Mads Larsen

University of Oslo · Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM)

Sex ratio theory suggests why mating practices have become dysfunctional in the West and other regions. Spain, Japan, and over 20 other nations are on course to have their populations halved by 2100, dramatically aging their citizenry. Experts and opinion makers warn that a demographic collapse cannot be absorbed by our current social order; Elon M...

Positive psychology is a thriving field with increasing political influence, yet there are few evolutionary studies that have had a tangible impact on rethinking mechanisms of well-being. This Element reviews existing literature and proposes synthesizing insights into human flourishing under an umbrella of multilevel selection (MLS). Conceptualizin...

Modern mating markets relegate a growing number of men to being incels (involuntary celibate). Increasing attention befalls another group struggling in the same markets: female insings (involuntary single). In the partly autobiographical novel, Half of Malmö Consists of Guys Who Dumped Me (2021), Amanda Romare dramatizes how urban dating and techno...

Increasing levels of singledom, dating dysfunction, and sexual inactivity contribute to plummeting fertility rates. This book investigates the perhaps most foundational factor behind this uncoupling: our present era’s ideology of love. Throughout human history, communities have shared fictional stories infused with various mating moralities that co...

Cinema is particularly suited for illuminating the kinaesthetic aspects of cultural subjugation. In Sameblod ( Sami Blood ) (2016), writer–director Amanda Kernell portrays the self-assimilatory journey of an indigenous 14-year-old girl as a result of forced and voluntary exposure to novel bodily experiences. Using as its conceptual point of departu...

A common stance is that only reading literary fiction improves theory of mind (ToM). Characters in popular fiction are said to be so predictable that they merely reaffirm readers’ expectations. Emilie Flygare-Carlén was Sweden’s bestselling 19th-century novelist, but literary historians have disregarded her works for being too commercial and her in...

Domestic violence is physical, psychological, or sexual abuse between intimate partners, offspring, parents, and siblings within a family structure. Evolutionary approaches illuminate the psychological mechanisms that underpin these behaviors. Partner abuse has been explained as a male mate guarding strategy. Jealousy-motivated violence was seen as...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1065889.].

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1068119.].

Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions’ literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West’s First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, use...

Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions’ literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West’s First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, use...

Dante’s proto-humanist Divine Comedy represents a point of acceleration for the medial evolution toward subjective immersion. From the humanist perspective, reality no longer consists of objective truths that merely have to be conveyed; a subjective reality should arise from the experience that a narrative produces inside of meaning-making audience...

In the postmodern 1990s, LGBT families were portrayed as pioneers for new family forms and processes of individualization. The queer viewpoint was that of a socially beneficial vanguard that could help liberate everyone from stale heteronormativity and dysfunctional socialites. The Icelandic queer dramedy 101 Reykjavík (2000) lets its slacker prota...

Transcultural film remakes can offer insight into how distinct cultures have different ideals for the heroic. A protagonist who appears admirable in Scandinavia can have values, traits, or skills that are perceived as less appealing, on average, to audiences in other regions of the world. Screenwriters and directors who want to import a story from...

Nordic high-trust societies are underpinned by prosociality, a term denoting cooperation and working for the good of others. State-funded voluntarism provides opportunities for altruism that appears to contribute to the Nordics’ exceptional level of well-being. Altruists are rewarded by a warm, lasting affect that enhances personal well-being, thus...

This article proposes an evolutionary model for well-being informed by multilevel selection. We posit that people’s subjective assessment of their own quality of life is the sum their happiness, which is related to individual selection, and their sense of having a meaningful life, which is related to group selection. Conceptualizing life quality as...

The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that direct...

The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that direct...

This is a collection of 21 articles published as an eBook in Frontiers in Psychology. This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its manifestations but unified by species-typical sets of biologically grounded motives, emotions, and cognitive dispositions. The...

Today’s political despondency is informed by how Western populations no longer believe in the cosmopolitan stories that underpinned the modern world. Before Kantian universalism became hegemonic, the eighteenth century offered a variety of perspectives, like those of outpost philosophers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder. The scholarly...

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) founded modern Scandinavian drama with comedies that still are among the region’s most popular plays. Critics have bemoaned how these romantic comedies lack passion; his modern standard biographer concludes that Holberg dramatized mating behavior simply to follow ancient convention and without adding anything new based on...

Scandinavia’s only extant Shrovetide farce, Den utro hustru (The Unfaithful Wife), embodies a unique ethos in regard to mating and gender relations. The school play, presumably written by a university-educated teacher around 1500, dramatizes humanistic, pre-Lutheran views on sex and marriage—yet from a perspective of marginalized urban men. The Eur...

As the past decade built toward today’s crisis, Scandinavian social democracy was frequently suggested as a model that could reform capitalism. The Nordic region’s income equality, gender equality, low-conflict politics, and prosperous economies with generous benefits contribute to high levels of happiness and social cohesion. Leading politicians o...

A pivotal question since the Enlightenment has been how to promote reason to the masses. Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and its film adaptations across four countries and seven decades let us examine this discourse across time and geography. Ibsen offers Nietzschean, elitist radicalism to save the public sphere from ignorance. Ein Volksfeind...

Henrich (2020) accounts for how the modern world was underpinned by a psychological-institutional coevolution set in motion by the Church’s Marriage and Family Practices (MFPs). Among these was the prohibition of polygyny, which had driven a zero-sum mindset of violence and risk-taking—to the detriment of social trust and self-regulation. Raffield...

Review of evocriticism articles.

Scandinavian social democracy has become increasingly embraced by the American Left as a model for emulation. In the Nordic countries, too, their political model was long assumed to be universal; many Scandinavians thought that also other nations would evolve toward generous welfare and low inequality. Dissent has come from scholarship that since t...

Artificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedi...

Scandinavian social democracy is increasingly upheld as an alternative that could reform capitalism. The Nordic Model produces income equality, low-conflict politics, and happy people. When half of young Americans express that they would prefer “socialism,” they generally mean to live in a society that provides for its citizens as the Nordics do. S...

The Icelandic saga Gísla saga Súrssonar has long been read as dramatizing a transition between moralities. Whether this change is viewed as one from pagan to Christian, or from warrior to civil morality, Gisli Sursson has mostly been interpreted as the embodiment of an outdated ethos which motivates Gisli’s glorious demise. The heroic warrior is po...

The myth of true, lifelong love promoted low divorce rates among farmers who depended on each other for survival. In the urban ecology after industrialization, it became increasingly clear that long-term monogamy goes against human nature. In the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-1800s literary movement, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and...

Review of evolutionary literary criticism articles.

In the contest between the three major modern political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, and fascism—the Nordic countries found a middle way with social democracy. For over four decades, Finland remained a class-divided anomaly after the failed socialist revolution in 1918 and fascist rebellion in the 1930s. Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star tril...

Nobel-winner Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles for group efficacy are used by the Evolution Institute to explain the success of Nordic societies. These principles are offered as an evolutionary foundation for a new social paradigm at all levels, from the local to the global. This article argues that Scandinavian internalization of these univer...

Research shows that students write better academic essays if the instructor facilitates a process of preparation that allows for purposeful peer discussion. Drawing on screenwriting pedagogy, this article proposes a workshop model that lets students express their essay’s structural elements as single sentences, which allows for effective peer and l...

Christopher Miller recently supported Adele King’s exposure of 'L’enfant noir' (1953) as likely having been ghostwritten, thus ingraining the stain of French anti-independence conspiracy on the founding novel of Francophone African literature. A new perspective on decolonialization from Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder suggests that it is misunders...

The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger' (1890; 'Sult') fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to...

Android fiction has connected memory to personhood in a variety of ways. The Swedish TV series 'Real Humans' (2012-2014) and its British remake 'Humans' (2015-2018) argue that lived experience is insufficient for making memories authentic. If experiences are to be more than data, they must be imprinted with affect or another subjectivizing force. F...

Niels Klim's Underground Travels (1741) was the European breakthrough for the Norwegian Enlightenment polymath Ludvig Holberg. The emerging novel format inspired Holberg to trust his readers to use their own rationality to decide on the contentious issues of their era. The intellectual contrarian had always been sceptical of his contemporaries' abi...

The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890; Sult) fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to be n...

Outlaw (1981; Útlaginn), the only close film adaptation of an Icelandic saga, offers an everyday protagonist who suffers the inhumanity of honor culture. The scrawny actor who plays Gisli Sursson appears as similarly unexceptional as his former friends who hunt him down. They too are good people yet as helplessly trapped as Gisli within a social mo...

Outlaw (1981; Útlaginn), the only close film adaptation of an Icelandic saga, offers an everyday protagonist who suffers the inhumanity of honor culture. The scrawny actor who plays Gisli Sursson appears as similarly unexceptional as his former friends who hunt him down. They too are good people yet as helplessly trapped as Gisli within a social mo...

After decades of investigation, leading scholars conclude that the founding novel of francophone African literature was likely written by Europeans. Camara Laye's 'The Dark Child' (1953) was sold as an autobiography and became the most read African novel in French. The idyllic narrative that African critics accused of colonial apologetics is now ac...

How did a genre that began as overt Marxist agitation grow into a global phenomenon in which Swedish authors could sell books by the tens of millions? Per Hellgren—journalist, author, and Per Wahlöö scholar—attempts to offer new pieces to this puzzle by tracing the ideological evolution of Nordic Noir. He finds the genre’s roots in Raymond Chandler...

When fiction introduces controversial new perspectives, the novel and its film adaptation can play different roles in a cultural discussion. In the wake of globalization and Generation X, the novel 101 Reykjavík (Helgason [1996] 2002) suggested a sex-obsessed slacker identity that most Icelanders rejected or ignored. A later film adaptation (Kormák...

Nordic Noir’s progenitor The Man on the Balcony from 1967 critiques social democracy from a Marxist viewpoint. The novel’s 1993 film adaptation, however, reuses the same crime to challenge neo-liberal globalization. From a story perspective, this is a drastic deviation from ideological fidelity. But a systems perspective shows that the adaptation a...

To sell a novel as socially relevant, the book cover, prefaces, and other paratext can help convey why readers should care and how the story should be read. But relevance can expire as society moves on. Reprints of groundbreaking classics that no longer engage contemporary concerns adapt their paratext to reach new readers, often by emphasizing the...

Finland’s 1918 Civil War tore the nation apart along class lines, wrecking the social narrative that made Finns trust each other and cooperate. The Finns’ inability to agree on what had happened during and after the war kept them divided until the novel trilogy 'Under the North Star' (1959–62; 'Täällä Pohjantähden alla') and its film adaptations (1...

Finland’s 1918 Civil War tore the nation apart along class lines, wrecking the social narrative that made Finns trust each other and cooperate. The Finns’ inability to agree on what had happened during and after the war kept them divided until the novel trilogy 'Under the North Star' (1959–62; 'Täällä Pohjantähden alla') and its film adaptations (1...

In 1590, after Norway's most famous witch trial, Anne Pedersdotter was burned alive. Resource scarcity and religious competition transformed an old superstition into a witch craze to which Anne fell victim. Her story became a play in 1908 and a film in 1943. The two adaptations attempt to give Anne's persecution more modern explanations. In the pla...

Paradigm transitions come with tremendous risk, as societies can come undone when people stop believing in the imaginary constructs that unite us. The Black Plague’s devastation resulted not only from its lethality, but from how its ensuing crisis in faith triggered evolved cognitive systems that lead to tribalism, self-destructive despair, and att...

Today’s virtual reality (VR) restricts the screenwriter with its technological shortcomings, and there is little agreement on how stories should be told in the new format. While its immersivity heightens the audience’s sense of presence, and perhaps accentuates empathy, it draws attention away from plot and information, favouring mood and emotion....