Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of imaginary worlds in modern societies

Abstract

Imaginary worlds are one of the hallmarks of modern culture. They are present in many of the most successful fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), films (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). This appeal is worldwide (e.g., the worldwide success of Lord of the Ring, the emergence of xuanhuan and xanxia genres in China), and massive: people spend an increasing amount of time, energy and resources involved in fictions with imaginary worlds. Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt exploratory preferences, a set of cognitive preferences that have evolved in humans and non-human animals to motivate individuals to explore new sources of reward. Imaginary worlds are fictional superstimuli that tap into the human’s interest for unfamiliar and potentially rewarding environments. This theory predicts that 1) fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience (because this personality trait is associated with exploratory preferences), 2) such fictions should be more attractive for younger people (because young people reap more rewards from exploratory behaviors) and 3) such fictions should be more successful in more economically developed societies (because affluent ecologies lower the costs of exploration). We successively test these predictions with two large cultural datasets, namely IMDb (N=85,855 films) and Wikidata (N=96,711 novels), as well the Movie Personality Dataset, which aggregates averaged personality traits and demographic data from the Facebook myPersonality Database (N=3,5 million), the films they like on Facebook and metadata for films from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). We provide evidence that the appeal for imaginary worlds relies on our exploratory psychology.

Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies

“…As a result, adaptive phenotypic plasticity adaptively promotes such preferences in such finetuned local ecologies (Baumard et al, 2021;Dubourg and Baumard, 2021). We therefore predicted and provided evidence for the fact that romantic love stories and imaginary worlds increase when living conditions improve with economic developments (Baumard et al, 2021;Dubourg et al, 2021d;Martins and Baumard, 2021).…”

“…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 ).…”

“…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.…”

“…Under the same rationale as we used for other sources of variability (that producers make fictions that please their audience at a given time, in a given location), we propose that adaptive phenotypic plasticity is a major causal explanation for the cultural evolution of fictions across time (in diachrony) and for the cultural distribution of fictions across countries or regions of the world (in synchrony). For instance, in more affluent societies, across both time and space, humans produced fictions with more romantic love stories ( Baumard et al, 2021 ; Martins and Baumard, 2021 ), more cooperative relationships ( Martins and Baumard, 2020 ), and more imaginary worlds ( Dubourg et al, 2021a ). This is the case because such elements tap into preferences that are more evoked in affluent environments.…”

Why imaginary worlds? The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds

“…In a study on the correlation between literary taste patterns and social differentiation in Finland, age was the only variable which significatively decreased the liking of speculative fictions (a proxy for fictions with imaginary worlds; see section 2), whereas age had no such effect on other fictional genres (Purhonen et al, 2009). In Dubourg, Thouzeau et al (2021),…”