That Study Everybody's Talking About

If you are on a social media website you've probably heard of it - the study that says we can actually 'lose ourselves' in a fictional character. What does this mean? What was studied, and how, and what do we do with the results?

Let's start of with the basics. The study was conducted by Geoff Kaufmann (Dartmouth College) and Lisa Libby (Ohio State University), and it is entitled "Changing Beliefs and Behaviour Through Experience-Taking" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Who doesn't hate her?

The term 'experience-taking' here is defined as "the imaginative process of spontaneously assuming the identity of a character in a narrative and simulating that character's thoughts, emotions, behaviours, goals, and traits as if they were one's own".

In plain English, this means essentially becoming a character by mentally sharing their experiences (in a book, for example). 

If you've ever read a book, you can probably relate to this. Can any member of the Harry Potter generation (an age group of roughly 25-15 years) honestly say they never felt the need to enter their copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and give Dolores Umbridge a good-natured slap with, let's say, an atomic bomb? Where you relieved when Frodo finally threw the Ring? Do you really think I will believe that you didn't get the slightest bit teary-eyed during the final scene of Dead Poets' Society?

"Oh captain, my captain?"

Well, that is what we call empathy. And even though we may not see the person, which gives our empathetic mirror neurons quite a hard time, our brain still manages to show that same compassion. How, we don't fully know yet - but that doesn't mean it isn't a real feeling, just because we don't quite understand it - just imagine, we aren't even sure why humans are compelled to yawn when another one yawns... Although I have my own theory about that. Yawning is a sign of overheating (not tiredness or boredom), and an effort to 'refresh' the bran. So what if neurons in the brain of another person then basically go 'Oh, if this person is too warm, maybe it actually is quite hot in here and I should take the precaution of yawning as well."

Anyway, I digress. The study I was talking about actually consisted of six different trials. The first three, and I quote, "showed that being in a reduced state of self-concept accessibility while reading a fictional work increased participant's levels of experience-taking". Let me translate this: If you don't think about your own self a lot while reading, you're more likely to pick up character traits of the characters that you're reading about. This works the other way round - If you think and reflect a lot about yourself while reading, you won't care about the fictional characters as much. 

(Still, I have no idea how they managed to lower their participants' "state of self-concept accessibility".)

The fourth experiment showed, not surprisingly, that the reader will identify with the character even more if the story is written in first instead of third person ('I' instead of 'he'), and when that narrator is also in a position that the reader is familiar with and able to relate to (for example in terms of age, gender and general situation). 

We said six experiments, so there's two left. These are actually quite interesting, in that they have repercussions far beyond the world of fiction. In these to groups, the main character in the story was revealed as either gay or black fairly early in the story - and then there was another story for each group in which that was revealed in the end. 

If the reader didn't know these facts about their characters until the end, their level of the so-called 'experience-taking' was a lot higher, and in tests, they showed a "more favourable attitude" towards the character. Now, the flaw in this is that we aren't told the skin colour and sexuality of the actual readers, but it isn't too hard to guess. Basically, this means that even with fictional characters, we manage to judge - particularly, I'd imagine, for the homosexual character, there may be some people that just shut down their empathy going thinking "I don't want to feel like that guy." That's not exactly a nice thought, but that is a different issue that I won't deal with right now.

Anyway, the basic message: We feel compassion and empathy for people, be they flesh and blood or ink and paper. We feel excited when they do, we suffer emotionally when they are in pain, we celebrate with them.

Question that I still have: What kind of a messed-up, bookless childhood did Kaufmann and Libby have that they needed a scientific experiment to show this? Seriously.