More than just a story: Narrative insights into comprehension, ideology, and decision making

As the conflicts that the United States finds itself waging become more and more complex with an increasing civil-military dimension, and as the forces of globalization intertwine the economic, foreign policy, and security interests of more and more states, nonstate organizations and individual communities, the US government and other interested interlocutors require methods and tools for understanding the decision making behavior of these organizations and communities. Narratives are value-shaping, ideologyexpressing, and comprehension-guiding phenomena that operate at macro- (cultural), meso- (local, community, subcultural), and micro- (personal) levels and are thus powerful tools for gaining insight into individual, organizational, community, and societal decision making. This chapter explores the phenomenon of narrative in three key dimensions relevant to decision making: As a sociocultural artifact expressing values, influencing culture, and producing ideology; as a cognitive process of understanding and providing frameworks that shape the meaning of actions, policies, events, news, and all manner of information; as a form of rationality distinct from cost-benefit logic, influencing decisions with criteria of familiarity, expectation, and emotion.