Admittedly among some people I am embarrassed to admit I like some of these films where the evil are fetishised. Is this a more modern phenomenon? Do antiheroes exist in folk stories?

Have you seen Funny Games? Surely the ultimate example of a movie where the criminals succeed and the good all lose. And horrible to watch for that reason.

The Art Instinct is at its best in its discussion of fiction. Yes, fiction is instructive: we all know a lot about nineteenth-century Russia, though none of us has been there. Yes, it helps us strategize our social lives, as Pinker argued. Dutton adds another dimension: fiction hones our mind-reading skills. … fiction lets us explore other minds ­ the minds both of imagined characters and, at one remove, of authors. That all three of these features are adaptive, is highly plausible.

IMHO, these explanations don’t get very far at explaining why we are interested in fictional worlds with such alien settings, and such different social behavior in those settings.

http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/HumanSciences/artinstinct.html

One of the primary uses of stories by Denis Dutton’s theory is teaching “mind reading” skills. Both by the author putting you into the mind of the characters and less directly learning to read the author’s mind as to why he wrote/said what he did.

That is: why is fiction production and consumption preferred over other types of signalling?

Alan, you think the reason you really enjoy something can’t be signaling?

My instinct is that sexual selection plays a role here. Being a good story teller is sexually attractive, and to a lesser degree so is being an avid story listener. That is how I feel, anyway. But I can’t see a connection to reproductive fitness, which you’d expect for a sexually attractive trait.

Giving lots of (one sided) real world examples is a sure tool of a demagogue/self-aggrandizer. So maybe it is safer for the listeners to avoid all real world examples for foundational ideas.

I don’t buy the stories we like or propagate necessarily promoting positive characteristics about ourselves. I’m thinking of ancient myths mainly, they don’t have people/gods thinking coherently or all being paragons of good or bad. When people told of Odin often tricking people (including his own son), was the teller trying to make people think he would often trick them?

Maybe it is more important in modern days to signal our moralities?

That makes an large assumption about what sort of thing a morality must be.