A fondness for antiheroes is deeply revealing
Antiheroes embody personalities with strengths and weaknesses. This appeals more to those people who also ascribe some unpleasant characteristics to themselves.
In film and television, good traditionally fights against evil, and the audience is on the side of the heroes and heroines. Those who sympathise with dubious characters, on the other hand, can expect to be looked down upon. And this is not entirely unfounded, reports a US research group in the specialist journal "Psychology of Popular Media": a soft spot for villains or anti-heroes indicates rather unpleasant character traits.
The team led by psychologist Eliott K. Doyle from the University of Oregon asked 473 students, most of them female, about the dark sides of their personality: how narcissistic, manipulative, lacking in empathy and ruthless were they, and how much pleasure did they derive from other people's suffering? They were also asked to answer questions about 25 fictional characters, for example from the Harry Potter series. Did they know the character? If so, how much did they admire them? And how similar did they think they were to them?
The more they themselves tended towards dark traits, particularly psychopathy and sadism, the more the respondents admired the anti-heroes and the more they thought they resembled them. Although this also applied to flawless villains, the correlations were weaker here. Admiration for heroes, on the other hand, revealed nothing about their own dark characteristics. However, those who believed they were similar to the heroes tended more towards narcissism - and less towards Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism.
Of course, these tendencies say nothing about individual people. So if you like the fictional serial killer Dexter from the series of the same name, that doesn't make you a psychopath. The study also does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about how the statistical correlations come about. The researchers suspect that any similarities contribute to this. For example, people feel more connected to fictional characters if they have similar experiences to themselves.
However, this does not necessarily mean that you want to be just like the person on the screen, as a study in "Psychology of Popular Media" 2021 suggests. Here, too, subjects with psychopathic traits were more likely to recognise their own similarities with antiheroes. However, the more malicious their favourite characters behaved, the less they wished they were similar to them.
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