Affect, narratives, cultural evolution, transformative experience, and empathy — investigated with the methods of cognitive science and the humanities. Five lines of work, one underlying question: how do minds connect?
A key concept for us is co-experience. How can people share experiences at all? And how has the evolution and culture of our cognitive abilities led us to where we are now? The answer is intertwined with our ability to tell stories: it is by means of stories that we share experiences of not just facts, but also emotions.
In our work on empathy, we use phenomenological approaches to study the triggers and blockers of empathy. One of our contributions is the three-person model: we examine how people take a side in a conflict they observe, how they develop empathy for their chosen side, and then potentially demonize the other side. In short, empathy can be the fuel for polarization.
The link between stories and empathy is strong. People are more likely to engage with another when presented with a narrative about that person's fate. What are the precise triggers for empathy, and why are narratives so well suited to it?
See Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell UP, 2019)
Our lives are more intense when we are enmeshed in stories — I narrate, therefore I am. But it is not only our own lives that are heightened by narratives; through narratives we transform individual experience into shared experience and empathy. Our research substantiates the idea that our species should be characterized as homo narrans, showing how narratives shape how we think, communicate, and behave.
We use a wide range of study designs to test storytelling — from the Telephone Game approach to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure tasks.
See The Narrative Brain (Yale University Press, 2025)
One of our core projects explores narratives through story retelling under experimentally controlled conditions, using serial reproduction. Participants retell a short story "in their own words"; the result is passed to another participant, who retells it again, and so on. After several generations, the retellings accumulate quite a few changes. We have used this design for the largest narrative-retelling experiment to date — more than 20,000 stories.
Our findings suggest that emotions are better preserved than any other story element, contradicting a long history of research focused on causal and factual structure. Some narrative emotions act as anchors for processing, remembering, and retelling — and reward people for their engagement with the story. We have also used this data to understand how language evolves, and we now extend the approach to AI and to cultural comparison across many languages.
Breithaupt, Li & Kruschke, Cognition & Emotion (2022) · He et al., Scientific Reports (2023) · Li et al., PNAS (2024) · Huang et al., Cognition (2026)
We are creatures of experience: our lives are shaped by new, repeated, and imagined experiences. We want to understand better what constitutes a meaningful or transformative experience. While we usually think of experiences as past, present, or future, we suggest a new framework — experiences as firsts, repetitions, and those imagined experiences we have not yet had, perhaps never will, but which guide us like few actual events.
Do we prefer the comfort of repetition, seek the thrill of the new, or live in the shadow of imagined catastrophes and hoped-for salvations? What experiences shape and transform us, and why?
See Einmal, Zweimal, Keinmal (Suhrkamp, 2026)
We welcome collaboration inquiries, replication questions, and students who want to learn how to study stories experimentally.
Contact the lab