期刊名称：Evolutionary Psychology: an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior
印刷版ISSN：1474-7049
出版年度：2008
卷号：06
期号：04
页码：715-738
出版社：Ian Pitchford, Ed.& Pub
摘要：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.
关键词：egalitarian groups, literature, social dominance, stigmatization.
