From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu 06 Nov 2003 - 13:52:33 GMT
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/press_releases/december_2001/psp8161028.html
Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends
Chip Heath
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Chris Bell and Emily Sternberg
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
ABSTRACT
This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the
basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and
emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear,
or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been
precisely described. In Study 1, with controls 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. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs
that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found
that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely
on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of
emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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