Literature inspires people over hundreds of years

Jan 15, 2009 14:33 GMT  ·  By

Books, as forms of passing down knowledge from one generation to another, have been around for thousands of years, from the first writings on stones, to the papyrus ones, and finally to their new hardback or leather-bound versions. And if there's one thing that good books have in common it's the fact that they all have a large influence on the people reading them. Sometimes, the influence can be so great that readers have a hard time getting out from under the “spell” their favorite book casts on them, and start identifying themselves with fictional characters to the letter.

But one of the most fundamental traits of all major books is that they inspire people and make them want to exceed their own condition, to evolve, and to become something more than they are at any given point. It's this very trait that a new study, conducted by Jonathan Gottschall and Joseph Carroll, focused on.

Gottschall is a professor at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, and is also the main author of the current study. Co-author Joseph Caroll is a professor at the University of Missouri, in St Louis. The two worked together with evolutionary psychologist John Johnson, from the Pennsylvania State University in DuBois, to figure out if and how Darwin's theories on evolution apply to literature.

For this very purpose, the researchers asked 500 people to fill in questionnaires about famous Victorian novels, and to rate the protagonists and antagonists' behaviors according to the famous theories. In the aftermath of the study, participants had rated protagonists as being those endowed with positive characteristics, such as Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

On the other hand, characters such as Bram Stoker's Dracula were rated as power hungry. Social dominance was also a feature of antagonists, which makes sense considering that Darwin said that people tend to dislike those who try to take things into their hands alone, as opposed to letting the group handle problems.

In ancient times, people moved past their previous organization, when the alpha male ruled everyone with an iron spear, and started taking action as a whole, which yielded far more rewards. "Maybe storytelling – from TV to folk tales – actually serves some specific evolutionary function. They're not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation," concludes Gottschall.