How do people make decisions about their preferences? We examine how others’ opinions affect one’s decisions. In Experiment 1, we found that popular online news stories were not inherently interesting, suggesting that something other than the content of the stories was driving people’s liking of the stories. In Experiments 2 and 3, we manipulated information about how previous readers rated the...

The linguistic fund, that is, the actual lexical inventory of a language, is always considerably larger than the sum total of the contents of dictionaries for that language. It corresponds to all the possibilities of derivation and compounding-with the associated word-formation rules. The exploitation of the latter. within machine-readable dictionaries should therefore allow a far more accurate...

Preschool-aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real-world situations. We examined children's transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½- to 5½-year-old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about re...

This paper challenges claims made by Scrum proponents when characterising the communicative nature of user stories: including being more 'authentic' because they comprise spoken language and that they are stories. We argue and decisively demonstrate that neither can be upheld. By incorrectly characterising user stories, we miss opportunities to understand what they are and how they work during ...

When is a story just a story? When is a story much more than a story? When is the story we think we know obscuring a much richer story? These questions and more lay at the root of my lifelong quest to understand the power of story. Growing up in a southern rural community, I learned the art of storytelling from my family and neighbors. I often heard with some admiration, “She sure is a good sto...

one of the most important reasons for the success of literary figure is his sufficient use of story elements such as characterization, plot, point of view, symbols. this study critically analyses the different literary elements in naguib mahfouz’s famous collection of short stories, “the infamous house” consisting of 18 stories.  at first, we offer a definition of the short story as a genre and...

of the most outstanding features of iranian folk stories, which had not been precisely scrutinized, are their meaningful deep links with the archetypes in the stories of the prophets, and the reiteration or reproduction of the events of their lives. in such context, three types of roles can be considered for the prophets in these stories are: 1) their active and leading role in the process of t...