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Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive 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. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly "good to think with”. According 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 survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with”, and should be over-represented in imaginary animals. This paper argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts, which attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.

Explaining the mechanisms of success and failure in culture remains an important challenge. In this paper we suggest that a first-mover advantage hypothesis, borrowed from economics, can explain the success in cultural industries such as music. The hypothesis claims that companies that enter a new market niche early on become more successful. In music, a genre is analogous to a niche, and early representatives of a genre may be considered first movers. To test whether early representatives of music genres are indeed more successful, we study ten new music genres using large data on musical success collected by the Spotify streaming service. Our findings support the hypothesis that successful artists may owe their popularity to innovativeness in new artistic niches.

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. 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.

Explaining the reasons behind the success of various kinds of fiction is important, but how granular should our explanations be? I suggest that using a less granular, more general hypothesis would allow avoiding some pitfalls, such as using the concept of “imaginary world,” which eludes precise definitions.

Detecting the forces behind the success or failure of cultural products, such as books or films, remains a challenge. Three such forces are drift, context-biased selection, and selection based on content—when things succeed because of their intrinsic appeal. We propose a tool to study content-biased selection in sets of cultural collections—e.g. libraries or movie collections — based on the “shortlist effect”: the fact that smaller collections are more selective, more likely to favour highly appealing items over others. We use a model to show that, when the shortlist effect is at work, content-biased cultural selection is associated with greater nestedness in sets of collections. Having established empirically the existence of the shortlist effect, and of content-biased selection, in 28 sets of movie collections, we show that nestedness contributions can be used to estimate to what extent specific movies owe their success to their intrinsic properties. This method can be used in a wide range of datasets to detect the items that owe their success to their intrinsic appeal, as opposed to “hidden gems” or “accidental hits”. Introduction Selection and nestedness in cultural collections The shortlist effect and its consequences in movie collections Discussion Materials and methods

A Correction to this article was published on 29 August 2019 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0294-x). © The Author(s) 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.

The main question posed in the article is, was the historical development of the novel characterized by an increase in the quantity of dialogues? To test whether this is true, the author conducted a quantitative study of four hundred Russian novels of the nineteenth century. Using the “coefficient of dialogic liveliness” — a measure suggested by Boris Yarkho in the 1930s — this article suggests an answer in the affirmative. In addition, it attempts to answer three subsequent questions: (1) Why did the number of dialogues increase? (2) Why was this increase not linear? (3) Why did some of the highly dialogic Russian novels appear already at the beginning of the nineteenth century? The first problem is explained by some psychological features of readers' perceptions of dialogues. The second problem is answered by the theory of evolution. The third problem is solved by a brief analysis of the historical context of the epoch.