Narrative: Why It’s Important, and How It Works
A story is just a chain of reinforced intraverbals—build lessons link-by-link and attention holds.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hineline (2018) wrote a theory paper. He asked, "What is a story, in ABA terms?"
He mapped every part of a tale—beginning, middle, end—onto plain verbal operants. Intraverbals link one line to the next. Higher-order operants keep the whole chain glued together.
No kids, no trials, just a new lens for looking at instructions, social stories, and chat.
What they found
A coherent story is simply a long chain of reinforced intraverbal responses.
The listener keeps listening because each sentence delivers a small social reinforcer: sense-making.
If you know the chain parts, you can build better lessons and social narratives that hold attention.
How this fits with other research
Prasher et al. (2004) extends the same idea to joint-attention drills. They treat eye-shift and point as social operants. Use both papers together: build a story that asks the child to look, point, and answer—each step a reinforced intraverbal.
Smith (1996) looks at high-p compliance, not stories. Yet both papers show how one verbal response raises the odds of the next. High-p requests create momentum; narrative coherence creates a different kind of momentum—sense momentum.
Catania (2025) talks about consequence classes. Hineline’s "sense-making" reinforcer is one example of such a class. Read the two side-by-side to see why "feeling the flow" can function as reinforcement even when no edible or toy is given.
Why it matters
Next time you write a social story, script a task analysis, or give chained instructions, think in links. Make each sentence an easy intraverbal fill-in that sets up the next one. Your learner stays engaged because the story itself is the reinforcer.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Behavior analysts have said little about narrative and storytelling, emphasizing instead the functional/pragmatic aspects of verbal behavior. Nevertheless, these are ubiquitous human activities, and they are important to understand. Stories are prominent in essays on social issues, fund-raising appeals and political speeches, and they are the bedrock of theater. Foundational narratives are at the roots of major religions and of conflicts between them, and narrative has been proposed as an organizing basis for psychological wellbeing as well as a source of empathetic reactions. The ongoing process of reading or hearing a good story entails interlocking relations between establishing stimuli and their related, differentiated reinforcing consequences, with a story’s coherence providing a key to its reinforcing effects. What are the behavioral principles that underlie the repertoires involved in all this? Behavior analysts have defined and studied some—the basic verbal classes, of course, although temporally extended sequences require some adjustments in these. Intraverbal behavior needs to be parsed into sub-categories to delineate highly varied sequences such as occur in paraphrase and translation. These two, along with imitation, generalized imitation and re-telling of stories, entail a salient role of complex invariance. The terms pliance and tracking help to balance the roles of speaker and listener, and to account for joint attention, which appears important in early verbal development. Transfer and transformation of function are additional ubiquitous processes, addressed through stimulus equivalence, relational frames, and other higher-order operants, especially naming, which entails the fusion of speaking and listening. Finally, we should consider ways in which a behavioral understanding of narrative can serve both behavior analysis and its surrounding culture. The online version of this article (10.1007/s40614-018-0137-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s40614-018-0137-x