Finding the Sweet Spot: Is There a Fixed Template for Culturally Successful Counterintuitive Narratives?

Finding the Sweet Spot: Is There a Fixed Template for Culturally Successful Counterintuitive Narratives? M. Afzal Upal (Afzal.Upal@drdc-rddc.gc.ca) Adversarial Intent Section Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC) Toronto 1133 Sheppard Ave W, Toronto, M3M 3B9 Abstract This article reports an investigation involving a series of studies carried out to critically examine the hypothesis that presence of 2 or 3 counterintuitive concepts in a story makes it more memorable than stories containing fewer or more such concepts. Our results paint a more complicated picture involving a number of interacting factors with contribution of the counterintuitive concepts to the global story cohesion emerging as a key factor. Keywords: Memory, culture, folktales, concept learning. Introduction A number of recent studies have found that minimally counterintuitive concepts are recalled better than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive ideas (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer, 1994, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001). Better memorability for minimally counterintuitive concepts, these researchers argue, explains why such concepts form part of widespread religious beliefs and other widely shared cultural beliefs. However, as Atran (2003) has argued, these findings on their own are not sufficient to explain why most of the widespread cultural folktales contain only a small number of counterintuitive concepts 1 and are mostly composed of intuitive concepts. How and why do the apparently less memorable intuitive concepts continue to be successfully transmitted along with a small number of counterintuitive concepts? Does the presence of counterintuitive concepts improve overall recall for a story? If so, would an even larger number of counterintuitive concepts make the story even more memorable or would memorability drop of if counterintuitive concepts are added beyond a certain number? Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, and Schaller (2006) report on an investigation carried out to study these questions. They selected 42 Grimm Brothers folktales such that half of the stories were judged to be “culturally successful” (they attracted more Google hits) and the other half were considered to be “culturally unsuccessful” (because they received fewer Google hits). Counterintuitive concepts present in each story were then counted. They found that a vast majority of the culturally successful folk tales had two or three counterintuitive ideas whereas counterintuitive ideas were more evenly distributed among the unsuccessful The rest of the article uses the terms MCI concepts or simply counterintuitive concepts when referring to minimally counterintuitive concepts. folktales. Subjects were then asked to read the stories and answer a number of questions to determine if the subjects thought that the stories were familiar, memorable, easy to understand, easy to transmit, and interesting enough to tell others. Their results show that stories with more Google hits were judged by the subjects to be more memorable and worth telling their friends. On the basis of this evidence, Norenzayan et al. argued that stories that contain two or three counterintuitive ideas enjoy memorability advantages over stories that have fewer (0 or 1) or more (4, 5, 6, or larger) counterintuitive ideas. They further argue that this should be true for all stories and not just Grimm Brother’s tales or just Northern European folktales from the 19 th century, or just for narratives of a certain length. They call stories containing 2-3 counterintuitive concepts as MCI narratives and state, “we propose that MCI narratives are culturally successful partly because they enjoy a stronger cognitive advantage in recall than other narrative templates” (Page 549)(Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Scaller, 2006). Let us call the hypothesis that stories containing 2 or 3 counterintuitive ideas are more memorable than stories containing fewer or more concepts as the MCI-hypothesis. The objective of this paper is to carefully examine the MCI-hypothesis and its implications. This is accomplished through a series of studies. Initially, we replicate Norenzayan et al.’s methodology but then complement it with other techniques. Study I This study replicates Norenzayan et al.’s methodology for a different set of folktales. Aesop’s fables are folktales credited to a Greek slave named Aesop who is thought to have lived from 620 to 560 BC. Most of the short stories contain between 50 and 500 words and are organized around moral themes. A number of stories contain counterintuitive concepts such as anthropomorphic animals. While Aesop’s fables have survived for hundreds (if not thousands) of years and are widely known around the world, not all tales are equally well known. This study used George Fyler Townsend’s collection (1867) containing 350 fables. Using Norenzayan et al.’s methodology, Google hits were computed for all 350 fables by querying for “Aesop” and the title of a story (e.g., “The Hare and the Tortoise”). Besides Google’s initial estimate of the number of matching documents (which was the only measure used by Norenzayan et al.), this study also computed the actual