Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies. Edgar Dubourg and Nicolas Baumard. Front. Psychol., March 1 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.786770
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.
See also Why imaginary worlds? Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of fictions with imaginary worlds in modern societies. Edgar Dubourg. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/06/fictions-with-imaginary-worlds-should.html.
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A Specific Kind of Technologies: Entertainment Technologies
The Centrality of Entertainment in Fictions
Literary theorists and historians have long noticed the cross-culturally recurrent and entertaining features of fictions (which have also been called “themes,” “tropes,” or “patterns”) such as adventures, conflicts, love stories, imaginary worlds, monsters, gossip, authority, success, and the search of social status (Kato and Saunders, 1985, p. 232; Pavel, 1986, pp. 147–148; Campbell, 1993; Schaeffer, 1999, p. 241; Huang, 2001, pp. 60–61; Hogan, 2003; Booker, 2004). Evolutionary critics in the humanities and evolutionary social scientists brought evidence that such universal fictional features are influenced by the evolutionary history of the human mind (Carroll, 1995; Gottschall, 2008; Fisher and Salmon, 2012; Saad, 2012; Grodal, 2017). More recently, as we have seen in section The By-product Hypothesis (and the Problem of Fitness Benefits), these cross-cultural features have been linked to specific cognitive preferences (Table 1). In all, there seems to be a large and interdisciplinary consensus to say that narrative fictions include attractive and entertaining features. The question therefore is: Why are such features attractive and entertaining to the human mind?
We contend that such pleasurable features of fictions are very close to what evolutionary biologists called superstimuli (Tinbergen, 1969; Barrett, 2010). Many studies show that some species, in the course of their evolutionary history, recycled pre-existing attractive traits for new evolutionary relevant functions such as attracting mates (Lorenz, 1966; Krebs and Dawkins, 1978; Basolo, 1990; Ryan et al., 1990). For instance, because the female frog Physalaemus pustulosus had developed preferences for lower-frequency chuck sounds, males evolved the ability to produce such sounds to tap into this sensory preference (Ryan et al., 1990).
In nonhuman animals, this recycling of preexisting preferences usually emerges through biological selection. In humans, it can emerge through cultural evolution: producers use their expertise to target and refine stimuli that are already appealing to consumers (Lightner et al., 2022), so as to fulfill fitness relevant goals (Singh, 2020). We will explain what these goals are in the next sub-section.
We therefore argue that content features in fictions are superstimuli: they are crafted to resemble stimuli that were already appealing to the human mind, because of the natural selection of attention-orienting cognitive mechanisms, and of the pleasure systems rewarding the behavior of paying attention to such stimuli. This is a form of what psychologists have called “content-based attraction,” when the attraction and prevalence of a cultural item is favored by its content (Sperber, 1996; Claidière and Sperber, 2007; Scott-Phillips et al., 2018).
A question follows: Why are such stimuli attention-grabbing in the first place (in the real world)? This is where we fall back on the by-product hypothesis: such preferences for some stimuli (e.g., social information) evolved because humans endowed with them survived and reproduced better in the ancestral environments when the human cognition evolved.
In evolutionary and cognitive approaches to fictional content, superstimuli have already been studied in fictional texts (Jobling, 2001; Nettle, 2005a,b; Singh, 2019), in movies (Cutting et al., 2011; Andrews, 2012; Clasen, 2012; Cutting, 2016, 2021; Sobchuk and Tinits, 2020), in video games (Jansz and Tanis, 2007; Mendenhall et al., 2010), in artistic representations (Verpooten and Nelissen, 2010, 2012), and in cross-media approaches to fiction (Grodal, 2010; Barrett, 2016; Dubourg and Baumard, 2021). Let us note that such fictional superstimuli can be narrative superstimuli (e.g., how Marcel in Search of Lost Time reaches prestige), visual superstimuli (e.g., the form of Mickey), auditory superstimuli (e.g., the terrifying sounds in horror films), and other sensory superstimuli (e.g., the sense of control in open-world video games or in virtual reality games). Producers of fictions use any means available to them to make the most attention-grabbing superstimuli and therefore the most entertaining fictions.
Of course, the pleasure-inducing effect elicited by superstimuli in fictions is also elicited by some other cultural behavior and products, such as sport and news (Barrett, 2010, 2016). This is because the fiction industry is not the only one to target entertainment. However, the presence of superstimuli successfully isolate fiction from non-fiction, because superstimuli are never included in non-fictional narratives: the obligation to (try to) stick to real facts prevent, to a large extent, producers of non-fictional narratives to invent and exaggerate any feature (or else their epistemic reputation might suffer, and the benefits of attracting other people’s attention would be overweighted by the reputational costs of having deceived their audience). We contend that such a distinction is intuitive to consumers: they will continue to consume and positively evaluate fictions that they take pleasure from, while they will either stop consuming or negatively evaluate fictions that deceive the expectation to be entertained. Conversely, when they consume non-fictional narratives, such as a philosophical treatise, a political essay, or an history documentary, their primary goal is to learn things, so that they will not stop consuming the non-fiction if they are not entertained, and they will not base their evaluation on this criterion.
The Fitness Consequences of Entertainment Technologies
Why would producing fictions be adaptive? With the entertainment hypothesis, this question is the same as the following one: Why would attracting the attention of other people by inventing entertaining cultural items should bring any fitness benefit? We propose that, because they are highly attractive and entertaining, fictions can be used to fulfill any evolutionary relevant goal that needs others’ attention to be caught, be it signaling one’s values to potential mates (Miller, 2001) or cooperative partners (Bourdieu, 2010; André et al., 2020; André and Baumard, 2020; Dubourg et al., 2021b; Lightner et al., 2022), transmitting knowledge (Schniter et al., 2018; Nakawake and Sato, 2019; Sugiyama, 2021b), communicating social norms (Mar and Oatley, 2008; Ferrara et al., 2019), or selling products (Saad and Gill, 2000; Saad, 2012).
Consistently, narrative fictions seem to have been used (1) as recruitment technologies: they allow the producers of fictions to attract and potentially cooperate with individuals that matter to them, by signaling one’s qualities (e.g., their competence, their moral sense, and their intelligence) and therefore enhancing one’s reputation as a cooperative partner (Sperber and Baumard, 2012). For instance, in many countries at most time in history, cultural institutions and organizations aimed at spotlighting the producers of fictions, from the poetry contests (uta-awase) in Japan from the Heian period to the modern Nobel Prize in Literature and movie Academy Awards. Narrative fictions are also obviously used to (2) derive economic or material gains. This is clearly pictured in the form fiction production and fiction consumption took in large-scale societies, that of a massive (and highly lucrative) contract-based market.
Crucially, such adaptive goals need not be conscious or deliberate. They need not be the only motivations either: drawing on adaptive hypotheses that we reviewed in section State of the Current Hypotheses, producers of fictions can have other goals, such as transmitting knowledge (Sugiyama, 2021a). The association between both motivations of educating and entertaining people has produced a new form of cultural devices called “Edutainment” (Singhal, 2004; Anikina and Yakimenko, 2015), which we argue has emerged far back in human cultural history, embedding not only recent fictions (e.g., Dora the Explorer), but also ancient folktales (Sugiyama, 2021b) and other literary forms such as pre-17th century European fairy tales.
According to this hypothesis, narrative fictions are sustained because they confer fitness benefits to the consumers too. First, let us note that the opportunity costs of fiction consumption seem rather low because people do not seem to consume fictions at the expense of other more “evolutionary relevant” activities such as sleeping, eating, and parenting. On the other hand, consumers can use fictions they liked to signal their skills (Veblen, 1899; Bourdieu, 1979; Lizardo, 2006, 2013). They can also use more culturally successful fictions they liked to signal their personality traits (Dubourg et al., 2021a), or to share cultural focal points for social coordination (Dubourg et al., 2021b,c). Besides, human minds have evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms to detect and use social markers for coordination (Nettle and Dunbar, 1997; Boyer, 2018). We propose that preferences for fictions have become relatively important markers in the ecology of modern cultural diversity, because of their signaling potential.
Summary of the Hypothesis
In all, we propose that humans did not specifically evolve the capacity to tell fictional stories, but they rather produce fictions thanks to a range of other adaptations (e.g., language, the capacity to simulate, Theory of Mind, and communicative inferences; Zunshine, 2006; Mellmann, 2012; Wilson, 2018). Yet, we do not consider fictions as “by-products,” because they clearly confer fitness benefits to the producers (André et al., 2020). We argue that fictions are “entertainment technologies” (Dubourg and Baumard, 2021): they are crafted by storytellers to artificially attract the attention of other people and then fulfill evolutionary-relevant goals (Singh, 2020). Obviously, fictions are not the only example of entertainment technologies. Sport, TV shows (Barrett, 2010, 2016), music (Dubourg et al., 2021a), and performing arts (Verpooten and Nelissen, 2010, 2012) are also entertainment technologies in the sense that they are created to trigger people’s attention, and are consumed because they exaggerate the features of phenomena (e.g., human voice and interindividual competition) that humans evolved to be interested in.
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