The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives
Lecture 9: Fake News
‘Fake News’ is a serious contemporary issue that has garnered much discussion. This lecture explains how its cultural success can be better understood by how it exploits several of the biases covered in previous lectures and demonstrates the value of a cultural evolution approach to the issue. In the exercise you will compare ‘fake news’ to genuine news, to assess if it does exploit content biases.
Resources
Slides: (pdf)
Exercise:
Instructions (pdf)
Work sheet (docx)
Model answer (pdf)
Fake news:
Pence, human suffering (pdf)
Morgue worker gives birth (pdf)
Clinton emails, sex ring (pdf)
Real news:
Pence defends faith (pdf)
Mortuary attendants steal from dead (pdf)
Comey criticized over Clinton emails (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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