Stories and shared interpretive frames can integrate causal understanding, moral salience, identity, and action while also increasing conformity, exclusion, polarization, and correlated error.

Stories compress many propositions and values into a form people can remember, inhabit, transmit, and use to orient action. They can make causal structure legible, indicate what matters, supply a sense of membership, and connect individual contribution to a larger future. The same compression selects what is noticed and omitted. A strong frame can make contingent assumptions feel sacred, define outsiders, suppress minority interpretations, or cause people and agents to repeat the same error with increasing confidence. This claim does not establish that one civilizational narrative is necessary or that persuasive uptake demonstrates truth or human benefit. For Leo, narrative is a versioned coordination artifact whose empirical premises remain linked to contestable claims and whose tensions, exclusions, and behavioral consequences must remain visible.