Cognitive Evolution and the Transmission of Popular Narratives: A Literature Review and Application to Urban Legends

Abstract

Recent research into cultural transmission suggests that humans are disposed to learn, remember, and transmit certain types of information more easily than others, and that any information that is passed between people will be subjected to cognitive selective pressures that alter the content and structure so as to make it maximally transmittable. This paper presents a review of emerging research on content biases in cultural evolution with relevance to the transmission of popular narratives. This is illustrated with content analysis of urban legends, which found that most exploited at least one known content bias, with emotional information and social information being the most frequent. We argue that the narratives do not succeed because of the transmission of adaptively relevant information but because of their exploitation of content biases in human cognition.

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

“…For example, trickster stories reflect the problem of free‐riding, and tellings involve mimicry of the behavior of animals or describe their habitats (Scalise Sugiyama, , ). Similar content biases are apparent in modern‐day stories like urban legends (Stubbersfield et al., ). Urban legends often evoke emotions relevant for survival.…”

“…Evidence for these criteria is typically drawn from three sources. A first source is the structure and content of narrative, which exploits various aspects of the human cognitive system (e.g., content biases; Stubbersfield, Flynn, & Tehrani, ). A second source is the instinctive motivations of participants to engage in storytelling activities (Mellmann, ).…”

“…Demonstrating that storytelling is an adaptation is complicated by the fact that what counts as a “story” or “storytelling” varies widely. A staggering wealth of human knowledge gets expressed in narrative form, including gossip (Dunbar, ), rumors (e.g., Guerin & Miyazaki, ), urban legends (Bangerter & Heath, ; Stubbersfield et al., ; Zipes, ), traditional legends (Dégh, ), conspiracy theories (Franks, Bangerter, & Bauer, ), myths (Lévi‐Strauss, ), personal life events (McAdams & Guo, ), and even scientific facts (Dahlstrom, ). The functions of these different discursive products may vary; thus, claiming a singly overarching function risks being excessively reductive.…”

Digital culture

“…Transmission fidelity can be, however, increased by "fidelity amplifiers" (Acerbi, 2019a) associated with the process of transmission. Cognitively attractive features can make some narratives easier to remember (J. M. Stubbersfield et al, 2017), rhymes and repetitions can help the memorisation and repetition of stories, written instructions can be preserved better than oral ones. In this perspective, digital media provide several fidelity amplifiers: they possess the features that make analogue writing effective, but also many others, including the possibility of direct interactions (e.g.…”

Cultural accumulation and improvement in online fan fiction

“…Cultural transmission is a noisy process. Transmission chain experiments show that information transmitted orally tend to be lost and transformed [18]. In some cases, populations of individuals converge on similar cultural traits without the need of accurate passage of information, because of various constraints [5,13].…”