ArticleFrontiers in psychology2022
Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Honor the dice: narrative effects in "actual-play" media.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The Influence of Mating Context on Creativity: Insights from Simulated Dating Scenarios.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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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
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