Cultural complexity and demography: The case of folktales

Acerbi, A.; Kendal, J.; Tehrani, J.J.

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.03.005

Cultural complexity and demography: The case of folktales

Acerbi, A.; Kendal, J.; Tehrani, J.J.

Authors

A. Acerbi

Dr Jeremy Kendal jeremy.kendal@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Professor Jamshid Tehrani jamie.tehrani@durham.ac.uk
Head Of Department

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between cultural complexity and population size in a non-technological cultural domain for which we have suitable quantitative records: folktales. We define three levels of complexity for folk narratives: the number of tale types, the number of narrative motifs, and, finally, the number of traits in variants of the same type, for two well-known tales for which we have data from previous studies. We found a positive relationship between number of tale types and population size, a negative relationship for the number of narrative motifs, and no relationship for the number of traits. The absence of a consistent relationship between population size and complexity in folktales provides a novel perspective on the current debates in cultural evolution. We propose that the link between cultural complexity and demography could be domain dependent: in some domains (e.g. technology) this link is important, whereas in others, such as folktales, complex traditions can be easily maintained in small populations as well as large ones, as they may appeal to universal cognitive biases.

Citation

Acerbi, A., Kendal, J., & Tehrani, J. (2017). Cultural complexity and demography: The case of folktales. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(4), 474-480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.03.005

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 27, 2017
Online Publication Date	Mar 30, 2017
Publication Date	Mar 30, 2017
Deposit Date	Mar 31, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Mar 30, 2018
Journal	Evolution and Human Behavior
Print ISSN	1090-5138
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	38
Issue	4
Pages	474-480
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.03.005
Related Public URLs	https://osf.io/vtv63/

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2017 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/