Heather Wax in The “Uncertainty” Effect notes that people who are reminded that they can’t always control the outcomes of situations register diminished belief in Darwinian evolution.
Fascinating. We want to believe that we can control what happens to us, and if we can't, we want there to be something else out there that can.
It's one of the main functions of the left brain hemisphere: through creating coherent narratives that explain our behavior (to ourselves!) we control the experience of what happens to us. Numerous experiments have been done on patients whose corpus callosa have been cut. In all these patients, even when the left brain has been prevented from knowing what the right brain has seen (say by blindfolding the right eye), the left brain will invent a story to explain otherwise inexplicable behavior.
We need to believe we know what we're doing.
Hence our need for stories.
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