Folklore in 1000 societies: Communities with low tolerance towards antisocial behavior, captured by the prevalence of tricksters getting punished, are more trusting and prosperous today

Folklore. Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue. NBER Working Paper No. 25430. January 2019, Revised January 2021. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25430/w25430.pdf

Abstract: Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed  through the generations by word of mouth. We introduce to economics a unique catalogue of oral traditions spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalogue’s content by showing that the groups’ motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present two sets of applications. First, we illustrate how to fill in the gaps and expand upon a group’s ethnographic record, focusing on political complexity, high gods, and trade. Second, we discuss how machine learning and human-classification methods can help shed light on cultural traits, using gender roles, attitudes towards risk, and trust as examples. Societies with tales portraying men as dominant and women as submissive tend to relegate their women to subordinate positions in their communities, both historically and today. More risk-averse and less entrepreneurial people grew up listening to stories where competitions and challenges are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Communities with low tolerance towards antisocial behavior, captured by the prevalence of tricksters getting punished, are more trusting and prosperous today. These patterns hold across groups, countries, and second- generation immigrants. Overall, the results highlight the significance of folklore in cultural economics, calling for additional applications.

JEL No. N00,Z1,Z13

6 Concluding Remarks

Narratives are essential building blocks of our society. We introduce to economics a unique catalogue of oral traditions across approximately 1; 000 groups. After validating folkloreís content showing that episodes in a groupís oral tradition reáect its geographic and social attributes as articulated in the ethnographic record, we undertake a series of applications illustrating how to extract information from folklore. In the Örst set, we illustrate how to Öll in the gaps and expand upon a groupís ethnographic record. In the second set, we discuss how machine learning and human-classiÖcation methods can help shed light on ancestral norms. Our initial examination indicates a striking consistency between values derived from folklore and contemporary attitudes related to trust, risk-taking, and gender norms. Images and episodes in folklore appear to endure and, possibly, still shape how individuals perceive the world today. 

Next Steps

We view this study as a springboard for further research. The Önding that folklore-based measures of the economy and the polity correspond to what we know from ethnographers suggests that we can obtain more precise estimates of a groupís heritage by combining the two sources. Lowering the measurement error in the historical record will allow us to revisit and better understand our societiesílegacies and their consequences. One related idea is to use folklore to Öll in the EA and SCCS gaps for the universe of recorded traits along the lines described in Section 4. Moreover, one can utilize folklore to derive bilateral measures of cultural proximity, see Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009), or explore how di§erent geographical traits and historical events ináuence the content of oral traditions. For example, what do groups located in malaria-prone regions, fertile territories, or rugged terrains "talk" about? Similarly, what are the distinctive themes in the folklore of groups that have experienced disruptions from slavery, epidemics, forced migrations, and colonization? This approach would allow testing famous conjectures in anthropology including the "culture of honor" proposed by Goldschmidt and Edgerton in 1971 and "the original a­ uent society hypothesis" by Sahlins (1972).

 There is a long list of contemporary values and attitudes in regional and global surveys that we have not covered, including patience, aspirations, reciprocity, attitudes towards violence, strangers, the elderly, the community, the importance of imagination, obedience, independence, hard work, honesty, etc. We hope that the roadmap provided here can help trace these values in the respective oral traditions. Obtaining folklore-based measures of these attitudes may help us better understand the cultural traits that are stable over time.

Another avenue of future research relates to how motifs and concepts have traveled across oral traditions. Some motifs appear to be universal, whereas others are found in a handful of folklore traditions. Is there a pattern in the content of localized versus universal narratives? Moreover, the multiplicity of charactersíattributes in a given motif and oral tradition (at least as classiÖed by humans) may convey important information about the richness and the ambiguity of the charactersí personality. This within-oral tradition diversity in attitudes may provide a way to gauge the degree of áexibility in the norms transmitted intergenerationally. It would also be interesting to explore how the individual characteristics of those reading and classifying the motifs may systematically predict how a given motif is perceived. Finally, we posit that the degree of continuity in the narratives between contemporary childrenís books and the folktales and myths of the respective societies is a direct measure of the rate at which ancestral norms are intergenerationally transmitted.

 Given the versatility of folklore as a vehicle for obtaining a unique (and perhaps our only) view of our ancestral cultural heritage, we expect it to be useful to scholars interested in the historical origins of comparative development, social psychology, culture, and beyond.