Bouizegarene, Ramstead, Constant, Friston and Kirmayer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 0G4, Quebec, Canada

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