Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T04:13:25.606Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The familiar appeal of imaginary worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2022

Andrew Shtulman Open the ORCID record for Andrew Shtulman [Opens in a new window]
Andrew Shtulman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Imaginary worlds may satisfy our need to explore, but it's an open question what we are searching for. Research on imagination suggests that if we are searching for something extraordinary – something that violates our intuitions about real-world causality – then we seek it in small doses and in contexts that ultimately confirm our intuitions. Imaginary worlds allow for true novelty, but we may actually prefer ideas that are novel on their surface but familiar at their core.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 45 , 2022 , e298
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 25, 535–564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gong, T., & Shtulman, A. (2021). The plausible impossible: Chinese adults hold graded notions of impossibility. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 21, 76–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L. (2021). Early constraints on imagination: The realism of young children. Child Development, 92, 466–483.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kelly, M. H., & Keil, F. C. (1985). The more things change…: Metamorphoses and conceptual structure. Cognitive Science, 9, 403–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewry, C., Curtis, K., Vasilyeva, N., Xu, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2021). Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physics. Cognition, 214, 104762.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McCoy, J., & Ullman, T. (2019). Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics. PLoS ONE, 14, e0217513.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norenzayan, A., Atran, S., Faulkner, J., & Schaller, M. (2006). Memory and mystery: The cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives. Cognitive Science, 30, 531–553.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shtulman, A. (2017). Scienceblind: Why our intuitive theories about the world are so often wrong. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Shtulman, A., & Morgan, C. (2017). The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1573–1585.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weisberg, D. S., & Goodstein, J. (2009). What belongs in a fictional world. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9, 69–78.Google Scholar