Losing yourself in fictional characters affects RL
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
For many role players, their RP characters are real. It even arguable that some characters are more “real” than the individuals behind them if you look at measures on online influence, whether it’s Klout or just the numbers of friends and followers on multiple networks or platforms. When you “lose yourself” in fictional characters and the worlds they inhabit you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, according to a recent study from Ohio State University.
Now before you start panicking that playing a vampire or a shifter or even a demon is going to turn you into one, you should know that while “losing yourself” in a fictional character can impact your real life and lead to real changes, it’s only temporary.
So what, exactly does it mean to “lose yourself” in a fictional character?
“You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character’s identity,” said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study while a graduate student at Ohio State. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College.
According to researchers at Ohio State University there are times and people who find themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of the characters as if they were their own. It’s a phenomena known as “experience-taking” and it doesn’t happen all the time. Experience-taking only occurs when people are able to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading.
“Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes,” Kaufman said.
To study the effects of losing yourself or experience taking, researchers conducted two experiments. In one, they found that individuals who strongly identify with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were more likely to vote in a real election several days later. The second experiment revealed that individuals who went through the experience-taking process about a character who was of a different race or sexual orientation showed more favorable attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype. Their findings appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.
Although researchers did not look specifically at role-playing, some of their findings may have interesting potential implications for role players. For instance, results of one experiment indicated that participants who read a story told in the first person about a character in their location (in the experiment their university) had the highest level of experience-taking and it affected their real life behavior. Change the location and the real life affect declines even if the story is told in the first person.
“When you share a group membership with a character from a story told in first-person voice, you’re much more likely to feel like you’re experiencing his or her life events, said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University. “And when you undergo this experience-taking it can affect your behavior for days afterwards.”
Something else to ponder, since we all know people are more likely to lose themselves in a character similar to themselves, what happens when they learn that character is not so similar later in the story? Turns out, those people who identified with a character only to find out later that character wasn’t as much like them as they thought report significantly more positive attitudes towards the different group (say sexual orientation or race) than those fr whom the were no differences or those differences were revealed early in the story.
It’s important to remember that experience-taking is spontaneous. You can’t tell people to do it and have it happen. It happens naturally under the right circumstances. Many RP characters are probably the result of experience-taking. At the same time, they may be generating some experience-taking of their own. And that’s not a bad thing.
“Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways,” said Libby. “Experience-taking can be very powerful because people don’t realize it is happening to them. It is an unconscious process.”