The epic scientific quest to reveal what makes folktales so compelling

Once upon a time, a strong, attractive hero lost one or both of his parents. He then overcame a series of obstacles and faced off against a monster that had terrorised his community. The hero vanquished the monster and was celebrated.

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is the road travelled by Superman, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and countless other fictional heroes stretching back centuries. Its enduring appeal has puzzled researchers for nearly as long. However, in recent years, the study of storytelling has been revitalised, as linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution have begun probing the subject using large databases of myths and folktales, powerful algorithms and an evolutionary mindset. We are finally starting to get answers to key questions, including what makes a good story, why some are more enduring than others and exactly how far back we can trace the roots of the most popular ones – as well as how stories have traversed time and space.

It is an epic quest, but there has never been a better time to undertake it. Unlike the Brothers Grimm and other early folktale collectors, modern surveyors of storytelling needn’t do painstaking fieldwork – they don’t even have to stray from their computer screens to chart the emergence and evolution of stories. “Social media is almost a natural experiment in storytelling that, through its very platform, does the collection,” says folklorist and ethnographer Timothy Tangherlini at the University of California, Berkeley. What’s more, this new scientific approach can illuminate some phenomena that appear to be modern,…