Jonathan Gottschall

A User’s Manual

We created an online questionnaire, listed about 2,000 characters from 201 canonical British novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and asked respondents to select individual characters and answer questions about them. Potential research participants were identified by scanning lists of faculty in hundreds of English departments worldwide and selecting specialists in nineteenth-century British literature, especially scholars specializing in the novel. Lists of English departments are available on the web, and most departments give a listing of faculty that contains information about their teaching and research interests. Invitations were also sent to multiple listservs dedicated to the discussion of Victorian literature or specific authors or groups of authors in our study. Approximately 519 respondents completed a total of 1,470 questionnaires on 435 characters from 134 novels. A copy of the questionnaire used in the study can be accessed at the following URL: http://http://www-personal.umich.edu /~kruger/carroll-survey.html. (The form is no longer active and will not be used to collect data.)

The “Beauty Myth” Is No Myth

The phenomenon of apparently greater emphasis on human female physical attractiveness has spawned an array of explanatory responses, but the great majority can be broadly categorized as either evolutionary or social constructivist in nature. Both perspectives generate distinct and testable predictions. If, as Naomi Wolf (The beauty myth: How images of female beauty are used against women. New York: William Morrow, [originally published in 1991], 2002) and others have argued, greater emphasis on female attractiveness is part of a predominantly Western “beauty myth,” then an analysis of a culturally diverse sample should reveal marked fluctuation in gendered attractiveness emphasis: there should be significant numbers of cultures in which male and female attractiveness are equally emphasized, and cultures in which male attractiveness receives more emphasis. On the other hand, an evolutionary perspective suggests that disproportionate emphasis on female attractiveness will be a universal or near-universal phenomenon. To test these hypotheses, we tallied references to male versus female attractiveness in 90 collections of traditional folktales from 13 diverse cultural areas. The results are consistent with the evolutionary predictions and inconsistent with the constructivist predictions. Across culture areas information on physical attractiveness was much more likely to be conveyed for female characters. Together with other recent studies, these results suggest that the main elements of the beauty myth are not myths: there are large areas of overlap in the attractiveness judgments of diverse populations, and cross-cultural emphasis on physical attractiveness appears to fall principally upon women.

Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?

To love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think constantly about him or her, and to discover that one’s own priorities in life have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person’s well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.

Greater Emphasis on Female Attractiveness in Homo sapiens: A Revised Solution to an Old Evolutionary Riddle

Substantial evidence from psychology and cross-cultural anthropology supports a general rule of greater emphasis on female physical attractiveness in Homo sapiens. As sensed by Darwin (1871) and clarified by Trivers (1972), generally higher female parental investment is a key determinant of a common pattern of sexual selection in which male animals are more competitive, more eager sexually and more conspicuous in courtship display, ornamentation, and coloration. Therefore, given the larger minimal and average parental investment of human females, keener physical attractiveness pressure among women has long been considered an evolutionary riddle. This paper briefly surveys previous thinking on the question, before offering a revised explanation for why we should expect humans to sharply depart from general zoological pattern of greater emphasis on male attractiveness. This contribution hinges on the argument that humans have been seen as anomalies mainly because we have been held up to the wrong zoological comparison groups. I argue that humans are a partially sex-role reversed species, and more emphasis on female physical attractiveness is relatively common in such species. This solution to the riddle, like those of other evolutionists, is based on peculiarities in human mating behavior, so this paper is also presented as a refinement of current thinking about the evolution of human mating preferences.

A Users Manual

This report gives a user introduction to the tools of Tav, a veriication system for parallel and nondeterministic systems within the calculus of CCS. In particular Tav contains tools for deciding various notions of bisimularity between processes, and contains tools for model{checking with respect to a rather powerfull (recursive) modal logic. A distinctive feature of the tools of Tav | important from a development point of view | is, that they all ooer explanations for the answers they give.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS AND THE SCIENCES OF THE MIND

Two recent books by Patrick Colm Hogan deserve attention for all they get right and, to a lesser but important extent, for where they go wrong. Hogan is among the most accomplished members of an expanding group of humanistic scholars who are assimilating and putting to use the most promising models of human potential taking shape in the human sciences. By drawing on theory and research in cognitive and brain sciences, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cross-cultural anthropology, this group is finally beginning to push literary studies beyond defunct tabula rasa and psychoanalytic theories of human potential that have served as the main foundations for the elaboration of literary theory over recent decades.1 Varieties of hard social constructivism and psychoanalysis have continued to dominate thought in the humanities, despite the fact that those theories have lost all credibility in the human sciences.2 Hogan’s books provide a preview of the kinds of theoretical models that will fill the vacuum once literary scholars fully assimilate

Agonistic Structure Differentiated by Sex

The organization of characters into eight sets forms an implicit empirical hypothesis—the hypothesis that agonistic structure, differentiated by sex, is a fundamental shaping feature in the organization of characters in the novels. We predicted (1) that each of the eight character sets would be sharply defined by a distinct and integrated array of features, that these features would correlate in sharply defined ways with the emotional responses of readers, and that both the features of characters and the emotional responses of readers would correlate, on the average, with character role assignments; (2) that characters identified as protagonists and their friends and associates would have attributed to them, on average, the features to which readers are most attracted and that they most admire; (3) that characters identified as antagonists and their friends and associates would have attributed to them, on average, the characteristics for which readers feel an aversion and of which they disapprove; (4) that protagonists would most completely realize the approbatory tendencies in reader response; and (5) that antagonists would most completely realize the aversive tendencies. Taken individually, each of these propositions might seem obvious, but only if one presupposes the validity of the terms “protagonist” and “antagonist”—the very terms our study is designed to put to the test.

Jane Austen, by the Numbers

Jane Austen bulks larger than any other single author in the data set. Out of the total of 435 characters in the data set, 56, or about 13 percent, are from Austen novels. All of her characters together received 423 codings, or about 29 percent of the 1,470 codings for the whole data set. Since we have averaged the ratings for characters who receive more than one coding, each Austen character, no matter how many codings he or she receives, counts only once in the total set of scores for all 435 characters.

Indifferent Tragedy in The Mayor of Casterbridge

For the novels of Jane Austen, quantitative methods provide new evidence on disputed issues, offer opportunities for confirming and refining the best insights of traditional criticism, and provide a deeper and more systematic understanding of her underlying designs. For The Mayor of Casterbridge, quantitative analysis gives occasion for a more radical intervention in the critical tradition. On the thematic and tonal structures of Jane Austen’s novels, critics have reached a very high degree of consensus. Most major differences arise only at the highest level of thematic reduction—the level at which common observations are located within global theoretical paradigms. In Austen’s case, global theories have little impact on the analytic summary that constitutes the bulk of most criticism. The Mayor of Casterbridge, in contrast, presents a major interpretive puzzle.

Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities (review)

Willie van Peer and his colleagues have produced an important, innovative book that ought to be widely studied by humanities scholars. Its central thesis is that humanists need to think as hard about their methodological assumptions as they do about their theoretical and hermeneutical ones. For Van Peer et al., the problem with standard humanities methods is that they are “often merely speculative, in the sense that there are very few checks on the assertions made,” and therefore “they do not yield particularly reliable forms of information” (p. 7). While this is in itself a pedestrian observation, the authors’ proposals for addressing this limitation are not. They boldly argue that literary scholars can do more than borrow ideas, findings, and vocabularies from the sciences—they can borrow the methods too. Muses and Measures is a call for humanities scholars to actually do science. If the authors have their way, ordinary humanities jargon will expand to include wundt curves, likert scales, within-subject and between-subject experimental designs, normal distributions, descriptive and inferential statistics, t-tests, p-values, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). This prospect will strike most humanities scholars as nightmarish – the latest in a depressingly long string of foolish, doomed attempts to cram humanistic inquiry into science’s alluring but ill-fitting mold. For two reasons, however, readers should resist any reflex of fear or disgust until they actually read the book. First, there is a fundamental difference between what Van Peer et al. are proposing and previous attempts, like psychoanalysis or structuralism, to establish sciences of the literary. While previous schools have imported concepts, vocabularies, and an aura of rigor from scientific fields, they have almost never sought to apply the methods of the sciences. These days, almost everyone thinks that barriers between disciplines are permeable (or illusory), and almost everyone celebrates work that links knowledge from disparate disciplines. But humanities scholars have almost never seriously tried to move the methods of the