Superheroes To The Rescue--For Real

Flying like Superman in virtual reality can make you more helpful in real life. That's what my colleagues and I found in a recent study. At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Shawnee Baugman, Jeremy Bailenson, and I had participants enter a virtual environment and they were either given the power of flight or rode as passengers in a helicopter. They were then assigned one of two tasks: help find a missing diabetic child or tour a virtual city. Regardless of which task they performed, people who had the power of flight were significantly more likely to help a researcher pick up spilled pens in real life than the helicopter passengers were. 

Embodying a superpower in virtual reality may prime players to ‘think like superheroes’ and thus facilitate subsequent helpful behavior in the real world. Alternately, participants who could fly in the game may have felt like more active participants than those who passively sat in the helicopter while performing tasks, and this more active involvement may have induced their subsequent behavior.

To read the paper in the journal PLOS ONE, click here. To see a short video clip about the study, click here.

And for more about superheroes, take a gander at my new book:

Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care

This is a book about seven superhero origins stories, what they reveal about the superheroes' personality, how they reflect the findings of psychological research, why we're interested in their origin stories, and what their stories can teach us about ourselves.

[photo credit: Cody Karutz]

Another Cosplay Survey: The Psychology of Cosplay 2

Hello to all you folks who cosplay. Here’s the link to a survey on cosplay that my colleague, Andrea Letamendi, and I are conducting.

http://tinyurl.com/cosplaysurvey

We want to know more about the psychology of cosplay and hope you can help us. We’ll post the results this summer.

Thanks!

The Psychology Behind Superhero Origin Stories

From my article in Smithsonian Magazine:

“Why is every superhero movie an origin story?” complained Entertainment Weekly film critic Adam Markovitz after seeing a trailer for this summer’s Man of Steel—yet another version of the 75-year-old Superman saga. Perhaps we love origin stories, Markovitz suggested, because they “show the exact moment when a normal guy goes from being Just Like Us to being somehow better, faster, stronger.”

I’m inclined to disagree. As a clinical psychologist who has written books about the psychology of superheroes, I think origin stories show us not how to become super but how to be heroes, choosing altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power. I’ve learned this through hundreds of conversations at comic book conventions, where fans have been remarkably candid about their lives and the inspiration they draw from superhero stories.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Psychology-Behind-Superhero-Origin-Stories-187938991.

Holy Wonder Woman! A Review of Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines

I had the opportunity to see documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines recently. The film provides a history of superheroines, beginning with Wonder Woman, overlaid with a history of women in American culture and women’s rights during the same decades. It was interesting to see Gloria Steinem talking about feminism, Ms. Magazine, and Wonder Woman in the same breath, and to see many women (and men)—some famous, some not—talk about the ways in which Wonder Woman has been an icon of female power and inspiration.

The film also includes what the director or interviewees see as the descendants of Wonder Woman in popular culture:The Bionic Woman, Ripley in the Alien films, Sara Conner ofTerminator, Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and evenCharlie’s Angels. Charlie’s Angels seems like a bit of a stretch, but the film makes a case for it.

More interesting psychologically are the parts of the film that talk about how icons in general, and superheroines in particular, inform us about what we should aspire to be. How they create templates to which we gravitate and fuel our imaginations, our self-images, and who we might want to become. Some of us may resonate with (or aspire to) Sara Conner’s tough, capable, and single-minded way of being strong. Others of us may resonate with Wonder Woman’s model of compassion, bravery, and strength. Or Buffy’s sense of humor in the face of adversity. There is something for everyone in the pantheon of superheroines.

I wish the film had spent more time on the sexualization of superheroines. We all know that superheroines in comic books are drawn with marvelous figures in skimpy costumes, and film and TV superheroines as similarly endowed and attired. The film touched on the issue of superheroines always being sexy, and sexy being equated with power, but a longer discussion of the implications of this for the audience would have been welcome. For instance, what does it mean that superheroines sometimes use their attractive physical appearance to achieve their goals? (Though Wonder Woman rarely does this, other superheroines do.) And what are the effects on females in the audience who see that superheroines only come in a certain size “package,” adorned a particular way. (For interesting research related to this in computer games, see Lissa Behm-Morawitz’s research). What does it mean for women and men that superheroines are, by and large, also seen as sex objects in our world? (Click here for research aboutobjectification, in which the experience of being treated as an object results in coming to see oneself that way. Objectification theory was originally conceived of as primarily pertaining to females. The original article by Barbara Frederickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in 1997.)

I suppose that’s the subject for another documentary.

Copyright 2013 by Robin S. Rosenberg

All rights reserved.
 Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. Her website is DrRobinRosenberg.com. Her most recent book is What’s the Matter with Batman? An Unauthorized Clinical Look Under the Mask of the Caped Crusader.

Cosplay Survey

To those of you cosplayers who heard--or heard about--the Psychology of Cosplay panel at New York Comic Convention and would like to take the Cosplay survey, click here to go to the survey or go to the URL below:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG5UWHk0VU94TW5XQ2ZJWmRQekd3YVE6MQ

 I plan to publish the results and will link to them.

How Could She Do That? Compliance, the film—what's going on

Remember a bunch of horrible phone scams to fast food restaurants? The caller posed as a police officer and induced managers to strip search young female employees by saying the young women have stolen from customers? (If not, you can read about it here.) A docudrama film, Compliance, has been made of the worst incident, in which a young employee was detained, strip searched, and perform sexual acts. The story is a true one, and a disturbing one, and the film is similarly disturbing. Disturbing enough that at a screening that I attended yesterday, some people walked out. (This has been true in other cities as well.)

In the nutshell, the police officer ratchets up his requests of the restaurant manager; in turn she is swamped at work and with the approval of the caller (who is posing as a police officer) delegates to others the task of “watching over” the young employee who the police officer has said has stolen money. It starts out having her empty her pockets, then search her pocket, then disrobe to have her clothes searched. It goes on from there. The process resembles that of the participant in Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience study, in which participants were asked to give increasingly larger shocks to another person (unbeknownst to the participants, no actual shocks were administered. Click here for more information about the Milgram experiment.)

Given this incident really happened (in other locales as well—this wasn’t the only place the perpetrator called), how could this happen? We hear about this case, shake our heads and say that if we were the manager, we wouldn’t do anything like that. We’d know enough to say “no.” But would we?

There are several factors that explain how this could happen:

• ·      At least in the film, the manager was portrayed as clearly identifying with “authority”—the (supposed) police officer. The caller played this up, explicitly joking that she was his eyes on the ground. She was more focused on being a good “assistant” to him, rather than a good, thoughtful person viz her employee. (When the manager’s boyfriend was enlisted to watch the young employee, the manager very much wanted her boyfriend also to be a good assistant to the caller.)
• ·      The restaurant was very busy that night, and the store was already short-staffed, and earlier in the day had a problem with food refrigeration and so were running out of some foods. The manager was very stressed, and had a heavy “cognitive load”—had many things she was juggling in her head. This would make her likely pay less attention to challenging the police officer or thinking critically about what he was asking her to do.
• ·      The young employee did not overtly “fight back” (though she did ask to be allowed to leave the room in which she was being detained); it seems clear in the film that she was experiencing some degree of learned helplessness—a situation in which no matter what she did, she couldn’t “escape” from the situation. At the start of her detainment, she had been told that if she cooperated with the strip search it would all be over soon. But it wasn’t over then, and it just kept getting more intense and outrageous. At some point, she likely felt that no matter what she did or how much she protested, it wouldn’t make a difference.

I won’t give too much more away, but if you have the stomach for an intense film with no happy ending, I suggest you see it.

Copyright 2012 by Robin S. Rosenberg

Suggested Reading:

Kosslyn, S. & Rosenberg, R. (2010). Introducing Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Richer, S. D., Haslam, A., & Smith, J. R. (2012).  Working Toward the Experimenter: Reconceptualizing Obedience Within the Milgram Paradigm as Identification-Based Followership. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 315.

More on the Psychology of Batman

With the frenzy about Batman this week, here are some links that might be of interest:

• My The Dark Knight Rises film review for Esquire magazine
• My interview with Wynne Parry, posted on Huffington Post and elsewhere
• My interview on NPR
• My opinion piece in Huffington Post
• My brief piece in Science and Religion
• Two articles in Slate (here and here)
• A New York Times article providing an overview of the academic presence at San Diego Comic Convention