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A four-year old uses the fable of the boy who cried wolf to explain to his dad why he should stop pretending being hurt when they are roughhousing. A mother uses the story of the grasshopper who sang all summer to explain to her daughter why she ought to save her pennies. An entrepreneur describes his new product as the goose that lays the golden egg.

Folk tales and fables are deeply influential in building our world views. And yet although researchers today have terabytes of data at their disposal, from millions of tweets to data-centers full of information on what consumers will click on, folklore remains almost entirely unstudied by economists—or indeed, any experts other than folklore scholars themselves.

Yet economists over the last two decades have come to realize that there can be enormous value in studying different cultures’ various beliefs and attitudes, and investigating the historical roots of these differences. The problem economists face is how to proceed in the quantitative mode to which they’re accustomed. For example, Robert Shiller (2017) points out that, despite the central role of stories in motivating and connecting activities to deeply felt values and needs, our understanding is at best superficial, and calls for quantitative work to shed light on the relationship between narratives and economic fluctuations. The main obstacle? A lack of comprehensive datasets.

Fortunately, a folklorist has now come to the rescue. The eminent anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin shared his lifetime work, a unique catalogue coding the spatial distribution of thousands of motifs across roughly 1,000 indigenous societies worldwide. This means we now have data on thousands of customs, myths, legends, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.

Looking at this data, we did three things that reveal the tremendous potential of oral traditions for economists and political scientists interested in comparative development and culture.

First, we did a text analysis. Among other things, we found that groups whose folklore has a higher intensity of earthquake-related motifs live closer to earthquake-prone regions, those found on fertile lands display more motifs related to agriculture, and finally those residing in areas more often struck by thunderstorms have more motifs rationalizing this natural phenomenon. We also explored how a group’s mode of subsistence and institutional complexity (elements often known from the ethnographic record) can be glimpsed from the tales narrated. Kings and Queens are often featured in tales of institutionally complex pre-industrial societies, while motifs about hunting abound among groups that rely on foraging. These patterns suggest that folklore can aid us improve our understanding of group characteristics for which we already have some information and, crucially, help us quantify aspects for which we know little, like the importance of the market economy.

Second, we tried to go deeper, to look not only at the physical and economic environment but to get a sense of people’s inner lives. We used two psychosocial dictionaries which have been widely used in linguistics, psychology, and sociology and mapped them to our folklore dataset. For example, social scientists have long hypothesized that pastoral environments (e.g., groups that rely on herding animals) favor a psychological phenotype that is sensitive to honor and prone to aggression, compared to horticultural environments (e.g., groups that stay in one place and raise crops) where the opposite psychological profile is favored. Is the culture of honor reflected in the oral tradition of pastoral societies? We find that pastoralists’ folklore does feature disproportionately more motifs depicting anger and themes involving the main character taking revenge.

Here’s another example, of how social arrangements reverberate in a group’s oral tradition. Specifically, we found that societies organized along extended family lines (basically societies where family members including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives, all live nearby or in one household) feature family members in their folk tales much more frequently compared to groups organized along nuclear families. And in groups where folklore has more images and motifs about family, people today are more likely to report high levels of trust towards their family. Level of familial trust has been linked by other scholars to issues like political attitudes and demand for labor markets regulations; we hope that future research will be able to build on our work by finding connections between folklore and these political-economic issues.

Finally, we looked at the intensity of rule-following norms among centralized societies’ folklore. This inquiry was motivated by the question whether strong institutions crowd in or crowd out law-abiding norms. Across politically complex societies, motifs on deference towards authorities and respect for tradition abound—suggesting that across the globe, cultural narratives of respect and deference and formal institutions go in tandem.

And these narratives seem to matter for how people think today. Specifically, we find that individuals belonging to groups whose oral traditions have more images and episodes on respect towards authority are systematically more likely today to condemn instances of anti-social behavior, like exploiting government benefits, cheating on taxes, or accepting a bribe. Similarly, survey respondents whose folklore has images of retaliation and anger are more likely to say that the use of violence is justifiable. This suggests that folklore itself may be one of the vehicles via which culture is vertically transmitted across generations.

We hope that this study will be a springboard for further research. The continuity between contemporary children’s books and the folk tales and myths of one’s ancestors is remarkable, and could be a measure of the rate at which historical norms are inter-generationally transmitted. Given the versatility of folklore as a vehicle of obtaining a unique (and perhaps our only) view of our oral cultural heritage, we hope it will be widely used among scholars interested in the historical origins of comparative development, culture, and beyond.

Stelios Michalopoulos is an Associate Professor of Economics at Brown University. Melanie Xue is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University.