Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative e...

In December 2010, the FCC completed an almost 4 yearlong rulemaking process related to socalled “Internet Neutrality.” During this process, more than 32,000 comments and related documents were filed with the FCC, arguing for or against net neutrality regulation. The debate over net neutrality is largely understood to be one of access providers vs. content providers. Those companies providing ho...

Jin Feng, in her paper "The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction," proposes that the representation of the "new woman" in Chinese fiction was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period probed occasionally the thematic im...

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one (genres as regions of conceptual space) dominant but inadequate, the other (genres as historical particulars) better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, in...

This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policyoriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority, and represen...

Young children are surrounded by fictional media, including books, videos, and games. Often they are expected to learn new information from these explicitly fictional sources, while simultaneously avoiding confusion about what is true in the real world versus what is true only in fictional worlds. How do children navigate this ‘‘reader’s dilemma”? The current review addresses this question by f...

The Google Books corpus, derived from millions of books in a range of major languages, would seem to offer many possibilities for research into cultural, social, and linguistic evolution. In a previous work, we found that the 2009 and 2012 versions of the unfiltered English data set as well as the 2009 version of the English Fiction data set are all heavily saturated with scientific and medical...

There has been considerable interest in images of medicine in popular science fiction and in representations of doctors in television fiction. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to doctors administering space medicine in science fiction. This article redresses this gap. We analyse the evolving figure of 'the doctor' in different popular science fiction television series. Building upon ...