Expect the Unexpected? Testing for Minimally Counterintuitive (MCI) Bias in the Transmission of Contemporary Legends

Abstract

In this study, we use computational methods for analyzing cultural transmission to examine the role of cognitive selection pressures on the evolution of narratives, the first use of computational phylogenetic analysis in the study of contemporary legends. It has been suggested that a number of biases in transmission may alter the content and structure of narrative so as to maximize how transmittable it is. One bias that has attracted much attention is Boyer’s minimally counterintuitive (MCI) bias, which suggests that a cognitively optimal number of counterintuitive concepts increase the salience and, therefore, the transmission of a narrative. Previous research has used traditional folklore and religious texts to examine this bias and a cognitively optimum number of 1–2 or 2–3 counterintuitive concepts has been suggested. The present research uses the legend of “Bloody Mary,” a contemporary (or urban) legend with MCI elements in a computational phylogenetic analysis to examine the influence of MCI on cultural transmission and evolution. Counterintuitive and intuitive concepts were found to be equally stable in transmission, suggesting that MCI bias may function on the narrative as a whole, rather than individual concepts within it.

The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood

“…Folktales represent an excellent target for phylogenetic analysis because they are, almost by definition, products of descent with modification: Rather than being composed by a single author, a folktale typically evolves gradually over time, with new parts of the story added and others lost as it gets passed down from generation to generation. Recent case studies of the urban legend ‘Bloody Mary’ [32] , the ‘Pygmalion’ family of myths in Africa [33] , and western European variants of the folktale ‘The Kind and the Unkind Girls’ [6] have demonstrated the utility of phylogenetic techniques for reconstructing relationships among variants within a given tale type. The present study aims to establish whether these methods can also be used to differentiate the tale types themselves, and test the empirical validity of the international type system.…”

Cultural entrenchment of folktales is encoded in language

“…The current study adds to a growing body of cultural evolutionary research into the history and development of "Little Red Riding Hood" (Tehrani, 2013; and folktales and fairytales in general (e.g., Ross et al, 2013;Stubbersfield and Tehrani, 2013;Da Silva and Tehrani, 2016;Ross and Atkinson, 2016;Bortolini et al, 2017;. However, at present, the effect of entrenchment on storytelling mainly comes from literary studies, specifically in the context of parody retellings.…”

Toward a Sustainable Handling of Interlinear-Glossed Text in Language Documentation

“…In addition, skilled storytelling may increase an individual's reproductive fitness 14,15 and social value, as well as promoting cooperation within groups 15 . Stories can be an efficient and effective vector for information transfer 16 , and an established body of literature in the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution suggests that the success or failure of a story and its component parts are determined by the mechanisms of biased cultural transmission [17][18][19][20][21][22] .…”

“…This includes content linked to the following six types of information: (i) social, either in the sense of everyday basic social interaction or of "gossip" about third parties 20,21 ; (ii) survival, for environmental contexts relevant to individual fitness 21,41,44 ; (iii) emotional, that elicits strong positive or negative responses such as disgust 19,40,45,46 ; (iv) moral, regarding acceptable behavior and social norms 19,47 , which has not been previously studied explicitly using transmission experiments; (v) rational, describing causeand-effect connections 48 ; and (vi) counterintuintuive, which defies ontological expectations in biological, physical, mental, and other domains 39,49 . Additionally, counterintuitive information can influence transmission in different ways: by themselves, counterintuitive elements can be more salient than other types of information 39 ; or, collectively, a minority of counterintuitive elements can lead to a minimally counterintuitive ("MCI") bias that enhances overall recollection of a story 22,50 . We crafted the narratives used in this study to resemble real-world creation stories in both form and the aforementioned types of content biases (see Methods).…”