One thing I have noticed about debates about how fiction affects people is that people who tend to argue it is positive tend to focus on the themes and messages in the story. By contrast, people who argue it is negative tend to claim that behavior that is portrayed in fiction will influence behavior in reality, regardless of whether it is portrayed ositive or negative. So, for example, in the famous comic book moral panic of the Fifties, there were a lot of horror and crime anyhology comics that portrayed villain protagonists getting a grisly comeuppance after doing something terrible. The moral panickers tended to assume people would do crime because crime is portrayed, even though it is condemned and punished in the narrative. The defenders of the comics tended to deny that this would happen, but did believe that explicit positive messages might have some impact, for example, one publisher was proud of publishing a science fiction story with an anti-racisr moral.
I suspect what's actually going on is that some people find the portrayal of certain subject matter to be viscerally upsetting and seek rationalizations for censoring it. The people in the Fifties who hated horror and crime comics asserted that they promoted violence, even though the narrative condemned violence. You can see the same dynamic today when someone condemns a work of fiction for being racist or homophobic when it portrays an evil villain doing racist and homophobic things.
Based on the studies Ozy has assembled, the anti-censorship side is largely correct. The Rwandan and Ugandan studies seem to indicate that people responded mildly to some of the explicit themes and messages in fiction. The Brazilian study does show that fiction can have unintentional effects, but they tended to promote stuff that was portrayed as "normal" and not condemned or promoted, rather than negative behavior that was explicitly portrayed as villainous.
“Some writers might want to get readers to empathize with everyone on every side of a conflict.
The book series A Song of Ice and Fire is a masterclass in this. “
I think George does this in Westeros but deliberately avoids doing this in essos.
SPOILERS AHEAD. When I finished the Game of Thrones tv series I was flabbergasted that they made Danny the villain and thought that wouldn’t happen in the books. But then I reread those and I was surprised by how villainous her actions really were, the reason we don’t notice it is because we only get her perspective and all the essosi seem “harzoos” (as barristan calls them) to us. Only on careful reread do we notice the true inner complexity of essosi society and Danny’s terribleness. I think that this is meant to pull the rug out from under us once she finally reaches westeros and we get to see her usual brutal actions, but now from the perspective of our beloved povs whose complex relationships we do understand, making us reevaluate all the actions she did on those ‘foreigners’ that we didn’t really care about.
I wonder if, the "main" themes of stories are sufficiently varied and sufficiently noticeable that people's belief in them tends to self-correct, but that there's more influence in how the author chooses to show everything else in the book that the reader can easily not think about. E.g. the reader might debate the book's choice to show a woman reconciling/not reconciling with her husband. But not think to question whether they most often see books showing women who are married, or mothers, or divorced, or employed, self-employed, or home-making.
It seems like a difficult question to answer through experiments because it seems like there's such high variability on the effects of a story on an individual. And not in ways that we can narrow down to race, sex, age, etc.
For most high school students, reading Catcher in the Rye either put them in a temporarily annoyed mood or gave them mild solace by seeing their turbulent teenage emotions put down on paper. Maybe it made some of them more sympathetic to delinquency. There's probably at least a few authors who was inspired to start writing after reading the book, and then for some reason there are multiple assassins who hold a special reverence for the book. But there's also presumably some assassins who read Catcher in the Rye and didn't care for it. Why did Catcher in the Rye strike such a chord with Mark David Chapman?
A story can't just influence anyone in any way, it has to have just the right delivery for just the right person. Like, what makes someone decide to not do drugs? Is it the anti-drug film they watched in 5th grade? Is it watching Breaking Bad? Is it a video essay they stumbled across on youtube? It would be interesting to find correlations with these things, but I'd assume they'd be pretty difficult to pin down.
Thinking about narratives I know in which, historically speaking, people have believed fiction affecting reality.
- I've heard of it being said in Spain that Cervantes was the death knell of the Spanish Empire; when everyone was going around reading popular chivalrous novels, a small fraction of the readers decided to go try to act like the heroes of the novels, and most got killed and some achieved great deeds for Spain; when Don Quixote kills the fad stone dead by mocking these people, the Empire goes downhill because nobody wants to go be a hero.
- There was a Chinese author during the period of increasing European influence over the Qing empire (I'm blanking on his name) who concluded that the reason the British were so successful was that their adventure fiction (e.g. Haggard) encouraged manly virtue and doing great deeds for the nation, and deliberately attempted to copy this fiction to synthesize nationalistic Chinese adventure novels for the salvation of the country. He succeeded at writing well enough for other authors to copy him, for the adventure fiction fad to catch on, and ultimately (in my opinion) for it to now start to displace the original that he copied, here in the modern day.
> I can’t think of a reason why people who believe in the just world hypothesis would be more likely to watch TV
As someone who does not believe in the just world hypothesis, it can sometimes get tedious to constantly consume media that does :P
One thing I have noticed about debates about how fiction affects people is that people who tend to argue it is positive tend to focus on the themes and messages in the story. By contrast, people who argue it is negative tend to claim that behavior that is portrayed in fiction will influence behavior in reality, regardless of whether it is portrayed ositive or negative. So, for example, in the famous comic book moral panic of the Fifties, there were a lot of horror and crime anyhology comics that portrayed villain protagonists getting a grisly comeuppance after doing something terrible. The moral panickers tended to assume people would do crime because crime is portrayed, even though it is condemned and punished in the narrative. The defenders of the comics tended to deny that this would happen, but did believe that explicit positive messages might have some impact, for example, one publisher was proud of publishing a science fiction story with an anti-racisr moral.
I suspect what's actually going on is that some people find the portrayal of certain subject matter to be viscerally upsetting and seek rationalizations for censoring it. The people in the Fifties who hated horror and crime comics asserted that they promoted violence, even though the narrative condemned violence. You can see the same dynamic today when someone condemns a work of fiction for being racist or homophobic when it portrays an evil villain doing racist and homophobic things.
Based on the studies Ozy has assembled, the anti-censorship side is largely correct. The Rwandan and Ugandan studies seem to indicate that people responded mildly to some of the explicit themes and messages in fiction. The Brazilian study does show that fiction can have unintentional effects, but they tended to promote stuff that was portrayed as "normal" and not condemned or promoted, rather than negative behavior that was explicitly portrayed as villainous.
“Some writers might want to get readers to empathize with everyone on every side of a conflict.
The book series A Song of Ice and Fire is a masterclass in this. “
I think George does this in Westeros but deliberately avoids doing this in essos.
SPOILERS AHEAD. When I finished the Game of Thrones tv series I was flabbergasted that they made Danny the villain and thought that wouldn’t happen in the books. But then I reread those and I was surprised by how villainous her actions really were, the reason we don’t notice it is because we only get her perspective and all the essosi seem “harzoos” (as barristan calls them) to us. Only on careful reread do we notice the true inner complexity of essosi society and Danny’s terribleness. I think that this is meant to pull the rug out from under us once she finally reaches westeros and we get to see her usual brutal actions, but now from the perspective of our beloved povs whose complex relationships we do understand, making us reevaluate all the actions she did on those ‘foreigners’ that we didn’t really care about.
Re: Footnote 10. I've just begun reading Pratchett's Discworld books this year. Previously, I had only read Good Omens.
But there are so many of them, and everyone has different favorites. Which ones do you like most?
Interesting!
I wonder if, the "main" themes of stories are sufficiently varied and sufficiently noticeable that people's belief in them tends to self-correct, but that there's more influence in how the author chooses to show everything else in the book that the reader can easily not think about. E.g. the reader might debate the book's choice to show a woman reconciling/not reconciling with her husband. But not think to question whether they most often see books showing women who are married, or mothers, or divorced, or employed, self-employed, or home-making.
It seems like a difficult question to answer through experiments because it seems like there's such high variability on the effects of a story on an individual. And not in ways that we can narrow down to race, sex, age, etc.
For most high school students, reading Catcher in the Rye either put them in a temporarily annoyed mood or gave them mild solace by seeing their turbulent teenage emotions put down on paper. Maybe it made some of them more sympathetic to delinquency. There's probably at least a few authors who was inspired to start writing after reading the book, and then for some reason there are multiple assassins who hold a special reverence for the book. But there's also presumably some assassins who read Catcher in the Rye and didn't care for it. Why did Catcher in the Rye strike such a chord with Mark David Chapman?
A story can't just influence anyone in any way, it has to have just the right delivery for just the right person. Like, what makes someone decide to not do drugs? Is it the anti-drug film they watched in 5th grade? Is it watching Breaking Bad? Is it a video essay they stumbled across on youtube? It would be interesting to find correlations with these things, but I'd assume they'd be pretty difficult to pin down.
Thinking about narratives I know in which, historically speaking, people have believed fiction affecting reality.
- I've heard of it being said in Spain that Cervantes was the death knell of the Spanish Empire; when everyone was going around reading popular chivalrous novels, a small fraction of the readers decided to go try to act like the heroes of the novels, and most got killed and some achieved great deeds for Spain; when Don Quixote kills the fad stone dead by mocking these people, the Empire goes downhill because nobody wants to go be a hero.
- There was a Chinese author during the period of increasing European influence over the Qing empire (I'm blanking on his name) who concluded that the reason the British were so successful was that their adventure fiction (e.g. Haggard) encouraged manly virtue and doing great deeds for the nation, and deliberately attempted to copy this fiction to synthesize nationalistic Chinese adventure novels for the salvation of the country. He succeeded at writing well enough for other authors to copy him, for the adventure fiction fad to catch on, and ultimately (in my opinion) for it to now start to displace the original that he copied, here in the modern day.
Stephen King was wise to let Rage fall out of print.