Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective

This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that includes the whole scope of human behavior. In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve 3 sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to produce different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.