The Theory of Narrative Thought begins with the assumption that everyday thought is in the form of narratives, which are causally motivated, time-ori… - Lee Roy Beach

To begin, image theory assumes that decision makers use three different schematic knowledge structures to organize their thinking about decisions. These structures are called images, in deference to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960), whose work inspired image theory. The first of the three is the value image, the constituents of which are the decision maker's principles. These are the imperatives for his or her behavior or the behavior of the organization of which he or she is a member and serve as rigid criteria for the rightness or wrongness of any particular decision about a goal or plan. Principles serve to internally generate candidate goals and plans for possible adoption, and they guide decisions about externally generated candidate goals and plans.

The elements of narratives are symbols that stand for real or imagined events and actors, where the latter are animate beings or inanimate forces. The glue that binds the elements is causality and implied purpose. The narrative is a temporal arrangement of events that are purposefully caused by animate beings or are the result of inanimate forces. The narrative’s story line is the emergent meaning created by arranging the elements according to time, purpose, and causality. Just as arranging words into sentences creates emergent meaning that unarranged words do not have, and just as arranging sentences into larger units creates even more emergent meaning, arranging events, actors, time, purpose, and causality into a narrative creates the emergent meaning that is its story line or plot.A “good narrative” is coherent and plausible; coherent when effects can be accounted for by causes and plausible when the actions of its actors are consistent with their own or similar actors’ actions across contexts (i.e., across different narratives). We tend to believe that good narratives are valid.

Images are defined to be information structures, with different kind of images representing different kind of information about what the actor is doing, why and how, and what kind of progress is being made.