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Human Nature and Pop Culture

2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/a0027905

1939-1552

Maryanne L. Fisher, Catherine Salmon,

Media Influence and Health

You might be asking yourself, why a special issue on evolutionary approaches to studying popular culture? After all, isn’t evolutionary psychology focused on reproductive success and the ancestral environment? The aspects of pop culture featured in this issue, such as TV shows and horror films, were not a feature of our ancestral world. They don’t seem to directly relate to reproductive success. They don’t have obvious ties to the environment (whether it be geographical or temporal) in which we evolved. So, what could an evolutionary perspective possibly add to our understanding of them as aspects of our modern world? The punch line is that we created these media products using our evolved brains, and that we interact with them using these brains. There might not actually be werewolves running around New York City, but we evolved the capacity to imagine them, to consider problems that need solutions, and to play out situations that evoke a sense of astonishment. Indeed, there are many aspects of our modern environment and our behavior that are best understood under the light of an evolutionary perspective. For example, much attention has been focused in recent years on the increase in obesity, especially in the United States, and how one possible cause includes the overconsumption of fast food. The reality is, that for millions of years, humans who stored fat during times of abundance had an advantage over others when food was scarce, and hence they were favored by natural selection. A taste for fatty and sweet foods would also have been favored by natural selection, as they were relatively rare (e.g., honey, ripe fruit) or required hard work to obtain (e.g., hunting for meat) and yet were important sources of calories (Burnham & Phelan, 2000; Saad, 2007). In the modern world of fast food, it is all too easy to get such foods without expending much energy, and so we end up overweight. We end up with a mismatch, in that our bodies evolved to want these foods and to enjoy them, but sadly, we did not also evolve a way to ensure we don’t eat too much of them, as the latter would not have been a problem during the our evolutionary past. In a similar vein, Salmon and Symons (2004) used evolutionary thinking about human sexuality to explain an unusual genre of erotica produced by and for women. Slash fiction is largely created by and for heterosexual women and yet focuses on romantic and sexual relationships between two male expropriated media characters, such as Kirk and Spock from Star Trek or Clark Kent and Lex Luthor from Smallville. At first glance, such stories seem an unlikely choice for heterosexual females. But these stories often epitomize ideal aspects of female mate choice, including intense bonds of commitment, strong friendships before engaging in a sexual relationship, all of which involve high-mate-value men. Evolutionary approaches have already been used in the fields of literary theory and art. The field of Darwinian literary studies, which is quickly gaining considerable momentum, has provided evidence that humankind’s evolved history influences the topics of texts (Carroll, 1995). For example, one can study Jane Austen’s novels and learn about women’s mating strategies (Strout, Fisher, Kruger, & Steeleworthy, 2010) or analyze the content of folk tales from around the world to document sex differences in mate preferences (Gottschall, Martin, Quish, & Rea, 2004). One can also explore topics of Western paintings, and see that the most frequent topics are not random, but instead reflect topics that can be predicted by theory that is informed by evolution (Fisher & Meredith, in press). Like pop culture, literary theory (and the study of art) has been dominated by a variety of perspectives, such as social constructivism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism (including Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic frameworks), which have focused more on a blank-slate view of human behavior. Even those working within these fields have commented on the stagnation that has resulted from this narrow perspective of human behavior (e.g., Carroll, 1995). Psychologists should not be surprised; after all, Freud and Lacan, e.g., are basically footnotes in our understanding of human behavior in modern psychology programs. We’ve achieved a better understanding of the human mind since the 1930s (which was the last decade of Freud’s life). At last, the study of literature and art is starting to benefit from the work of those who are applying that new understanding. For examples from the literary and art fields, there are a number of anthologies including The Literary Animal, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, the journal founded by Alice Andrews called The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science and Culture, and books like Homo Aestheticus by Ellen Dissanayake, The Rape of Troy by Jonathan Gottschall, and The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton. In the end, this new understanding is all about the important why questions: Why do people spend so much time engrossed in worlds of fiction or other imaginary social worlds? Why do particular genres rise and fall (as in music or comedy)? After establishing that the reason is linked to human nature, we can then begin to tease apart various factors. For example, how much of a show’s success is due Maryanne L. Fisher, Department of Psychology, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Catherine Salmon, Psychology Department, University of Redlands. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Maryanne Fisher, PhD, Department of Psychology, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3. E-mail: mlfisher@smu.ca Review of General Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association 2012, Vol. 16, No. 2, 104–108 1089-2680/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0027905