Hierarchy in the library: Egalitarian dynamics in Victorian novels

Original article:

Hierarchy in the library: Egalitarian dynamics in Victorian novels

Evolutionary Psychology 6(4): 715-738 John A. Johnson, Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, DuBois, PA, USA, j5j@psu.eduJoseph Carroll, Department of English, University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USAJonathan Gottschall, Department of English, Washington & Jefferson College, Washington, PA, USADaniel Kruger, Prevention Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Abstract

The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-seeking and dominance behaviors that are stigmatized in such groups. This hypothesis was tested with an online questionnaire listing characters from 201 canonical British novels of the longer nineteenth century. 519 respondents generated 1470 protocols on 435 characters. Respondents identified the characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, judged the characters’ motives according to human life history theory, rated the characters’ traits according to the five-factor model of personality, and specified their own emotional responses to the characters on categories adapted from Ekman’s seven basic emotions. As expected, antagonists are motivated almost exclusively by the desire for social dominance, their personality traits correspond to this motive, and they elicit strongly negative emotional responses from readers. Protagonists are oriented to cooperative and affiliative behavior and elicit positive emotional responses from readers. Novels therefore apparently enable readers to participate vicariously in an egalitarian social dynamic like that found in hunter-gatherer societies. We infer that agonistic structure in novels simulates social behaviors that fulfill an adaptive social function and perhaps stimulates impulses toward these behaviors in real life.

Keywords

egalitarian groups, literature, social dominance, stigmatization.

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