Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends

This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basi s of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust ). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disg ust, Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in d isgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest l evel of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produ ce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that leg ends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urb an legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional sel ection for the social marketplace of ideas.