Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors

From Conscientious Objections by Neil Postman. Page 14.

Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and fat, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gives us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.

I think it justifiable to say that in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture. In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have largely come from the pens of social historians and researchers. Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists. I do not mean, incidentally, that I think the metaphors of social research are created in the same way as those of novels and plays. The writer of fiction creates metaphors by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus. The researcher tends to do it the other way around. His focus is on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion. Also, the novelists proceed by showing. The researchers, using abstract social facts, proceed by reason, by logic, by argument. That is why fiction is apt to be more entertaining. Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh shows us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorstein Veblen argues them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulberg showed us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has recently tried to explain through sociological analysis. So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. But the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our own times, apparently more credible.