Storytelling as a Cognitive System of Resistance to Cultural Maladaptations
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the study of cultural evolution, it is known that the calibration process whereby natural selection copes with rapid environmental changes leads to evolved cultural adaptations. This process has also resulted in an increase in the degree of susceptibility to infectious cultural information, elsewhere known as “cultural maladaptations”, “rogue ideas” or “memes”. Embedded in this design tradeoff is an epistemic vigilance mechanism (Sperber et al.) characterized by significant malleability and constrained by a variety of cognitive biases. In this presentation, I argue that the shuffle of information by which contemporary “network societies” (Castells) maintain the established power relationships in communities has a direct impact on the continuous reconfiguration of environmental “cues”. The strong connectivity between the global nodes of these networks has made it possible for their social agents to exploit the innovations in communication methods. The outcome is a set of unstable cues which are incompatible with the cognitive functions of reasoning (that normally react best to stable environmental cues) and which have significant effects on the deactivation of epistemic vigilance in favor of maladaptive conformity bias, conforming, in this case, to the established power relationships. Aside from the cultural information diffused by the network societies discussed above, I suggest that, when decoupled from the personal interests of these societies, storytelling, a medium of cultural information diffusion with distinct features, functions to lessen the susceptibilities to cultural maladaptations and to fortify the epistemic vigilance mechanism. I discriminate between the two types of information-diffusion mechanisms and identify storytelling as a form of resistance to cultural maladaptations. I argue that the universals found in stories associated with the majority of genres (with few exceptions) act as cues which appeal to our “basic concepts” in that they are cognitively perceived as “intuitive beliefs”, as opposed to “reflective beliefs” (Sperber). Ultimately, the high “relevance” (Sperber and Wilson) and low cost of these information-universals makes them less difficult to acquire than the information diffused by the interest-driven network societies, and more compatible with the epistemic vigilance mechanism as both are found to be calibrated to the EEA (presumably located within the Pleistocene epoch). I survey exemplary stories and present my argument as an alternative explanation for why numerous recent studies have repeatedly found that people who read more fiction are more diligent in evaluating cultural information, less prone to conformity bias, and more likely to behave in fitness-increasing adaptive ways. |
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