The Stories of Your Life: The Eight Masterplots That Explain Human Behaviour

We understand the world through stories. All of our experiences, all of our insights – psychologically, we interpret them through specific lenses that have been curated, perfected and passed down throughout human history. Internationally bestselling author Professor Ben Ambridge has quantified those lenses into eight distinct masterplots that can apply to any experience.

The mother who wakes up an hour early every day to prepare her child's breakfast? She's playing out the Sacrifice plot. The amateur sports team who go on to win the big trophy against all the odds? They're part of the Underdog narrative.

Ambridge uses examples from fiction, real life, and popular psychology research to demonstrate how we not only naturally gravitate towards the masterplot narratives, but how we actually use those narratives to manipulate the world around us – like the addict who uses the Monster plot to paint their illness as something to overcome, or the boxer who relies on the Revenge narrative to motivate themselves to fight their way back after an embarrassing defeat.

These masterplots do more for us than to help us understand the world; they're vehicles through which humans have survived.