The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives
Lecture 6: Horror
Do you like scary movies? Horror is one of the world’s most successful genres and horrific elements are often present in traditional folktales and myths. But why are stories that evoke disgust and fear so culturally successful? This lecture explains how successful narratives exploit biases for emotive content, and why stories that evoke negative emotions might be particularly successful. The exercise gives you the chance to edit two scary urban legends to make them more cognitively appealing, as a researcher might in an experiment.
Resources
Slides: (pdf)
Exercise:
Instructions (pdf)
Model answer (pdf)
Work sheet (docx)
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.
The Cultural Evolution Society's Online Learning Tutorial Series is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For designers' contact information, click here.