On 12 Sep 2002 at 10:32, William Benzon wrote:
>
> Selected Article
>
> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology December 2001 Vol. 81,
> No. 6, 1028-1041 © 2001 by the American Psychological Association For
> personal use only-not for distribution
>
> Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends
>
> Chip Heath Graduate School of Business Stanford University
>
> Chris Bell and Emily Sternberg Fuqua School of Business Duke
> University
>
> ABSTRACT
>
> This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the
> basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and
> emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger,
> fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its
> elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for
> informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass
> along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled
> legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred
> to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust.
> Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust
> (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends
> that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on
> urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of
> emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.
>
> Full text
> http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/press_releases/december_2001/psp816102
> 8.html
>
>
>
>
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
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