While the ubiquity and importance of narratives for human adaptation is widely recognized, there is no integrative framework for understanding the roles of narrative in human adaptation. Research has identified several cognitive and social functions of narratives that are conducive to well-being and adaptation as well as to coordinated social practices and enculturation. In this paper, we characterize the cognitive and social functions of narratives in terms of active inference, to support the claim that one of the main adaptive functions of narrative is to generate more useful (i.e., accurate, parsimonious) predictions for the individual, as well as to coordinate group action (over multiple timescales) through shared predictions about collective behavior. Active inference is a theory that depicts the fundamental tendency of living organisms to adapt by proactively inferring the causes of their sensations (including their own actions). We review narrative research on identity, event segmentation, episodic memory, future projections, storytelling practices, enculturation, and master narratives. We show how this research dovetails with the active inference framework and propose an account of the cognitive and social functions of narrative that emphasizes that narratives are <i>for the future</i>-even when they are focused on recollecting or recounting the past. Understanding narratives as cognitive and cultural tools for mutual prediction in social contexts can guide research on narrative in adaptive behavior and psychopathology, based on a parsimonious mechanistic model of some of the basic adaptive functions of narrative. We propose an approach to narrative that leverages the resources of active inference to account for some key features of narrative relevant to their evolutionary emergence and adaptive function. An active inference model of narrative can clarify some mechanisms at play in the use of narrative in adaptation and everyday functioning at both individual and group levels. This can guide novel research on narrative inquiry and inference as well as on potential maladaptive consequences of certain forms of narration. 2 Active inference What follows is a brief, non-technical overview of active inference. Recent applications of active inference to the study of group action in humans focus on the social construction of niches that provide cultural affordances, that is, culturally specific possibilities for action ( Ramstead et al., 2016 ; Constant et al., 2019 ; Veissière et al., 2020 ; Constant et al., 2022 ). This work suggests that the social-ecological niche—namely, the set of persons, material structures, institutions, norms, and culturally patterned practices that structure social life for a given group—participates in the error minimization process described above ( Constant et al., 2018 ). Dubourg and Baumard (2022) suggest that narrative fictions in entertainment technologies may be akin to ethological superstimuli ( Tinbergen, 1969 ; Barrett, 2010 ). This process can be cast in active inference terms to capture some of its individual and social dynamics ( Ciria et al., 2022 ). In the remainder of this paper, we unpack the argument that a key function of narratives in human adaptation and everyday functioning is their use as a tool for inference and predictions and for larger-scale group-level coordination, based on the active inference framework. Research suggests a moderate positive association between narrative meaning making and coherence with psychological well-being ( Adler et al., According to the NPH, human agents learn to provide reasons for their own and others’ actions over the course of their development, mostly by participating in a special kind of narrative practice, namely, folk-psychological narrative practices ( Hutto, 2012 ). Folk psychological narratives are stories that center on accounts of the mental states of other persons as explanations, causes or outcomes of action. Many (indeed, perhaps most) types or genres of stories (e.g., fairy tales and myths) that adults tell children over the span of development involve the mental states of characters involved. According to the NPH, ‘folk psychological stories’ or ‘person stories’ provide children with developmental anchors through which they acquire the ability to provide reasons for the way they (and others) acted. In the cultural practice of everyday storytelling, agents participate in narrating ordinary events and experiences of self and others. Participation in such practices leads agents to acquire the folk psychological skills necessary for more elaborate cognition through self-narration and self-presentation. These claims of the NPH are consonant with, and find support in, empirical work on narrative in developmental and social psychology. Of course, applying an active inference lens to master narratives does not contradict existing work, but supplements it, notably with regard to the defining principles noted above, while offering a complementary explanation for the basic underlying principles that explain the development of master narratives. 4 Future directions Our model also has implications for the overall direction of narrative research, with potential downstream consequences for several domains of psychology and the human sciences in general. Bruner’s (1986) distinction between the narrative and paradigmatic modes of knowing remains very influential. He insisted that intentionality is central to narrative, but that it plays virtually no role in paradigmatic knowing (i.e., how the physico-chemical world works). While Bruner suggested that the narrative mode of knowing pertains to aspects of the world (e.g., meaning and intentionality) that are completely distinct from those that pertain to the paradigmatic mode, a virtue of active inference modelling is that it allows us to reject the hardline distinction between the epistemological realms of human meaning and physical mechanism.