Folklore.

ABSTRACT: Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by word of mouth. We introduce to economics a unique catalog of oral traditions spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalog's content by showing that the groups' motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present two sets of applications. First, we illustrate how to fill in the gaps and expand upon a group's ethnographic record, focusing on political complexity, high gods, and trade. Second, we discuss how machine learning and human classification methods can help shed light on cultural traits, using gender roles, attitudes toward risk, and trust as examples. Societies with tales portraying men as dominant and women as submissive tend

SUBMITTER: Michalopoulos S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8505355 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature