Title: Why Radicals Win the Newsday?: Ratcheting-up of Cultural Counterintuitiveness in Rumors and NRM Doctrine
Abstract: Why Radicals Win the Newsday: Ratcheting-up of Cultural Counterintuitiveness in Rumors and NRM Doctrine M. Afzal Upal ([email protected]) Defence Research & Development Canada 1133 Shepherd Ave W, Toronto, ON, M3M 3B9 Canada Abstract Culturally counterintuitive concepts are ideas that violate a small number of justifiable expectations raised by shared beliefs of a group of people. Previous studies have shown that ideas that violate a small number of expectations are better remembered by people than ideas that conform to their expectations or ideas that violate a large number of people’s expectations. However, as counterintuitive ideas become embedded in a group’s belief-system they lose their memorability advantages and must change to regain those advantages. This article presents two case studies conducted to better understand the dynamics of the diffusion of information. It outlines how a cognition and culture approach can help us understand cultural dynamics and offers new insights into rumor diffusion and new religious movement splits. Keywords: counterintuitive concepts, rumor diffusion, new religious movements. Introduction The Windigo monster was a superhuman giant about thirty feet tall, who lived in the forest and preyed on human beings. The algonkians believed many spirits inhabited the forest but only this was a cannibal. He was described as having a heart of ice, no lips, huge jagged teeth, and protuberant eyes rolling in blood. His feet were a yard long with pointed heels and only one toe. His hands were like claws. He hissed and made a long-drawn-out thundering sounds, accompanied by gruesome howls.” (Page 109) (Ezzo, 2008) This crocodile was found in New Orleans swimming down the street. 21 FT long, 4500 lbs, around 80 years old minimum. Specialists said that he was looking to eat human because he was too old to catch animals. This crocodile was killed by the army last Sunday at 3:00 pm, currently he is in the freezer at the Azur hotel. The contents of it’s stomach will be analyzed this Friday at 2:30 pm. (Snopes.com/katrina/photos/crocodile.asp) Why and how do counterintuitive ideas such as above spread in a society? Why are counterintuitive ideas so prevalent in rumors and religious beliefs of people around the globe? Cognition and culture researchers have suggested that a fruitful way to answer such questions is to study mental structure of different types of concepts focusing on their fit with people’s cognitive machinery to understand which ideas are preferentially processed by people (Boyer, 1994; Sperber, 1996). All else being equal, ideas that are easier to comprehend, memorize and communicate to others are more likely to become widespread and hence stand a good chance of becoming part of a group’s shared belief-system. Much of the cognition and culture work has focused on cognitive processes connected to memory to identify ideas that are more memorable for people. One of the most significant achievements of this approach is the so called minimal counterintuitiveness (MC) hypothesis (Boyer, 1994, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001) which suggests that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts that violate a small number of intuitive expectations (such as, a tree that talks, a rock that eats, and an invisible cow) are more memorable than either intuitive concepts (such as, a green tree, a brown rock, and a good person) or maximally counterintuitive concepts that violate a larger number of intuitive expectations (such as, an invisible talking tree that does not occupy any space and a sad illuminant rock swimming to cross a river). A number of subsequent empirical studies (J. Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001; Gonce, Upal, Slone, & Tweney, 2006; Upal, 2005; Upal, Gonce, Tweney, & Slone, 2007) have found some support for better memory for the MCI concepts. Traditionally, the MC hypothesis has been used to explain the fact that widespread religious concepts around the globe tend to be minimally counterintuitive (J. L. Barrett, 2008; Boyer, 2001). Traditionally, some cognitive scientists of religion have argued that the MC hypothesis only applies to those concepts that are counterintuitive to all human beings regardless of their age, gender, cultural knowledge, or mental beliefs (J. L. Barrett, 2008). Upal (2010; 2011) has argued that counterintuitiveness is inherently dependent on the expectations of an agent which are generated by the agent’s mental beliefs at the time. Thus counterintuitive ideas are counterintuitive in a given context. A counterintuitive idea can eventually become intuitive once people get used to it. The notion of counterintuitiveness as context-dependent violation of people’s expectations, also allows us to apply the MC hypothesis to a much larger class of concepts. In particular, Upal (2010; 2011) has argued that ideas that violate a small number of expectations raised by shared
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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