Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Edgar Dubourg

Cognition ENS @cognitionens.bsky.social · 27d

MEDIAS I Très belle chronique de « Histoire naturelle de la fiction» de @edgardubourg.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social paru le 03/09 aux éditions Humensciences 👉 bit.ly/4nvYP9C

3 6

Reposted by Edgar Dubourg

Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · Sep 12

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days !
If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September):
psl.eu/agenda/collo...

Colloque inaugural du Grand programme de recherche CultureLab | PSL

Recherche, CultureLab inaugure ses travaux le 22 septembre 2025 au Campus Condorcet avec une journée consacrée aux sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles et à l’évolution culturelle. , Le Gra...

psl.eu

1 12 21

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Sep 12

Merci Le Monde des Livres pour cette lecture attentive et cette belle critique de mon livre…

1 3

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Sep 4

Awesome!! Congrats!

1

Reposted by Edgar Dubourg

Nicolas Beauvais @nicolasbeauvais.bsky.social · Aug 21

Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢
With Aikaterini Voudouri, @boissinesther.bsky.social & @wimdeneys.bsky.social we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments.

🔗Full paper: shorturl.at/JTeTi
Quick thread below!

1 6 14

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Full paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

And huge thanks to my collaborators…

Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core

Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction - Volume 7

www.cambridge.org

3

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

By combining cultural history, large-scale datasets, and LLM-based annotation, we can move long-standing debates on the evolution of fiction from speculation to data – and begin to explain why our stories have drifted so far from reality.

1 3

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

The likely drivers are changes in audience psychology: increased trust, reduced puritanism, and greater openness to novelty, all linked to more secure and affluent environments.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Over the long term, we also see gradual increases, with peaks in prosperous periods like the Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty, and Renaissance. Even in antiquity there were highly fictive works, but they were much less common than today.

1 2

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Across the 20th and 21st centuries, fictiveness rises steadily in novels, films, and Chinese fiction, regardless of genre or language. Box office data show that high-fictiveness films have become increasingly successful over time.

1 1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

The approach scales to all periods: The Imitation Game (real people and events) has low fictiveness; The Lord of the Rings (invented everything) has very high fictiveness; One Piece (manga) also scores high for fantastical settings, events and characters.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

One example: Jurassic Park (1993) scores low for characters (ordinary humans), high for events (reviving dinosaurs through fictional science), and moderate for settings (a realistic island but with invented facilities). The overall fictiveness is thus intermediate.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

We checked validity by reviewing random samples and comparing to known genre patterns. As expected, fantasy and science fiction scored highest, biographies and historical dramas lowest. LLM annotations also converged with a second model and with manual checks.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Each work was annotated three times – once for protagonists, once for events, once for settings – yielding more than 195,000 separate evaluations. The model produced a score and a brief justification, and returned “NA” for unfamiliar works.

1 1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Manual scoring at this scale would be impossible. Instead, we used large language models (LLMs) to annotate each work. For every title, the model received minimal metadata (title, author, date) and a detailed prompt defining the scale and historical context.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

We then assembled more than 65,000 works from over 30 countries and 4,000 years – from The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey to modern cinema and video games – and scored them on a 0–6 scale for each narrative dimension.

1 1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

We tackled this problem by defining “fictiveness”: the degree to which a story’s protagonists, events, and settings are invented or impossible, assessed according to the worldview of the time and place where the story is set.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Historians of culture and literary theorists have long debated whether fiction has grown more imaginative over time. These debates have remained mostly qualitative, because “distance from reality” is hard to measure across centuries and cultures.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Today’s popular fictions can be extremely far from reality: The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Legend of Zelda, Avengers: Endgame. But has this always been the case?

1 5 7

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jul 4

I’ve long wanted to explore horror, and I did it with the very person who helped crack the paradox of horror… We looked at what makes horror scary.

Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · Jul 4

Formulaic horror! 👹💀😱

Research by @edgardubourg.bsky.social and @morbidpsych.bsky.social (giveaway handle!) defines a Protagonist Vulnerability Index, which accurately predicts genre (horror), fear in non-horror films, and fear-related physiology (heart rate); and...

buff.ly/wscaJll

1/2

2

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jun 2

The pdf is available here! drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

Dubourg et al 2025 Using the Nested Structure of Knowledge to Infer What Others Know.pdf

drive.google.com

1 1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jun 2

Many thanks to my co-authors, Thomas Dheilly, @hugoreasoning.bsky.social and @oliviermorin.bsky.social.

1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jun 2

To sum up, knowledge is not scattered randomly. It is structured. And when we hear someone mention something, we intuitively—often accurately—reconstruct that structure. Our paper: “Using the Nested Structure of Knowledge to Infer What Others Know” is available here.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

2 4

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jun 2

Of course, this mechanism has limits. It may not work for entirely unfamiliar domains. And it doesn’t tell us how people estimate rarity—only that they do. We think people rely on fast and frugal heuristics. Perhaps they track word frequency, or rely on cues like familiarity.

1 1

Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · Jun 2

These results are not limited to one experiment. We replicated the nestedness of knowledge in a massive external dataset: 42,000 participants, nearly 3 million trivia responses. Same pattern.

1