I think I mentioned Will Storr's book, The Science of Storytelling? Well, he has a good chapter on character, particularly character development. Both the development of the character within the text and the way that we as people in the real world develop over time.
His insights are indeed all science based and he cites psychologists and experimental research. Much of this was familiar to me from reading another excellent book, Timothy Wilson's Strangers To Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. In this book, Wilson explains how much of our reasoning, beliefs, reactions and prejudices are outside our conscious awareness. It's somewhat humbling to recognise that who we are is largely out of our sight.
Anyway, back to Storr's explanation of character growth. He writes how the world shapes us in our early years, through experiences and education, as we absorb social norms and develop our own strategies to cope with the challenges we face as children. We bring in all this stuff to a large extent without questioning it and build a model of what the world is and how to deal with it which is individual and subjective. And then there comes a point where we turn from model builders to fortress defenders. We have these inevitably flawed models, but we will fight to maintain their sanctity rather than take on board a new perspective offered by another person. From the internal being shaped by the external, to the internal shaping external reality to fir the preconception it has. Indeed, we will seek to maintain these internal structures in the face of all environmental challenges. When others see the world differently from us, we think them wrong. Change is difficult and painful - so instead we respond with distorted thinking, argument and aggression. We ignore, forget or actively distort what is inconsistent. And we don't even realise that's what we are doing.
When we come across something that conforms to our model, we experience a subconscious burst of positivity - and stop thinking. We don't question its validity. And, because we have found something that supports our world view, we feel justified in maintaining our world view. We feel that our quest for the truth has been noble and thorough. On the other hard, we feel a burst of negativity when something contradicts our model and we will go to extremes to disprove, denounce and deny its validity. Threats to our neural models are regarded by the ego in the same way as threats to the physical self: the same hormonal and bodily changes take place (increased cortisol and so on).
Intelligence is no insurance: smart people are better at 'proving' alternatives to be wrong.
Storr says that 'good dialogue' is two monologues clashing - because each of us, in reality, is thinking about ourselves, in that we are thinking in our own world-view-bubble.
What happens in great literature, with fully developed characters, tends to be an existential challenge to a protagonist's dearly-held belief. The novel turns on whether the character is destroyed by the world-view that is the foundation for her being or her ability to evolve and change.
I would argue that this is precisely what we deal with in real life. Growth is dependent on tearing down and rebuilding, not on continual maintenance of our inherited and early-formed models.
Useful analogies! I had an extra credit with Audible so just bought the Storr book. Thanks for all your posts.