8 hours Ago By Ben Mitchell
People in the UK are likely to believe that fictional heroes like Harry Potter and Gandalf would share their political views, while villains like Darth Vader and Cruella de Vil would vote for opposing parties, new research shows. The University of Southampton researchers behind the study say this tendency, for people to project their own views onto fictional characters, is fuelling political polarisation. The tendency also extended beyond fiction.
When presented with news stories about politicians engaging in charitable or corrupt behaviour, participants tended to associate the "good" politician with their preferred party and the "bad" politician with the opposition. Dr Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte of the University of Southampton explained the implications of these findings: "If we see ‘villains’ as belonging to the other side, then we also tend to associate more and more negative attributes with that group. “This is not only bad news for polarisation, but also makes us more easily susceptible to misinformation that confirms the existing biases we hold about the voters of certain parties.
" The first of two studies, conducted by researchers from the University of Southampton and the University of Vienna, surveyed 3,200 individuals in the United Kingdom and United States. Participants were asked which political party they believed various fictional characters from popular franchises, including Marvel, Disney, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars, would support. In the UK they were asked if the characters were more likely to vote Labour or Conservative, while in the US they were asked if they would vote Democrat or Republican.
The answers were then cross-referenced with the respondents’ own political leanings. The researchers for the study, published in the journal Political Science Research and Method, found that people were 20 per cent more likely to project their own politics onto a hero than a villain. The respondents were also 20 per cent more likely to say a villain would vote for the opposing party than their own.
In the second study, 1,600 people in the UK were shown one of two contrasting news stories about a local councillor – one in which the councillor donated money to a local charity and another in which they had stolen money from the charity. The results showed that about one in six people falsely remembered which party the councillor represented, with a “strong tendency” to see the charitable donor as a member of their party, and the thief as a member of their rival party. Dr Turnbull-Dugarte said: “People believe heroes are more likely to belong to their group but can accept a proportion might not.
Respondents were much more consistent when identifying a villain as belonging to the other group. “In a context where polarisation is high, projection appears to be more about defining who we are not, than who we are.” He added that the tendency to see heroes on their side and villains on the other was greater amongst those with stronger political identities, with those on the political left more inclined to do so than those on the right.
Dr Turnbull-Dugarte added: “To overcome increasing political division, we need to recognise this tendency to project heroic and villainous traits along partisan lines and recognise that reality is always more complex and nuanced than our biases would have us believe.”.
