Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction

Area of Science:

• Narrative studies
• Digital humanities
• Computational social science

Background:

• Human narratives have evolved significantly over millennia.
• Understanding the trajectory of fictional elements in storytelling is crucial for cultural analysis.
• Previous studies have not comprehensively quantified fictiveness across diverse media and cultures over vast time scales.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantitatively analyze the historical trend of fictiveness in human narratives.
• To measure fictiveness across protagonists, events, and settings in diverse cultural and media contexts.
• To explore potential drivers behind the observed increase in narrative fictiveness.

Main Methods:

• Utilized large-scale datasets encompassing over 65,000 works (movies, literature) from 2000 BCE to 2020 CE.
• Employed automatic annotations from large language models (LLMs) to score fictiveness across narrative dimensions.
• Validated the fictiveness measure through genre-specific analyses and cross-media comparisons.

Main Results:

• A consistent, long-term increase in narrative fictiveness was observed across all analyzed media and cultures.
• Fictiveness has steadily risen from ancient narratives (2000 BCE) to a peak in the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Notable peaks in fictiveness correlate with periods of societal affluence, such as the Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty, and European Renaissance.

Conclusions:

• Human storytelling has become progressively more detached from reality over time.
• The rise in fictiveness may be linked to evolving audience preferences influenced by ecological and social changes.
• This study provides a quantitative framework for understanding narrative evolution and its cultural underpinnings.