Richard Alexander on Scenario Building:

"People in the arts are by definition the best storytellers among us. What they tell us is never superfluous, impractical, or trivial unless we, the audiences, allow it to be. We gain mightily from knowing how and when to listen, to whom to listen, and what to do with the experience afterward. For the arts are theater, and theater in all its guises represents the richest, most condensed, and most widely understood of all cultural contributions to our patterns of social scenario building through consciousness and foresight. These scenarios, which we build, review, and revise continually everyday of our lives, are obligate passports to social success, and perhaps the central evolved function of the human social brain. We use them to anticipate and manipulate the future - the ever more distant future in ever greater detail."

Evolutionary Selection and the Nature of Humanity

Darwinism and Philosophy (2008)