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Poetics Today : ( December ) ./-
© by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Why Monsters Are Dangerous
Olivier Morin
Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, ENS—PSL University
Oleg Sobchuk
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Abstract Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a
wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their proper-
ties be predicted? These were long- standing questions for structuralist or cogni-
tive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to
solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and
to explain some cross- cultural regularities that such animals present — traits like
hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first
investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structur-
alist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with.” Accord-
ing to Mary Douglas’s influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that
disrupt intuitive classifications of species — the “monsters- as- anomalies” account.
But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications
of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded.
This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters
as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters — “monsters-
as- predators” — starts from the importance of predator detection to our past sur-
vival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good
to think with,” and should be overrepresented in imaginary animals. This article
argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other
account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts that attempts
to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and
predatoriness, tend to go together.
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648 Poetics Today 44:4
Keywords cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, hybrids, predators,
minimally counterintuitive representations
Imaginary animals could be like imaginary phone numbers. Fictional
phone numbers look very much like real ones: no special feature betrays the
fact that they are not real (to nonspecialists at least). Likewise, some imagi-
nary animals — the Yeti, the Loch Ness monster, some unicorns — would
not be out of place in a real- world bestiary. Fictional entities need not nec-
essarily wear their fictionality on their sleeve (Goodman ) and in some
ways, fictional animals are rather unimaginative: for instance, they tend
to replicate basic body schemas (Ward ; Wengrow ). Utterly fan-
ciful creations — animals with no sensory organs, animals with detached
but functional arms or legs — are rare (though not unheard of). Yet there
are good reasons to expect fictional animals to be dierent from their real-
world counterparts. Fictional entities are less constrained, leaving us free to
endow them with features that appeal to our imagination. We would thus
expect them to be more memorable, more interesting — in a word, more
cognitively appealing than real animals.
This idea has been defended by a number of scholars, most notably in
the field of cognitive anthropology (e.g., Sperber ; Boyer ), but
also in archaeology (e.g., Wengrow ). Its origins can be found in s
structuralist anthropology. Claude Lévi- Strauss () and Mary Douglas
([] ) established the notion that some biological species are, in
Lévi- Strauss’s famous phrase, “good to think with” (: ), compared
to others not as worthy of cognitive or symbolic elaboration. This hypoth-
esis proved widely successful: it was firmly established by Mary Douglas
in Purity and Danger (see discussion below) and became a staple of structur-
alist anthropology (e.g., Leach ), even though the elements that made
up the cognitive appeal of a species varied widely from one scholar to
another. Once the basic idea — dierent animals vary in the material they
oer for cultural elaboration — was in place, its application to imaginary
creatures was only a small step away. As Dan Sperber () remarked,
if some features make certain animals more cognitively appealing than
others, imaginary animals should exhibit those features, since they are
built by our cognition for its own benefit. If we can figure out what makes
some animals more interesting to the human mind, we could predict some
recurring aspects of imaginary animals; and by studying monsters and
other fantastical creatures, we could understand better how human cog-
nition represents animals. There will probably never be an interesting sci-
ence of imaginary phone numbers worth investigating, but there could be
one for monsters. Real animals may or may not be “good to think with,”
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 649
but imaginary ones have to be. To get there, we need to answer two related
questions:
First question: What are the properties that make some real animals “good
to think with”?
Second question: Do imaginary animals possess those properties?
The first three sections of this article will review several theoretical pro-
posals from the history of cognitive anthropology. These proposals were
invented more often to answer the first question, more rarely the second.
But we can use them to shed light on both. We first consider Douglas’s
proposal: animals are fit for symbolic elaboration when they cross tax-
onomic boundaries or otherwise disturb the way we classify them (what
we will dub the monsters- as- anomalies account). As we shall see, this the-
sis runs into diculties when we attempt to determine what it is precisely
that makes an animal disturb a classification. We will see how this argu-
ment has been refashioned, chiefly by Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, into
a claim that has more psychological plausibility (in section ). Another pro-
posal would replace intuitive classificatory categories (e.g., the dierence
between quadrupeds and fish) with intuitive ontological categories (e.g.,
living vs. nonliving; animate vs. inanimate). The view that entities enjoy
high cognitive appeal if they transgress these ontological boundaries in one
and only one way is deservedly famous in cognitive anthropology, but we
will argue that this hypothesis does not apply well to monsters (section ).
A third answer to our two questions, the “monsters- as- predators” account,
starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and
reproduction and argues that predatory features make animals “good to
think with,” and should be overrepresented in monsters (“. . . but preda-
tors have a hold on our imagination.”). The last section (“Toward a unified
hypothesis”) sketches a theoretical framework that synthesizes ideas from
the monsters- as- anomalies and monsters- as- predators accounts. There, we
attempt to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters,
anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to be paired with one another.
Throughout this article, we use the phrases imaginary animals and monsters
interchangeably, even though each carries dierent connotations. Imag-
inary animals are simply that — fictional creatures — while monsters are
typically big and dangerous, in addition to being imaginary. The equivo-
cation is deliberate. In the last part of our article, we will make the case
that the link between fictionality and danger is not accidental: imaginary
animals tend to be frightening, that is, they tend to be monstrous. We pro-
pose an account of this relationship: in other words, we hope to explain
why monsters are dangerous.
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650 Poetics Today 44:4
1. Classificatory anomalies are not all good to think with . . .
In true structuralist fashion, Douglas ([] ) argued that the cultural
and symbolic status of animals was determined by their position within a
classification. Specifically, she claimed that Biblical dietary prohibitions
target animals that are not typical of their kind and linked this to the sym-
bolic status of classificatorily ambiguous animals in other cultures, most
famously the Pangolin among the Lele of Congo. Douglas’s specific pro-
posal was heavily criticized (Lemardelé ; Sperber ; Walsh ;
Lewis ), not least by Douglas herself (Douglas ), but the gene-
ral notion that unclassifiable animals have particular cognitive appeal
endures. This thesis provides a ready answer to our first question, What
makes some animals good to think with? Answer: classificatory anoma-
lies. If this is true, then such anomalies should be overrepresented among
monsters. Are they?
On the face of it, they are. Imaginary animals do not merely stretch
commonsense categories; they flaunt them (Sperber ). They look noth-
ing like common or garden species. They tend toward the freakish and the
monstrous. Imaginary animals typically possess traits that would make
any real species stand out, including mutations like multiple limbs, a sin-
gle eye, excessive size, and so on. More interestingly from the perspec-
tive of structuralist anthropologists, imaginary animals also fuse features
belonging to phylogenetically distant species: eagle- headed lions, feathered
humans, and the like.
A Douglasian way of viewing monsters still commands a lot of credibil-
ity in the humanities. Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (Carroll ),
having cited Douglas, elaborates:
Many monsters of the horror genre are interstitial and/or contradictory in terms
of being both living and dead: ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, the Fran-
kenstein monster, Melmoth the Wanderer, and so on. Near relatives to these
are monstrous entities that conflate the animate and the inanimate: haunted
houses, with malevolent wills of their own, robots, and the car in King’s Christine.
Also many monsters confound dierent species: werewolves, humanoid insects,
humanoid reptiles, and the inhabitants of Dr. Moreau’s island. ()
. . . .
[Monsters] are un- natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of
nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only
physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to
common knowledge. ()
This view of monsters as taxonomical anomalies is worth pondering for
a moment. It seems intuitively right, but we should distinguish one sense
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 651
in which it is just trivially true, from a dierent, more substantive read-
ing. The trivial claim is the following: any zoological classification meant
for real- world animals is bound to ignore nonexistent creatures. Thus, in
a trivial sense, imaginary creatures are classificatory anomalies simply
because they are absent from the inventory of (real- world) animals. This
is not much of an anomaly; the simple addition of a new category would
resolve it.
Monsters may disrupt our classification of animals in a much more sub-
stantive way, by calling into question the coherence of major classificatory
principles (if their existence is taken seriously). That kind of disruption
could occur, for instance, if the monster in question presents features of two
distant species supposed to belong to entirely distinct categories. This more
substantive claim brings with it problems of its own, however. To know
whether an animal violates or stretches the categories that a culture uses to
classify animals, we need to figure out what these categories are. But not
all cultures entertain a unified classification of species with the ambition of
identifying natural kinds: folk classifications tend to be plastic and pluralis-
tic, instead of rigidly systematic. They readily accept vague or overlapping
categories (Sperber ).
Another challenge is in knowing how unlikely an animal has to be to
count it as a classificatory anomaly. Many real- world species combine fea-
tures from distant taxonomical categories without disrupting scientists or
laypeople’s classifications: dolphins and whales are mammals who live and
look like fish, hippos have hairless skin like humans yet live in the water like
fish, chimpanzees resemble humans without having language, and so on.
Last, one needs to demonstrate that the threat to the classification is
eective and recognized as such. This is not always easy to do. To take but
one example, Christian medieval theologians and zoologists accepted the
existence of many outlandish monsters as fact and went on to find a place
for them in God’s harmonious creation in quite a relaxed way (Wittkower
).
In short, structuralist anthropology spoke of classificatory anomalies
without putting forward any clear and shared criterion that researchers
could use to distinguish the anomalous animals from the rest. Douglas’s
original claim was quite elastic, and subsequent proposals did nothing to
make it tighter. Few sharp distinctions were drawn between animals with
slightly atypical features (e.g., pigs do not physically resemble the rumi-
nants with which they coexist), hybrids of two species (such as mules),
mutants, sick animals, and imaginary monsters. This elasticity no doubt
contributed to the hypothesis’s success, but that same elasticity renders
hybrids challenging to evaluate.
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652 Poetics Today 44:4
Today’s cognitive anthropology is much better equipped to describe
people’s naive classifications of animals. Anthropologists like Scott Atran
() or Pascal Boyer () focused their investigations on the univer-
sal building blocks of intuitive classifications. In contrast with standard
ethnographic analyses that are typically tailor- made for the categories
of a given culture, these theoreticians sought to develop hypotheses that
were as general in scope as was possible. The resulting framework rests
on the view that humans are natively prone to classifying things accord-
ing to “folk theories.” According to the framework, these folk theories are
emphatically not the popular theories that hold among a particular group.
They represent deep psychological constraints on human worldviews, pro-
ducing cross- culturally robust and early- developing intuitions. One such
intuition separates animate from inanimate beings (more on this below).
Another posits that biological individuals have essential properties dis-
tinct from their accidental properties (folk biology), or precise expectations
about the beliefs and desires of entities that are capable of those things
(the so- called theory of mind). Even a cursory description of these theo-
ries would be beyond the scope of this article; but what do they have to say
about anomalous animals?
First, folk classifications are plastic enough that taxonomical anomalies,
properly speaking, rarely occur at all (Atran : chap. ). Most cultures
inhabit an ecology where the distinction between species (e.g., sheep) and
genera (e.g., Ovis) is irrelevant to most classificatory purposes. The family
level (e.g., bovidae) is usually left implicit. The resulting classifications tend
to be flat (our term). They tend to consist in categories that fuse the generic
and the specific level without much superordinate elaboration, as opposed
to the ramified family- genre- species taxonomies that biologists are accus-
tomed to. Few zoological oddities are so extreme that a flat taxonomy can-
not accommodate them simply by creating an ad- hoc category. In a flat
system, such categories are nothing special. As Sperber () and Atran
() argue, ad hoc categories are just as productive as other categories. In
the land of the Dorzé of Ethiopia, only one species of snake is commonly
known. Snakes in the Dorzé classification thus form a zoological singleton,
but when a Dorzé travels to the Great Rift Valley where other species of
snakes are known, the Dorzé classify them under the Dorzé category for
snakes as a matter of course (Sperber ). This simple strategy also takes
care of hybrids. The fact that donkeys and mares can interbreed consti-
tutes a limited breach of these species’ boundaries, but folk classifications
(distinct on this point from scientific classifications) solve the problem sim-
ply by making mules into an ad hoc species, known to bridge its parent
species and to consist of sterile individuals. Thus, contrary to what Doug-
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 653
las (and most of structuralist anthropology alongside her) claimed, classif-
icatory anomalies do not explain why some animals lend themselves more
readily to symbolic elaboration. Folk taxonomies are structured in such a
way that serious anomalies are unlikely to arise and are easily solved.
This point invalidates the standard view of classificatory anomalies, and
alongside it the power of anomalies to explain monsters. But it still leaves
the door open for a revised version of this claim. In this revised version
of the monsters- as- anomalies view, taxonomical boundaries are replaced
with statistical regularities:
The taxonomic position of bats, seals, whales, ostriches and the like, though
logically speaking never anomalous, is nonetheless often psychologically
peculiar. In some societies the bat is classified with the bird, in others with the
quadruped, in yet others it is given a separate taxonomic status equal to that
of the bird and the quadruped (...). But whatever taxonomic solution one opts
for, the result is abnormality: if classified with the birds or quadrupeds, still it is
morphologically and behaviorally distinct from the other birds or quadrupeds;
and if given a position equal in status to that of the birds, quadrupeds and fish,
still it lacks the numerical and ecological diversity of these other higher order
taxa and constitutes a much more perceptually and behaviorally homogenenous
taxon. This peculiarity is attention- getting. Hence it renders such kinds choice
subjects for symbolic speculation (. . .) (cf. Sperber ). (Atran : )
What Sperber and Atran proposed amounted to a substantial rethinking
of Douglas’s classificatory anomalies as prototypicality eects (Rosch )
whereby things that are perceived as belonging to a category might none-
theless occupy a marginal position within that category (e.g., ostriches and
penguins compared to sparrows). Atypical animals may be cognitively
appealing for the same reasons that novel or incongruous notions are eas-
ier to recall: they stand out (see, e.g., Waddill and McDaniel ; see
Purzycki and Willard for an overview). Having advanced this propo-
sition, Atran went on to cite numerous examples of animals that are atyp-
ical but not more symbolically or cognitively important for being so (e.g.,
armadillos among the Tzeltal of Mexico). In the same vein, Sperber also
notes the lack of clear evidence that mutants or hybrids per se are consid-
ered repulsive. The beliefs and taboos that apply to mules in most cultures
do not seem (prima facie) more negative or restrictive than those associated
with donkeys. We might add that more unusual hybrids, like geeps (a cross
between a goat and a sheep), sometimes occur naturally and have been
known to naturalists for centuries, yet neither religion nor folklore aord
them particular interest.
Counterexamples only go so far, and the claim that unusual animals are
good to think with could still be true on average. Demonstrating the truth
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654 Poetics Today 44:4
of this claim properly would be a research program in itself, but, instead of
pursuing it, cognitive anthropologists took a dierent direction.
2 . . . and many monsters are not “minimally counterintuitive” . . .
Ontological anomalies, like talking animals, shape- shifters, or immate-
rial creatures, threaten not just the classification of animals but also the
basic boundaries that separate animals from other types of things: objects,
plants, humans, or divinities. Shape- shifters like werewolves are not just
biologically atypical. They transgress our basic expectations about nature,
like the intuitive divide between animals and humans, or the fact that a
creature should not be able to shift between these two categories. A particu-
larly influential hypothesis holds that the most appealing cultural inven-
tions make use of one and only one violation of our ontological intuitions
(Boyer ; Norenzayan et al. ; but see Purzycki and Willard ).
Dr. Frankenstein’s creature is not a human but an artifact (a major onto-
logical violation); otherwise, it behaves and thinks like a normal person
would. In technical parlance, the creature is “minimally counterintuitive.”
What counts as an ontological violation in this framework depends on
very specific hypotheses about human cognition, drawn from develop-
mental psychology. Because of this diculty, the minimal counterintuitiveness
hypothesis cannot be used to explain the cultural success of bizarre crea-
tures that do not, for all their weirdness, breach any ontological bound-
aries. Many animals of the medieval bestiary qualify, for instance. Some,
like grins or unicorns, are essentially composite animals fusing several
species’ attributes. Others are real animals endowed with implausible fac-
ulties: stags can live for a thousand years; weasel females give birth through
their ears; ostriches can ingest anything at all, and so on (Pastoureau ).
Medieval bestiaries also feature properly supernatural creatures, but (here
as in other compendia of imaginary beasts) the supernatural element argu-
ably is not the main attraction.
The popularity of such animals suggests that entities can be cognitively
appealing and culturally successful without being minimally counterin-
tuitive (Purzycki and Willard ). Despite this, the minimal counter-
intuitiveness hypothesis has occasionally been taken, by proponents and
adversaries alike, as relevant to explaining the cultural success of mon-
sters. For instance, David Wengrow’s influential study of monstrous imag-
ery in the Bronze Age (Wengrow ) uses this hypothesis (in Boyer’s
[] version) as its main theoretical target, even though the book dwells
on “composite” animals that fuse body parts from several dierent spe-
cies. Composites are strange animals that often violate zoological classi-
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 655
fications (although, as we just saw, the violation may not be obvious), but
they are not counterintuitive in the technical sense of the term (Boyer ;
Norenzayan et al. ; Purzycki and Willard ): composites as such do
not flaunt our basic expectations about animals as distinct from objects or
humans.
Addressing this point, Boyer (: .) retorts that strange animals
such as unicorns, dragons, or satyrs, are seldom merely strange. Usually,
they are also thought to possess features that are counterintuitive in the
strong, technical sense defined by cognitive scientists: unicorns can only
be seen by virgins; Greek man- goat forest spirits appear or disappear at
will; many dragons are divinities with cosmological powers, and so on.
This claim sounds plausible but raises at least three analytical concerns.
First, people could simply invent counterintuitive creatures and leave it at
that: a horse that only virgins can see, a goat that can appear or disappear
at will, a cosmic deity, and the like. Why do we need to turn these entities
into weird animals, on top of their counterintuitive features? This suggests
a specific appeal for anomalous animals, which the minimal counterintu-
itiveness hypothesis does not account for. (To be fair, making sense of the
appeal of anomalous animals is not the purpose of the hypothesis.) Second,
one can doubt whether most fantastic creatures are minimally counterin-
tuitive, rather than maximally so. Some depart from intuitive expecta-
tions in more than one way. Shape- shifters, for instance, are seldom just
shape- shifters: shamans in many cultures can turn into animals but have
many other supernatural features (Singh ). Western literary vampires
(like Stoker’s Dracula) can turn into bats, but they are also immortal, and
unreflected by mirrors. Last, critics of the minimal counterintuitiveness
hypothesis (e.g., Purzycki and Willard ) have pointed out that litera-
ture does not always maintain a clear distinction between minimally coun-
terintuitive concepts and merely strange ones.
In summary, Boyer’s hypothesis concerning the cognitive appeal of
minimally counterintuitive concepts was not intended to explain the puz-
zling features of imaginary animals, and we should not expect it to do so.
3. . . . but predators have a hold on our imagination
A look through any inventory of imaginary creatures (e.g., Weinstock ;
Borges ) reveals many dangerous predators. Most real animals pose no
danger to humans, but many imaginary ones do. Danger, in fact, seems
to answer the first and the second question of our introduction: it is a fea-
ture that makes animals good to think with, and it is also particularly pro-
nounced in imaginary animals.
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656 Poetics Today 44:4
Are dangerous animals “good to think with”? In short, yes. The reasons
for this are theoretical as well as empirical.
Evolutionary psychologists have long held that humans should have
inherited from our primate ancestors learning mechanisms that are biased
toward the rapid and accurate detection of predators (Guthrie ;
Öhman and Mineka ; Barrett ). This does not mean humans are
born with an innate fear of snakes or spiders; it means that our plastic
learning mechanisms are better at learning to recognize stimuli associ-
ated with the presence of predators. The rationale for this view is twofold.
First, animate beings were, on average, much more useful for a primate
to learn about, compared to inanimate beings, given that many animals
are potential prey, predators, or conspecifics (New, Cosmides, and Tooby
). Second, predators raise a specific challenge for cognition. The costs
of failing to recognize a predator are much higher than the costs of failing
to recognize a conspecific or a prey (Barrett and Broesch ). Primates
should thus have evolved learning mechanisms with a lower threshold for
predator recognition.
Relevant evidence for each of these two assumptions has been gathered
over the past two decades by scholars of primatology, developmental psy-
chology, and comparative psychology. As is often the case, the data is most
abundant on Western human adults. Adults from industrialized countries
stand as an interesting case in this instance, given that most live in envi-
ronments where animal predators are no longer a threat: opportunities
to learn about predatory danger firsthand are thus limited. The general
picture that emerges seems to support the view that predators are cog-
nitively appealing, even though some issues remain moot. Studies show
a general bias for the detection and recall of animal shapes in primate
and human adults (New, Cosmides, and Tooby ; Schussler and Olzak
; Calvillo and Jackson ; Altman et al. ; Guerrero and Calvillo
; but see Hagen and Laeng ). Evidence for a specific sensitivity
to predatory animals is abundant but also disputed. In a series of papers
published in the s (summarized in Öhman and Mineka ), Arne
Öhman, Susan Mineka, and their colleagues showed enhanced cognitive
and physiological sensitivity to pictures of snakes and spiders, compared to
pictures of mushrooms or flowers. These results elegantly complemented a
series of experiments with primates, showing faster individual and social
learning for the recognition of predatory animals compared to nonpreda-
tory animals or plants. But the scholars’ choice of stimuli for the human
studies did not include nonpredatory animals, preventing them from rul-
ing out the possibility that their participants showed a general sensitiv-
ity to animals, rather than to predators per se. Current research is trying
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 657
to tease these potential eects apart. Although heightened sensitivity to
threat- related stimuli (not just snakes or spiders but guns, syringes, etc.) is
well established, it is still unclear whether evolutionary ancient threats are
prioritized over recent ones (like guns or syringes).1 A possible specific bias
for snakes, probably humankind’s most important multicellular predator,
is also quite heavily debated (Coelho et al. ).
Parallel to this work, Clark Barrett and his team led a series of cross-
cultural studies showing that verbal information concerning animals and
plants is better retained by children when it concerns dangerousness, as
opposed to other ecologically relevant traits (e.g., habitat or diet) (Barrett
and Broesch ; Barrett, Peterson, and Frankenhuis ; Broesch, Bar-
rett, and Henrich ). Although quite dierent in method from the visual
recognition literature, Barrett’s work tests the same basic idea: danger-
related information enjoys a cognitive premium due to the high costs of
ignoring it.
In short, there is strong evidence that animal predators are good to think
with, since they combine two highly relevant features, animacy and dan-
ger. Are imaginary animals more dangerous than real ones? Our knowl-
edge on this second point is far less systematic or generalizable, but there
does appear to be a general scholarly consensus. We are not, of course, the
first to remark that monsters are dangerous (Carroll ; Clasen ;
Hanich ). Specifically, if the monsters- as- predators account is right,
monsters should not be simply dangerous, but dangerous in the specific
ways that animal predators are to humans. And, indeed, a typical mon-
ster does not carry infectious diseases, does not entrap its target, does not
manipulate or betray them. It attacks its targets directly in close combat.
As Hanich notes, “We are frightened by the sheer presence of the monster
either because it reminds us forcefully of an act of violence we have already
witnessed or have inferred from the plot; or because it points toward an
impending cruelty indicated by the monster’s aggressive behavior and/or
dangerous appearance” (Hanich : ). This notion — that monsters are
dangerous not in a generic but in a specifically predatory way — is impor-
tant for two reasons. First, because this idea stands in contrast with the
view that biological anomalies should elicit disgust or nonspecific feelings
of danger (Douglas [] ; Wagner et al. ). Second, because this
concept indicates something broader about the cognitive appeal of fiction.
In a previous article (Morin, Acerbi, and Sobchuk ), we proposed that
fictional dangers could be sorted into two types: mere threats, and ordeals.
. See Blanchette ; Freeman ; Zsido, Deak, and Bernath for evidence against
this; Penkunas and Coss for evidence in the opposite direction.
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658 Poetics Today 44:4
Mere threats are the kind of danger for which we can best prepare by
taking precautions in the real world. When a danger is rare, serious, and
avoidable, it constitutes an ordeal. Ordeals are dangers that are best antic-
ipated by simulating them through training, plays, or stories. Real experi-
ence of the danger does not prepare us for it (because it is rare), but faking
such an experience might. Play and fiction arguably share relationships
with an evolved propensity to simulate ordeals. Encountering a ferocious
predator is a typical ordeal: an event too rare and dangerous for us to
prepare for it by direct practice, but which can be faced as simulations.
We thus expected ordeals to be much more common in fiction compared
to real life. We compared fictional death counts in fiction to real statis-
tics. In keeping with our hypothesis, we found in a sample of novels that
fictional characters are vastly more likely not just to die but to be killed
by an agent. Killings by animal- or monster- predators were particularly
overrepresented.
This account predicts that the inventors of imaginary animals will
likely exaggerate all the features that can make them good predators (as
remarked in Clasen ). Providing these imaginary animals with nat-
ural weapons (like horns, claws, sharp teeth, beaks, flailing tails, etc.) is
one obvious means of exaggeration. Increased size is another. All these
qualities are abundantly present in imaginary animals, many of which are
modeled after apex predators dangerous to humans (like wolves or snakes).
Sometimes the single addition of a natural weapon is enough to define an
imaginary animal. (A typical unicorn is a horse with one natural weapon
added; early unicorns were goats with one super- sized horn.) Size is almost
systematically exaggerated upward, seldom downward (who ever heard of
the Tiny, Tiny Wolf?). Some other adaptations of real- world predators are
not as frequently and self- evidently found in their imaginary counterparts,
however. These include cognitive adaptations, ranging from forward-
facing eyes to greater intelligence; chemical weapons such as venom; and
motor adaptations, like stealth. Conversely, some customary features of
monsters are not specific to predators: wings and extra limbs can serve to
move faster on a prey but are equally useful to elude attackers.
This account of imaginary animals gives us no particular reason to
expect monsters to be classificatorily ambiguous — to bridge major divides
between animal families. This may or may not be a lacuna. Some imagi-
nary animals, like giant spiders or unicorns, do not seem to cross any spe-
cies divide; they are merely regular animals with added predatory features,
or predators on steroids. Yet most monsters (judging, e.g., by Weinstock’s
inventory) do seem to scramble our classifications in egregious ways. Oth-
ers, like cyclops or Cerberus, do not straddle classificatory divides, but
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 659
they are anomalous in ways that violate our expectations about a species’
identity.
Thus, the two most promising accounts we examined so far, the
monsters- as- anomalies hypothesis and the monsters- as- predators account,
each seem to hold a piece of the puzzle, but also to miss a crucial part of
the phenomenon — which the other theory explains. To reconcile the two,
we need an account that explains why these two key properties, anomaly
and danger, happen to coincide within imaginary animals.
4. Toward a Unified Hypothesis
The easiest way to explain the coincidence of anomaly and danger would
be to start from Douglas’s claim that anomalous animals create unease
because they upset what is felt to be a natural ordering of the world (see
also Leach ). Some support for this view comes from recent studies
investigating negative attitudes toward genetically engineered organisms
(GMOs/GEOs) (Blancke et al. ; Kronberger, Wagner, and Nagata
; Wagner et al. ). Transgenic GMOs, which combine the genes
of two dierent species, are generally judged more negatively compared
to cisgenic GMOs, in which artificially combined genes come from two
individuals who could naturally interbreed. If creatures that bridge spe-
cies boundaries elicit negative attitudes, this could explain why imaginary
animals tend to be monstrous, that is, to carry the features of fearsome
predators.
Such an account, though superficially appealing, runs into several obsta-
cles. We already encountered two of them: the general diculty of recon-
structing folk classifications and the fact that many classificatory systems
are structured in such a way that they avoid anomalies altogether. As we
saw in the first section, the revisions proposed by cognitive anthropologists
go some way toward addressing these issues. Two additional problems are
matters of psychological plausibility.
First, there is little evidence for the general claim that hard- to- classify
entities per se provoke disgust or fear — nor would it make much sense for
human cognition to be afraid of anything it cannot unambiguously clas-
sify. A link between ambiguity and fear or disgust enjoys some currency
in GEO studies, as we saw, or in engineering (the famous “uncanny val-
ley” hypothesis: Mori, MacDorman, and Kageki ). But can this link
be generalized? As far as we know, ambiguous colors that are dicult to
name evoke no particular disgust or fear. Neither did things that for a long
time were classificatory anomalies, like mercury (a metal that is also a liq-
uid), planets (celestial bodies that shine permanently like stars but move
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660 Poetics Today 44:4
around like comets), corals (halfway between the living and the mineral
realms), or, for that matter, saxophones (hybrids of trumpets and oboes).
Leap years are an irregularity in our calendar, yet no strong superstition
attaches to them.
Second, the monsters- as- anomalies account predicts the wrong emo-
tional reaction to monsters: disgust, or some nonspecific negative reaction,
rather than fear. The original purpose of Douglas’s account was to explain
sacrality and food taboos; it was adapted more recently to apply to GMOs.
In both cases classificatory anomalies are supposed to be linked to disgust,
or to nondescript negative aect. But monsters are fear inducing rather
than disgusting, and food taboos are not usually central in the mythologies
surrounding them.
These two problems can be tackled by appealing to evolutionary psy-
chology. There is a good evolutionary rationale for being wary of unknown
biological entities (plants or animals). As we saw when discussing preda-
tors, there is a cost asymmetry to the identification of dangerous animals
and plants. The costs of misidentifying a toxic plant or a predator are
higher than the opposite mistake — mistaking an innocuous plant for a
toxic one, for instance. The way we detect living things should be sensitive
to this asymmetry and extend dangerous categorizations more liberally
(Guthrie ; Barrett ). Extending this reasoning to cases where no
category is applicable, the default expectation should be that one is facing
a dangerous entity.
The kind of danger that one anticipates should dier between animals
and plants. This distinction, we would suggest, is the key to understanding
why ambiguous categorization creates dierent reactions to plants and to
animals. The chief hazard linked to plants is their toxicity, which varies
greatly from one species to the next, not always in easily detectable ways
(Wertz and Wynn ). The toxicity of animals is quite a dierent matter.
Badly preserved meat or fish is quite hazardous, but the key factor here are
the conditions of preservation, not the particular species that one is eat-
ing (exceptions being made for some kinds of seafood). Predatoriness, by
contrast, varies quite a lot from one animal species to the next (and is not
relevant for plants). Thus, ambiguous plants should be avoided because of
their possible toxicity: they should elicit disgust. Ambiguous animals, on
the other hand, are not (pace Douglas) particularly disgusting. Instead,
they should be feared as possible predators.
This account appears to solve the two problems we identified. It is spe-
cific to biological entities, predicting no general aversion for taxonomical
or statistical oddities; and it predicts the right emotional reaction: mon-
strous animals are dangerous as predators, not as food, and the proper
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Morin and Sobchuk · Why Monsters Are Dangerous 661
reaction to them is fear, not disgust. If correct, this account would link the
two characteristic features of monsters: their incongruity and their dan-
gerousness. It would do so without circularity (claiming that monsters are
dangerous because we fear strange creatures), and without making exces-
sive claims about human cognition (e.g., that any categorical anomaly is a
cause for distress).
5. Conclusion
We started with a challenge: find one or several things that make real ani-
mals cognitively appealing and see if those things could be found in imagi-
nary animals. The literature contains several answers that make super-
ficial sense but fail to account for important aspects of the problem. The
first account — monsters as anomalies — would face serious objections from
students of ethno- biological classifications, but it seems to capture some-
thing important about monsters — their incongruousness. The minimal
counterintuitiveness hypothesis was never really meant to be applied to
imaginary animals (except for a few authors). The monsters- as- predators
account, perhaps the most promising of the three, leaves out the fact that
most monsters are egregiously strange, not simply big and ferocious. We
suggested a way to synthesize the anomalies account and the predators
account, building on the strengths of each to explain why anomalous ani-
mals are associated with danger, danger and anomalousness being each
cognitively appealing for dierent reasons.
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