with tales in many other cultures, from Indian to Arabic. Phylogenetic
analysis confirms just how much story borrowing there has been.
‘There’s not a great deal that’s special about any one country’s oral
tradition,’ Tehrani said. ‘In fact, they’re highly globalised.’
Why did humans start telling stories in the first place? One
explanation is that tales help us preserve useful information. There’s
evidence that storytelling is a highly valued skill in hunter-gatherer
societies, leading to suggestions that stories took hold in the early
stages of human history because good storytellers were more
desirable as mates.[23] There are two competing theories about
what sort of story-based information we have evolved to value.
Some researchers suggest that stories relating to survival are most
important: deep down, we want information about where food and
dangers are. This would explain why tales that evoke reactions like
disgust are memorable; we don’t want to poison ourselves. Others
have argued that because social interactions dominate human life,
socially relevant information is most useful. This would imply that we
preferentially remember details about relationships and actions that
break social norms.[24]
To test these two theories, Tehrani and his colleagues once ran an
experiment looking at the spread of urban legends. Their study
mimicked the children’s game of ‘broken telephone’: tales were
passed from one person to another, then to another, with the final
version showing how much was remembered. They found that
stories containing survival or social information were more
memorable than neutral stories, with the social stories outperforming
the survival ones.
Other factors can also boost the success of stories. Earlier broken
telephone experiments found that tales tend to become shorter and
simpler as they spread: people remember the gist but forget the
details. Surprises can help a tale as well. There’s evidence that tales
are catchier if they include counter-intuitive ideas. However, there is
a balance to be struck. Stories need some surprising features, but
not too many. Successful folk tales generally have a lot of familiar
elements, combined with a couple of absurd twists. Take Goldilocks,