An Experimental Analysis of Folklore and Culture

Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference on New Trends in Social Sciences

Year: 2022

DOI:

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An Experimental Analysis of Folklore and Culture

Toshinari Baba

 

ABSTRACT: 

Bruner (1990) mentioned that those who shared the same meaning of a word were the members of the same culture. He also said that small children learnt the meaning of a word from parents first. Naturally, children firstly became the members of the culture their parents belonged to. Based on his claim, we experimentally tested the effect of a culture on people’s actions. We collected survey data of Grade 4-12 students who read one of two versions of a folklore, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” which had two extreme endings. We analyzed the data by using multiple regressions and 2-way ANOVA to examine the effect of different endings on subjects’ actions about helping others. While the variable representing different endings was not significant, the variable which reflected culture which a subject was a member of was significant. This implies the culture influenced a subject’s action and it was in line with Bruner. Elementary school teachers can use our outcomes as effective learning methods for young students to teach morals and ethics.

keywords: Culture, meaning, narrative, experiments, empirical analysis.