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DARPA Wants To Know How Stories Influence People
coondoggie writes "DARPA in a nutshell wants to know how stories or narratives influence human behavior. To this end, they are hosting a workshop called 'Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts,' on Feb. 28th to discuss the topic. 'Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency," DARPA stated.'"
Stories are often a delivery method for propaganda (even the good-safe-happy Aesop kind), and almost any bit of propaganda can be framed into a narrative story. The effects and influence of propaganda campaigns have been studied well previously. Start there.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
... want to tell better stories? Or study the mythology of a culture to better understand their thinking? The former is a difficult problem, as attempting to inject new tales into a group is difficult. Aesop isn't writing any new fables, so anything unfamiliar or that doesn't jive with the established culture will stand out. The latter is a worthwhile endeavor. Many of our f*ckups in dealing with various groups stem from our cultural insensitivity. If we can learn to understand them based on their folklore, we may end up not falling on our faces quite as often.
Have gnu, will travel.
People apparently watch Fox news and believe everything they are told. I think it's some kind of witch craft, probably Obama's fault too.
"Darmok, and Jalad... at Tanagra!"
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
"Once upon a time, in a suburb of the capital of a large and powerful nation, there was a little agency called DARPA. DARPA was hard working and industrious and friendly and valuable to the nation, but DARPA lacked all the funding it needed! Oh, what was DARPA to do?"
Why are they spending tax payers money for what is already known and available through any field of story writing, be it fiction or fact or some combination?
If there is any urgency it only because the near 7 billion people on this planet are starting to wise up to the less than 1% fabricating crap that causes problems for the rest of us. Ultimately we all are not going to need or be able to afford the ongoing BS produced by politicians and control freaks of war game players Instead those wasted resources on destructive technology can be far more effective in fixing real world problems and hence greatly reducing motivations of war and terrorism and... bla bla bla destructive fabrications for the self supported dependencies of the addicted to the mental handicap of having a lack of morals and ethics. And there can be plenty left over to put them into rehab for life.
What the World Wants, but not the mentally handicapped control freaks otherwise it'd already be happening.
What we have instead is even more on defense for 2011 than shown HERE
It's a code. If you spell it backwards and remove the 'y' you get TEN ROTS. This is obviously telling us that these 'stories' they want to come up with will really be secret messages encoded in ROT10. I've probably said too much.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I worked for the local university, which had a sweet tuition remission policy. I ended up taking classes in anything I was interested in, hopping from college to college. Linguistics, American Studies, Film Studies, lots of literature, some sociology and anthropology... After a few years of this, the university sent me a letter demanding that I declare a degree and f'ing graduate already, or they wouldn't let me take any more classes.
The course load was so varied that it was hard for me to shoehorn it into a single field. I had to figure out what tied them all together.
I realized that I had been studying the ways the stories and cultures interact and affect each other. Lots of semiotics, language, and that sort of idea encoding, but also study of cultural reactions and re-manifestations of stories to "fit the times." Propaganda was a big part of that. (I declared the program in early 2001. That September, I discovered a wealth of research material.)
There was no discrete program to fit that into, but there *was* the catch-all "University Studies" degree: a sort of roll-your-own program that, if you could make a case for hanging your classes together somehow, you could graduate.
I call my degree "Propaganda Studies" for my own amusement, I work in I.T. to pay the bills... but now I can go apply at DARPA! Fat government research grant, here I come!
Their goal is to formalize the study of stories so that they can develop quantitative methods of tracking understanding stories. Whenever a new plant is "discovered" there are a bunch of people like you who say "well, the natives already knew of it". Yes, everyone knows about stories. But there is not a formal scientific approach to dealing with them, so they have a lot of untapped potential from a social engineering perspective. It's like building a bridge without a quantitative approach to design. Yes, people did it for thousands of years, but once they figured out the science behind it they got a lot better at it. DARPA is hoping they can achieve the same thing for stories.
Their intent is to use this for military applications, but it's better than bombs, right? I'd rather fight wars through stories, honesty.