New Research Project: Sensitivity to Threat Narratives by Memetic Doxastic Replicator Uptake

Abstract 4 (Draft) : We want to measure sensitivity of different personality types to memetic threat narratives, or threat memes, with additional categories for political alignment and ideo-cultural disposition. Specifically of interest is the propensity to perceive symbolic and physical threat from out groups based upon narratives about those groups, plus memetic replicators possessed by participants. The objective is to determine the extent to which different personality types, when factorially combined with political alignment, religious disposition, and ideology, are prone to feel a sense of symbolic threat, and when they are prone to experience physical threat.

Method (Draft): Multiple independent variables and a factorial ANOVA (probably 5x2 or 5x2x3. This is yet to be determined.) More than one factorial ANOVA experiment might be necessary. It is yet to be determined if any controls are needed within groups or subjects for age, gender, or other demographics. It's likely that there would be maturation effects in a longitudinal study focused upon the predictor variables in question.

We define narratives using an information theoretic approach, according to which a narrative is a set of heterogeneous sources that are typed according to accompanying heterogeneous information types (not to be confused with computer data types.) We classify a memetic threat narrative using an information-theoretic source-centric conception of narratives. According to our model a (Dawkinsian) meme is an intragroup, intergroup, and intersubjectively transmissible semantic and doxastic content module which is grounded in a set of internal and external information sources and transmitted symbols. We defer in large part to the pre-theory of Sebastian Sequoia-Grayson for the basis of transmission of doxastic content, or the content of agent doxastic states, with information flow based loosely upon Dretske’s Xerox principle, but allowing for partial transmission (Sequoiah-Grayson, 2009). We define memes as heterogeneous semantic information source sets that supervene upon information source sets. The approach based on agent doxastic states is more appropriate than the logic of group epistemic updating because we are interested in the doxastic commitments and epistemic beliefs of the participants, rather than analysing when participants know something. It’s assent – not knowledge – and the accompanying sensitivities, that are in question.

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