EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES LAB

We focus on two connected topics: story telling and empathy.
 

Narratives are essential to who we are as humans. We orient ourselves in the world by means of stories, gossip, and narrative thinking. 

Guided by narratives, we form our identities, join groups, make decisions concerning belief, act, love, and experience emotions. 

And narratives allow us to share our experiences with others. As homo narrans, we are able to co-experience the past or fiction with others. 

Our lab aims to make sense of stories, fiction, empathy, polarization, and emotions wherever they occur.

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The lab is a creative place with many different projects. We employ a wide range of methods. Any team member can lead a project. And we all want to enjoy what we do. If you want to find out more, contact us or join us.  

We recently published the largest largest retelling study to date with close to 20,000 retellings and 12,800 participants (Breithaupt, Li, & Kruschke, “Serial reproduction of narratives preserves emotional appraisals,” Cognition & Emotion, 2022). In this and other studies, we found that four emotions survived retellings with little change in intensity over three generations, while length, facts, and causal structure of the stories deteriorated.

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Breaking news: Fritz' new book, The narrative Brain is the Science Book of the Year 2023! 

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