Narrative Networks, Social Identity and Complexity in Collective Action

I recently gave a NSF sponsored talk at Duke Computer Science in conjunction with the HarambeeNet SocialNets in Education Project.  I raised the question regarding the evolution of cooperative behavior beyond a certain level of social complexity and suggested that successful collective action might depend on identity-promoting institutional design, which itself would depend on coherent narrative.  In essence, our tendency for cooperative behavior could have co-evolved with our penchant for storytelling.  And storytelling provides the relative speed of cultural evolution and an efficient means of reducing behavioral space in response to the frame problem described in an earlier post.  The full slide deck is available here.