Successful fairy tales contain two to three counterintuitive violations

Evidence

In a study I did with Scott Atran, Mark Schaller, and Jason Faulkner, we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 363

Categorization

• CANDY: “Have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?” is a delightful trivia hook about failed fairy tales.
• SEED: A ‘minimum viable strangeness’ essay: both religious and secular narratives optimize for just enough counterintuitive content to transmit — what contemporary storytelling gets wrong by oversaturating.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 363
• XREF: connects to: The kindness-rewarded, greed-punished tale recur in nearly every human culture independently — , A Year of World Stories, 9258

Broader Connections

• The kindness-rewarded, greed-punished tale recur in nearly every human culture independently #expands (0.72) — , A Year of World Stories, 9258