Cognitive biases in folklore: From fairy tales to fake news

Dysoc/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution
The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis are happy to announce a series of free webinars on cultural evolution.
www.dysoc.org/ces_webinars
Speaker: Joseph Stubbersfield (Psychology, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK)
Topic: Cognitive biases in folklore: From fairy tales to fake news
Abstract: Storytelling and narratives have played a vital part of human culture for millennia, and throughout this time stories have evolved shaped by the selection pressures of human minds and societies. Research on the cultural evolution of narratives has flourished over the past few decades, identifying and testing these selection pressures to better understand this evolution. In this webinar I focus on how cognitive biases for certain types of information content influence the social transmission and cultural evolution of a range of folklore narratives, from traditional tales, such as Red Riding Hood to, to more contemporary tales such as the urban legend of Bloody Mary and Fake News.
CES Learning Module description: The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives. This module explores the universal and uniquely human behavior of narrative and how cultural evolution theory has provided vital insights into the transmission and evolution of narratives and why some become culturally successful.
Module designers: Joseph Stubbersfield (Psychology, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK)
Jamie Tehrani (Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK)
Oleg Sobchuk (Max Planck Institute the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany )
Webinar slides www.dysoc.org/ifiles/CESwebina...