Transmission is reconstruction rather than copying, so repeated retelling pulls representations toward forms the mind finds easy to hold, whatever the original was.
Sperber's epidemiology of representations replaces the copying metaphor: each recipient rebuilds the idea from a partial cue, and the rebuild is biased toward what is memorable, inferable and emotionally salient. Stability across a population therefore needs no fidelity, and a story will drift toward the same shape in unrelated traditions because it is drifting toward the same attractor.
In practice
- A policy explained accurately at the top is, four levels down, the version that was easiest to remember.
- A rumour retold twenty times converges on a tidier and more shocking story than the event.