While narratives have shaped cognition and cultures for centuries, digital media and online social networks have introduced new narrative phenomena. With increased narrative agency, networked groups of individuals can directly contribute and steer narratives that center our collective discussions of politics, science, and morality. We report the results of an online network experiment on narrative and hashtag generation, in which networked groups of participants interpreted a text-based narrative of a disaster event, and were incentivized to produce matching hashtags with their network neighbors. We found that network structure not only influences the emergence of dominant beliefs through coordination with network neighbors, but also impacts participants' use of causal language in their personal narratives.

翻译：尽管叙事几个世纪以来一直塑造着认知与文化，数字媒体与在线社交网络却催生了新的叙事现象。随着叙事能动性的增强，网络化的个体群体能够直接参与并引导那些聚焦于政治、科学和道德等集体讨论的叙事。我们报告了一项关于叙事与话题标签生成的在线网络实验结果：在网络化分组的参与者中，他们对一则基于文本的灾难事件叙事进行解读，并被激励与网络邻居产生匹配的话题标签。研究发现，网络结构不仅通过与网络邻居的协调影响主导信念的涌现，还会影响参与者在个人叙事中对因果性语言的使用。