  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.
