[Applause] for the past decade I've been living a double life currently that double life looks like this by day I'm a psychology Professor here at the University of Oklahoma by night I'm a fiction writer and the author of over a dozen published novels so today I'm going to be talking to you about something that fascinates me is both a writer and a scientist and that's the relationships we form with fictional characters in 2012 I sat down to do a calculation I wondered how much time people had invested in the Harry Potter series so I started off by making some assumptions that I thought would give me a conservative estimate and when I tell you what those assumptions were you'll see what I mean when I said I was shooting for a conservative estimate I started off with the total number of books sold I assumed that only half of the books sold had ever been read that no one had ever read their book twice that no two people had ever read the same book and that a person can read any of the Harry Potter books in 3 hours for the movies I assumed that the movies had only ever been seen in the theaters that they never been seen on the internet on television or on DVD and using those assumptions uh the number I came up with for the amount of time people that spent on Harry Potter is this and this number doesn't look that big Until you realize that the unit on this number is years 20 35,000 years of man-hours spent reading the Harry Potter books and watching the Harry Potter movies so to put that in perspective for you that means that one person could have sat around from the dawn of man until now reading the Harry Potter books and watching the Harry Potter movies 24 hours a day and that still wouldn't be equal to the amount of time that people have spent on Harry Potter in the modern world and if we go from talking just about Harry Potter to talking about all fictional books all fictional television shows movies theater and video games the amount of time we spend on fictional stories is astounding and that has led to two questions in the psychology of fiction the first is why why do we spend so much time and so much money and so much emotion on something we know isn't real and the second question is given that we are spending so much time engaging with fiction what effect does this engagement have on us now today I'm going to be talking about a specific subset of this engagement and that's the relationships we form with fictional characters to a certain extent reading Harry Potter isn't just about going to Hogwarts or imagining that magic exists it's about spending time with the characters on the pages it's essentially about hanging out with Harry and Ron and Hermione and Luna love good and serious black and so on so so from this perspective the two questions I just showed you then become why do we care so much about fictional characters why do we feel so connected to them and what effects do the relationships we're forming with these characters have on us now when I talk about the relationships that we have with fictional characters I'm talking about what media psychologists refer to as parasocial relationships now parasocial relationship is a relationship you form with someone you don't actually know know by consuming media about that person so you can have a parasocial relationship with fictional characters such as the ones that I have with Katniss everine of Hunger Games or scandals Olivia Pope but we also form parasocial relationships with real people we don't know people like celebrities and politicians so for example if you read a lot about England's royal family you may feel as though you know this woman you saw her get married you've watched her through twoe pregnancies People magazine keeps you very up toate on her day-to-day life and of course since this is 2015 we don't just keep track of these people through traditional media but we see them on social media as well so for example you might follow Taylor Swift on Twitter nearly 50 million people do and if you one of those 50 million people you get to see Taylor talking about her favorite movies you get to see her talking about her family and their sense of humor and you're probably combining that information with with other information stuff like song lyrics interviews she's given speeches she's given and pictures of her cat and over time you may come to feel as though you really really know Taylor Swift similarly you may have that same intuition about Olivia Pope or Harry Potter or one of the Avengers you've seen them in private moments you've seen things they've never let another person in their own world ever see you know what they feel and how they feel about what they feel and how they would act in any given situation you might even occasionally find yourself yelling at the television screen you know Olivia what are you doing or don't go in there but no matter how loudly you yell that person is never going to hear you no matter how well you feel like you know Olivia Pope Olivia Pope does not know you she can't know you because she's not real right logically we know this logic we know that Taylor Swift has 50 million Twitter followers and that in all likelihood she is not talking directly to us logically we know that we don't have real two-sided relationships with makeb believe people and utter strangers and yet sometimes it feels like we do and one way of understanding this is by referring to a philosophical concept that philosopher Tamar gindler calls a leaf now to explain to you what an aaf is I'm going to tell you you a story imagine that you're in a glass elevator soaring 50 stories above the ground and you look down your heart starts beating faster your hands are sweating why it's not because you believe that you can sink through the glass floor of an elevator you don't believe that at all but at the same time you have this gut level automatic subconscious belief likee thing that says the exact opposite of what you really believe and that's an aaf so the way gindler explains our attraction to fiction is she says that we believe that fictional characters are fictional but we a we have this gut level subconscious belief likee idea that they're real so if you apply that to the parasocial relationships we have with these individuals you might suggest that we believe that these interactions only go one way that I might know Olivia Pope but she doesn't know me but on the other hand you might a leave or feel as if she really does know you and in fact in the course of human history if you saw someone as often as I see Taylor Swift and Olivia Pope it was because you did actually know them so I've given you one answer to this first question why do we care so much about fictional characters I'm going to spend the rest of this talk addressing the second question what effects do these relationships have on us Decades of research in media psychology and Communications have provided a variety of fascinating answers so for example work by JL Derek and colleagues suggest that parasocial relationships can buffer against losses of self-esteem and feelings of social rejection it's as if we're drawing social and emotional support not only from our real friends and loved ones but from our fictional friends as well similarly Gardener and NS found that just exposing someone to a picture of a favorite television character can increase their performance on certain cognitive tasks they call this a social facilitation effect and it's the exact same effect you would expect to see if someone were in the presence of a real friend and this is a trend we see again and again in this research the benefits of real world relationships actually seem to correspond pretty closely to the benefits of these imaginary relationships as well it's almost as if our perceived Social Circle includes not only the real people who we actually know and actually love but the people we fictionally know and fictionally love and as well uh and this led my graduate student Jessica black and I to wonder what happens when that perceived Social Circle is broken what happens when you lose someone who you fictionally love so we were interested in what we'll call fictional grief now John Jonathan Cohen and colleagues have examined that the emotional Fallout that can happen when for instance your favorite television show is cancelled but we were interested in a different kind of party specifically we were interested in death this phrase Valor mulis comes from Game of Thrones translated it means all men must die and this tweet comes from the Twitter feed of Author George RR Martin where he says I walk into a bar everybody dies fictional death is not uncommon as an author I've killed characters before and I have gotten anguished emails from readers saying why why did you do that why would you do those that to those characters in that book and why would you do that to me and as a reader and a viewer I have felt that anguish myself I felt it when I watched the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones I felt it for the first time when I was 10 years old and I read a book called Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson and when I was 10 years old I didn't even know that characters particularly kid characters could die in fiction so when I got to the point where a character I loved who I felt like I knew who felt like my friend died I was devastated and that Devastation is exactly what my graduate student Jessica and I were interested in investigating so I want you to take a moment and think about your favorite fictional character from a television show or book series okay you have that person in your mind now imagine how you would feel if that person died okay and now I want you to pick a person sitting a few rows in front of you here in this Auditorium someone you didn't know before today but you've seen a few times maybe you talked to them during one of the breaks okay now I want you to imagine that that person has died how would you feel and actually this is almost exactly what Jessica and I asked participants to do 134 participants filled out an online survey and in that online survey they were asked to specify both a favorite fictional character from a book series or television show and also a real world acquaintance someone they saw on a semi-regular basis but didn't know all that well so someone like a classmate or a coworker or someone they saw at the gym so for each case they provided the name of this person and then we asked them to imagine that that person had died and we asked them to report on a variety of reactions so for example we asked them to quantify how upset they would feel on a scale from zero they wouldn't care at all to 100 they would feel extremely upset we also asked them to quantify how much money they would pay to bring that person back to life How likely they would be to cry how much they would miss that person and how sad they would feel overall finally we also asked them to report how sad they Fel thought they ought to feel in each case and how sad they would really feel in each case and here is what we found now just to orient you to these graphs over here on the Y AIS we have mean grief scores this is a combined score of four of the items I told you about earlier uh how upset would you feel how sad would you feel how much would you miss the person and How likely would you be to cry on the x-axis we have both character grief and acquaintance grief and for reasons that are going to come apparent I'm going to show you the results separately for men and women and here is what we found so we found an overall effect where participants were reporting statistically more grief for the fictional character than for the real world acquaintance but as you can see from this graph this was driven almost entirely by our female participants so female participants were reporting significantly more grief about the idea of a fictional character dying than a real world acquaintance interestingly even though we don't see this effect in our male participants in the male participants what we're seeing is no statistically meaningful effect so neither group is actually saying hey I would be sadder about the real person neither group is saying that and in some ways this is shocking because in one case you're talking about a makeb believe person and in the other case you're talking about a real person who you actually know that person has a real life and real hopes real dreams real relationships real emotions and yet you're also talking about the difference between a fictional friend and a real world more distance acquaintance and it seems that what matters is how close you feel to the person not whether or not they're real now for the record participants seem to realize that there might be something slightly off about this pattern of results both male and female participants report that they wouldn't be as sad as they ought to be about the real person and that that would be sadder than they ought to be about the fictional character so what do we make of this what does it mean that fictional stories which are written for the purpose of engaging our emotions are so good at doing just that what does it mean that we might overvalue the lives of fictional characters and undervalue the lives of people in the real world well one question you might ask is whether or not there's any way we can leverage that caring for fictional characters and translate it into something in the real world and in fact this is exactly what fan activism does so for example the Harry Potter Alliance is an organization that has engaged millions of Harry Potter fans in their mission to turn readers into Heroes and make activism accessible through the power of story now organizations like this aren't all that dissimilar from the effects we would see if a celebrity asked their fans to help out a certain organization or the effects we might see psychologically in the real world if a real world close loved one came and told you their story and told you about an organization that they want you to help out and in fact there is some research in the psychological sciences that suggests that reading fiction might increase our empathy it might teach us in some way to pay more attention to the mental States and emotions of other people there are so many benefits to engaging in fiction and to these parasocial relationships but given what I showed you about fictional grief today I also think it's worth asking what are the potential downsides of these relationships and one question you might ask is given that we're throwing so much emotion into to make believe people who are these people who does media represent and if our popular media is disproportionately white and disproportionately male if it concentrates on some groups and excludes others what is that doing to our perceived Social Circle what is that doing to our imaginary friends and what does that mean for people in the real world you might also ask given the parallels between the way we relate to fictional characters and the way we relate to real people like celebrities and politicians who we don't actually know you might ask how much of this is really because we're treating fictional characters like they're real and how much of it is because we're treating these celebrities and politicians like their make believe and if we really are treating these individuals like they are just characters in a story what does that do for our judgment and our intuition and our moral intuitions about various things given that morality can work very differently in fiction these are open questions but given the vast amount of time that we as a species spend on fictional stories I think they're questions that every single person in this room should be asking themsel so my charge to you is that the next time you sit down to spend some time with your fictional friends be mindful be mindful of what media you are consuming be mindful of that perceived Social Circle and be mindful of what you can do to turn your love for make believe people and for stories into some kind of action in the real world thank you