The Rules of Contagion

(Greg DeLong) #1

  1. Luu C., ‘The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm’,
    JSTOR Daily, 2 May 2018.

  2. Da Silva S.G. and Tehrani J.J., ‘Comparative phylogenetic
    analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales’,
    Royal Society Open Science, 2015.

  3. Smith D. et al., ‘Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-
    gatherer storytelling’, Nature Communications, 2017.

  4. Background from: Stubbersfield J.M. et al., ‘Serial killers,
    spiders and cybersex: social and survival information bias in the
    transmission of urban legends’, British Journal of Psychology,
    2015. A similar result pattern has been found in other telephone
    studies, with social information seemingly having an advantage
    when it comes to transmission.

  5. Background on counter-intuitive elements from: Mesoudi A. and
    Whiten A., ‘The multiple roles of cultural transmission
    experiments in understanding human cultural evolution’,
    Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2008;
    Stubbersfield J. and Tehrani J., ‘Expect the Unexpected? Testing
    for Minimally Counterintuitive (MCI) Bias in the Transmission of
    Contemporary Legends: A Computational Phylogenetic
    Approach’, Social Science Computer Review, 2013.

  6. Dlugan A., ‘How to Use the Rule of Three in Your Speeches’, 27
    May 2009. http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/rule-of-three-speeches-
    public-speaking

  7. The rule of three is also common in comedy, where an
    unexpected third item creates the punchline.

  8. Newberry M.G. et al., ‘Detecting evolutionary forces in language
    change’, Nature, 2017.

  9. Valverde S. and Sole R.V., ‘Punctuated equilibrium in the large-
    scale evolution of programming languages’, Journal of the Royal
    Society Interface, 2015.

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