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Social Psychology and the Comic-Book Superhero: A Darwinian Approach
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 38, Number 1A, October 2014
- pp. A195-A215
- 10.1353/phl.2014.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
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Why is the comic-book superhero such a persistent topic of cultural representation? Citing Dutton’s evolutionary aesthetic, we argue that comic-book superheroes persist because they offer a cultural means of negotiating the gap between the small group size that human beings have evolved a cognitive architecture to deal with, and the much larger group size that is entailed by modern social arrangements. This position implies four predictions: the superhero should (1) exhibit punitive prosociality, (2) be supernatural or quasi-supernatural, (3) be minimally counterintuitive, and (4) display kin-signaling proxies. These predictions are tested against seventeen superhero figures from various comic-book universes.