Fiction is a way to engage with the darker aspects of your personality.
People tend to identify with fictional villains who have similar dark personality traits to their own.
Those with chaotic and tricky sides to their personality may identify with The Joker in the Batman movies.
People who are ambitious and intellectual might secretly admire Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty.
Fictional baddies give us a chance to recognise the darker sides of our personalities without the natural repulsion to real-world criminals.
Ms Rebecca Krause, the study’s first author, said:
“Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to our darker selves.
When people feel safe, they are more interested in comparisons to negative characters that are similar to themselves in other respects.”
Typically, people recoil from negative parts of their personality, except when the context is fictional, said Ms Krause:
“People want to see themselves in a positive light.
Finding similarities between oneself and a bad person can be uncomfortable.”
Professor Derek Rucker, study co-author, said:
“[However], when you are no longer uncomfortable with the comparison, there seems to be something alluring and enticing about having similarities with a villain.”
The study included 1,685 people in five lab studies along with data from over 232,000 people registered with a website called CharacTour, an online, character-focused entertainment platform.
The results showed that people consistently preferred villains who share some similarities with their own personalities.
Being similar to a fictional villain does not threaten people’s self-image, the researchers think.
Professor Rucker said:
“Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us.
Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Krause & Rucker, 2020).
