The staying power of fairy tales (and myths, legends, and stories from religions)

Norenzayan and colleagues (including anthropologist Scott Atran) recently published an interesting article on one of the factors that make certain kinds of stories culturally successful. They found that "minimally counterintuitive narratives" - those with two or three violations of folk psychology, folk biology, or folk physics - were more memorable than those with fewer such violations, or those with a lot of them. For example, Snow White has the talking (and all-seeing) mirror and the kiss that awakens a young woman from death; Beauty and the Beast has the human/beast transformation and the beast with human characteristics.

After doing some background studies testing people's memory of lists of intuitive and counterintuitive things (thirsty cats, thirsty doors, etc.), they analyzed a bunch of Grimm's fairy tales, comparing those that have been culturally successful with those that have not, and found that the pattern held pretty strongly. They think this finding probably extends to religious stories, but they haven't done cross-cultural work.

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R. is off at the regional daylily conference for the second evening in a row. I bet he is going to be really tired by tomorrow afternoon, with all this driving in the heat, and with all this staying up hours past his usual bedtime.