The recall and use of narratives as declarative and procedural consumer knowledge

Schank and Abelson (1995) once claimed that all meaningful social information is in the form of stories that people acquire through experience, construct themselves, or communicate to others. This change is undoubtedly overstated. Nevertheless, an overwhelming proportion of our knowledge is in the form of narratives that we use to comprehend new experiences, to predict the future and explain the past, and to decide how to attain a desired goal. The representations of narratives in memory have been alternatively described as scripts, goal schemas, procedures, episode models, autobiographical memories, and event prototypes. Whatever the name that has been assigned to them, their role in comprehension, judgment and decision-making is incontrovertible.