Abstract
Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions are by-products of the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictions adaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen as entertainment technologies that is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner.
Highlights
Narrative fictions are the hallmark of modern culture
Under the same rationale as we used for other sources of variability, we propose that adaptive phenotypic plasticity is a major causal explanation for the cultural evolution of fictions across time and for the cultural distribution of fictions across countries developments (Baumard et al, 2021; Dubourg et al, 2021d; Martins and Baumard, 2021)
We hypothesized that narrative fictions are neither adaptations nor by-products: they are entertainment technologies, that is, crafted cultural items that producers create to attract the attention of the consumers, entertain them, and fulfill other evolutionary-relevant goals
Summary
Narrative fictions are the hallmark of modern culture. People all around the world spend an enormous and growing amounts of time consuming them, in the forms of novels, films, TV series, video games, manga, or theatre plays. The proposed evolutionary functions are not specific to fictional narratives It is not clear why humans would need to evolve fictions to regulate their emotions, transmit information, or forecast the future because evolving fiction would not be the most straightforward way to do that. The other hypothesis posits that narrative fictions are by-products, and did not evolve through natural selection Within this framework, it is argued that fictions co-opt pre-existing cognitive capacities and preferences that evolved in the human mind for no reasons related to fictions, and that this explanation is sufficient to explain the existence, universality, and pervasiveness of fictions in human cultures. We propose a middle-ground solution that explains why the existence of fiction is adaptively plausible, for both the producers and the consumers, and why the content of fiction is so well tuned to the human mind
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
