The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives
Lecture 4: Soap Opera
Why are soap operas and other stories involving social interaction so popular? This lecture introduces the concept of cognitive content biases, and our bias for social information. In the exercise you will learn how to code material produced by participants in a transmission chain experiment, to test if social information is more likely to be preserved than other types of content.
Resources
Slides: (pdf)
Exercise:
Instructions (pdf)
Work sheet (docx)
Model coding keys (pdf)
Model answer (pdf)
Exercise chains:
Control chain 1 (pdf)
Control chain 2 (pdf)
Control chain 3 (pdf)
Social chain 1 (pdf)
Social chain 2 (pdf)
Social chain 3 (pdf)
This project was supported by Grant #61105 from the John Templeton Foundation to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (PIs: S. Gavrilets and P. J. Richerson) with assistance from the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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