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.
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.
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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