Cognitive psychology

Information transmission

Neuroscience

Biology

Social psychology

Literature

Cognition

Narrative

Telecommunications

Computer science

Computer network

Content (measure theory)

Genetics

Psychology

Relevance (law)

Mathematics

Political science

Sociology

Mathematical analysis

Transmission (telecommunications)

Cultural transmission in animals

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

Recent research into cultural transmission suggests that humans are disposed to learn, remember, and transmit certain types of information more easily than others, and that any information that is passed between people will be subjected to cognitive selective pressures that alter the content and structure so as to make it maximally transmittable. This paper presents a review of emerging research on content biases in cultural evolution with relevance to the transmission of popular narratives. This is illustrated with content analysis of urban legends, which found that most exploited at least one known content bias, with emotional information and social information being the most frequent. We argue that the narratives do not succeed because of the transmission of adaptively relevant information but because of their exploitation of content biases in human cognition.Keywords: urban legends, content biases, cognitive biases, cultural evolution, cultural transmission

Cognitive Evolution and the Transmission of Popular Narratives: A Literature Review and Application to Urban Legends