The cultural evolution of love in literary history

N. Baumard (), Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil and Lou Safra ()
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N. Baumard: IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Alexandre Hyafil: UNIC - Unité de neurosciences intégratives et computationnelles - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CRM - Centre de Recerca Matemàtica - UAB - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona = Autonomous University of Barcelona = Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
Lou Safra: CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, LNC2 - Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives & Computationnelles - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - INSERM - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale

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Abstract: Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love'). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development.

Keywords: Economics; Human behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Published in Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, 6

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