Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how fiction has become more common and imaginative over time, using a large dataset of narratives from different cultures and time periods.

Contribution

The study introduces a new method to quantify fictiveness in narratives using large language models and reveals a long-term global trend of increasing fictiveness.

Findings

Fictiveness has steadily increased over time, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Ancient narratives also show a gradual rise in fictiveness, with peaks during affluent historical periods.

The trend is consistent across different narrative forms and cultures.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive analysis of the rise of fictions across human narratives, using large-scale datasets that collectively span over 65,000 works across various media (movies, literary works), cultures (over 30 countries, Western and non-Western), and time periods (2000 BCE to 2020 CE). We measured fictiveness – defined as the degree of departure from reality – across three narrative dimensions: protagonists, events, and settings. We used automatic annotations from large language models (LLMs) to systematically score fictiveness and ensured the robustness and validity of our measure, specifically by demonstrating predictable variations in fictiveness across different genres, in all media. Statistical analyses of the changes in fictiveness over time revealed a steady increase, culminating in the 20th and 21st centuries, across all narrative forms. Remarkably, this trend is also evident in our data spanning ancient times: fictiveness increased gradually in narratives dating back as far as 2000 BCE, with notable peaks of fictiveness during affluent periods such as the heights of the Roman Empire, the Tang Dynasty, and the European Renaissance. We explore potential psychological explanations for the rise in fictiveness, including changing audience preferences driven by ecological and social changes.

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