The Storytelling End of the Spectrum Gets a Bad Rap

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Roxanne Jones: Is it also possible that the storytelling end of the spectrum sort of gets a bad rap because we valorize rationality? She says there's value to empathy in a broader range of cases. But maybe we shouldn't only rely on empathy, right? That's just one of the tools that we have for making sense of a situation; why does it have to be rationality or empathy? Jones: Maybe we should see what each has to offer and then integrate both into our overall evaluation.

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

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Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton. Among her awards are the Gittier Award from the American Psychological Foundation, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

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