Spreading Non-natural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials

Abstract

The four experiments presented support Boyer's theory that counterintuitive concepts have transmission advantages that account for the commonness and ease of communicating many non-natural cultural concepts. In Experiment 1, 48 American college students recalled expectation-violating items from culturally unfamiliar folk stories better than more mundane items in the stories. In Experiment 2, 52 American college students in a modi ed serial reproduction task transmitted expectation-violating items in a written narrative more successfully than bizarre or common items. In Experiments 3 and 4, these ndings were replicated with orally presented and transmitted stimuli, and found to persist even after three months. To sum, concepts with single expectation-violating features were more successfully transmitted than concepts that were entirely congruent with category-level expectations, even if they were highly unusual or bizarre. This transmission advantage for counterintuitive concepts may explain, in part, why such concepts are so prevalent across cultures and so readily spread.

The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

“…For example, ghosts have human-like intentions (a folk psychology module) but in being able to pass through solid objects violate another (a folk-physics module). The aforementioned study by Barrett & Nyhof (2001) supports this claim, with population-level consequences of this bias seen in the widespread popularity of supernatural or religious beliefs across the world (Boyer 1994) and the persistence of minimally counter-intuitive folk tales through history (Norenzayan et al 2006).…”

“…Transmission chain studies, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, show that human cultural transmission can often be vulnerable to distortions and biases rather than constituting a process of high-fidelity replication. These studies have identified several candidate content biases in cultural transmission: a counter-intuitive bias (Barrett & Nyhof 2001); a hierarchical bias ); a gender-stereotype bias (Bangerter 2000;Kashima 2000); and a social bias (Mesoudi et al 2006a). (We qualify these as 'candidate' biases given that each is supported by one or at most two experiments; as the field expands, we anticipate future experiments to provide further support or qualifications to these initial findings.)…”

“…In another study, Mesoudi et al (2006a) found that information concerning thirdparty social interactions was transmitted with higher fidelity than equivalent non-social information, in line with the hypothesis that primate intelligence evolved particularly to solve complex social problems (Byrne & Whiten 1988;Dunbar 2003), suggesting the operation of a 'social bias' in cultural transmission. When we add the counter-intuitive bias (Barrett & Nyhof 2001) and the social bias (Mesoudi et al 2006a) to the hierarchical bias ) and gender-stereotype bias (Bangerter 2000;Kashima 2000) noted earlier, we can begin to see a provisional list of content biases emerging from the experimental literature. In §2 we noted that cultural evolutionary population thinking encourages the extrapolation of individuallevel biases to explain population-level patterns in actual cultural datasets.…”

“…The results of these studies largely supported Bartlett's original findings of increasing generalization and assimilation to pre-existing knowledge. Although the later twentieth century saw a decline in the popularity of the transmission chain method, several recent studies have sought to reintroduce the method as a means of studying cultural change, and have updated the transmission chain method to conform to modern standards of experimental psychology (Bangerter 2000;Kashima 2000;Barrett & Nyhof 2001;Mesoudi et al 2006a;Kalish et al 2007;see Mesoudi 2007). These recent studies, too, support Bartlett's (1932) conclusions.…”

Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales

“…Mesoudi, Whiten, & Dunbar, 2006;Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2015); iii) a bias for emotionally arousing content, such as disgust, or amusement (Eriksson & Coultas, 2014;Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2017); iv) a bias for minimally-counterintuitive (MCI) information that violates some of our implicit ontological assumptions about the world in ways that makes it more salient than information that can either be taken-for-granted or is incomprehensible (e.g. Barrett & Nyhof, 2001); v) a stereotype-consistency bias, in which information is transformed and recalled in ways that make it more consistent with pre-existing expectations and prejudices (e.g. Bangerter, 2000).…”