Volume 5, Issue 1

In this study conducted during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, I explored how trait morbid curiosity was related to interest in 1) factual information about Coronavirus that was specifically morbid; 2) general factual information about Coronavirus; 3) pandemic and virus genres of films and TV shows; and 4) genres of film and TV shows that center around threat more broadly. Participants (n = 125) who scored high in morbid curiosity reported increased interest, compared to usual, in pandemic/virus genres as well as horror and thriller genres. Morbidly curious participants were also more interested specifically in morbid information about Coronavirus. Furthermore, disgust sensitivity was unrelated to these preferences. These results provide initial evidence that trait morbid curiosity can predict particular media preferences in the face of a real threat, and that morbid curiosity may reflect an adaptive predisposition in some individuals toward learning about the dan­gerous and disgusting aspects of a threat.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has predominantly been read as a critique of patriarchy, a feminist dystopia. This article amends the feminist analysis by applying a biocultural approach to the novel, taking as its point of departure three problems that have troubled the feminist reading: Offred’s perceived passivity, the novel’s subtly critical stance towards its feminist characters, and the open ending. By taking into account the environmental context-a fertility crisis-the biocultural reading is able to analyze char­acter in terms of survival and reproductive strategies. Recognizing that the characters are negotiating male and female mating strategies under extreme conditions leads to a deeper comprehension of the way the contrasting philosophies of radical feminism and sociobi­ology inform sexual politics in the Republic of Gilead.

After summarizing Roger Griffin’s Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2018), I describe the academic subfield of Comparative Fascist Studies (CFS). I argue that CFS could be strengthened by integrating it with cognitive science, evolutionary psychol­ogy, and religious studies. That biocultural integration would make it more effective as both a scholarly endeavour and an antifascist vaccine for democratic societies. I explain the role of traditional mass media and digital social media in the rise of dominance-style leadership and radical-right populism, construct a neurosociological revision of the CFS concept of fascism as a “political religion,” and characterize ultranationalism as a set of maladaptive supernormal stimuli. These revisions of CFS aim at providing a cross-disciplinary frame­work able to explain the spread of alt-right conspiracy theories online and offline.

The myth of true, lifelong love promoted low divorce rates among farmers who depended on each other for survival. In the urban ecology after industrialization, it became increas­ingly clear that long-term monogamy goes against human nature. In the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-1800s literary movement, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and others clashed in a battle over modern mating morality. Each interpreted Darwin to fit their own agenda, suggesting naturalistic understandings of “free love” and “true mar­riage,” some of which were laughable while others landed authors in prison. Evolutionary theory from our present era suggests that human mate choice is guided by three brain systems: erotic lust, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment; our species thus evolved for serial pair-bonding with extra-pair copulation. Using these and other evolutionary insights, this article evaluates narratives from the Modern Breakthrough, which laid the foundation for today’s gender-equal and sexually liberal Nordic societies.

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reli­able in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experi­ment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all hu­man language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is not “reliabilist” as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discov­eries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and inno­vations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial.

In Imagination, Jim Davies explains that most humans have mental imagery: an ability to make pictures in the mind without immediate perceptual input-as we do when we dream. Davies writes programs that enable computers to do something similar. Given a few words of description, a computer can generate pictures with several objects arranged in appropriate ways. Jonathan Gilmore’s Apt Imaginings is about whether engagement in works of fiction is continuous or discontinuous with how we deal with people and objects in everyday life. He argues for discontinuity. In constructing a critical framework within which to evaluate these two books, I use Kenneth Craik’s theory of mental models. Craik’s theory enables us to understand how we humans have evolved to imagine possible futures, to plan and to act in relation to them, and also to imagine what might be going on in other people’s minds.