Optimal Eventfulness of Narratives

OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASICS)This study examines whether there is an optimal degree of eventfulness of short narratives. We ask whether there is a specific degree of eventfulness (unexpectedness) that makes them “stick” better than other stories so that they are maintained more faithfully in serial reproduction (telephone games). The result is: probably not. The finding is that there is an impressive correlation of eventfulness rankings of original stories and resulting retellings in serial reproduction, despite the change of many other story elements and almost regardless of low or high eventfulness. Put more simply, people remember and retell “eventfulness” accurately, even when the actual events and circumstances of a story are changed

Why Empathy is not the Best Basis for Humanitarianism

The paper challenges the assumption that empathy is the key source of humanitarianism. It begins by asking what underlies the perception of empathy as one of the chief motors of humanitarian aid. This leads to an examination of the 'scene of empathy' - which in turn sheds light on some of the more problematic aspects of empathy. Three of these problematic aspects and their importance for humanitarian aid are discussed, namely (temporary) self-loss, a tendency to radicalize conflicts and the danger of sadism. In conclusion, the author asks in how far humanitarianism can be decoupled from empathy and proposes an alternative approach. This alternative approach revolves around the development of a common we-identity which does not depend on empathy

The Disappearance of Moral Choice in Serially Reproduced Narratives

How do narratives influence moral decision-making? Our ongoing studies use serial reproduction of narratives, that is multiple retellings as in the telephone game, of morally ambiguous situations. In particular, we tested stories that include a minor misdemeanor, but leave open whether the wrongdoer will be punished by a bystander. It turns out that serial reproduction (retelling) of stories tends to eliminate the possibility of intervention by the bystander under certain conditions. We reason that this effect can be explained either by preferences of the readers or by the reader\u27s discomfort to get involved. A second finding is that retellings of third-person narratives of moral situations lead to a higher degree of change and invention of the outcome than first-person narratives

Fact vs. Affect in the Telephone Game: All Levels of Surprise Are Retold With High Accuracy, Even Independently of Facts

When people retell stories, what guides their retelling? Most previous research on story retelling and story comprehension has focused on information accuracy as the key measure of stability in transmission. This paper suggests that there is a second, affective, dimension that provides stability for retellings, namely the audience affect of surprise. In a large-sample study with multiple iterations of retellings, we found evidence that people are quite accurate in preserving all degrees of surprisingness in serial reproduction – even when the event that produced the surprisingness in the original story is dropped or changed. Thus, we propose that the preservation of affect is an implicit goal of retelling: merely do retellers not recall highly surprising events better, but rather they register all levels of surprisingness precisely and aim to surprise their implied audience to same degree. This study used 2,389 participants.Significance Statement: Story retelling is a process whereby cultural information is transmitted horizontally across social networks and vertically down generations. For the most part, retelling research has focused on the relevance and stability of factual information, “who did what, where, when, and why”; comparatively little is known about the transmission of affective information. We suggest that affect can serve as a second axis of stability for retelling, partially independent from factual information. In serial reproduction tasks modeled after the telephone game, we find that surprisingness of stories is well preserved across retellings – even when the facts and events of the story are not. The findings are significant for the communication of information, and thereby also the stability and transformation of culture in general

Quantifying the retention of emotions across story retellings

Story retelling is a fundamental medium for the transmission of information between individuals and among social groups. Besides conveying factual information, stories also contain affective information. Though natural language processing techniques have advanced considerably in recent years, the extent to which machines can be trained to identify and track emotions across retellings is unknown. This study leverages the powerful RoBERTa model, based on a transformer architecture, to derive emotion-rich story embeddings from a unique dataset of 25,728 story retellings. The initial stories were centered around five emotional events (joy, sadness, embarrassment, risk, and disgust—though the stories did not contain these emotion words) and three intensities (high, medium, and low). Our results indicate (1) that RoBERTa can identify emotions in stories it was not trained on, (2) that the five emotions and their intensities are preserved when they are transmitted in the form of retellings, (3) that the emotions in stories are increasingly well-preserved as they experience additional retellings, and (4) that among the five emotions, risk and disgust are least well-preserved, compared with joy, sadness, and embarrassment. This work is a first step toward quantifying situation-driven emotions with machines

R : How cognitive selection affects language change

Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition

The bad things we do because of empathy

Empathy is usually seen as a prosocial and morally positive influence on behaviour. This article provides an overview of cases of negative acts motivated by empathy. It includes discussions of polarizations that are fueled by side-taking and empathy, selfish forms of empathy (such as sadistic empathy, vampirism, and helicopter parenting), and filtered empathy (using identification with a third person as a medium to have empathy with another). The definition of empathy used is to co-experience the situation of another

Echo: Zur Neueren Celan-Philologie

Journal articleDie Celan-Philologie ist seit einigen Jahrzehnten Schauplatz der Diskussion dessen, was lesen heißt. So präzise Texte sprechen, so unklar ist, was sie sagen. Obwohl ein Text ohne Bedeutung kaum denkbar ist, kann das von einem Text Bedeutete nicht als fester Bestandteil des Textes gelten. Das Bedeutete eines Textes ist zugleich die Mitte eines Textes, die alles zusammenhält, und ein Äußeres, welches nicht im Text erscheint. Mit der Frage der Bedeutung wird die Grenze zwischen Innen und Außen eines Textes zweifelhaft. Gerade “die Abwesenheit des Sinns führt zu dem Wagnis” der Lektüre, 1 eine solche Grenze zu setzen. Doch in dem, was eine Lektüre als die Bedeutung eines Textes setzt, verschwindet das Wagnis und mit ihm der Text