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The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction

July 2021
Emotion Review 13(3)

Authors:

University of California, Davis

The sympathetic plot-featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards-is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evokes sympathetic joy. It establishes the protagonist as an ideal cooperative partner pursuing a goal, appealing to mechanisms for helping. When the protagonist succeeds, they receive rewards, and audiences feel sympathetic joy, an emotion normally triggered when beneficiaries triumph. The capacities underlying the sympathetic plot evolved for learning and cooperation before being co-opted for entertainment.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739211022824

Emotion Review

Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 2021) 183 –198

ISSN 1754-0739

DOI: 10.1177/17540739211022824

https://journals.sagepub.com/home/emr

The Sympathetic Plot

Once upon a time, a strong, attractive hero lost one or both of his

parents. He then overcame a series of obstacles and faced off against a

monster that had terrorized his community. The hero vanquished the

monster and was celebrated.

This is the story of Harry Potter, Superman, James Bond,

Luke Skywalker, and The Lion King’s Simba. It is the story of

the Sotho hero Litaolane (Lesotho: Casalis, 1861, pp. 347–350),

the Garo hero Jereng (India: Rongmuthu, 1960), the Ainu myth-

ological hero Yayresu:po (Northeast Asia: Ohnuki-Tierney,

1974), and the heroic twins Kototabe and Kelokelo of New

Guinean folklore (Ker, 1910, pp. 61–63). If the hero is a young-

est-born sibling rather than an orphan, this becomes the story of

the ancient Greek god Zeus (in his confrontation with Kronos:

Hard, 2004, pp. 67–69), the ancient Chinese heroine Li Chi

(Kao, 1985, pp. 105–106), and the princely main character of

the Serbian tale Baš Čelik (Petrovitch, 1915, pp. 247–267).

Here’s another story:

Once upon a time, a poor girl lived with her abusive stepsiblings or

stepparents. She embarked on a journey, received gifts from a big-hearted

helper, and eventually escaped her destitution. Her terrorizers, jealous of

her success, were punished.

This is the story of Cinderella (Perrault, 1697). Similar tales

have been told across Europe (Cox, 1893), as well as in Burma

(Lwin, 2010, pp. 39–42), Hausaland (West Africa: Alidou,

2002), Japan (Whitehouse, 1935), and the Malay world

(Donaldson, 2014), among many other places (Dundes, 1982).

If the story features a little boy rather than a little girl, this

becomes the Himalayan “Story of the Black Cow” (Dracott,

1906, pp. 83–87); if the heroine is tormented by older blood-

siblings rather than step-siblings, this becomes the tale of the

girl with a marred face, told by peoples throughout northeast-

ern North America (e.g., Mi’kmaq: Olcott, 1917, pp. 17–22;

Algonquian: Rafe, 1992; Ojibwe: San Souci, 1994).

The orphaned monster-slayer and the Cinderella story are

both examples of what I term the sympathetic plot.1 The sympa-

thetic plot is a ubiquitous and popular narrative structure defined

here on the basis of five core features:

1. A protagonist, sometimes referred to as a hero or hero-

ine, has a goal.

The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins,

and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction

Manvir Singh

Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France

Abstract

The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is

ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers

mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem

and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evokes sympathetic joy. It establishes the protagonist as an ideal

cooperative partner pursuing a goal, appealing to mechanisms for helping. When the protagonist succeeds, they receive rewards,

and audiences feel sympathetic joy, an emotion normally triggered when beneficiaries triumph. The capacities underlying the

sympathetic plot evolved for learning and cooperation before being co-opted for entertainment.

Keywords

empathy, evolution, fiction, pleasure, sympathy, universals

Author Note: The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a

graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation and, through IAST, by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the Investments for the Future

(Investissements d’Avenir) program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010.

Corresponding author: Manvir Singh, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, 1, esplanade de l’Université, Toulouse Cedex 06, 31080, France.

Email: manvir.manvir@gmail.com

1022824EMR0010.1177/17540739211022824Emotion ReviewSingh The Sympathetic Plot

research-article2021

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184 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

2. The protagonist’s goal is relatable or justifiable, like

marrying a prince, escaping poverty, killing a monster,

or procuring a magical item.

3. The protagonist confronts an obstacle in pursuit of their

goal, sometimes in the form of mean opponents.

4. The protagonist prevails. This might be due to their own

virtue or outside assistance.

5. The protagonist reaps rewards. These can include

wealth, power, an attractive spouse, new parents who

are loving and kind, or a boon that they bestow on

humanity.

Stories with these core features, referred to here as sympa-

thetic tales, frequently exhibit at least six secondary features as

well. These elements do not appear in all sympathetic tales, but

they are common:

6. The protagonist is appealing. They might be strong,

clever, humble, skillful, attractive, generous, or consid-

erate.

7. The protagonist is alone and suffers early misfortunes.

They might be orphaned, abandoned, or the child of

poor rural-folk.

8. The protagonist is high-status, or at least tied to high-

status individuals. They might be orphaned but then

adopted by royalty. They might be abandoned but also

the offspring of deities. They might be the child of poor

rural-folk but known throughout the land because of

prophecies about them.

9. The protagonist journeys to distant places to achieve

their goals. On the way, they encounter foreign and fan-

tastical obstacles.

10. The protagonist’s opponents are repulsive and formida-

ble. They might be dragons, callous step-sisters, or

pompous rival princes.

11. Characters who oppose the protagonist eventually suf-

fer or are reformed.

The sympathetic plot has been recognized by folklorists and

mythologists for the last 150 years, although nearly all scholars

organized these features within more elaborate templates. Von

Hahn (1876), Rank (1914), and Raglan (1936) documented the

sympathetic plot in their studies of mythical heroes from

Europe, West Asia, and the Middle East (see also Cook, 1965).

Propp (1968, pp. 50, 92) uncovered it in his study of Russian

folktales. Thompson (1946, p. 23) saw it in complex Eurasian

fairy tales; Kimball (1999) described it in her cross-cultural

study of orphan tales; and Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, and

Kruger (2012, p. 26) noticed it in nineteenth-century British

novels. When Jobling (2001) compared hero-ogre stories from

around the world, he focused on elements such as the virtuous-

ness of heroes and the repulsiveness of monsters, but underlying

these parallels was the sympathetic structure.

Perhaps the best-known hypotheses of universal narrative

structure are those by Campbell (1949), Booker (2004), and

Hogan (2003; 2011). All three provide further evidence for the

sympathetic plot’s ubiquity.

Campbell (1949) claimed that stories everywhere recount

adventurous rites of passage. His template was complex, involv-

ing 17 events organized into three main stages, but he summa-

rized the basic pattern as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of

supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a

decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious

adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (Campbell,

1949, p. 30)

Starring a protagonist who overcomes obstacles, achieves a

goal, and enjoys rewards, Campbell’s hero’s journey is a version

of the sympathetic plot.

Booker (2004) reviewed 450 (mostly European and

American) stories, spanning films, plays, novels, novellas,

ancient epics, and fairy tales. He then organized those stories

into seven plots: (1) Overcoming the Monster; (2) Rags to

Riches; (3) The Quest; (4) Voyage and Return; (5) Comedy

(defined broadly to include many romantic stories); (6) Tragedy;

and (7) Rebirth.

Six of Booker’s plots—all except Tragedy—are sympathetic

plots. They tell of goal-directed protagonists who confront

obstacles, overcome them, and enjoy prizes. In fact, they differ

almost solely on what the protagonist’s goal is, whether it be

destroying a monster, overcoming hardship, procuring a price-

less object, returning home, finding love, or escaping a dark

spell. Booker’s plots also exhibit many of the secondary fea-

tures listed earlier. Some protagonists start out in distressing

circumstances, some are honorable and strong, some face off

against terrible opponents, and some go off on far-away jour-

neys.

Finally, there are the patterns proposed by Hogan (2003).

Hogan read pre-colonial literature from every inhabited conti-

nent and suggested three universals: romantic, heroic, and sacri-

ficial. Romantic and heroic stories often have sympathetic plots.

In romantic stories, two people fall in love, although forces pre-

vent their union. Eventually, they are united. In heroic stories, a

legitimate leader’s position is usurped. The usurped leader van-

quishes an out-group enemy, re-establishing their authority.

Crucially, Hogan pointed out, both plots can be truncated, turn-

ing them into tragedies and violating the sympathetic structure.

Hogan’s (2003) third narrative universal is less clearly a

sympathetic plot. In sacrificial stories—“perhaps the least obvi-

ously prototypical” (Hogan, 2011, p. 133)—a deity punishes a

society’s sins, most often with famine. The society responds by

sacrificing an innocent person, leading to restoration and agri-

cultural abundance. Systematic cross-cultural research will con-

firm whether sacrificial stories are ubiquitous. Regardless, their

existence underscores that sympathetic tales, while ubiquitous,

do not exhaustively cover all stories (see also trickster stories

and origin myths: Long, 2005; Scheub, 2007).

Why do people everywhere tell stories with such similar fea-

tures? Here, I argue that the sympathetic plot recurs because it is

a technology for producing pleasure. It develops from a cultural

selection for entertainment and works by triggering two sets of

psychological mechanisms:

Singh The Sympathetic Plot 185

1. It appeals to mechanisms involved in learning about

obstacles and how to overcome them. It describes a

character trying to solve a problem, building interest,

narrowing attention, and eventually delivering satisfac-

tion.

2. It appeals to mechanisms involved in allocating coop-

erative effort, evoking sympathetic joy. The protagonist

appears as an ideal cooperative partner—competent,

warm, and in-need—and they pursue a daunting goal.

When they succeed, they receive rewards, and the audi-

ence feels sympathetic joy. Sympathetic joy usually

occurs when a cooperative partner succeeds, and it

likely exists to proximately motivate helping. Given the

audience’s attachment to the protagonist, however, the

mechanism misfires, and they feel their fictive friend’s

fortune.

Of course, this doesn’t deny that other psychological mecha-

nisms contribute to literary experiences. Stories may stir up past

emotions (Hogan, 1996). They may engross through dazzling

imagery and captivate through sex, threat, and coalitional con-

flict (Green & Brock, 2000; Nettle, 2005; Stubbersfield et al.,

2015). But these and other studied mechanisms (e.g., Mar,

Oatley, Djikic, & Mullin, 2011) are unimportant for explaining

the sympathetic plot. Instead, I claim, the sympathetic plot

recurs because it triggers systems adapted for learning about

obstacles and allocating cooperative investment.

In the following sections, I (1) review existing explanations

for the sympathetic plot; (2) propose that the sympathetic plot

culturally evolves to entertain; (3) review how it entertains; and

(4) use the account to explain core features of stories. I conclude

with a list of five testable predictions.

Existing Approaches Cannot Explain the

Sympathetic Plot

Many writers have connected narrative patterns to human psy-

chology (Bastian, 2005; Dundes, 1987; Hogan, 2003; Jung,

1959; Lévi-Strauss, 1955). In fact, Witzel (2012, p. 12) wrote,

many scholars “assume that similarities found in myths the

world over are due to common, universal features of the human

mind that forever produce the same images or ‘archetypes’.”

Despite this growing consensus, most major theories explain-

ing versions of the sympathetic plot hinge on spurious or

untested assumptions about the mind (Dutton, 2005). Rank

(1914) interpreted the heroic legend as expressing sublimated

Oedipal urges. Campbell (1949) saw hero’s journey myths as

conveyors of wisdom that arouse the psyche and provide under-

standing. Booker (2004) concluded that his seven basic plots

were the unconscious’s way of reminding the conscious self

how to achieve a full life. The failure to ground these explana-

tions in contemporary psychological science is striking given

progress in the study of story (Bower & Morrow, 1990; Gerrig,

1998; Oatley, 2011; Tan, 1996; Zillmann & Vorderer, 2000), as

well as the emergence of fields like literary Darwinism (Boyd

2009; Carroll 2011; Gottschall and Wilson 2005) and cognitive

literary studies (Keen, 2007; Zunshine, 2006).

An important exception to this disconnect is Hogan’s recent

analysis. Across several works (e.g., Hogan 2003, 2011, 2017),

Hogan has proposed a set of narrative universals (reviewed

above) and applied insights from cognitive science to explain

them.

Hogan’s account is based on three premises. First, pursuing

a goal is enjoyable. Second, people everywhere share goals,

including having sex, achieving in-group prestige, and enjoying

food and security. Third, stories produce emotional responses

by activating remembered emotions and through empathically

experiencing the character’s emotions. Thus, he argues, stories

in which protagonists pursue basic goals will produce pleasure

across diverse audiences. His proposed universals reflect these

shared goals. Romantic stories recur because the protagonist

pursues sex and affiliation. Heroic stories recur because the pro-

tagonist pursues prestige and superiority over out-groups. And

sacrifice stories recur because characters pursue food and secu-

rity. Prototypes are universal, he maintains, because hearing

about someone pursuing a familiar desire feels good.

Hogan’s account establishes an ambitious baseline for schol-

ars interested in explaining narrative patterns. Nevertheless, it

suffers from at least two limitations. First, it was developed to

explain his three universal prototypes, but as currently formu-

lated, it fails to explain features of the sympathetic plot more

generally, such as why protagonists often start out abandoned or

why they are connected to high status. Second, Hogan’s account

focuses on empathy and remembered emotions, but as many

researchers have demonstrated, our emotional responses to sto-

ries vary according to characters’ traits (Raney, 2003). Put

crudely, we feel good when a liked character succeeds and bad

when they fail (Trabasso & Chung, 2004; Zillmann & Cantor,

1977). Moreover, we seem to represent characters, at least

partly, as other people. We miss them, detest them, feel embar-

rassed for them, cry at their triumphs, and yell instructions at

them, like “Run for it!” or “Close the door, stay in there!”

(Bezdek et al., 2013; Hoffner & Cantor, 1991). These observa-

tions do not invalidate Hogan’s account, but they suggest an

alternative hypothesis that centers on how we represent and

respond to characters.

Another set of hypotheses that fail to explain the sympathetic

plot are the simulation hypotheses. Although simulation hypoth-

eses were not developed to explain the sympathetic plot, they

are among the most prominent theories for the evolution and

function of fiction.

Simulation hypotheses argue that stories, like flight simula-

tors, instruct through simulation (Oatley, 2008). Oatley and

Mar, for example, hypothesized two functions of fictional sto-

ries: (1) They develop abstract models of the social world, and

(2) they encourage simulation of these models, developing

empathy and theory of mind abilities (Mar & Oatley, 2008;

Oatley, 1999, 2016; Oatley & Mar, 2005). Hobbs (1990) and

then Pinker (1997, 2007), meanwhile, argued that fiction is less

about abstract models or empathy and more about testing out

strategies (see also Clasen, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, & Johnson,

2020; Morin, Acerbi, & Sobchuk, 2019). Stories, they hypothe-

sized, serve as thought experiments for solving problems. A sto-

ryteller identifies a goal, such as securing a romantic partner,

186 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

and then tries out ways of achieving it under controlled settings.

Gottschall (2012) integrated Hobbs’s and Oatley’s frameworks,

equating fiction with play. According to his hypothesis, stories

force audiences to experience protagonists’ struggles, building

implicit memories that prove useful in similar circumstances

(see also Steen & Owens, 2001). All of these hypotheses agree

that fiction is an adaptation. We evolved to tell stories, they say,

because they are instructive.

As currently formulated, simulation hypotheses—especially

those proposed by Hobbs (1990), Pinker (1997), and Gottschall

(2012)—cannot explain the sympathetic plot. First, they cannot

reconcile protagonists’ advantages with their distresses. If sto-

ries are designed to teach people how to problem-solve, then we

should expect characters to resemble audiences—to be normal-

looking and of average strength rather than attractive and strong.

A story about how a good-looking dragon-killer procures a prin-

cess is of little adaptive value to an ordinary-looking vegetable-

seller.2

Another weakness of simulation hypotheses is that many

stories are unhelpful for dealing with real-world problems.

Aside from being unrealistically capable, protagonists confront

problems that no audience would encounter, including battling

monsters or escaping dark netherworlds. Although these chal-

lenges may be metaphors, it is unclear how useful a protago-

nist’s fantastical adventures would be for addressing everyday

struggles or building a model of reality.3 Moreover, protago-

nists commonly succeed by receiving the serendipitous help of

supernatural donors, such as talking animals or fairy godmoth-

ers (Propp, 1968; Thompson, 1946, pp. 47–67). But a seren-

dipitous helper who solves the problem tells us little about how

to solve it ourselves.

In short, simulation hypotheses argue that people tell stories

to develop and test simulations of reality. But the sympathetic

plot is a sub-optimal simulation. Its scenarios are unrealistic, the

characters are idealized, and serendipitous helpers often resolve

the problem, undermining its utility for learning how to solve

problems in the future.

Building on work by media psychologists and communica-

tion scholars (Raney, 2003; Trabasso & Chung, 2004), I here

develop an account that overcomes these limitations. Like

Hogan, I posit that a universal narrative structure (the sympa-

thetic plot) recurs because it induces pleasure. But I argue that it

induces pleasure not by stirring remembered emotions but by

exploiting mechanisms involved in learning and cooperation.

Audiences connect with sympathetic protagonists because their

cognitive systems evaluate protagonists to be worthwhile social

partners deserving of help. And they feel pleasure, sympathetic

joy, when those characters succeed because of misfiring hedonic

responses that evolved to proximately motivate cooperation.

This account is an example of a by-product hypothesis

(Bloom, 2010). In contrast to simulation hypotheses and other

adaptive accounts of fiction (Scalise Sugiyama, 2001; Tooby &

Cosmides, 2001), I argue that our mind is not designed to tell

and receive fictional stories: Fiction might produce benefits, but

it is not an adaptation. Instead, following authors such as Bloom

(2010) and Nettle (2005), I argue that the psychological mecha-

nisms supporting our interest and enjoyment in stories evolved

for other purposes and have been co-opted by storytellers and

cultural evolution. Some stories are shaped to socialize youth.

Others are wielded to demonize rivals. The sympathetic tale,

meanwhile, recurs because it entertains. In the same way that

cheesecake taps Stone Age sense organs to delight consumers

(Pinker, 1997), the sympathetic plot exploits systems for learn-

ing and cooperation to draw audiences in and tickle their pleas-

ure spots.

The Sympathetic Plot Develops from

Intentional Design and Cultural Selection

I propose that the sympathetic plot functions to provide pleasure

(see also Tan, 1996; Vorderer, Klimmt, and Ritterfield 2004;

Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982). By pleasure, I mean positive

affect. Pleasurable states include the pleasures of food and sex

(Georgiadis & Kringelbach, 2012; Kringelbach, 2015), the

amusement of humor (Martin, 2007), and sympathetic joy (feel-

ing happy for another person) (Morelli et al., 2015). Although

different pleasures have distinct neural signatures, they seem to

share neural activity in common hedonic systems (Kringelbach

& Berridge, 2009).

Functional design can develop through at least two pro-

cesses: intentional design and selection (Dennett, 1995).

Intentional design refers to when individuals deliberately craft

an entity to serve some end, like when someone fashions a sharp

stick to stab prey. Selection refers to when (1) entities have dif-

ferent inheritable traits and (2) entities with certain inheritable

traits spread at the expense of those with other traits, over time

increasing in frequency. An example of (cultural) selection is

when people experiment with and preferentially maintain weap-

ons that more effectively kill prey, over time producing better

hunting technology.

Intentional design and cultural selection likely interact to

produce sympathetic tales. Intentional design is a source of var-

iation. As people try to entertain each other, they generate sto-

ries of varying entertainment quality. But whereas the space of

potential stories is profoundly vast—including descriptions of

ice cubes melting or rocks doing nothing—the space of stories

that people concoct is much smaller. When asked to make up

stories, New York City children as young as two years old

described characters performing actions or experiencing events

(Sutton-Smith, 1981). Older children, meanwhile, made up sto-

ries in which characters pursued a goal, although their stories

also featured content from popular tales, leaving it unclear

whether kids spontaneously invent goal-directed protagonists

(Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977; Sutton-Smith, 1981).

Aside from inventing the basic structure of stories, storytell-

ers also introduce variation by remodeling existing tales.

Among the Ojibwe and the Winnebago, “the raconteur who has

obtained complete mastery over his technique plays with his

material and it is this play that becomes an important factor in

the origin of different versions” (Radin, 1915, p. 43). Ntsomi

story-performers in South Africa were “free to rearrange details

and incidents . . . indeed to make major changes and introduce

modifications” (Scheub, 1975, p. 91).

Singh The Sympathetic Plot 187

Inventiveness and experimentation produce variations of

stories, but the most entertaining variants proliferate through

cultural selection (Singh, 2020). As audiences demand their

favorites and storytellers re-use what has been effective, they

retain the most pleasurable variants and fuel a selection for

entertaining tales (see also Nettle, 2005). Scheub (1975, p. 90)

observed the selective retention of entertaining techniques

among South African ntsomi performers: “[A]n artist includes

and emphasizes those elements that she delighted in during

ntsomi performances that she has witnessed.” He even con-

nected this retention and the experimentation mentioned earlier

to the development of the ntsomi tradition: “Considering that

this process of borrowing, influencing, innovating, and combin-

ing has been going for decades, there should be no surprise that

such an involved form has developed” (Scheub, 1975, p. 19).

Although intentional design and cultural selection likely

interact to produce entertaining tales, their relative contribu-

tions are unclear. Intentional design explains low-level elements

of stories, such as the goal-directed protagonist, while cultural

selection explains why some tales diffuse across cultures or are

maintained over time. But what about meso-level plot elements,

such as the orphaned protagonist or punished rivals? Do people

intuitively know that they should kill a protagonist’s parents or

does discovering the idea require years or generations of itera-

tive experimentation? Future research will help determine pre-

cisely which elements of the sympathetic plot are intuitive and

which require a search process to discover.

Obstacles and Sympathetic Joy: The

Mechanics of the Sympathetic Plot

The sympathetic plot provides pleasure, I argue, by evoking two

sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it builds interest by

confronting a goal-directed protagonist with a problem and

induces satisfaction when the problem is overcome. Second, it

scaffolds narrative features onto this basic plot, such as making

the protagonist likable, depriving them of parents, and reward-

ing them at the end of the story, in turn producing a hedonic

feeling of sympathetic joy.

Stories Engage Audiences through Obstacles

and Resolution

At the basis of many stories—whether or not they exhibit the

sympathetic plot—is the problem-solving structure: A goal-

directed protagonist confronts an obstacle and tries to overcome

it (Brémond, 1970; Dundes, 1962; Lwin, 2010; Propp, 1968).

This structure recurs, I argue, because it triggers mechanisms

involved in learning about obstacles. It encourages people to

pay attention to a story and evokes satisfaction when the obsta-

cle is overcome (see also Black & Bower, 1980; Brewer &

Lichtenstein, 1982; Mandler, Scribner, Cole, & DeForest,

1980). Hearing about someone who can’t achieve a goal piques

our curiosity. Learning how they achieve that goal feels good.

Evolutionary logic predicts we would have mechanisms for

learning from others’ difficulties. In the words of cognitive

scientist Jerry Hobbs (1990, p. 40), “We are planning mecha-

nisms, continually planning our way towards goals.” We iden-

tify goals, like attracting sexy mates, and encounter obstacles

in their pursuit, like when sneaky rivals compete for a mate’s

affections. Given that other people tackle similar problems, we

benefit from learning about others’ hardships and the strate-

gies that have successfully skirted them.

Three sets of psychological features suggest we are endowed

with cognitive mechanisms designed to learn from others’ prob-

lem-solving. First, others’ obstacles intrigue us. We feel sus-

pense when we hear about someone who has difficulty

completing a goal (Fine & White, 2002). In fact, obstacles are

so potent for producing interest that they can induce suspense

even when we know the outcome. Gerrig (1989) reminded Yale

undergraduates of familiar outcomes, such as that George

Washington was the first president of the United States. He then

narrated the events leading up to these outcomes but highlighted

difficulties along the way, such as that Washington was

exhausted after the Revolutionary War. Even though the partici-

pants knew the outcomes and were reminded of them at the

beginning of each story, they still felt suspense when they

learned about obstacles (see also Delatorre et al., 2018).

Second, our intrigue is satisfied when we learn how a char-

acter overcomes an obstacle. Iran-Nejad (1987) documented

this feeling in his experiments on reader enjoyment. He found

that participants enjoyed stories with positive outcomes, such as

if a camper defended himself against an intruder. But more cru-

cially, readers liked stories more when they read how the char-

acter overcame the opponent as opposed to when it was left

ambiguous. In another study, schoolchildren and college stu-

dents reported enjoying stories more when the protagonist’s

goal seemed more important or harder to attain (Jose, 1988).

Lastly, not only are we intrigued and delighted by accounts

of people confronting obstacles, but we find them memorable.

American undergraduates remember incidents according to a

character’s goal and the strategies they used to pursue it (Black

& Bower, 1980; Bower, 1978; Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982;

Mandler & Johnson, 1977). They are better at remembering

actions that relate to a goal, and they regard the goal as the most

important element of a story (Bower, 1982; Owens et al., 1979;

Thorndyke, 1977). Crucially, these mental schemas transcend

cultural contexts. Mandler et al. (1980), for example, docu-

mented similar recall biases across participants in Liberia and

the United States, including comparisons with unschooled

Liberian children and non-literate Liberian adults.

These three psychological responses to obstacles—our atten-

tiveness towards them, our pleasure at learning how they are

overcome, and our predisposition to remember events around

them—provide evidence that humans share capacities for learn-

ing about how others confront and solve problems.

This interpretation differs from that advanced in the simula-

tion hypotheses of Hobbs (1990) and Gottschall (2012).

According to these hypotheses, fiction is adaptive: We evolved

to tell and pay attention to stories, because they teach us how to

solve problems. The account presented here, in contrast, pro-

poses that we have general-purpose mechanisms for learning

about others’ difficulties that fiction then exploits (see also Mar,

188 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

2018). We are intrigued when we encounter someone in difficult

straits, because we might end up in a similar situation and it

pays to learn about the obstacle and how to overcome it. We are

interested when characters confront obstacles not because it

allows us to simulate problem-solving, but because it masquer-

ades as useful information. In the same way that erotic images

activate pathways of sexual arousal that evolved for copulating

with real-life people, fiction taps psychological mechanisms

that exist for learning about useful obstacles. It doesn’t matter

that a tale about a handsome orphan battling an ogre tells us lit-

tle about how to solve problems in our own lives; rather, the

story triggers circuits that exist for learning about obstacles,

focusing our attention.

The Sympathetic Plot Induces Sympathetic Joy

Once the protagonist overcomes the goal, the audience might

feel some satisfaction, but most of the pleasure of sympathetic

plots comes from the interaction of features including the ensu-

ing rewards, the orphaning of the protagonist, and the protago-

nist’s strength or attractiveness. These features, I argue, interact

to induce sympathetic joy. First, the story creates a sympathetic

protagonist who audiences are motivated to help, appealing to

cognitive mechanisms for finding social partners and allocating

cooperation. The protagonist then succeeds, and audiences feel

a surge of sympathetic joy. This emotion evolved to motivate

cooperation, but it misfires when we represent an imaginary

character as a potential social partner.

People feel happy for people they want to help. People feel

pleasure in response to other people’s good fortune. Research-

ers variously refer to this feeling as symhedonia (Royzman &

Rozin, 2006), positive empathy (Morelli et al., 2015), vicarious

reward (Mobbs et al., 2009), empathic joy (Batson et al., 1991),

and empathic happiness (Light et al., 2015). Following Royz-

man and Rozin (2006), I call it sympathetic joy.

Some researchers argue that sympathetic joy serves to moti-

vate cooperation (Smith et al., 1989; Telzer et al., 2010). They

point out that if you expect that someone’s success will feel

good, then you will be motivated to help them and feel the

promised tickle (see also Telle and Pfister, 2016). In the same

way that the pleasures of sex, sugar, and safety entice us (Rozin,

1999), a beneficiary’s success feels good so as to encourage us

to reproduce it.

Converging lines of research suggest that we feel happy for

people we want to help. US participants reported greater sympa-

thetic joy towards individuals to whom they felt more attached,

such as best friends, compared to casual acquaintances

(Royzman & Rozin, 2006). Similar effects have been docu-

mented when studying brain activity. Subjects showed greater

activity in hedonic systems when in-group members succeeded

compared to out-group members (Hackel et al., 2017) and when

friends benefited compared to antagonists (Braams et al., 2014).

Subjects who felt more attached to a target—NYU students who

identified more with their university, Los Angeles young adults

who identified more with their family, and Dutch young adults

who reported being closer to their mothers and friends—showed

greater hedonic activity when the target benefited compared to

subjects who felt less attached to a target (Braams & Crone,

2017; Hackel et al., 2017; Telzer et al., 2010).

A second set of studies has found that people who experience

or anticipate joy in others’ successes are more likely to help

them. Pittinsky and Montoya (2016) used survey results, expert

evaluations of teaching, and student outcomes of 1,200

American teachers to investigate the correlates and conse-

quences of teachers’ sympathetic joy. They found that teachers

who reported greater joy in their students’ successes created

higher-quality learning environments and had higher achieving

students. Batson et al. (1991) and Smith et al. (1989) tested

whether the anticipation of seeing a happy beneficiary moti-

vated helping. It did: American undergraduates who expected to

see a positive reaction were more likely to help, although in one

study, this effect disappeared when the participants were asked

to empathize with the recipient.

These findings indicate that people feel happy for a benefi-

ciary when the target is someone they want to help. If stories

develop to induce sympathetic joy, then they should feature

characters who audiences most want to assist. What should

those ideal beneficiaries look like?

People want to help individuals who are competent, will-

ing, and in need. The most important ultimate factors motivat-

ing someone to help are kinship and reciprocity (Baumard et al.,

2013; West et al., 2007). In short, our psychology seems

designed to allocate help to relatives and people who will help

us in return. Convincing an audience that a protagonist is a fam-

ily member seems difficult, especially when the same story is

told to many individuals. But convincing the audience that the

protagonist is an appealing cooperative investment is much

easier.

There are at least two sets of traits that make someone a val-

uable cooperative partner and which people esteem in others

(Barclay, 2013; Cuddy et al., 2008; Fiske et al., 2007; Kummer,

1978; Tooby & Cosmides, 1996):

1. Competence. A valuable partner is strong, fast, talented,

good-looking, courageous, clever, and high status. That

is, they have attributes that reliably produce shareable

benefits, both through intentional action (e.g., coali-

tional support) and positive externalities (e.g., popular-

ity by association).

2. Willingness to help (or warmth). A valuable partner is

generous, sincere, trustworthy, moral, and genuinely

invested in us. That is, they are willing to help us and

remain with us when things get difficult. A partnership

becomes much easier when the people involved want

the same things; it becomes harder when their wants

diverge, such as if one partner regards the other’s goal

as wrong (and likely to draw disapproval).

People are predisposed to help strangers with appealing

traits, presumably to initiate relationships with them (Pisor &

Singh The Sympathetic Plot 189

Gurven, 2016, 2018). Maestripieri et al. (2017) reviewed the

vast literature demonstrating people’s biases towards attractive

individuals, including that attractive marathon runners receive

larger online donations (Raihani & Smith, 2015) and attractive

waitresses get larger tips from men, regardless of the quality of

the service (Lynn, 2009; Lynn & Simons, 2000). These coopera-

tive biases extend to strangers with appealing traits other than

physical attractiveness. Students at UCSB played the ultimatum

game (an economic game) with partners who were represented

with face photographs (Eisenbruch et al., 2016). A separate

group of students rated the same photographs for attributes such

as health, dominance, and social status. Despite having no pre-

vious relationship with the targets, participants gave more

money to partners represented by appealing faces, such as those

that appeared healthy, attractive, prosocial, and high status.

The ideal beneficiary should not only be a valuable social

partner; they should suffer too. People have compassion. We are

motivated to help people in need (see Batson et al., 2002; Goetz

et al., 2010 for reviews). This motivation is influenced by how

close we feel towards a target (Greitemeyer, 2010). We help

needy family members more than needy good friends and needy

acquaintances more than needy near-strangers (Cialdini et al.,

1997). Meanwhile, an enormous experimental literature, includ-

ing studies in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Nigeria,

shows that people prefer to help individuals whose suffering is

out of their control (Rudolph et al., 2004). As with our generos-

ity towards appealing would-be partners, compassion likely

exists to secure cooperative relationships (Goetz et al., 2010).

We help the needy, especially when help is cheap for us and

beneficial to them, to secure their gratitude and reap the benefits

of their friendship in the future (Trivers, 1971).

In summary, a technology designed to produce sympathetic

joy should create a character who is capable, warm, and who has

goals that are relatable and uncontroversial. They should be in

need, arousing our compassion, although their suffering should

be out of their control.

Explaining Stories

Protagonists of Sympathetic Tales are Ideal

Beneficiaries and Audiences Regard Them as

Friends

Stories should most effectively evoke sympathetic joy when

audiences want to help protagonists and especially when they

regard protagonists as attractive social partners. Narrative pat-

terns and studies of how people represent and respond to char-

acters show that this is the case: Protagonists everywhere are

appealing and in distress; audiences, in turn, develop warm feel-

ings towards them.

Protagonists are appealing. The protagonists of the world’s

folktales are appealing. Gottschall (2005) coded the features of

568 female protagonists and 392 male protagonists from 658

tales from around the world. The tales, selected as a globally

representative sample of folktales, frequently starred studs.

Physical attractiveness was mentioned for 22% of male protag-

onists and 51% of female protagonists—and nearly all were

attractive. In fact, of the 568 female protagonists coded, only

eight were described as unattractive. Characters were also

prosocial: 42% of female protagonists were “primarily moti-

vated to help others”; in contrast, very few antagonists (14%

female, 5% male) had prosocial inclinations (data for male pro-

tagonists were not reported). Lastly, characters were competent;

they had skills or abilities that produced benefits. A third of

male protagonists exhibited heroism, while a fifth of all males

were said to be best described as courageous.

In her cross-cultural study of orphan stories, Kimball (1999)

also noted the appealing traits of protagonists. Orphans were

sometimes witty (7/50) and often virtuous (29/50). Some were

hardworking, industrious, and brave; others’ merits were never

explicitly stated, although they were “observable as the orphan

endures abuse without complaint” (p. 565). In fact, Kimball

only mentioned the negative traits of two orphan-protagonists:

The Poor Turkey Girl (Zuni), who refrained from visiting a

flock of turkeys who helped her, and Coolnajoo (Wabanaki),

who acted as a fool to spite his uncle. Notably, these two were

the only orphan-protagonists to suffer at the end of their stories.

The heroes of hero-ogre stories around the world were also

appealing, exhibiting unique courage and strength (Jobling,

2001). They could kill villages of cannibals (Mbundu of

Angola), shoot arrows through armor (Apache of American

Southwest), and decapitate ogres with a slash of a thumbnail

(Micronesia). And they were good: “In all the stories, the hero’s

actions benefit the in-group as a whole” (Jobling, 2001, p. 260).

Finally, these trends seem to apply to Western stories. When

Johnson et al. (2008) studied the characters of 201 canonical

nineteenth-century British novels, they found that protagonists

typically valued their friends, pursued education, and helped

non-kin. Antagonists, meanwhile, rarely exhibited those traits.

Protagonists are the victims of uncontrollable misfor-

tune. Stories everywhere subject protagonists to tragic distress.

A common trope is to make the protagonist an orphan (Hen-

neberg, 2010). In a sample of 124 award-winning American

children’s novels, 18% featured orphan protagonists; 37% fea-

tured protagonists who were removed from their parents in any

way (Mattix, 2012). A similar analysis of top-grossing animated

children’s movies found that 18% included the death of a par-

ent, much more frequent than deaths of romantic interests

(6.7%), children (4.4%), or close friends (4.4%) (Colman et al.,

2014). Orphans are so common that the motif wiki TV Tropes

includes more than 25 pages describing orphan-related motifs,

including “Disappeared Dad” (Forrest Gump), “Doorstop

Baby” (Harry Potter), “Heartwarming Orphan” (James of James

and the Giant Peach), and “Street Urchin” (Oliver Twist) (TV

Tropes, 2019b). A page on “Death by Childbirth” underscores

the trope’s potency by pointing to its statistical improbability4:

“So sad, so tragic, so heart-wrenching . . . such a goldmine of a

plot device. Nothing impossible about it, but the statistics are

ridiculously high, especially for any industrialized nation” (TV

Tropes, 2019a).

190 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

Orphan protagonists dominate non-Western stories, too. In

Igbo (Nigeria) stories, “heroes and heroines were motherless

children, orphans or paupers, who always vanquished the more

privileged by miraculous or magical means” (Amadiume, 1987,

p. 85). In Toraja (Sulawesi) stories, “there is repeated mention

of orphans who are neglected and mistreated, only to achieve

glory later on” (Adriani and Kruijt, 1970, p. 140). In Karen

(Myanmar) folklore, “many tales recount episodes in which an

orphan exercises his uncanny powers, usually in defense of

some weaker person who he saves or helps to get the better of

his foes” (Marshall, 1922, p. 269).

Another common sympathy-inducing trope is the youngest

sibling protagonist (e.g., Muria Gond of central India: Elwin,

1947, p. 237; Nenet of Siberia: Golovnev, 1997, p. 149; Ainu of

Japan: Batchelor, 1927, pp. 337–342, 364–365). As with being

an orphan, being a youngest sibling is out of a character’s con-

trol but subjects them to immediate disadvantage, especially

when they are bullied.

Audience members represent characters as people and are

attached to appealing characters. People regard characters as

other people, at least partly. They speak to characters, feel sorry

for them when they make mistakes, and feel comfortable around

characters as they would around friends (Giles, 2010; Klimmt

et al., 2006). Men who watch more news shows and women

who watch more sitcoms report being more satisfied with their

friendships, presumably because they represent characters as

friends (Kanazawa, 2002). Readers of Harry Potter and Twi-

light admit to missing characters after finishing the book series

(Fan Forum, 2008; Harry Potter Forums, 2011), while Ameri-

can viewers of soap operas have physically assaulted actors who

play villains (Winsey, 1979; cited in Hoffner and Cantor, 1991).

In 1969, 5,000 viewers gathered at a church in Lima, Peru to

watch the filming of a main character’s wedding. According to

one newspaper, “People were dressed in their best outfits; sev-

eral people fainted, gripped by their emotions” (Singhal et al.,

1994, p. 8). Bezdek et al. (2013) coded viewers’ participatory

responses to films, including replotting (“He should’ve tried to

hide behind a seat or something”) and stated preferences for

outcomes (“I hope there’s no one in the house”). They found

that, aside from emotional outbursts (“Oh no!”, “Oh my god!”),

viewers’ most common participatory responses were instruc-

tions to the characters on how to solve problems, like “Get out

of there!” or “Just do it!”

The claim that we represent fictional characters as other peo-

ple may at first seem strange. Children as young as five recog-

nize the distinction between reality and fantasy (Samuels &

Taylor, 1994; Skolnick & Bloom, 2006; Woolley & Phelps,

1994). If people understand that characters are fictional, why

should they represent them as other people? Why should they

miss them, hate them, pity them, and yell helpful instructions?

Scholars refer to this puzzle as the paradox of fiction: Although

we understand fictional entities to be made-up, we emotionally

respond to them as if they were real (Friend, 2016; Radford &

Weston, 1975).

The resolution to the paradox of fiction is simple: Many of

our responses to stimuli occur regardless of whether they are

encoded as real. Participants are less willing to consume sugar

labeled “not sodium cyanide, not poison” compared to sugar

labeled “sucrose, table sugar”, even when they observe the same

sugar poured into both bottles (Rozin et al., 1990). They regard

feces-shaped fudge to be less appealing than disc-shaped fudge

and vomit-shaped rubber to be more repulsive than a sink stop-

per, even when they are assured that the fudges and the rubbers

have the same compositions (Rozin et al., 1986). They are sexu-

ally aroused by erotic imagery, even when they understand that

the targets are inaccessible or imaginary. Of course, our

responses to mislabeled sugar, stool-shaped fudge, and erotic

imagery are tempered compared to our responses to real ver-

sions of those stimuli. Nevertheless, as Bloom (2010, p. 169)

summarized, “our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast

between events that we believe to be real or that are imagined to

be real.” Fictional characters evoke many of the psychological

responses that real humans do, even when audiences understand

that they are imaginary.

Given that we treat characters (at least partly) as individuals,

it should be of little surprise that we find the same traits appeal-

ing in story-characters as we do in real-life social partners. Not

only do audience members like characters with attractive traits

(Hoffner & Cantor, 1991; Krakowiak & Oliver, 2012; Weber

et al., 2008; Zillmann & Cantor, 1977), but they develop friendly

feelings towards them, too. Elementary schoolchildren in

Illinois had stronger one-sided relationships—including miss-

ing a character when they’re not around and wanting to meet

them—with characters who appeared attractive, intelligent, and

strong (Hoffner, 1996). Midwestern American undergraduates,

meanwhile, had stronger relationships with characters they con-

sidered socially attractive (e.g., friendly) and competent (e.g.,

capable of getting things done) (Rubin & McHugh, 1987).

Whereas characters’ likable traits encourage friendly feel-

ings, their difficult circumstances seem to invite compassion.

Although there is little to no experimental research on how

readers respond to mistreated children protagonists, Keen’s

(2007) survey of an online discussion group provides prelimi-

nary evidence. She found that “many readers report that novels

in which child characters are subjected to cruel or unfair treat-

ment evoke empathy” (p. 69).5 And notably, readers reported

these responses while acknowledging that they came from dif-

ferent backgrounds. As one reader wrote, “In both [Jane Eyre

and David Copperfield] my strongest empathetic responses

were aroused by scenes of abuse by cruel relatives and abusive

school teachers, even though I was a happy lovingly-nurtured

child who adored my teachers and school” (Keen, 2007, pp.

69–70).

The Protagonist’s Journey Provides a Series of

Nested Obstacles

Sympathetic protagonists frequently go on journeys, encounter-

ing monsters, gate-keepers, and redirection along the way. The

account developed here offers at least two reasons for this trope.

First, a journey enhances the perceived difficulty of a goal and,

as a consequence, good feelings. If, as Jose’s (1988) findings

suggest, we experience greater joy when a character completes

Singh The Sympathetic Plot 191

a more difficult goal, then forcing the character to embark on a

complicated and dangerous series of tasks (e.g., escaping a

cyclops, skirting sirens) is a simple way of boosting pleasure

when the protagonist finally succeeds.

A second explanation for the frequency of journeys is that

they allow stories to include a series of related obstacles. A story

might include several obstacles for many reasons, including that

(1) the story is longer and requires successive problems to main-

tain interest, (2) the story describes feats or trials to show off the

protagonist’s special abilities, and (3) as just discussed, the story

enhances the perceived difficulty of attaining the goal. But unre-

lated obstacles cannot be piled onto each other. Instead, story-

tellers must causally connect the conflicts a protagonist

encounters, ideally unifying them under a single goal (Bower,

1982; Trabasso & Sperry, 1985; Trabasso & van den Broek,

1985; Zacks et al., 2007). Journeys provide this structure. They

establish an overarching goal (like destroying a ring) and string

a series of obstacles leading up to it (like avoiding Orcs and

escaping a spider), enabling longer, coherent sympathetic tales.

Explaining Success

Throughout this paper, I have reviewed many stories that con-

clude with the protagonist’s success. Here I review psychologi-

cal evidence showing that this success evokes sympathetic joy.

I then consider tales that seem to violate the sympathetic tem-

plate: tragedies.

People feel sympathetic joy when characters they like suc-

ceed. A viewer of the Indian soap opera “Hum Log” showed

how intense this vicarious pleasure can be in a letter she wrote

to the television network:

Congratulations on the wedding of Dr. Ashwini and Badki. When the

wedding was being telecast, my family and I could not control the tears

of joy, and when the newlywed couple was blessed for the first time, our

excitement knew no bounds. (Sood and Rogers, 2000, p. 400)

Researchers have demonstrated this joy in experiments

(Zillmann, 1995). In one study, American schoolchildren

watched a short film in which a boy was either nice, neutral, or

mean (Zillmann & Cantor, 1977). Afterwards, the boy either

received a new bike and delightfully rode off or fell off his bike

and cried. Children felt happy when the nice protagonist got a

bike or the mean one fell. They felt sad, in contrast, when the

nice protagonist fell or his mean counterpart got lucky. In

another study, participants watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo

and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (Trabasso and Chung, 2004;

described in Oatley, 2011). The experimenters stopped the films

twelve times, and at each point, participants either evaluated the

success of different characters or reported their emotions. When

the protagonist succeeded or the antagonist failed (as rated by

half of the participants), viewers felt positive emotions like hap-

piness and relief. When things went badly for the protagonist or

swimmingly for the antagonist, in contrast, viewers felt nega-

tive emotions (see also Zillmann, Taylor, & Lewis, 1998).

Unsympathetic characters suffer misfortune more often. If

the audience’s feelings track how appealing they find the pro-

tagonist, then protagonists who fail should often have unappeal-

ing traits. This seems to be the case. Literary scholars appreciate

that protagonists of European tragedies tend to exhibit a tragic

flaw, a misjudgment or moral failing that propels their eventual

demise (Bushnell, 2008). The failing can manifest as an unac-

ceptable goal, like a taste for pedophilia, or ugly methods for

attaining it, like killing a family member. Stories as diverse as

Richard III, Macbeth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lolita, and

Scarface pair a character’s moral faults with their eventual

demise (Booker, 2004; Bushnell, 2008).

Plots that involve the sympathetic protagonists’ ultimate

misfortune often compensate with redemption. Stephen King

(2002, p. 169) wrote, “No one likes to root for a guy over the

course of three hundred pages only to discover that between

chapters sixteen and seventeen the pig ate him.” Yet sympa-

thetic plots sometimes end with a likable protagonist’s down-

fall. An example is the Ainu story of Kutri and Yai-mah

(Batchelor, 1927, pp. 437–448). Declared the most handsome

man, Kutri was also strong, swift, clever, keen-sighted, charis-

matic, an astute tracker, and a talented fisherman. Yai-mah

had a lustrous, moon-round face and a cerulean, well-defined

tattoo; she danced, played the harp, brought water without

spilling, and maintained a respectable garden plot. The two

were instantly enamored, but both were betrothed as children

to mean, useless, ugly partners. When Kutri and Yai-mah ran

away, their ugly exes pursued them. The exes shot Kutri with

a poison arrow. After he died, Yai-mah killed herself.

The story of Kutri and Yai-mah violates our expectations. It

follows the structure of the sympathetic plot (with almost car-

toonishly appealing social partners) but distorts it by leaving the

protagonists’ goals unfulfilled, even killing them. Nevertheless,

it ends with feel-good justice. After the lovers’ deaths, the ugly

exes approached the couple’s house. One of the exes kicked Yai-

mah’s dead body, piercing himself with the poisoned arrow. He

died immediately. The other ex burned down the house, attract-

ing the attention of the couple’s faithful dogs. They bit the

vengeful arsonist. Within days, she began scratching, barking,

and foaming at the mouth. Both ugly exes lived cursed afterlives

among demons, while Kutri and Yai-mah enjoyed their after-

lives in bliss.

The point is that even violations of the sympathetic plot

induce good feelings by offsetting (to some extent) the protag-

onist’s misfortune with redemption. Romeo and Juliet ended

not with the star-crossed lovers’ deaths but with their families

concluding their feud and promising to immortalize the chil-

dren in golden statues. After the blameless, titular character of

Antigone hanged herself, the son and then the wife of the king

who ordered her death killed themselves too, leaving the king

alone and despairing. The film Titanic showed the death of the

protagonist’s lover (Jack), but then revealed that her cruel

fiancé committed suicide, that she lived a full life, and that she

was reunited with Jack in a mesmerizing afterlife. Chinese

tragedies paired the death of a sympathetic protagonist with

192 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

cosmic justice, too (Wallace, 2013). In the thirteenth-century

play The Injustice to Dou E, a young widow was framed for

murder and forced to confess. She was beheaded, but before

her execution, she prophesied unnatural events in the case of

her innocence. Her blood did not drip on the ground, snow fell

in midsummer, and the region suffered a drought. Three years

later, her father ordered a reinvestigation and the perpetrators

were properly punished.

Redemption softens the blow of tragic endings, but it fails to

explain why sympathetic plots take terrible turns. Instead, psy-

chological responses distinct from sympathetic joy likely con-

tribute to people’s positive appraisals of tragedies (Menninghaus

et al., 2017; Oliver & Raney, 2011; Tan, 1996). Oliver and

Bartsch (2010) found evidence that stories regarded as mean-

ingful or emotionally impactful produce positive experiences

beyond a basic hedonic punch. When the authors surveyed par-

ticipants about the most recent film they watched, they found

that respondents rated movies along a dimension the authors

called “moving/thought provoking”, including items such as

“The movie was thought provoking” and “I was moved by this

movie.” Responses to these items clustered distinctly from

responses to items such as “The movie was entertaining” and “I

had a good time watching this movie,” indicating that people

represented them as separate from pure enjoyment. Deviations

from the sympathetic plot can persist when they evoke positive

psychological responses aside from sympathetic joy.

Concluding Remarks

Why This Pleasure But Not That Pleasure?

Why is sympathetic joy so important for producing narrative

structure when there exist other ways of inducing pleasure? We

enjoy hearing about powerful weapons, magical items, mon-

sters, beautiful landscapes, and sexual gossip, yet these have

featured little in the proposed account. Why?

Many stimuli focus our attention or produce hedonic feelings

(Kringelbach & Berridge, 2009). But sympathetic joy is special,

because inducing it requires manipulating cognitive representa-

tions of a character and what happens to them. Insofar as we

enjoy hearing about monsters or sexual escapades, a storyteller

can include them in a tale and produce the accompanying feel-

ings. Evoking sympathetic joy, in contrast, demands defining

character and plot. It demands presenting an appealing charac-

ter, subjecting them to early distress, confronting them with an

obstacle, and having them succeed. If we start with the basic,

attention-grabbing substrate—a goal-directed protagonist con-

fronts an obstacle—we can modify it in many ways to make it

entertaining, such as by introducing fantastical artifacts or indi-

cations of betrayal. But among the most impactful changes will

be those serving to induce sympathetic joy.

Importantly, sources of pleasure aside from sympathetic joy

also require modifications to plot or character, resulting in dis-

tinct narrative archetypes. Trickster tales feature characters who

are often unappealing, mentally abnormal, and horny or glutton-

ous (Abrams & Sutton-Smith, 1977; Babcock-Abrahams, 1975;

Radin, 1956). These tricksters violate social norms, engage in

activities involving excrement and sexuality, and trick others or

are tricked themselves. Such elements of character and plot

embody the combination of alarm and distance considered cen-

tral for experiencing humor (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; McGraw

& Warren, 2010), suggesting that trickster tales are, in a sense,

laughter machines. Origin stories, meanwhile, seem to arrange

events to evoke the satisfying hit of learning a causal relation-

ship—a version of the Aha! experience (Shen et al., 2016;

Topolinski & Reber, 2010) or what Gopnik (1998) referred to as

the “orgasm” of explanation. As long as triggering certain pleas-

ures requires manipulating representations of characters and

events, those pleasures are expected to be important in shaping

narratives.

Of course, stories are far from the only technologies that

induce pleasure. Sweets, drugs, pornography, music festivals,

and ‘the like button’ are just some of the many cultural products

apparently engineered to hijack reward pathways and spark

good feelings. Moreover, as these examples demonstrate, differ-

ent pleasures are induced by different technologies. The delight

triggered when eating a chocolate chip cookie cannot be acti-

vated by watching Harry Potter or vice versa. Different pleas-

ures are evoked by very different stimuli, resulting in a diversity

of pleasure-technologies.

Five Predictions

I had two aims in this paper. First, I proposed that a particular

narrative structure, the sympathetic plot, is ubiquitous, appear-

ing in books, films, myths, and folk tales everywhere. This pro-

posal yields testable predictions, including the following two:

1. The sympathetic plot should appear in the vast majority

of the world’s folkloric traditions, regardless of socie-

ties’ subsistence strategies or levels of social complex-

ity and controlling for similarities that might result from

diffusion or shared cultural history.

2. For any story with a sympathetic plot that has variants

over a geographic range (e.g., many versions of

Cinderella across Europe), the primary and secondary

features (see Table 1) should vary less across variants

than do other features of the stories.

I then argued that the sympathetic plot recurs because it is a

technology for producing pleasure. It works by first presenting

a goal-directed protagonist with an obstacle, building interest. It

then establishes the protagonist as an appealing cooperative

partner, so that when they succeed, audiences experience sym-

pathetic joy, a hedonic state that normally occurs to motivate

helping. I used this account to explain the features of the sympa-

thetic plot, summarized in Table 1. This hypothesis also gener-

ates a set of predictions, including the following:

3. The hedonic neural activity that occurs at the trium-

phant end of a sympathetic tale should match the neural

activity involved in sympathetic joy more than the neu-

ral activity during other hedonic states, such as the

pleasure of remembering past instances of one’s own

success.

Singh The Sympathetic Plot 193

4. People’s desire to help a character should predict their

hedonic state when that character succeeds.

5. Protagonists’ traits and goals and the features of oppo-

nents should vary according to local cultural contexts.

In particular, protagonists should exhibit those traits

that people in that context prefer in their social partner;

protagonists’ goals should be those that people pursue

and consider justifiable; and opponents should exhibit

traits that make them formidable and unappealing. As

people’s social partner preferences, goals, and concep-

tions of formidability and repulsion change, the stories

they tell should transform, too.

Summary

Why do people everywhere tell stories about abused stepdaugh-

ters who marry royalty and revel in awarded riches? Whence all

the virtuous orphans? The answer, I have argued, is entertain-

ment. Tales in which a likable main character overcomes diffi-

culty and reaps rewards create a compelling cognitive

dreamscape. They twiddle psychological mechanisms involved

in learning and cooperation, narrowing attention and inducing

sympathetic joy. Story imitates life, or at least the elements of

life to which we have evolved pleasurable responses.

Acknowledgements

Maarten Boudry, Luke Glowacki, Jonathan Gottschall, Patrick Hogan,

Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley, and an anonymous reviewer provided helpful

comments on an earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the

research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Manvir Singh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6026-947X

Notes

1 In this paper, I refer to the sympathetic plot, sympathetic joy, and sym-

pathetic characters. By sympathetic plot, I mean stories featuring a

goal-directed protagonist who confronts an obstacle, overcomes it,

and reaps rewards. By sympathetic joy, I mean the pleasure we experi-

ence at another person’s good fortune. By sympathetic characters, I

mean characters whom audiences like, feel for, and want to help. I use

sympathetic in all three contexts partly because of precedent (at least

for joy and character) and partly because theoretical reasons justify a

common term. As I argue, the sympathetic plot seems partly designed

to engender audience sympathy towards protagonists (i.e., audiences

feel for protagonists and want to help them; see Table 1 in Goetz et al.,

2010 for definitions of sympathy). When the character succeeds, audi-

ences experience sympathetic joy.

2 A rejoinder might be that people enjoy imagining themselves as attrac-

tive and strong. But this rejoinder deviates from the prediction of

simulation hypotheses: The story is no longer a useful simulation but

simply what is pleasurable.

3 A rejoinder might be that fiction serves to simulate encounters with

threats that are rare but in which a person’s decisions can dramatically

affect their welfare, like face-offs against murderers or wild beasts.

But when Morin et al. (2019) recently tested this ordeal simulation

hypothesis, they found that agentive deaths (e.g., murder) were just as

frequent in a corpus of fiction as they were in a corpus of diary entries

and private correspondence. They were thus unable to reject the alter-

native explanation that implausible threats in fiction reflect humans’

general interest in social and threat-related information (Barrett et al.,

2016; Blaine & Boyer, 2018; Fessler et al., 2014; Mesoudi et al., 2006;

Stubbersfield et al., 2015).

4 Using data from both the CIA World Fact Book and the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for

Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth, and

Families, Mattix (2012) estimated that less than one percent of school-

age children in the United States (~408,000 of 63 million) are orphans.

5 In her prompt, Keen defined an “empathetic response” as “one in

which you felt with a fictional character or another aspect of the fic-

tion” (emphasis in original), contrasting it with a “sympathetic reading

experience, which does not necessarily entail shared feelings” (https://

list.indiana.edu/sympa/arc/victoria/2004-11/msg00156.html). But

distinguishing between an empathetic response (roughly, feeling as

someone else) and a sympathetic response (feeling for them) can be

difficult. Consider a father who sees his daughter win a spelling bee.

They have a shared feeling (happiness), but there are many reasons

why they might share this feeling. The father might mirror or simulate

Table 1. Features of the sympathetic plot and their hypothesized psychological responses.

Feature of the sympathetic plot Psychological response

Primary

features

1. A protagonist (P) has a goal. Builds interest by triggering mechanisms for learning about problem-

solving (Builds interest); Motivates audience to help P (Motivates helping)

2. The goal is relatable or justifiable. Motivates helping

3. P confronts an obstacle. Builds interest; Motivates helping

4. P overcomes the obstacle. Resolves interest about how to overcome obstacle, delivering satisfaction;

Produces sympathetic joy

5. P reaps rewards. Produces sympathetic joy

Secondary

features

6. P is appealing. Motivates helping

7. P suffers early misfortunes. Motivates helping

8. P is connected to high status. Motivates helping

9. P goes on an adventure. See pp. 190–191

10. P’s opponents are repulsive and formidable. Motivates helping

11. Anyone who opposes P reforms or is punished. Produces sympathetic joy

194 Emotion Review Vol. 13 No. 3

his daughter’s emotion, or her triumph may remind him of his own

victories, or he may feel happy for her. He would report an empathetic

response yet remain ignorant of the mechanism producing the shared

feeling. This ignorance also applies to the readers who responded to

Keen’s question. They understand their emotional response to the

orphan’s plight as “empathetic”, but their shared feeling may occur

for many reasons, including being sad for the orphan.

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Video oyunların altın çağını yaşamaktayız. Akademik dünyada da bunların araştırmasına yönelik gittikçe artan bir ilgi vardır. Ancak, çoğu araştırma tek bir oyunun mimarisini çalışarak başlamaktadır. Oysa ki, bir oyunda mimarinin kullanımını anlamak için, öncelikle alanın arka planı çalışılmalıdır. Tek bir oyundaki mimarinin kullanımını araştırmak için; hem hikaye anlatıcılığı ve dünya yaratma kavramları hem de video oyunlar ve mimari ilişkisi incelenmelidir. “Hikaye anlatıcılığı” kavramı, bir kültürel ve sosyal aktivite olarak öykülerin paylaşımıdır. Her kültürün; eğitim, eğlence ya da belli duyguları uyandırmak için başvurduğu hikayeleri vardır. Hikaye anlatıcılığının tarihi, insanın bilişsel devrimi gerçekleştirmesi kadar eski olmalıdır. Sözlü hikayeler (mitolojik öyküler, epik kahramanlık destanları, peri masalları ve fabllar gibi), en ilkel uygarlık düzeylerinde dahi karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Yazının icadı ise, hikayelerin kayıt altına alınarak daha geniş kitlelere ulaşmasını sağlamıştır. Çağdaş hikaye anlatıcılığı ise daha geniş anlamlar içermektedir. Yeni medya biçimlerinin yaratılması, insanlara hikaye anlatmak ve kaydetmek için yeni yollar ortaya çıkarmıştır. Günümüzde artık çizgi romanlardan, film ve video oyunlarına kadar çeşitlenebilen genişlikte hikaye anlatım yöntemleri mevcuttur. Örnek vermek gerekirse; Yıldız Savaşları ya da Orta Dünya evrenlerinin üstün kalitede çağdaş dönem hikayeleri, hatta dünya yaratma destanları oldukları öne sürülebilir. Yakın gelecekte hayatımıza girecek Metaverse benzeri medya setleri ise, bambaşka duyularımıza hitap ederek yepyeni hikayeleri anlatmak vaadindedirler. “Dünya yaratma (Worldbuilding)”, hikaye anlatıcılığının bir alt dalıdır ve hikaye anlatmak için kurgusal evrenler yaratmayı ifade etmektedir. Kavram, sıradan ancak var olmayan bir köyden üzerinde yerleşimler olan bir gezegene ve hatta karmaşık galaksiler sistemine kadar değişik ölçek ve gerçeklik düzeylerini kastediyor olabilir. Ancak, dünya yaratma kavramı genellikle fantastik çevrelerin yaratılması için kullanılmaktadır. Dünya yaratanlar, yeni birer coğrafya (kıtalar, okyanuslar ve iklim), ekoloji (bitey ve direy; bitki örtüsü ve hayvan çeşitliliği) ve uygar sakinler (insanlar ya da kültürleri olan yeni türler) takımı tanımlamaktadırlar. Bir başka deyişle, bu kurgusal dünyalara yayılmış canlılar ortaya konmaktadır. Sihirli parlak ağaçlar ve kriptozoolojik canavarlar gibi yaşam biçimleri sık karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Elbette, bu varlıklarla etkileşime giren insan ya da başka antropomorfik türler biçiminde akıllı ve medeni türler oluşturulmaktadır. Kurgusal kültürler yaratmak dünya yaratmanın anahtar elemanıdır çünkü kurgusal türler ancak kültürleri aracılığı ile var olabilirler. Kültürler, kurgu dünyanın hikaye anlatımında ve gerçekçi algılanmasında belirleyici roldedirler. Hikaye anlatıcılığı ve dünya yaratma adına ayrıntılı kurgulanacak bir kültürde soyut ve somut kavramlar ele alınmalıdır. Soyut olanları için; değerler, inançlar, kutlamalar, finansal ve siyasi sistem, sosyal statüler ve tarih gibi kavramlar sorgulanmalıdır. Maddi kültür ise, elle tutulur ve gözle görülür nesnelerden oluştuğundan kurgu dünya kültürleri için daha da ayrıntılı ele alınmalıdır. Giysiler, gereçler, teknoloji düzeyi, araçlar ve mimari gibi somut kavramlar ayrıntılı şekilde sorgulanmalıdır. Mimarinin önemli bir hikaye anlatım unsuru olduğu her dönem tartışılagelmiştir. Gerçek dünyada olduğu gibi, sanal dünyalarda da mimarlık tek başına pek çok mesajı iletebilmektedir. Sadece yapılarını gözlemleyerek, bir kültürün ekonomik döngüsü, teknoloji düzeyi ve sosyal örgütlenmesi anlaşılabilmektedir. Görsel dünya yaratma kavramı için ise mimarinin mekansal deneyimi derinleştirme becerilerinden söz edilmelidir. Fiziksel mekanın tasarımcıların anlatmak istediği hikayedeki aktarımın çoğunu üstlenmesinden dolayı; mimarinin, dünya yaratma ve üst ölçekte hikaye anlatıcılığı düzeylerinde en önemli alt eleman olduğu rahatlıkla öne sürülebilir. Mimari ve mekan, hacim ve sahne anlamlarında antik tiyatrolardan beri anlatıcı rolünde kullanılmaktadır. Son iki buçuk yüzyılda ise; gerek sinema gerekse de televizyon, mimarinin bu yönünden konseptüel düzeyde oldukça aydalanmaktadır. Son altmış yılda ise yepyeni bir görsel medya olarak video oyunlar ortaya çıkmıştır. Mimari burada da doğrudan, ancak diğer medyalarda kayda değer bir farklılıkta kullanılmaktadır. Video oyunlarında mekan, gerçek dünyada olduğu gibi gezilebilir ve etkileşim kurulabilir kimliktedir. Seyirciler (“audience”; muhatap alınan kimseler) burada oyunculardır ve oyuncular mekan deneyiminde tam bir özgürlük yaşamaktadır. Oysa diğer görsel medyalarda seyirciler, mekanı sadece kendilerine sunulan perspektiften algılayabilen pasif kimselerdir. Mimari ayrıca, video oyun dünyasında fiziksel ve ekonomik sınırlamalardan tamamen sıyrılmış kimliktedir ve tüm yönleri ile hikaye anlatıcılığını desteklemektedir. Fantastik dünyalarda, mimari tanımlayıcı rolünü de üstlenmektedir. Buralarda insandan başka medeni türler görme olasılığımız yüksek olduğundan; onlar için tasarlanacak mimari, kültürleri konusunda çoğu mesajı verecek biçimleniştedir. Başka deyişle, kurgusal yerel kültürlerin nesnel varlıkları, onlarla tam uyumlu bir vernaküler mimari yaratılmadan anlatılamaz. Kurgu oyun dünyalarındaki kültürlerin yapılarına da vernaküler mimari denebileceğine göre, önce bu kavram anlaşılmalıdır. Vernaküler mimarinin tanımının zorlayıcı olduğu ve üzerinde tartışmaların sürdüğü, akademik çevrelerce kabul görmektedir. En kısa ve en bağlayıcı tanım “mimarsız mimarlık ”tır. Biraz daha genişletilmiş bir tanım aradığımızda ise, akademik çevrelerdeki şu ifadeler yardımcı olmaktadır: “mimar ya da usta gibi bir profesyonelin görevlendirilmediği; kabile, köylüler, halk gibi kullanıcıları tarafından yapılan yapılar”, “çevresel bağlam, yerel kaynaklar ve geleneksel teknikler kullanılarak, halkın kendine kurduğu yapılar”, “dışarıdan bir teknik ya da malzeme almadan içinde yaşayacak bireylerin inşa ettiği yapılar”. Vernaküler yapılar, gezegenin her köşesinde karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Ancak bu çalışma, kurgusal dünyalardaki vernaküler yapı örneklerine odaklanmaktadır. Buradaki kurgusal sözcüğü; özellikle fantastik türden roman, film ve video oyunlarındaki gerçekte var olmayan yapıları ifade etmektedir. “Yüzüklerin Efendisi”, “Yıldız Savaşları”, “Son Havabükücü Avatar” ve “World of Warcraft” gibi farklı evrenlerin yapıları; üstün kalitede vernaküler örnekler olarak değerlendirilebilir. Level tasarımcısı, sanat yönetmeni ya da formel eğitimli bir mimardan hangisi olursa olsun; bu yapıları yaratan kimselerin vernaküler mimarlık konusunda derin bir içgörüye sahip oldukları, oldukça başarılı sonuçlara bakarak saptanabilir. Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment firmasının yarattığı ve video oyunları, romanlar, filmler ve diğer medyalardan oluşan bir markadır. Bu markanın amiral gemisi olan World of Warcraft video oyunu ise, özellikle dünya yaratma ve mimarlık açılarından ayrıntılı şekilde incelenmeyi hak etmektedir. Oyun, bir yüksek fantezi (high-fantasy) dünyası olan “Azertoh”ta geçmektedir. Blizzard Entertainment, Azeroth’un hikaye anlatıcı yönünü büyük bir özenle tasarlamaktadır. Oyunun dünya çağındaki başarısının anahtarı da bu olmalıdır. Tasarımcıları, oyuncuların kuracağı duygusal bağı bildiklerinden, bu dünyayı yaratmak için oldukça uzun zaman harcamaktadır. Azertoh’ta okyanuslar ve kıtalar bulunmaktadır. Kıtalar; her birinin özgün birer bitki ve hayvan çeşitliliğine sahip oldukları, gerçek dünyadan bataklık, orman, ormanlık biyomları benzeri bölgelere ayrılmaktadır. Beklendiği gibi, çok çeşitli akıllı türler de yaratılmıştır. World of Warcraft, oyuncuların; görevleri tamamlayarak, canavarlar ve birbirleri ile savaşarak, Azeroth’u keşfederek ve yeni beceriler, silahlar ve zırhlar edinerek karakterlerini geliştirdikleri bir MMORPG yani Kitlesel Çok Oyunculu Çevrimiçi Rol Yapma Oyunudur. Oyuncular, oyunun en başında; her birinin özgün ve ayrıntılı bir kültürü olan insanlar, orklar, troller, taurenler, elfler ve benzeri pek çok ırktan birini seçerek bir karakter (avatar) yaratırlar. Gerçekten de tüm ırkların farklı giysileri ve gereçleri ile oldukça geniş çeşitlilikte mimarileri vardır. Mimarinin hikaye anlatıcılığı altındaki maddi kültür odaklı anahtar rolü bilindiğinden, oyundaki her bir yapı özenle detaylandırılarak tasarlanmıştır. World of Warcraft’taki yapı tasarımı, bir grup nedenle başarılı olarak değerlendirilebilir. Birincisi, Azeroth’un bir üç boyutlu dünya olmasından dolayı mimarinin iç mekan ve dış mekanların kimliklerini belirlemesidir. İkincisi, yapı biçimleri kadar yapı malzemelerini de hikaye anlatıcılığı için çalıştırmasıdır. Burada ne taş ne de ahşap gerçek malzemedir. Tüm yapı malzemesi görsel imajlardan oluşmaktadır ve malzemelere gerçek dünyada atadığımız anlamlar gereği yapıyı kullanan ırkların ne kadar ilkel ya da endüstrileşmiş olduklarına dair mesajlar vermektedir. Üçüncüsü; Azeroth’un çizgi film benzeri teması ile, çoğu hiperrealistik oyunun aksine, mimariyi oynanabilirlik düzeyinde optimize etmiş olmasıdır. Dördüncüsü ve en önemlisi se, yapıların farklı kültürleri ifade edecek şekilde mükemmel vernaküler kimlikte olmalarıdır. Genel bir mimari değerlendirme sonucu; World of Warcraft’ın, özellikle mimarinin gerçekliğini değil de hikaye anlatıcı rolünü ön planda tutması ile, bir diğer çağdaş dünya yaratma destanı olarak değerlendirilmesi gerekliliği rahatlıkla öne sürülebilir.

Reading the docufiction script: Harnessing the thin line between facts and fiction

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

The ethical issues raised by merging facts and fiction in docufiction screenplays as a genre suitable for social impact storytelling still linger. Hence, for the intended message to be effectively passed, the genre, formatting and narrative technique have to be clearly established for the readership’s consumption. Therefore, this article will investigate how facts are reinforced by fiction in docufiction. Textual analysis of Nicodemus Adai Patrick and John Iwuh’s is employed in exploring narrative techniques and formatting as indicators of the proportion of facts and fiction in a docufiction screenplay. It concludes that docufiction is a deliberate document with a mission in which the fact supplies the foundation on which fiction stands. Pre-knowledge of the embedded fact is primal to a deeper appreciation of a docufiction. It concludes that the readership’s level of comprehension and satisfaction will be enhanced if the thin line between facts and fiction is spotted.

The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities

Book

Jan 2025

Bradley J. Irish

Not supplied by the author. This Element surveys how a number of major disciplines − psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, and literary/cultural studies − have addressed the long-standing research question of whether human emotions should be thought of as meaningfully 'universal.' The Element presents both the universalist and anti-universalist positions, and concludes by considering attempts to move beyond this increasingly unhelpful binary.

A construção de gênero a partir da jornada da heroína Linn da Quebrada no Big Brother Brasil 22

Article

Dec 2023

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a passagem de Linn da Quebrada no reality showBig Brother Brasil (BBB) em 2022. Com o intuito de compreender como sua aparição no programa impactou múltiplos discursos de gênero e de vivência de identidades trans-femininas na sociedade brasileira, a abordagem metodológica desta pesquisa foi inspirada nas doze etapas da Jornada do Herói, teoria criada por Campbell (2007) e usada principalmente para explicar jornadas androcêntricas. Assim, a partir de uma pesquisa explicativa e de um estudo de caso, foi analisada a participação de Linn da Quebrada no BBB e como ela orientou, dentro da sociedade brasileira, múltiplos temas do transgenerismo para além do programa.

Americanizing the Scandinavian Super Underdog in Eighteen Film Remakes

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023

Mads Larsen

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 a different culture must therefore consider how their main character should be adapted in order to maximize a remake’s chance of artistic and commercial success (Singh). Such character adjustment, when informed by the expectations of a new film market, is part of the process Linda Hutcheon refers to as transculturation (141–48). In this article, I examine eighteen American remakes of fifteen Scandinavian films, from the 1930s to the 2010s. These case studies comprise nearly all Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish films that have been remade in America, with the exception of a handful of films I was unable to acquire access to with reasonable effort. Through an analysis of protagonists in these thirty-three films, I illustrate important cultural differences in respect to the heroic in Scandinavia juxtaposed with the United States. By heroic I refer to the range of values, traits, and skills that a culture promotes as worthy of emulation. While both Scandinavia and the US are Western cultures with a predominantly Protestant background, distinct environments and histories inform significant differences with regard to what their current populations consider to be good and bad.

“Conflict to collage”: A perceptual control architecture to underpin human consciousness

Chapter

Jan 2023

Warren Mansell

Not just a hijack: Imaginary worlds can enhance individual and group-level fitness

Article

Nov 2022

Why has fiction been so successful over time? We make the case that fiction may have properties that enhance both individual and group-level fitness by (a) allowing risk-free simulation of important scenarios, (b) effectively transmitting solutions to common problems, and (c) enhancing group cohesion through shared consumption of fictive worlds.

Subjective selection and the evolution of complex culture

Preprint

Full-text available

Nov 2020

Manvir Singh

Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is what I call subjective (cultural) selection, or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals. As they adopt and pass on those variants that seem best, they iteratively craft culture into increasingly effective-seeming forms. I argue that this process drives the development of many cumulatively complex cultural products, including effective technology, magic and ritual, aesthetic traditions, and institutions. I show that it can explain cultural dependencies, such as how certain beliefs create corresponding new practices, and I outline how it interacts with other cultural evolutionary processes. Cultural practices everywhere, from spears to shamanism, develop because people subjectively evaluate them to be effective means of satisfying regular goals.

Why people die in novels: testing the ordeal simulation hypothesis

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2019

What is fiction about, and what is it good for? An influential family of theories sees fiction as rooted in adaptive simulation mechanisms. In this view, our propensity to create and enjoy narrative fictions was selected and maintained due to the training that we get from mentally simulating situations relevant to our survival and reproduction. We put forward and test a precise version of this claim, the “ordeal simulation hypothesis”. It states that fictional narrative primarily simulates “ordeals”: situations where a person’s reaction might dramatically improve or decrease her fitness, such as deadly aggressions, or decisions on long-term matrimonial commitments. Experience does not prepare us well for these rare, high-stakes occasions, in contrast with situations that are just as fitness-relevant but more frequent (e.g., exposure to pathogens). We study mortality in fictional and non-fictional texts as a partial test for this view. Based on an analysis of 744 extensive summaries of twentieth century American novels of various genres, we show that the odds of dying (in a given year) are vastly exaggerated in fiction compared to reality, but specifically more exaggerated for homicides as compared to suicides, accidents, war-related, or natural deaths. This evidence supports the ordeal simulation hypothesis but is also compatible with other accounts. For a more specific test, we look for indications that this focus on death, and in particular on death caused by an agent, is specific to narrative fiction as distinct from other verbal productions. In a comparison of 10,810 private letters and personal diary entries written by American women, with a set of 811 novels (also written by American women), we measure the occurrence of words related to natural death or agentive death. Private letters and diaries are as likely, or more likely, to use words relating to natural or agentive death. Novels written for an adult audience contain more words relating to natural deaths than do letters (though not diary entries), but this is not true for agentive death. Violent death, in spite of its clear appeal for fiction, does not necessarily provide a clear demarcation point between fictional and non-fictional content.

Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice

Book

Jan 2011

Joseph Carroll

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction

Book

Dec 2009

Brian Boyd

Morphology of the Folktale: Second Edition

Book

Dec 1968

V. Propp

A Handbook of Greek Mythology

Book

Aug 2004

H. J. Rose

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction

Book

Jul 2011

Keith Oatley

The Folkstories of Children

Book

Dec 1981

Brian Sutton-Smith

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction

Book

May 2009

Brian Boyd

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City

Book

Aug 2019

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising forty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities; Contemporary; Philosophical Theories of the City; Urban Aesthetics; Urban Politics; Citizenship; and The Creation/Destruction of Place. The concluding section contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization.

The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction

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