![]() ![]() Evolutionary speaking, these hypotheses would hold only if our ancestors had faced a specific adaptive challenge that the behavior of producing or consuming fictions would have specifically solved ( Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). ![]() Notably, it has been argued that consuming fictions leads to acquire fitness-related knowledge ( Sugiyama, 2001 Smith et al., 2017 Schniter et al., 2018 Nakawake and Sato, 2019 Sugiyama, 2021b), self-regulate one’s emotional states ( Schaeffer, 1999 Gottschall and Wilson, 2005 Martin et al., 2018), simulate fake scenarios to be better prepared to face the real world ( Tooby and Cosmides, 2001 Sugiyama, 2005 Mar and Oatley, 2008 Bloom, 2010 Gottschall, 2012 Clasen, 2019 van Mulukom and Clasen, 2021), or attract sexual mates ( Miller, 2001). The Adaptive Hypotheses (and the Problem of Specificity)Ī common view in behavioral approaches to literature is that the capacity to tell stories is adaptive ( Gottschall and Wilson, 2005 Carroll, 2012). Why fiction, then? Why did narrative fictions appear? Why are they appealing? And why are they more successful in modern societies? We first review a set of current hypotheses before proposing the “entertainment hypothesis,” which posits that fictions are best seen as entertainment technologies. In evolutionary sciences, the question is framed as followed: “How can it make evolutionary sense that members of a species successful enough to reshape the earth spend so much time in telling one another stories that neither tellers nor listeners believe?” ( Boyd, 2018). Are such behaviors of producing and consuming narrative fictions biological adaptations, or by-products? How do narrative fictions culturally evolve? There is little consensus, nor any evidence of a search of consensus, as to how and why narrative fictions emerged in human cultures. Yet, the questions of the origin and evolution of narrative fictions have constituted a puzzle for decades. The recent massive success of streaming platforms for films and TV series, such as Netflix and Disney+, is yet another cue of this far-reaching cultural phenomenon. According to the latest estimations, the film industry and the book industry are worth more than 100 billion dollars worldwide each ( Motion Picture Association, 2020), and the video game industry is worth 200 billons dollars alone ( Accenture, 2021). The production of narrative fictions has risen too, exponentially, both in number and in revenue, to tremendous levels. For instance, humans in 22 different countries spend on average more time watching TV than doing sport, shopping, attending events or even seeing friends ( Our World in Data, 2020). ![]() 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. Narrative fictions are the hallmark of modern culture. 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. 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. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictions adaptive. 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. 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. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. 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. Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. ![]()
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