Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives

By Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner, Mark Schaller. Cognitive Sciences, 2006

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd0b1753519c59ef6f4553a3ef12de2d72ced61b

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Citations in the corpus

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions (2010, background): “Institut Jean Nicod Paris, France &5 John Jay College of Criminal Justice New York, NY, USA & ISR and Ford School of Public Policy University of Michigan10 Ann Arbor, MI, USA satran@umich.edu”
Our Gods: Variation in Supernatural Minds (2011, background): “Indeed, there is an intuitive–counterintuitive continuum (Norenzayan et al. 2006): while (1), (2), and (3) attribute agency to plants and are therefore counterintuitive in the technical sense, (1) and (2) make intuitive sense, whereas (3) does not.”
The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods (2010, background): “"e experiments so often pointed to as evidence for the importance of counterintuitiveness only reveal memory and recall effects (e.g., Barrett and Nyhof, 2001; Norenzayan et al., 2006), which tell us nothing about belief.”
The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution (2009, background): “The presence of a few counterintuitive concepts in a narrative, even within a list of otherwise ordinary concepts, improves memory for the entire narrative or list ( Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006 ).”
Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats: Emotional Selection Operating in Three Phases of Cultural Transmission of Urban Legends (2014, unknown): “However, research on verbal recall tends to study recall of single words rather than entire stories, which might be an important difference from the point of view of cultural evolution (Norenzayan et al., 2006).”
The Impact of Culture on Creativity (2015, background): “Psychological research suggests that the marketplace of ideas exhibits a bias toward ideas that are not overly counterintuitive, so as to maintain some continuity with existing knowledge (Norenzayan et al., 2006).”
What's in a Term? Paranormal, Superstitious, Magical and Supernatural Beliefs by Any Other Name Would Mean the Same (2012, background): “In contrast, a statement is defined as counterintuitive and supernatural if it describes an entity in one ontological category with a property that it according to common sense should not have or by denying it a property it should have (Boyer, 2001; Norenzayan et al., 2006; Pyysiäinen, 2004).”