Tanya Cushman Reviewer's Name Reviewer's Name 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 as 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 view. 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 three hours. For the movies, I assumed that the movies had only ever been seen in the theaters, that they'd never been seen on the internet, on television, or on DVD.
And using those assumptions, the number I came up with for the amount of time people would spend on Harry Potter is this. And this number doesn't look that big until you realize that the unit on this number is years. 235,000 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's. 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. 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 Lovegood and Sirius Black and so on. 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, a parasocial relationship is a relationship you form with someone you don't actually 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 Everdeen of Hunger Games or Scandal's Olivia Pope. But we also form parasocial relationships with real people we don't know. 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 two pregnancies. People magazine keeps you very up to date 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 are 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 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.
Logically, 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 make-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 a leaf is, I'm going to tell 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-like thing that says the exact opposite of what you really believe. And that's an alief.
So the way Gindler explains our attraction to fiction is she says that we believe that fictional characters are fictional. But we A-leave. We have this gut-level, subconscious, belief-like 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 J.L. Derrick 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, Gardner and Knowles 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 as well. 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, Jonathan Cohen and colleagues have examined that the emotional fallout that can happen when, for instance, your favorite television show is canceled. But we were interested in a different kind of parting.
Specifically, we were interested in death. This phrase, valor mogulis, comes from Game of Thrones. Translated, it means, all men must die.
And this tweet comes from the Twitter feed of author George R.R. 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 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 co-worker 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 thought they ought to feel in each case, and how sad they would really feel in each case. And here's what we found. Now just to orient you to these graphs, over here on the y-axis, we have mean grief scores. This is a combined score of four of the items I told you about earlier.
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 become 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 make-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 distant 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 they 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 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 they're 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 themselves.
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.