The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe

Martins, Maurício; Baumard, Nicolas

doi:10.1073/pnas.2009571117

Cited by 29 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…It is well-established that, during the 20 th century, economic development is associated with more tolerance, more optimism, more interest in science and less interest in religion (Inglehart, 2018;Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Similar observations can be done over the longer term: economic development in ancient societies is associated with more tolerance (Martins & Baumard, 2020;Safra et al, 2020) and more exploration (Baumard, 2019;de Courson & Baumard, 2019).…”

Section: Exploratory Preferences and Ecological Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 67%

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

Dubourg

Baumard²

2021

Behav Brain Sci

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Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Ring, Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars, Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One piece, Naruto) and TV series (e.g., Star Trek, Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this article, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and non-human animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental aesthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can therefore explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations.

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Section: Exploratory Preferences and Ecological Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 67%

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

Dubourg

Baumard²

2021

Behav Brain Sci

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“…In line with these developments, recent works have used a diversity of cultural artifacts such as portraits [ 13 ], theater plays [ 30 ], music [ 31 ] and movies [ 32 ] to infer the evolution of cultural traits such as social trust [ 13 , 30 ], positive and negative moods [ 33 ], wellbeing [ 31 , 34 ], individualism [ 35 , 36 ], romantic love [ 37 ] and exploratory preferences [ 32 ]. In all these cases, scientists build on cognitive and behavioral sciences to connect a specific cultural aspect of artifact (the smile in portrait) with the underlying cultural trait (the priority given to appearing trustworthy), and then reconstruct the long-term evolution of this cultural trait using a long-term series of cultural artifacts.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history

Hyafil

Baumard²

2022

PLoS ONE

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A central question in behavioral and social sciences is understanding to what extent cultural traits are inherited from previous generations, transmitted from adjacent populations or produced in response to changes in socioeconomic and ecological conditions. As quantitative diachronic databases recording the evolution of cultural artifacts over many generations are becoming more common, there is a need for appropriate data-driven methods to approach this question. Here we present a new Bayesian method to infer the dynamics of cultural traits in a diachronic dataset. Our method called Evoked-Transmitted Cultural model (ETC) relies on fitting a latent-state model where a cultural trait is a latent variable which guides the production of the cultural artifacts observed in the database. The dynamics of this cultural trait may depend on the value of the cultural traits present in previous generations and in adjacent populations (transmitted culture) and/or on ecological factors (evoked culture). We show how ETC models can be fitted to quantitative diachronic or synchronic datasets, using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, enabling estimating the relative contribution of vertical transmission, horizontal transmission and evoked component in shaping cultural traits. The method also allows to reconstruct the dynamics of cultural traits in different regions. We tested the performance of the method on synthetic data for two variants of the method (for binary or continuous traits). We found that both variants allow reliable estimates of parameters guiding cultural evolution, and that they outperform purely phylogenetic tools that ignore horizontal transmission and ecological factors. Overall, our method opens new possibilities to reconstruct how culture is shaped from quantitative data, with possible application in cultural history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics and behavioral ecology.

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“…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.…”

Section: The Cultural Evolution Of Fictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Dubourg

Baumard

2022

Front. Psychol.

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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.

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The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe

Cited by 29 publications

References 49 publications

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

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

Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history

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

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