Novels and fiction are possibly maladaptive hangovers of folk science and folk psychology. Sure, they're entrancing, but if you read Richerson/Boyd, they're quite likely where we get stuck — a bottleneck where simplistic info rules over correlational. The sciences tell us this, and it's paradoxical that our explanations come from above by... storytellers.
Parul Seghal's piece in the New Yorker last year hints at this.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-sto...