From: Danny Iny (danny@dandesign.co.il)
Date: Mon 10 Nov 2003 - 13:15:49 GMT
>>...but what about more recent cultural artefacts that can illicit disgust
in some people (e.g. clashing colours or the wrong kind of shoes amongst
fashionistas)?
This point is covered in Susan Blackmore's 'The Meme Machine'. Since the
best imitators would be most likely to pick up useful new skills, there was
a selection pressure in favor of people with an inclination to imitate the
best imitators. That's basically a selection pressure for imitating the
coolest people. All things being equal, someone with a propensity to feel
disgust at things that could incur the disapproval of the fashionistas would
be more likely to be close to the best imitators, and thereby in the best
position to learn from them.
Danny
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vincent Campbell" <VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 12:25 PM
Subject: RE: Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends
> I do think that talking of emotional selection merely changes the question
> rathering than offering a answer. Like Derek says, the 'why' behind
> emotional selection still remains. After all an urban legend that spreads
> because it connects with our disgust response makes sense when the legend
> involves ancestral environment things that we should find disgusting (like
> excrement or rotting things), but what about more recent cultural
artefacts
> that can illicit disgust in some people (e.g. clashing colours or the
wrong
> kind of shoes amongst fashionistas)?
>
> This makes me think of all that research, like uses and gratifications
work
> in media studies, that ultimately works back to Maslow's hierarcy of needs
> stuff. Does anyone know if anyone has done any work relating reasons for
> meme selection/transmission to this or similar stuff?
>
> Vincent
>
> > ----------
> > From: derek gatherer
> > Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> > Sent: Friday, November 7, 2003 9:10 AM
> > To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> > Subject: Re: Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends
> >
> > Yes, 'emotional selection' as they call it, could be a
> > case of 'cultural selection' (which is the more
> > general term of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman). I
> > mentioned this Heath/Bell/Sternberg paper briefly in
> > my last JoM paper - it's down at the bottom of the
> > rather rambling paragraph below....
> > Basically, it seems that cultural selection occurs,
> > but the question in a lot of cases is why. One answer
> > is that it is because of emotional selection, but
> > again you could ask why some things are emotionally
> > selected.
> >
> > and the paragraph:
> > from
> > http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2002/vol6/gatherer_d.html
> >
> > It is clear that a `random walk' pattern of meme
> > incidence over the iterations is more common than the
> > `contagionist paradigm' sigmoid curve, which only
> > occurs in rather `pure' situations. Random walk-like
> > effects may be genuinely random because of the
> > stochastic nature of the system (simulation 3),
> > because of balanced rules in a deterministic system
> > (simulation 4), or be anchored pseudo-random walks
> > because of fluctuations around an equilibrium
> > (simulations 10 and 11). Good `epidemiological'
> > sigmoid curves in culture seem to require either
> > arbitrary contagiousness (simulations 1 and 2), or a
> > powerful selective force (the unopposed
> > self-fulfilling prophecy of simulation 5). Some
> > aspects of human life may be arbitrarily contagious,
> > for example crowd hysteria (see reviews by Levy & Nail
> > 1993; Marsden 1998). Several authors have worked
> > within the `contagionist paradigm', producing models
> > of traits that spread in an epidemic manner. For
> > instance, Takahasi (1998, 1999) refers to `biased
> > cultural transmission', Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman
> > (1984) to `cultural selection', and Sperber (1985,
> > 1996) to the `epidemiology of representations'. In
> > these cases, it is taken for granted that the epidemic
> > trait is either arbitrarily contagious or, in the case
> > of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's `cultural selection',
> > that some powerful, and usually unspecified,
> > psychological factor is promoting the spread of the
> > trait. The self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon of
> > simulation 5 would presumably therefore be a case of
> > `cultural selection'. Another example might be
> > `prestige-based transmission' (Heinrich 2001) where
> > certain individuals are far more widely copied than
> > others, or `emotional selection' (Heath et al 2001).
> > Blackmore (1999) gives extensive further examples.
> > Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1984) also refer to
> > `natural selection' on culture, where a cultural trait
> > spreads through genuine adaptiveness in the absence of
> > either arbitrary `biased cultural transmission' or
> > psychological `cultural selection'. Powerful natural
> > selective forces of this kind do indeed also operate
> > in culture, resulting in some sigmoid incidence curves
> > for possession of, in modern times, mobile phones and
> > other useful paraphernalia (Rogers 1995), or, in the
> > Bronze Age, for bronze knives (Renfrew 1987). Hewlett
> > and Cavalli-Sforza (1983) describe an epidemic spread
> > of the use of the crossbow among Pygmies, conferring a
> > great hunting advantage over the traditional bow and
> > arrow.
> >
> >
> > --- William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> wrote: >
> >
> > >
> >
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/press_releases/december_2001/psp8161028.ht
> > ml
> > >
> > > 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.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > ===============================================================
> > > 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
> > >
> >
> > ________________________________________________________________________
> > Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo!
> > Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk
> >
> > ===============================================================
> > 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
> >
> >
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
>
===============================================================
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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