Earlier this month economist Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution highlighted this passage by Robin Hanson from Overcoming Bias.
Fiction is not only not real, it differs from reality in systematic ways. For example, characters in novels, plays, TV tend to be more attractive, articulate, expressive, and principled than real people. Now we also like to tell stories about ourselves and the events we see around us. These stories are more constrained by the facts we see than fictional stories, but I suspect they suffer from similar biases…
For example, it seems to me that teen romp movies tend to portray parents and teachers as inept, clueless, sexually repressed, but ready to help when help is wanted. If so, teens should realize that parents and teachers probably know more, are more sexually satisfied, but less available to help, than teens realize. We should be able to find hundreds of other applications, such as using the standard biases of science fiction.
I think fictional bias plays an astonishing role in human sexuality, not least because… well… when it comes to sex the ratio of what we actually do to that which is related to us is extraordinarily high.
And I’m not just talking about young people and porn, though fiction bias in porn surely affects everyone to some extent. When it comes to young people, for instance, consider the fiction bias in J.K. Rowling’s fiction — over the course of the last three or four books adolescent characters spend upwards of months of completely unsupervised time together with no breath at all of sexuality. (What breaths there are, as with the Harry and Cho characters, take place almost entirely in places where if supervision isn’t present than discovery is highly likely.) Consider further that whereas at age 62 the very real Professor Schwartz continues to discover (stirring!) new ways to enjoy a rich and varied sex life, we are left with no other impression of the fictional Professor McGonagal than a dry, dour, and thoroughly sexless grouch. (Note: Maggie Smith, who plays McGonagal in the movie, was only two years older than Schwartz in the first Potter movie.)
Other rather critical artifacts of fiction bias? Oh, how about that women are naturally chaste while men are naturally horny? That comes right out of nursery fiction as in boys are made of snakes and snails and puppydog tails while girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice and “some day my prince will come.”
And how about “big black men are hung like horses,” that prostitutes are inevitably either trafficked thralls or high-income private listers moonlighting while they complete their economics PhDs, that teenage boys will fuck anything that holds still, or that girls don’t want to have fun… unless they’re drunk as lords on spring break in Cancun.
What other gender and sex biases are instilled in us far more by fiction then by experience?
