Abstract

Utilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art and literature. This article focuses on evolutionarily informed explorations of popular culture, an area that, only relatively recently, has benefited from research taking this approach. The existing scholarship in this area will be reviewed, and future directions and challenges highlighted.