Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a research framework that formalizes how, when, andwhy ...

People are narrative animals. As children, our caretakers immerse us in stories: fairy tales, made-up stories, favorite stories, "Read me a story!" Even when barely verbal, we begin to tell our own proto-stories. "Phoebe! Pizza! Phoebe! Pizza!" was the excited story of a 2-year-old friend Addie when one of us happened to arrive simultaneously with the pizza delivery man. This story means, appro...

Social media has now become the de facto information source on real world events. The challenge, however, due to the high volume and velocity nature of social media streams, is in how to follow all posts pertaining to a given event over time – a task referred to as story detection. Moreover, there are often several different stories pertaining to a given event, which we refer to as sub-stories ...

Fictional information presents a unique challenge to the developing child. Children must learn when it is appropriate to transfer information from the fictional space to the real world and what contextual cues should be considered in this decision. The current research explores children’s causal inferences between fictional representations and reality by examining their developing sensitivity t...

Fabulists, from Aesop to Walt Disney, have employed animal characters to play human-like roles in their stories. The success of these stories suggests that people are willing to take a sharper look at the foibles of their own species if they pretend to see them in other creatures. In this paper, I confess a similar motivation. The paper is motivated by the evolution of food-hoarding behavior in...

The new social media sites — blogs, wikis, Flickr and Digg, among others — underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. Digg is a social news aggregator which allows users to submit links to, vote on and discuss news stories. Each day Digg selects a handful of stories to feature on its front pag...