Fact vs. Affect in the Telephone Game: All Levels of Surprise Are Retold With High Accuracy, Even Independently of Facts

Abstract

When people retell stories, what guides their retelling? Most previous research on story retelling and story comprehension has focused on information accuracy as the key measure of stability in transmission. This paper suggests that there is a second, affective, dimension that provides stability for retellings, namely the audience affect of surprise. In a large-sample study with multiple iterations of retellings, we found evidence that people are quite accurate in preserving all degrees of surprisingness in serial reproduction – even when the event that produced the surprisingness in the original story is dropped or changed. Thus, we propose that the preservation of affect is an implicit goal of retelling: merely do retellers not recall highly surprising events better, but rather they register all levels of surprisingness precisely and aim to surprise their implied audience to same degree. This study used 2,389 participants.Significance Statement: Story retelling is a process whereby cultural information is transmitted horizontally across social networks and vertically down generations. For the most part, retelling research has focused on the relevance and stability of factual information, “who did what, where, when, and why”; comparatively little is known about the transmission of affective information. We suggest that affect can serve as a second axis of stability for retelling, partially independent from factual information. In serial reproduction tasks modeled after the telephone game, we find that surprisingness of stories is well preserved across retellings – even when the facts and events of the story are not. The findings are significant for the communication of information, and thereby also the stability and transformation of culture in general.

All Roads Lead to Polenta: Cultural Attractors at the Junction of Public and Personal Culture

“…Our results thus demonstrate the macro-cultural consequences that arise when shared cultural schemas function as automatic pattern completion engines for distorted communications. Across many transmission steps, errors in the transmission process made utterances gradually lose their resemblance to the starting utterancea result that mimics empirical findings from prior laboratory studies (e.g., Breithaupt et al 2018). But the vast scale of our simulated transmission chains illustrated something that could not be easily observed within the short chains examined by laboratory work.…”

“…At the same time, an abundance of scholarship highlights that information is often inaccurately communicated between individuals (e.g., Bartlett 1920Bartlett , 1932Breithaupt et al 2018;Mesoudi and Whiten 2008;Schegloff 1987). Indeed, any transmission is a complex process: information must cross cultural modalities-personal to public to personal-thus requiring transformations of these representations (Boutyline and Soter 2021).…”

“…Indeed, empirical studies of social transmission chains illustrate that information often degrades as it is successively retold. For example, one recent study examines the information accuracy of a story across multiple retellings (Breithaupt et al 2018). The study finds that by the third re-telling, the story became 77% shorter, and retained only 23.5% of the details from the original story.…”

Towards a socially situated rumouring: Historical and critical perspectives of rumour transmission

“…Memes, which are cultural units of information that may include rumours, tend to propagate further in the social environment when they evoke highly arousing emotions, such as disgust (Heath, Bell, & Sternberg, 2001). Several promising studies that apply the serial reproduction paradigm have demonstrated an emotional content bias in information transmission and transformations (Breithaupt, Li, Liddell, Schille‐Hudson, & Whaley, 2018; Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2017; Tafani, Marfaing, & Guimelli, 2006). Therefore, the integration of heuristic‐systematic models for the effects of emotional context on information processing of a transmitted message (Chaiken, 1980; Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) appears to be a relevant future direction for rumour research.…”

Annotating Narrative Levels: Review of Guideline No. 7

“…through eye tracking 8 or the study of adaption in other media 9 ). Notwithstanding the many conceptual challenges of doing transmedia comparisons, one may profit from compar-ing with retellings 10 and film adaptations 11 to gauge more safely which words are imagined as spoken by what character (and to what music). 12 The powers of machine learning can be harnessed more productively through learning from transfer and actual reception.…”