The Most Influential People Who Never Lived

By Megan Patiry on March 2, 2014

The rise of the CSI lab, the invention of limb reattachments and the integration of women’s liberation into practical society may all seem like isolated, unrelated events in history. However, they have an element that runs silently through them, so silent it may, at first glance, appear to not exist.

These events were believed to be set in motion by characters that never lived.

A novel, written by Dan Karlan, Allan Lazar and Jeremy Salter, covered 101 fictional characters and their influences on our history and society. They argued (in light-hearted prose) that, for example, Sherlock Holmes was a major player in the rise of the aforementioned CSI lab with its use of forensic labs, Dr.Frankenstein’s monster was the inspiration and/or may have played a role in the invention of limb reattachments and organ transplants and that Nancy Drew was “… a key figure in the evolution of women’s liberation from moral ideal to practical goal.”

While Karlan, Lazar and Salter’s novel was, indeed, a playful read into the subject of fictional-character influence, The Ohio State University’s study on the effects of “experience-taking,” was nothing less than a serious look into the effect characters have on our psychology. The study found that experience-taking can result in changes and behaviors within the individual, using an experiment where potential voters read fictional stories about a character overcoming difficulties in the voting process, with some of the writings in the first person and others in the third person narrative.

“The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later. In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.”

Geoff Kaufman, graduate student at Ohio State and leader of the study, said “experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes.”

Kaufman goes on to explain that experience-taking doesn’t happen every time we read about a character, but rather in those moments where we totally lose ourselves in the character’s story. He mentions one experiment where the individuals were unable to succumb to experience-taking if they were placed in a cubicle with a mirror, highlighting the fact that a certain loss of self-identity is required for experience-taking to have effect.

The study also takes into account whether individuals identify with a character based on knowledge provided early or late in the narrative. Another experiment involved having heterosexual males read a story about a gay undergraduate. The results showing whether the group engaged in experience-taking were linked to whether the group found out early on or later in the story if the character was gay.

According to the study, “those who read the gay-late narrative also relied less on stereotypes of homosexuals – they rated the gay character as less feminine and less emotional than did the readers of the gay-early story.”

Photo by ALA Staff via Flickr.

The idea of experience-taking, and the fact that voters were able to identify so quickly with a first person narrative, begs us to question the effects long-time and well known, popular characters have on us. For instance, if you think back to one of your favorite characters, be it from a novel or movie, you will probably recall certain events the character went through that made you empathize with them. This empathy plays a large role in how we bond and identify with characters and causes their experiences to feel “real” because we’ve been through a similar experience ourselves.

“We’d have no way of processing a character cognitively if we didn’t have experiences with people outside of the fictional world,” explained Howard Sklar, post doctoral researcher in the English Philology Unit at the University of Helsinki in an article on character bonding.

“The experiences with fictional characters resonate with us because of the fact that we’ve had deep experiences with people throughout our lives,” he said.

We begin to sympathize with characters and invest ourselves in their well-being, just as we would family members or friends, which gives us the distinct impression, even if only for a moment, that they’re real people. In fact, as the article suggests, we may even “know” these characters more deeply than even our loved ones, as we tend to “fill in the gaps” of their past and then get a glimpse into their most private thoughts and compulsions, causing us to “fully know” their personality.

“If you can get people to relate to characters in this way, you might really open up their horizons, getting them to relate to social groups that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Lisa Libby, assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University, told the Edmonton Journal.

Libby makes a great point in how it’s possible, through using more storytelling and experience-taking techniques, that we can begin to pave a way for not only students, but for a vast majority of individuals to begin seeing groups outside of their circles and cliques in a different light.

Also, knowing their effect, we can begin to see how fictional characters possibly did have a role in creating some of our modern technological advances and social culture, and how their ideas could spur certain trains of thought in innovative individuals. After all, ideas occur in the realm of fiction before they’re conceived; maybe it takes the push of a beloved character’s personality to follow them through.

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