Resource Material

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10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Proof that a good story will survive and adapt to new environments, 10 Things modernizes Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and retells it in a 90s American high school. A breakthrough film for stars Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the film plays with the stereotypical roles found in romance narratives over the past five-hundred years.
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Mesoudi A, Whiten A, Dunbar R. A bias for social information in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology. 2006 Aug;97(3):405-23. [Link]

Stubbersfield JM, Flynn EG, Tehrani JJ. Cognitive evolution and the transmission of popular narratives: a literature review and application to urban legends. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. 2017 Apr 1;1(1):121-36. [Link]

Stubbersfield JM, Tehrani JJ, Flynn EG. Serial killers, spiders and cybersex: Social and survival information bias in the transmission of urban legends. British Journal of Psychology. 2015 May;106(2):288-307. [Link]

Clueless (1995) Like fellow English class classic-turned 90s teen rom-com 10 Things, Clueless shows that a good narrative can fit to a new environment. This time modernising Jane Austen's Emma to a 90s American high school. Like its Regency period ancestor it satirizes the complex social world of its characters and depicts issues around friendships, sexual relationships and social status.
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Baillargeon R. How do infants learn about the physical world?. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 1994 Oct;3(5):133-40. [Link]

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Liu D, Wellman HM, Tardif T, Sabbagh MA. Theory of mind development in Chinese children: a meta- analysis of false-belief understanding across cultures and languages. Developmental psychology. 2008 Mar;44(2):523. [Link]

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Tale of Tales (Il racconto dei racconti) (2015) An international co-production based on the collections of tales by 17th century Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile. His collections include some of the oldest recorded forms of many popular European fairy tales, including Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Tale of Tales, however, freely adapts some less well-recognised tales that feature several counterintuitive concepts, from a tree that spouts blood to a flea that grows to gigantic size – it is not a tale for children.
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Blaine T, Boyer P. Origins of sinister rumors: A preference for threat-related material in the supply and demand of information. Evolution and Human Behavior. 2018 Jan 1;39(1):67-75. [Link]

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Clasen M. Evolution, Cognition, and Horror: A Précis of Why Horror Seduces (2017). Journal of Cognitive Historiography. 2018 Aug 13;4(2):242-56. [Link]

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The Thing (1982) A remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World (itself an adaptation of a novella), John Carpenter's The Thing provides plenty of content to evoke strong emotions. From disgust at its body-horror grotesques to the social tension of not knowing who is human and who is 'the Thing'. The film provoked negative reactions at release ("a wretched excess") but became a cult classic and spawned books, board games, video games, a prequal and a remake to be released in 2020.
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Tomasello M. Uniquely Human Cognition Is a Product of Human Culture. In: Levinson SC, Jaisson P, eds. Evolution and culture: A Fyssen Foundation symposium. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press; 2006. p. 203-218. ISBN-10: 0262122782

The Big Sleep (1946) Adapted from the seminal hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, with a script co-written by Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, The Big Sleep has all the makings of a Film Noir classic. Combining multiple classic elements, including femme fatales, a steely detective, and interlocking mysteries not even Chandler could fully explain. It represents another step in the evolution of the detective story from Agatha Christie, driven not by clockwork puzzle parts but by characters, dialogue and atmosphere.
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Allport GW. The nature of prejudice. 1954. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; 1979. ISBN: 0201001756 9780201001754

Allport GW, Postman L. The psychology of rumor. New York: Henry Holt, 1947.

Bartlett J, Miller C. The power of unreason: Conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism. London: Demos; 2010 Aug 29. [Link]

Douglas KM, Sutton RM, Callan MJ, Dawtry RJ, Harvey AJ. Someone is pulling the strings: Hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories. Thinking & Reasoning. 2016 Jan 2;22(1):57-77. [Link]

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They Live (1988) In They Live, pro-wrestler-turned-actor "Rowdy" Roddy Piper plays a working-class drifter who uncovers a global conspiracy involving a ruling elite of aliens using subliminal messages delivered through mass media, all thanks to a pair of special sunglasses. When Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists attempted to co-opt the film as an anti-Semitic allegory, its director John Carpenter issued a swift rebuttal - "THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world."
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Acerbi, A. (2019). Cognitive attraction and online misinformation. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-7. [Link]

Fessler DM, Pisor AC, Navarrete CD. Negatively-biased credulity and the cultural evolution of beliefs. PloS one. 2014;9(4). [Link]

Vosoughi S, Roy D, Aral S. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 2018 Mar 9;359(6380):1146-51. [Link]

Wardle C. Fake news. It's complicated. [Internet]. First Draft. 2017 [cited 2020 Feb 26]. Available from: [Link]

Kate Plays Christine (2016) "Talk show hostess dies after shooting self on TV" sounds like a Fake News headline, but it really occurred in 1974 when TV news reporter Christine Chubbuck committed suicide live on television, interpreted by some as a protest against "blood and guts" sensationalist news. The docudrama Kate Plays Christine follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil's preparation for playing the role of Chubbuck in a fictitious film, and deliberately blurs the line between what is fact and what is fake.
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