Does Fiction Come Naturally? Rethinking Fictional Storytelling across Human Societies
This paper argues that fictionality is a culturally contingent convention rather than a human universal, demonstrating through ethnographic and historical evidence that the recognition of narratives as invented relies on specific social conditions and shared symbolic systems rather than being an innate interpretive default.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Humans are a storytelling species. From the earliest campfires to the latest streaming services, we have always shared accounts of events, people, and causes. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have long wondered why we spend so much time on stories we know are not true. If our ancestors needed to survive, they should have focused on facts: where the water is, which plants are poisonous, or who can be trusted. Yet, we seem to have a deep, universal hunger for fiction. Many scientists have assumed that the ability to tell and enjoy made-up stories is a hardwired part of being human, a mental tool we all possess from birth that helps us practice social skills or imagine different worlds.
This assumption rests on the idea that fictionality—the mutual agreement between a teller and a listener that a story is invented and not a report of real events—is a natural default. It is the belief that when we hear a story about a talking animal or a flying ship, our brains instantly switch into a "make-believe" mode, setting aside the question of whether it actually happened. But what if this switch is not something we are born with? What if, for most of human history, the very concept of a story being "just a story" did not exist?
A new paper by Ze Hong of the University of Macau challenges the idea that fiction is a human universal. The author argues that treating a narrative as fiction is not a natural instinct but a learned cultural skill, one that only became common in the last few hundred years. By looking at how people in small, traditional societies tell stories, and by examining the history of literature in ancient China, Greece, and Europe, the paper suggests that for most of our evolutionary past, every story was treated as a potential report of truth. The "make-believe" contract is a recent invention, not an ancient one.
The research begins by looking at how our minds naturally process information. When we hear someone speak, our first job is to decide if they are telling the truth. We ask: Is this source reliable? Is this event possible? This is a survival mechanism. If we believed everything we heard, we would be easily tricked. If we doubted everything, we would miss vital information. The author points out that this truth-evaluating stance is the default. Even when we doubt a story, we are still asking, "Is this true or is this a lie?" We are not yet asking, "Is this a game?" To treat a story as fiction requires a special, shared agreement to stop asking about truth entirely. The paper suggests that without specific cultural training, our brains do not make this jump on their own.
The author then looks at the content of stories to see if fantastical elements, like magic or monsters, automatically signal that a story is fake. In the modern West, we often assume that if a story contains something impossible, it must be fiction. However, the paper shows that in many traditional societies, the line between the possible and the impossible is drawn very differently. In cultures where people believe in spirits, shape-shifting, or magical causes for natural events, a story about a talking animal is not seen as impossible. It is seen as a report of something that could happen. Because the audience does not view these events as impossible, they cannot use them as a signal to switch into "make-believe" mode. The story remains a report of reality, even if that reality includes magic.
To test these ideas, the paper reviews a vast amount of evidence from anthropology and history. In traditional, small-scale societies, researchers found that people rarely distinguish between myths, legends, and factual accounts. In some groups, there is no word for "fiction." When outsiders showed films like Star Trek or The Jungle Book to people in these societies, the reaction was often not amusement at a fantasy, but confusion or moral outrage. The viewers did not see a made-up story; they saw a lie. They believed the events were real, and if the storyteller claimed they were not, the storyteller was accused of deception. In these cultures, stories are almost always presented as things that were heard from someone else, passed down from ancestors, or witnessed by a reliable source. The value of a story lies in its connection to the past and its truth, not in its originality or its invention.
The paper also traces the slow, difficult birth of fiction in literate societies. In ancient China, stories about ghosts and strange creatures were written down as records of real events, collected to preserve history, not to entertain with lies. Authors felt compelled to provide sources and dates to prove their tales were true. Similarly, in ancient Greece, stories about gods and heroes were treated as accounts of a real, though distant, past. Even when philosophers debated the details of these myths, they were arguing about what actually happened, not about what was fun to imagine. It was not until the rise of print capitalism, the spread of secular science, and the development of specific literary rules in early modern Europe that fiction began to stabilize as a distinct category. Only then did readers learn to accept a story as a "made-up" game, a space where the rules of truth were temporarily suspended by mutual consent.
The findings suggest that our modern love for fiction is not a direct product of evolution, but a byproduct of other mental tools. We have brains designed to track social information, understand cause and effect, and imagine the minds of others. In the modern world, we have learned to apply these tools to invented stories. But for most of human history, those same tools were used to understand the real world. The paper concludes that fictionality is a cultural achievement, a complex social agreement that took thousands of years to develop. It is not a universal human trait waiting to be discovered, but a specific way of thinking that requires a society to teach it. This changes how we understand the human mind: we are not naturally storytellers of fiction, but we are natural storytellers of truth, and fiction is a sophisticated, learned extension of that ability.
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