#959 Edgar Dubourg: The Psychological Foundations and the Cultural Evolution of Fiction

The Dissenter

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Edgar Dubourg is a PhD candidate in cognitive science at the Département d’Études Cognitives at the École Normale supérieure (ENS-PSL). He uses insights from both the natural sciences (behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience) and the humanities (literary theory, literary history, cultural studies), and both computational and experimental methods, to explain the psychological foundations and the cultural evolution of fiction.​

In this episode, we talk about the psychological foundations of fiction. We start by discussing what fiction is, and how old it is in human societies. We talk about evolutionary precursors to fiction. We discuss whether is it an evolved adaptation. We talk about the cognitive mechanisms behind fiction, and its (social) functions. We discuss two hypotheses to explain fiction: the entertainment hypothesis, and the information hypothesis. We talk about why so many people are fascinated by imaginary worlds, and how that might be explained by inter-individual differences in exploratory behavior. We also discuss how to approach the study of fictional genres, and cross-cultural differences in fiction. Finally, we settle an old One Piece debate.

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