Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What determines which stories (or parts of stories) about the social world are captured and conveyed by children? How do they transform with retelling? We use an iterated learning paradigm to explore how peer-to-peer transmission of explanatory stories (here, explanations for the social customs of novel social groups) is influenced by explanatory framework (natural, supernatural, or hybrid) and children's existing belief systems. Our participants were 69 Hindu and Muslim 3rd-7th-graders in Gujarat, India. Consistent with the `minimally counterintuitive' nature of many highly culturally preserved concepts, hybrid explanations (containing both natural and supernatural elements) were transmitted with the greatest fidelity across chains. Individual religiosity also affected transmission: children who reported themselves as more religious transmitted scientific explanations less faithfully (and hybrid explanations more faithfully) than less religious children.