of a concept have to be kept to a minimum to facilitate successful retention in
memory also holds for groups of concepts or larger narrative units. Experi-
ments that shed light on these factors were conducted by Ara Norenzayan and
Scott Atran. When Norenzayan and Atran (2004) examined how lists of items
(rather than individual concepts) are remembered, packages that had the
greatest chance to be recalled after a week contained only a few minimally
counterintuitive concepts (such as“thirsty door”), the majority of concepts
in the package being intuitive (in the sense of not violating ontological
schemata, such as“closing door”). In a subsequent study, Norenzayan and
colleagues analyzed folk-tales from the point of view of minimally counter-
intuitive details (Norenzayan et al., 2006). They found that successful folktales
typically contained two to three counterintuitive elements on the average,
whereas unsuccessful folktales could contain any number from zero to six.
These empirical results suggest that the most successful narratives will contain
only a minimum of counterintuitive elements, accompanied by a greater
number of intuitive details, whichfits in well with our observation about the
gospel narratives.
Does the violation of cultural schemata result in a similar effect on memory?
In connection with Bartlett’s experiments we argued that information that
does not fit our cognitive schemata would be forgotten or transformed.
Bartlett selected“The War of the Ghosts”because it seemed to him very
different from the intuitive expectations of his Cambridge students. In other
words, the story violated cultural schemata maximally and not minimally. Yet,
we can see that some of the “strange”ideas in the text were sticking to
students’memories, such as the“black thing”that came out of the mouth of
the young man in the story before he died. Characters in some successful
stories show unconventional traits or behavior that, however, do not violate
ontological expectations, such as the Valiant Little Tailor of the Grimm
Brothers. In the New Testament, the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable
(Luke 10:25–37), or the illiteratefishermen who speak divine wisdom (the
apostles, Acts 4:13) violate cultural schemata of contemporary Israelites, but
not ontological schemata.
Other“strange”items stretch the limits of their respective ontological
schemata, whereby they might or might not violate cultural conventions. In
an experiment at the University of Nijmegen, Karin Steenstra designed a
matrix of different violations of expectations (Steenstra, 2005). Objects and
persons could completely remain within expectations raised by cognitive
schemata, violate cognitive schemata in limited ways (minimally counter-
intuitive concepts), or only stretch the limits of the schemata (mere strange-
ness). The latter category included, for example,“a man who knows every
fairytale”—not impossible as such, but certainly stretching the limits of human
capacities in terms of the cognitive schema of HUMAN. Further, some of the
violations included an aspect of agency (“a child who is able to walk through
82 Cognitive Science and the New Testament