“Black CNN”: Cultural Transmission of Moral Norms through Narrative Art
In: Journal of Cognition and CulturePh.D. Researcher, Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic
Search for other papers by Jan Horský in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
In recent debates in moral psychology and literary Darwinism, several authors suggested that narrative art plays a significant role in the process of the social learning of moral norms, functioning as storage of locally salient moral information. However, an integrative view, which would help explain the inner workings of this morally educative function of narrative art, is still lacking. This paper provides such a unifying theoretical account by bringing together insights from moral psychology (concerning the non-reflective nature of moral cognition), educational sciences (concerning different types of settings and methods of moral learning), cognitive/evolutionary narratology (concerning how easy narrative art lends itself to the transmission of moral information), and cultural evolution (concerning different types of learning strategies/biases in relation to narrative art). A study of contemporary American rap music is included to showcase the benefits of this integrative approach in the context of one particular type of narrative art.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Acerbi, A. (2016). A cultural evolution approach to digital media. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10(636). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00636
-
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton & Company.
-
Asbury, B. D. (2011). Anti-snitching norms and community loyalty. Oregon Law Review, 89(4), 1257–1311. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1491630
-
Bloom, P. (2010a). How do morals change? Nature, 464, 490. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/464490a
-
Bloom, P. (2010b). How pleasure works: The new science of why we like what we like. W. W. Norton & Company.
-
Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. The Belknap Press.
-
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. The University of Chicago Press.
-
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2009). Culture and the evolution of human cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1533), 3281–3288. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0134
-
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2011). The cultural niche: why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(2), 10918–10925. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1100290108
-
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. McGraw Hill.
-
Butler, P. (2004). Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop theory of punishment. Stanford Law Review, 56(5), 983–1016.
-
Camerer, C. F. (2003). Behavioral game theory: Experiments in strategic interaction. Princeton University Press & Russell Sage Foundation.
-
Carroll, J. (2004). Literary Darwinism: Evolution, human nature, and literature. Routledge.
-
Carroll, J. (2009). Literature as a Human Universal. In S. Winko, F. Jannidis, & G. Lauer (Eds.), Grenzen der Literatur: Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen (pp. 143–160). Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110210835.3.142
-
Chang, J. (2005). Can’t stop won’t stop: A history of the Hip-Hop generation. St. Martin’s Press.
-
Chudek, M., & Henrich, J. (2011). Culture-gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(5), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.03.003
-
Chvaja, R., & Řezníček, D. (2019). An integrative framework of commitment displays in religious systems. Human Ethology, 34, 41–52. https://doi.org/10.22330/he/34/041–052
-
Coombs, P. H. (1985). The world crisis in education: The view from the eighties. Oxford University Press.
-
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(issue), 148–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.01.005
-
de Waal, F. B. M. (2006). Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved. Princeton University Press.
-
Doris, J. M., & Moral Psychology Research Group. (2010). The moral psychology handbook. Oxford University Press.
-
Dunbar, R. M. I. (2010). How many friends does one person need? Dunbar’s number and other evolutionary quirks. Harvard University Press.
-
Dunbar, R. M. I. (2014). How conversations around campfires came to be. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), 14013–14014. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1416382111
-
Dunbar, R. M. I., Barrett, L., & Lycett, J. (2007). Evolutionary psychology: A beginner’s guide. One World.
-
Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, & human evolution. Bloomsbury.
-
Gottschall, J. (2012). The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
-
Gottschall, J., & Wilson, D. S. (2005). The literary animal: Evolution and the nature of narrative. Northwestern University Press.
-
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 55–130. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978–0-12–407236–407237.00002–00004
-
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141
-
Graham, J., Meindl, P., Beall, E., Johnson, K. M., & Zhang, L. (2016). Cultural differences in moral judgment and behavior, across and within societies. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 125–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.007
-
Graham, J., Nosek, B. a, Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847
-
Gray, K., Young, L., & Waytz, A. (2012). Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2012.651387
-
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/0033–295X.108.4.814
-
Haidt, J. (2012). Righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.
-
Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology, Volume 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 181–217).
-
Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211–007–0034-z
-
Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intutitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555
-
Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed., pp. 797–832). Wiley.
-
Hallam, S., Cross, I., & Thaut, M. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford handbook of music psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
-
Han, H., Kim, J., Jeong, C., & Cohen, G. L. (2017). Attainable and relevant moral exemplars are more effective than extraordinary exemplars in promoting voluntary service engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(283). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00283
-
Haun, D. B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Majority-biased transmission in chimpanzees and human children, but not orangutans. Current Biology, 22(8), 727–731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.006
-
Henrich, J. (2009). The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30(4), 244–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhum behav.2009.03.005
-
Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution domesticating our species. Princeton University Press.
-
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., & McElreath, R. (2001). In search of Homo economicus: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. American Economic Review, 91(2), 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.91.2.73
-
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Henrich, N. S., Hill, K., Gil-White, F., Gurven, M., Marlowe, F. W., Patton, J. Q., & Tracer, D. (2005). “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(6), 795–815. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X05000142
-
Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J. C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D., & Ziker, J. (2010). Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment. Science, 327(5972), 1480–1484. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1182238
-
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-00074
-
Henrich, J., & Tennie, C. (2017). Cultural evolution in chimpanzees and humans. In M. N. Muller, R. W. Wrangham, & D. R. Pilbeam (Eds.), Chimpanzees and Human Evolution (pp. 645–702). The Belknap Press.
-
Hill, K. (1993). Life history theory and evolutionary anthropology. Evolutionary Anthropology, 2(3), 78–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.1360020303
-
Hume, D. (1983). An enquiry concerning the principles of morals. Hackett Publishing.
-
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (1999). Social functions of emotions at four levels of analysis. Cognition and Emotion, 13(5), 505–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999399379168
-
Kendal, R. L., Boogert, N. J., Rendell, L., Laland, K. N., Webster, M., & Jones, P. L. (2018). Social learning strategies: Bridge-building between fields. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(7), 651–665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.04.003
-
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918
-
Knight, M. M. (2007). The five percenters: Islam, hip-hop and the gods of New York. One World.
-
Laland, K. N. (2004). Social learning strategies. Learning and Behavior, 32(1), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03196002
-
Lapsley, D., & Yeager, D. S. (2013). Moral-character education. In W. M. Reynolds & G. E. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of psychology, vol. 7: Educational psychology (pp. 147–177). Wiley.
-
Lockwood, P., & Kunda, Z. (1997). Superstars and me: Predicting the impact of role models on the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 91–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022–3514.73.1.91
-
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745–6924.2008.00073.x
-
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002
-
McWhorter, J. H. (2003). How hip-hop holds Blacks back. City Journal, 13(3).
-
Meindl, P., Quirk, A., & Graham, J. (2018). Best practices for school-based moral education. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732217747087
-
Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood. Wiley.
-
Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture & synthesize the social sciences. University of Chicago Press.
-
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Dunbar, R. M. I. (2006). A bias for social information in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology, 97(3), 405–423. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712605X85871
-
Miller, G. F. (2001). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Anchor Books.
-
Monin, B. (2007). Holier than me? Threatening social comparison in the moral domain. Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale, 20(1), 53–68.
-
Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 221–229. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562–018–0522–1
-
Natapoff, A. (2009). Snitching: Criminal informants and the erosion of American justice. New York University Press.
-
Neill, A. (2009). Fiction, the paradox of responding to. In S. Davies, K. M. Higgins, R. Hopkins, R. Stecker, & D. E. Cooper (Eds.), A Companion to Aesthetics: Second Edition (2nd ed., pp. 278–281). Wiley.
-
Nichols, S. (2002). On the genealogy of norms: A case for the role of emotion in cultural evolution. Philosophy of Science, 69(2), 234–255. https://doi.org/10.1086/341051
-
Nielsen. (2017). Nielsen Year-End Music Report U.S. Nielsen.
-
Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the south. Westview Press.
-
Oatley, K. (2008). The mind’s flight simulator. The Psychologist, 21(12), 1030–1032.
-
Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 618–628. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002
-
Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), e46–e54. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000064
-
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking Penguin.
-
Pizarro, D. A., Detweiler-Bedell, B., & Bloom, P. (2006). The creativity of everyday moral reasoning: Empathy, disgust, and moral persuasion. In J. C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds.), Creativity and reason in cognitive development (pp. 81–98). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606915.006
-
Rai, T. S., & Fiske, A. P. (2011). Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychological Review, 118(1), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021867
-
Rose, T. (2008). The Hip Hop wars. Basic Books.
-
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. Transaction Publishers.
-
Sarkissian, H., & Wright, J. C. (2014). Advances in experimental moral psychology. Bloomsbury.
-
Singer, P. (1981). The expanding circle: Ethics, evolution, and moral progress. Princeton University Press.
-
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (Ed.). (2008). Moral psychology, Volume 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity. The MIT Press.
-
Sosis, R. (2003). Why aren’t we all Hutterites? Costly signaling theory and religious behavior. Human Nature, 14(2), 91–127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-003-1000-6
-
Stubbersfield, J. M., Dean, L. G., Sheikh, S., Laland, K. N., & Cross, C. P. (2019). Social transmission favours the ‘morally good’ over the ‘merely arousing.’ Palgrave Communications, 5(70). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599–019–0269-y
-
Stubbersfield, J. M., Flynn, E. G., & Tehrani, J. J. (2017). Cognitive evolution and the transmission of popular narratives: A literature review and application to urban legends. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 1(1), 121–136.
-
Stubbersfield, J. M., Tehrani, J. J., & Flynn, E. G. (2015). Serial killers, spiders and cybersex: Social and survival information bias in the transmission of urban legends. British Journal of Psychology, 106(2), 288–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12073
-
Stubbersfield, J. M., Tehrani, J. J., & Flynn, E. G. (2017). Chicken tumours and a fishy revenge: Evidence for emotional content bias in the cumulative recall of urban legends. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 17(1–2), 12–26. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373–12342189
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2001). Food, foragers, and folklore: The role of narrative in human subsistence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(4), 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090–5138(01)00063–00060
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2005). Reverse-engineering narrative: Evidence of special design. In J. Gottschall & D. S. Wilson (Eds.), The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (pp. 177–196). Northwestern University Press.
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2006). Lions and tigers and bears: Predators as a folklore universal. In H. Friedrich, F. Jannidis, U. Klein, K. Mellmann, S. Metzger, & M. Willems (Eds.), Anthropology and social history: Heuristics in the study of literature (pp. 319–331). Mentis.
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2008). Narrative as social mapping: Case study: The trickster genre and the free rider problem. Ometeca, XII, 24–42.
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2011). The forager oral tradition and the evolution of prolonged juvenility. Frontiers in Psychology, 2(133). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00133
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2017a). Literary prehistory: The origins and psychology of storytelling. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Critical Approaches to Literature: Psychological (pp. 67–83). Salem Press.
-
Sugiyama, M. S. (2017b). Oral storytelling as evidence of pedagogy in forager societies. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(471). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00471
-
Sugiyama, M. S., & Sugiyama, L. S. (2012). “Once the child is lost he dies”: Monster stories vis- à -vis the problem of errant children. In E. Slingerland & M. Collard (Eds.), Creating consilience: Integrating the sciences and the humanities (pp. 351–371). Oxford University Press.
-
Sullivan, D. (2011). Keep on pushing: Black Power music from blues to hip-hop. Lawrence Hill Books.
-
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Harvard University Press.
-
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Does beauty build adapted minds? Toward an evolutionary theory of aesthetics, fiction, and the arts. SubStance, 30(1&2), 6–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2001.0017
-
White, M. (2011). The great big book of horrible things: The definite chronicle of history’s 100 worst atrocities. W. W. Norton & Company.
-
Wiessner, P. W. (2014). Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), 14027–14035. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404212111
-
Wilson, D. S. (2005). Evolutionary social constructivism. In J. Gottschall & D. S. Wilson (Eds.), Literary animal: Evolution and the nature of narrative (pp. 20–37). Northwestern University Press.
-
Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection – A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022–5193(75)90111–90113
-
Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. The Ohio State University Press.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 770 | 342 | 149 |
| Full Text Views | 15 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 30 | 3 | 0 |
“Black CNN”: Cultural Transmission of Moral Norms through Narrative Art
In: Journal of Cognition and CulturePh.D. Researcher, Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic
Search for other papers by Jan Horský in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
In recent debates in moral psychology and literary Darwinism, several authors suggested that narrative art plays a significant role in the process of the social learning of moral norms, functioning as storage of locally salient moral information. However, an integrative view, which would help explain the inner workings of this morally educative function of narrative art, is still lacking. This paper provides such a unifying theoretical account by bringing together insights from moral psychology (concerning the non-reflective nature of moral cognition), educational sciences (concerning different types of settings and methods of moral learning), cognitive/evolutionary narratology (concerning how easy narrative art lends itself to the transmission of moral information), and cultural evolution (concerning different types of learning strategies/biases in relation to narrative art). A study of contemporary American rap music is included to showcase the benefits of this integrative approach in the context of one particular type of narrative art.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 770 | 342 | 149 |
| Full Text Views | 15 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 30 | 3 | 0 |