Emotionally charged stories spread farther than factually accurate ones

Evidence

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: Reinforces the reader’s cross-textual framework on how religious/moral concepts spread via emotional salience rather than truth-value — connects to how fearful supernatural-punishment beliefs (Norenzayan’s Big God account) outcompete rational alternatives.
• SHARE: The mad cow vs BSE label finding — same disease, six times more common by emotional label — is exactly the kind of nerdy detail a friend studying risk perception or moral psychology would love.