Jonathan Gottschall Ph.D.

About

Jonathan Gotschall, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department of Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania.He completed graduate work in English at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he worked under the biologist David Sloan Wilson. He also writes books at the intersection of science and art, books include: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012); The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005)-edited with David Sloan Wilson; The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer (2008); Literature, Science and a New Humanities (2008); Evolution, Literature and Film: A Reader-co-edited with Brian Boyd and Joseph Carroll; and Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (forthcoming, 2012)-co-authored with Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, and Dan Kruger. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American Mind, New Scientist, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Science, BBC Radio and NPR.

Books by Jonathan Gottschall Ph.D.

Recent Posts

The Holodeck Is Real

All of us understand that fiction is about fake people and fake events. But this doesn’t stop the unconscious centers of our brains from processing like it's real.

Does Fictional Violence Lead to Real Violence?

Has violent media consumption actually helped reduce criminal violence? The notion isn't as perverse as it may at first seem.

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Maria Konnikova has written a fun and intriguing new book called Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking 2013). Konnikova was good enough to answer a few of my questions.

Defending Just-So Stories

Evolutionary psychology is again under attack as mere "just-so" storytelling. But giving up on telling and testing just-so stories is giving up hope of answering the most compelling questions about our species: Who are we and how did we get this way?

A Message For Jonah Lehrer

They keep comparing you to James Frey, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair. But you aren't in that league. I'll give you another chance, Jonah, and I think others will too.

The Power of Fake Gay (and Black) Friends

New research doesn’t just suggest that fictitious gays blazed the trail that led to Barrack Obama’s historic endorsement of gay marriage. It suggests that but for “fictitious blacks”—from Kunta Kinte to the powerful African American commander-in-chief on the television show 24—we might not have had a President Obama in the first place.

Fiction Addiction

Imagine you find a magical device that allows you to enter an alternate universe as an invisible observer. Before entering, you know you will witness brutal, scarring things: the rapes and murders of women and children, bodies tortured, defiled, and dismembered.

Creatures of Story

Humans are storytelling animals. We are, as a species, addicted to story. But the addiction runs deeper than we think.

Sacred Fictions

Why did we evolve to be religious? How did dogmatic faith in imaginary beings not diminish our ability to survive and reproduce? How could the frugal mechanisms of natural selection not have worked against religion, given the high cost of religious sacrifices, taboos, and commandments?

A Cursed Rage for Order

What’s really striking about conspiracy theory is not how strange it is, but how ordinary it is. Go to Google, type in “conspiracy,” and browse through some of the millions of hits. Conspiracy theory is the product of certain universal biases in human psychology.