Tilmann Habermas’s work about the influences of others on our life stories has been foundational for my own thinking, and generative for the field. In this piece, I consider some of the ways that the line between an intellectual life story and a personal one is not so sharply delineated, and the complexities of others’ impacts on our life stories through the intersections of both intellectual and personal encounters between Tilmann and myself. To begin, I ask how we shape one another’s autobiographical memory and life stories. And to end, I ask about the ways we might already be doing this that have been less well-studied.

This chapter critiques the tendency to regard hubris within business organisations purely as a matter of excessive self-confidence. ‘Hubris’ is often used as a catch-all explanation for all business failure. The chapter therefore looks at other ingredients of hubris within business, including the concentration of excessive power in the hands of a few people at the top. These organisational factors are at least as important as psychological markers for hubris. The chapter identifies some widely held negative consequences of hubris, such as the unwise pursuit of mergers and acquisitions. It also explores some of the ways in which hubristic behaviours benefit individuals, including those who aspire to become CEOs. Examples are provided from the banking and finance sectors. These show a variety of destructive behaviours, including recklessness, contempt for critical feedback and abusive behaviour towards others. Finally, measures are suggested to limit the prevalence of hubris within business.

Two distinct lines of research characterize the psychological work on autobiographical memory. One line of research examines the way people give meaning to their lives and achieve a sense of personal identity, often in the form of narrative construction. An alternative line of research questions experimental psychologists have been asking about memory more generally, but now focuses on phenomena of autobiographical memory, such as conditions of retrieval and forgetting. Each line of research undoubtedly taps into important facets of autobiographical memory. But at present, the investigative efforts might be more accurately described as siloes rather than lines of research. Indeed, one could delve deeply into one of these siloes and be perfectly unaware that a whole body of research on autobiographical memory exists outside the silo. This chapter examines why research on autobiographical memory has become so siloed, exploring methodological differences, but also the differences in what each might view as basic, fundamental questions. It then turns to what is lost by the siloing of autobiographical memory research and ends by urging more interaction between the two areas.

Hubris (in so many ways) is still with us: commentators and pundits still return repeatedly to this ancient Greek concept as a way of diagnosing the shortcomings of leadership and foresight that underpin contemporary political and business failures. These appeals to the notion of hubris rest on aspects of the ancient phenomenon that would have been familiar to an ancient theorist such as Aristotle. But beyond these popular understandings, hubris has become a term of art in contemporary academic approaches to leadership and management and is widely considered to have congeners and analogues in contemporary psychology. Yet these disciplines are rarely brought into dialogue with the intellectual history of classical Greece. This Introduction remedies that deficiency by outlining the approaches of contemporary classics, business and management studies and psychology and discussing the potential for each of these disciplines to draw and learn from the insights of the others.

Management scholars and psychologists have puzzled about how best to define, identify and measure hubris and hubristic tendencies, with only partial success. Such attempts try to help us see what lies behind the analogy between the ancient vice of hybris and its modern re-conceptualisation. In this chapter we explore how the processes of making metaphors work and how storytelling affects the teller and the audience. We examine what purposes storytelling serves, especially when its achieves a mythic character. We explore where aesthetics and literary theorising intersect with evolutionary psychology, and by connecting that to management studies. This leads to observations about the nature and practice of leadership that might signal hubris in the making. That might just help us see when the dark side of modern hubris snuffs out its bright-side potential, and perhaps how to prevent it doing so. This may help leaders learn when not to believe their own storytelling (or press releases).

Adolescence is a pivotal stage for developing life narrative coherence, yet little is known about the impact of early adversity on this process. Given the importance of narrative identity in adolescence, this chapter explores how adolescents in care centers construct life narratives after experiencing family ruptures and socio-emotional adversities. Using Habermas and Silveira’s (2008) life narrative task, narratives from 66 adolescents (22 in care centers, 22 with families in low SES, and 22 with families in medium/high SES) were analyzed based on temporal orientation, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence. Results indicated that adolescents from medium/high SES families demonstrated a significantly higher temporal orientation than the other groups. Living in a care center alone did not account for poorer coherence; instead, socio-economic context played a pivotal role, particularly in temporal coherence. Highlighting the foundational role of temporal coherence in narrative structure, the study emphasizes the need for narrative scaffolding interventions for adolescents in care centers or low SES contexts to foster identity development and improve life narrative coherence.

Causal coherence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) is a cognitive process that is integral to the life story and is shaped by social and cultural forces. However, the majority of life story research focuses on individual recall of life events, obtained either via interviews with a researcher or from participants writing down their memories. This chapter analyzes four narratives of recent, negative events shared among friend dyads in which listeners made many contributions. Narratives were coded for causal coherence and categorized as independently produced, prompted by listeners, or suggested by listeners. Qualitative analysis shows examples of how the most responsive listeners prompted statements of casual coherence. Comparisons to other narrating scenarios – four from distracted listeners and six from long narratives told to attentive listeners who made fewer contributions – show that the narratives told to the most responsive listeners had the most statements of causal coherence. Based on these results, this chapter explores the disconnect between the theoretical role of social and cultural processes in the life story and the dearth of studies examining these processes directly.

Parental shared reminiscing and positive parenting are important for the development of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Yet, even though parents influence the content and structure of narrative identity throughout the lifespan (Camia et al., 2021; Köber & Habermas, 2018), it is understudied whether narrative themes such as agency and communion are associated with experienced parenting and whether this sustains beyond early childhood. Therefore, we investigated the influence of parenting on agency and communion in life stories provided at ages 26 and 32. Narratives with and without parental topics scored similarly on agency and communion. However, agency in narratives with mentions of parents was supported by an increased understanding of parents and by opposing parents’ advice. Communion in narratives mentioning parents was supported by positive evaluations of the parental relationship and by an increased understanding of parents. These results suggest that parents not only are part of the content of personal narratives but also influence narrative themes well into adulthood.

The prototypical form of hybris in the Greek sources involved the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This contribution looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris can also work in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. Hybris, that is, can also involve subordinates overstepping their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives reserved for those higher up the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.