Dan P. McAdams (2019), “‘First we invented stories, then they changed us’: The Evolution of Narrative Identity”, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 3(1), Spring 2019, pp. 1–18 — DOI-10.26613/esic.3.1.110
Key takeaways
- Definition. “A narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming (McAdams and McLean 2013).” It reconstructs the past and imagines the future to give the self “temporal coherence and some semblance of psychosocial unity and purpose”. Once a person has one, “the author has become the story”. There is “no going back” to being only an actor or an agent.
- Three layers of self. Development runs “from actor to agent to author”. There is the social actor of traits (self-recognition by age 2), the motivated agent of goals and plans (theory of mind, the school years) and the autobiographical author (adolescence and young adulthood). Autobiographical reasoning is “a critical factor”, and by “the early 20s” most people have a narrative identity.
- The story matters. Stories with agentic protagonists go with well-being. In Adler’s (2012) psychotherapy study, “the story changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. Midlife adults whose stories resemble “the redemptive self” score high on generativity. That pattern may be “an especially ‘American’ kind of life story”, drawn from a culture’s master narratives.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the read substitute for McAdams and McLean’s “Narrative Identity” (LIT-572), the canonical short review. That article is closed at SAGE, with no open copy found. This essay is by the same first author, five years later, and it extends the 2013 article in the LIT scheme’s sense: it takes the 2013 definition verbatim and cites the article for the claim that a narrative identity “provides a life with unity and purpose”. It adds the evolutionary framing, the actor, agent and author layers, and the cultural section. It lacks the 2013 article’s compact review of measures and findings, which it cites to Adler et al. (2016) and McAdams and Manczak (2015).
It is the record’s first psychological, as against philosophical, statement
of narrative identity. It carries narrative-unity and self as the owner’s
distinction asks, social-science because it is personality and
developmental psychology, and cognition for autobiographical memory,
episodic future thought and autobiographical reasoning. It also carries
personhood, because it adopts Schechtman’s (1996, LIT-468) claim that “we
constitute ourselves as persons” by narrative, and that narrative “situates
the individual as a moral agent”.
Where it bears on the record:
- Against Narrativity (LIT-452). Strawson denies the descriptive thesis that human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative, and says some people (“Episodics”) do not. McAdams asserts it as a developmental fact. The two are rivals in the LIT scheme’s sense: accounts of the same phenomenon that exclude each other, neither testing the other. McAdams does not cite Strawson. His concession is that studies “generally assume that nearly everybody ‘has’ a narrative identity”, and that some people are more oriented to it than others, as measured by the Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire. That concession is the nearest he comes to the dispute, and it is where a test would start.
- Dennett’s narrative self (LIT-442). Dennett’s self is a fiction the brain spins. McAdams’s narrative identity is “an invented construction”, not “a veridical testimony”, but it is causally real (“then these stories change us”). That is the empirical side of the question Dennett leaves open.
- Schechtman (LIT-468, Deferred). McAdams relies on her for the claim that narrative constitutes persons and allows “autonomy and moral agency”. This adds one more second-hand report of what her book says to the two that LIT-468 already uses (Strawson and the SEP map).
- Metzinger (LIT-568). The two selves are of different kinds. The précis’s self is pre-reflective and present; McAdams’s is reflective and temporally extended. The précis attributes the experience of an enduring self to bodily self-awareness and autobiographical memory, which is where McAdams starts.
No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.