Imaginary friends and real-world consequences: parasocial relationships | Jennifer Barnes | TEDxOU

>> 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 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 had 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,

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've 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 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,

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.

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 Gendler calls alief.

Now to explain to you what alief
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 Gendler explains our attraction
to fiction is she says that we believe

that fictional characters
are fictional, but we alief,

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 alief 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 Jaye 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, Gardiner 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 cancelled.

But we were interested in a
different kind of parting,

specifically we were interested in death.

This phrase, valar morghulis
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 Paterson.

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 image
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 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 our male participants, what we're seeing
is no statistically meaningful effect.

So neither group is actually saying, 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 suggest

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.

[ Applause ]