Narratives can coordinate attention, identity, and action by compressing interpretation and values, while also increasing conformity, exclusion, and correlated error.

A narrative links selected facts, causal interpretation, moral salience, identity, and possible action into a form people and agents can remember and share. That compression can reduce coordination costs, focus attention, make long-horizon purpose legible, and help participants understand how contribution fits a larger project. The same selectivity can suppress ambiguity, privilege one frame, define outsiders, and make participants inherit correlated errors with greater confidence. The claim applies where a narrative is socially salient and repeatedly transmitted; it assumes recipients interpret enough of it similarly for coordination to occur. It does not imply that narrative is false, that a single global story is necessary, or that virality establishes truth. Architecturally, narratives should remain versioned artifacts anchored to contestable claims, explicit commitments, alternatives, and visible tensions—not evidence for their own empirical assertions.