: Is accurate human nature required for good writing, even in fantasy scenarios, or with fictional species? I don't know if this is something that is established in the discipline of literature.

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This gets into what I have dubbed the "principle of donuts".

Humans like donuts, not because they are particularly good for us, but because they appeal to several appetites which serve their own purposes, and evolved for specific reasons.

We like sweet things - presumably in part because fruit which is sweet is often very nutritious. We like fatty things and starchy things, because they are good sources of calories (and our pre-agricultural ancestors, who we're scarcely distinguishable from, had to work hard to get enough calories). Fatty foods also often carried important proteins. Also, salt is difficult to obtain in nature, and it's key for our neurological function, and there's usually a hint of saltiness in your donut...

A thing is appetizing (or satisfying) because it appeals to appetites which already exist in us. True, people with variance in inborn preference, or raised on particular diets, may find donuts either overwhelmingly sugary and rich, or kind of bland... But there's a general popularity to donuts, not because our instincts primed us for liking donuts per se, but for all the attributes which the cook devised to combine in the donut.

As J.G. pointed out (in an answer that's probably more directly useful than mine), what is lacking in poor characterization is often not realism, but relatability. I would add that individual audience members will have trained themselves (or have been trained by their literary "diet") to expect varying degrees of realism as a prerequisite for relatability.

What is the correct level of realism? To begin with, are you making donuts? If you're unconcerned with nutritional content, and only want to hit as many appetites as possible - it's not realism exactly you need to aim for, but what your audience "likes", without putting in so many contradictions or inconsistencies that they choke.

In certain cases, making the character choose what a person would realistically choose, rather than what the audience wants them to choose, will alienate your audience. (Or so my experience and observation has led me to believe.) On the other hand, if your characters' behavior is consistently implausible and "unrelatable", your audience won't see your characters as people in the first place, and you won't have an audience for very long.

But beware - most people don't binge on donuts all day. If something doesn't feel at least a little bit "nutritious", it's staying power is actually lower.

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As someone pointed out Trek, I'd like to point out that Trek took special care (especially in DS9) to show that all the aliens had those members in their society that they disagreed with the cultural norm or saw it creatively. Much of Worf's story-lines was about being an outsider to Klingon Culture and realizing not all Klingons model his strict adherence to Honor that Worf had. For example, in TNG he eventually became an outcast for a period of time among the Klingons, having been declared without honor... however, everyone party to the entire incident knew Worf was not guilty of a damn thing even by their own laws, and that his dishonor status was done as a step to preserve the Empire and prevent information that would start a civil war from reaching the general population. Bearing the sins of an empire for it's own preservation would seem honorable to humans, but Klingons did not have any such understanding of this notion.

Honor as a concept can often be divided into two categories: Personal Honor and Societal Honor. The former concerns itself with how one perceives ones actions and the actions one would take with no one watching. That is, if I could do a moral wrong and get away with it, it would be honorable to not perform the action, witnesses or no witness. Societal Honor concerns other's perception of you and your reputation when evaluating your honorable status. Thus, if I could do a moral wrong and get away with it, it is practical to take that action, as society will still think I am honorable. While the concept of Personal Honor as described in the above is not unknown to Klingons, but it's generally pretty foreign to them in what we see.

This is entirely relatable to humans because human society recognizes these two types of honor but can be found and used against people... consider something in society that no one anticipated when writing Worf: Social Networks. These often act much like Klingon society because they rate people based on their actions perceived by the community, but not the quality of their character or the content of what is said. It can even be recognized in the past. The Tragedy of Caesar has the famous line "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives on after them; The Good Oft interred with their bones..."

In this speech, Mark Atony is stealthily explaining to the public that the stated reason for Caesar's murder was his ambitious nature but that does not discount the good that Caesar has done for his people as a leader. Up until this point, the crowd has believed that the crime of being ambitious, and ignore that Romans were better off because of Caeser alive than dead.

Even a famous Irish/Scottish Joke observes the effect of misdeeds rising above good. The joke is set in a bar where a drunk named Angus is imparting an important lesson to the traveller who doesn't know much about the local gossip. He lists all the things he did in the town in a similar format: "I built all the fences in this town [excrutiating detail into the effort it took]. But do they call me Angus the Fence Builder? No." This list goes on for some time to give you an idea that Angus has done some really great things for the town (built the church, saved the kids in the school house fire, so on and so forth) and not once is he named by the towns people for these deeds. Finally, the traveler asks Angus what his point is and Angus explains, "Because you can do all these things and no one will care to remember them," Angus then sighs, looks at his empty pint, and then looks at the traveler, "But you screw one goat..."

Star Trek was able to build from this and demonstrate the good and bad aspects of human traits by making aliens that exhibited human traits and ideas in logical excess. The Ferengi (the people who worship captitilism as a religion) have some pretty ugly traits, being opposed to unions, being greedy, selfish, and never missing an angle to make a quick buck, hating organized labor, holiday pay, sick leave, and view pregnancies as terms of contracts. But they also note that unlike humans, they never had wars among themselves (though hostile take overs are known), they never had slavery (menial wages sure, but they would never be so crass as to suggest that someone's work has no value worth paying for), and never committed genocide (why kill potential customers when you can sell to them?!). And then there are Rom and Nog, the former having no sense of business what-so-ever but is an amazing engineer and is on par with the best of Star Fleet (who in verse, have a reputation for being so good, they could take an ordinary rock and turn it into a replicator... even their enemies are impressed by them). Nog, his son, has a better buisness sense than his father, but suspects he's not nearly as good as Ferengi need to be to become big in their own society and is really upset by his father's treatment. However, he does decide to become a Starfleet officer, a first for his people, and actually carves out an impressive niche of being able to assess the situation and find the things needed to get the job done. Where as the Ferengi don't join Starfleet because there is no prophet to it, Nog is the first to realize that humans still make transactions for things they want but do not have, they just do not use currency to get it done. Even Starfleet, the military of a post-scarcity society, still has scarcities aplenty.

In a similar vein, in one DS9 episode, the crew meet a Klingon Lawyer who is not hostile or aggressive in anyway, and assume he is not a warrior and the proffesion is not the most desirable in Klingon society. The lawyer, however, argues that he is in fact a warrior still: Klingon honor codes demand that they achieve their honor on the battlefield, but are not specific about what a field of battle looks like. Is space any less a battle field than a court room in an Adversarial System? The logical conclusion is no, and he makes a rather impressive presentation of his case (in his first legal case in the Federation, which no doubt has different jurisprudence than in the Klingon Empire). In these cases, the aggressive nature is played with to show how it can be applied to professions that wouldn't otherwise matter in a society where murder is legal if it can be proven honorable.

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I agree with you, but with a qualifier.

I often read science fiction stories where humans in the future are fundamentally different from people today. The story will say how in the future people no longer fight wars or commit violent crimes because humanity has "matured" or "evolved", the people are all more intelligent, they are more rational, etc. I find this very implausible. People today are not particularly different from people hundreds or thousands of years ago. Read some very old book -- ancient Greek plays or the Bible, for example. (And when I mention the Bible, for present purposes ignore the religious content, just think about how the people behave.) What were the motives of people in ancient times? At their worst they wanted sex and money and power. At their best they wanted love and honor. Take any of these ancient stories and re-tell it in a modern setting. Would the behavior of the people seem at all peculiar? To pick one well-known Bible story off the top of my head, consider David and Bathsheba. A man gets an accidental view of a woman naked in her bath and instantly wants her. They are both married, but he approaches her and they have an affair. She gets pregnant. He is rich and powerful and so he arranges for her husband, who is a soldier, to be sent on a dangerous mission where, as he hoped, the man is killed. Certainly a dramatic and extreme story, but if you set that in 21st century America, would anyone find the behavior of the characters implausible?

I've read plenty of stories where I've found myself saying, "Oh come on, why would he do THAT? It doesn't even occur to him to be suspicious?" or "Yeah, I get that peole can panic in an extreme situation, but would anyone really be THAT stupid?" etc.

My caveat is this: We expect the hero, and often the villain, to be extreme. The hero or heroine may be much more brave or smart or sexy or whatever than any real person. I don't want to read a story about a guy who goes to work in an office every day, sits at a computer filling out forms, and then goes home, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. I want to read about bold adventurers, clever spies, sexy seductresses, etc.

With non-human races, I expect them to be different from humans in some way. Well, by definition they must be different in SOME way, but this could well include their behavior. There are lots of lazy stories where the dwarves or aliens or whatever just take some human characteristic and exaggerate it. How many non-humans in fiction are extremely war-like? Or extremely conformist? These are ideas that were not very interesting to begin with and that have been beaten to death.

I read a story once where the writer said that while humans primarily think in terms of "right and wrong", the aliens think in terms of "respectable and not-respectable". It was an interesting attempt to make a truly alien alien. In my humble opinion he never explained it well or explored the implications, but it was a good try.

I once came across the "writer's guide" for the original Star Trek series. They had what I considered an excellent little exercise in there. They described 3 brief scenes, and asked which had the biggest problems. One referred to the ship as "United States Ship Enterprise". Yes that's wrong, they said, but a trivial error that can be fixed by changing one word. Another described some futuristic weapon, and they said, sure, the description of the weapon appears to violate known laws of physics, but we don't care, and we don't want writers to be pre-occupied with gadgets. The third described a teaser scene where the Enterprise is attacked, and it concludes with Captain Kirk putting his arm around Yeoman Rand "as they wait for certain death". This, they said, was wildly implausible. Move the setting to a 20th century US Navy ship. They are attacked and expect to all be killed. Would the captain of the ship put his arm around a female officer and hug her as they prepared to die? Very unlikely.

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Personally I do feel that psychologically believable writing is generally the best - whatever the genre. It's one of the things I love about Harry Potter, for instance. Note that Rowling managed to create a believable psychology for house-elves which is different from human psychology (or western culture), but still within the realm of what humans can relate to. Same for centaurs and goblins.

Your readers will be people who relate to your way of writing - so if you enjoy reading and writing psychologically realistic stuff, that's the approach you should take. Simply because that's the approach that you're likely to be best at. You have to assume that the readers will follow, even though that is always going to be a gamble.

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What you need from your characterisation is not scientific accuracy, but that the characters are relatable. It's easy to mistake this for what you've asked about, since characters need to be somewhat like us to be relatable. I'll say more about why accuracy is the wrong way to think about it in a moment.

I recently watched a video explaining that a lot of writing goes awry due to thinking it needs to be more or less dark, or serious, than something that went before, because that something failed. But in the examples cited, it is argued the problem, not only with the earlier work but also a failed attempt to improve on it, is that the characters were never relatable enough. I wholeheartedly agree with many of the video's points, including the point that the darker parts of a plot "work" because we relate enough to the affected characters to care about the problems they face.

Right, about accuracy. The first issue is most people don't really know what human nature is like anyway (and may overestimate how stable it is across time and places, as in pessimism about the possibility of a progressive future, or underestimate how much different peoples have in common, as in xenophobia). So do you need to be accurate to actual facts, or believed alternatives? The second issue is you can get away with things believed-while-consuming conventions. Conflict occurs far more readily between people who could easily get along, even more so in fiction than in real life, because you need something to drive the story.

Let's look at a few ways, in no particular order, that fiction often deliberately gets human nature "wrong" for the better:

When you say a cool enough line, the other person is speechless.
In a fight, at least one person says something witty, and the greatest wit wins.
When you go on an adventure, you'll change your nature, or your opinion about something important to you in a short time (or if you won't, others around you will).

As for non-human peoples in fiction, that's always tricky because you'll need to think carefully about how inventive you want to be. I recommend studying examples of this trope to see what happens when aliens are, well... alien in their ideas or behaviour. The "likely candidates" paragraph will help you, but so will how well you think specific examples of this trope worked. But if they don't work, I suspect it's because they're not relatable enough.

A great example, in my opinion, of a relatable alien morality - for villains, no less - is that of the Sontarans in Doctor Who. Their morality is one they can consistently apply to other peoples, rather than a simple "we're best" attitude. They wage war, not necessarily because they hate the opponent or want their resources, but because they think war itself is a good thing. (Their ongoing war with the Rutans is a product of that species feeling the same way.) They can be stunned from the back, but don't see this as a weakness because it means they'll always nobly face their enemies. They think death in battle, of a Sontaran or otherwise, is honourable. They sometimes punish their own kind by forcing them to care for the sick.

That's all very unlike humans, isn't it? But be honest, it's relatable. Not only does knowing one or two facts about them make sense of the others; you can really get inside their head, and imagine how they'd feel and why. You won't agree, but you'll relate, which is what really matters. You could argue their thoughts are not so much alien as like those of certain militaries before World War I. But the Sontarans are just as relatable whether or not that's true, or you think it is, or it occurs to you.

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"Factual realism" is just a style, and an inclination towards it is just a personal preference. But "emotional realism" is everything in fiction. We'll forgive any kind of factual implausibility (or flight of fancy) if the emotions read true. The reason is simple: One of the main reasons we read fiction is for non-didactic learning. The fictional scenario puts us in the place and mindset of another person, and we learn, in a very natural, emotion based way, from what that person does or fails to do. It's not necessary for the circumstances to be realistic, or naturalistic, but if they are unrealistic to the point that we can neither emphasize nor learn anything, it greatly diminishes our pleasure and immersion.

Some of this is individual to the specific reader. But some of it is not. A wholly alien protagonist would be frustrating and off-putting to most readers. But so would an otherwise realistic protagonist who makes unjustifiable mistakes no reasonable person would make. On the other hand, reading about a person who is coping with special, idiosyncratic challenges (as in Room or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or Lord of the Rings) can be extremely compelling, even though we don't share those particular challenges, because we all have our own personal challenges we have to face. (The key here is making the challenges believable and consistent.)

The flip side of this is that there's more room to be genuinely "alien" with the antagonist (or even with the protagonist's allies), at least as seen from the protagonist's POV. Most of us can identify with at least occasionally dealing with other people whose behaviors we find odd, inscrutable, or flat out insane. So the writing can still be relatable even if the villain isn't. (A villain of this sort, however, is more of a "condition of nature" than a three-dimensional character --i.e Sauron in LOTR. A villain who is more directly present in the story will generally require more believability.)

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