Emotional charge makes stories spread regardless of factual accuracy

Evidence

Chip Heath, Chris Bell, and Emily Sternberg demonstrated such emotional effects on cultural contagion by looking at urban legends. Remember the one about the rat in the soda bottle? Or the movie star and the gerbil extracted from, well, you know, the anus? Laboratory experiments showed that people are more likely to spread stories that are strongly emotional (evoking feelings such as disgust and anger), even after matching stories on their factual accuracy, as well as their practical and entertainment value. The story about the rat in a soda bottle has far more potential to spread if it ends with the man quenching his thirst and then seeing that there were pieces of dead rat inside the bottle, as opposed to discovering the dead rat in the bottle before taking a sip. A survey of legends on the Internet also revealed that more emotionally loaded urban legends travel farther than their more cool-headed counterparts. As they argued, “Truth doesn’t always win out in the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ sometimes emotion does.” — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader contagion/transmission logic Norenzayan uses for religious beliefs — bears on why high-arousal rituals and fear-laden supernatural claims spread.