Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends

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The discussion centers on the success of memes and urban legends through the lenses of informational and emotional selection, with a particular focus on disgust as an emotional trigger. Research findings indicate that stories eliciting stronger feelings of disgust are more likely to be shared, regardless of their truthfulness. In a series of studies, participants demonstrated a preference for versions of legends that maximized disgust, and legends featuring more disgust-related motifs were found to be more widely disseminated on urban legend websites. The implications suggest that emotional selection plays a significant role in the social marketplace of ideas, highlighting the power of evoking strong emotions like disgust in the spread of narratives.
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We explore how much memes like urban legends succeed based on informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). We focus on disgust because it is the least intuitive form of emotional selection and its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, controlling for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. In Study 3, we coded legends for individual story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance); legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend web sites. We discuss implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.[continued]
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/bec/papers/Heath_Emotional_Selection.pdf
 
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Very interesting Ivan, thanx! :biggrin:
 
You're welcome. :biggrin:


Funny, isn't it? We are all little boys at heart - the disgusting part anyway.
 
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