How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval.

Ben Teasdale,R I M Dunbar,Laurie Maguire,Felix Budelmann

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.762011

Abstract

Fictional storytelling has played an important role in human cultural life since earliest times, and we are willing to invest significant quantities of time, mental effort and money in it. Nonetheless, the psychological mechanisms that make this possible, and how they relate to the mechanisms that underpin real-world social relationships, remain understudied. We explore three factors: identification (the capacity to identify with a character), moral approval and causal attribution with respect to a character’s behaviour in live performances of two plays from the European literary canon. There were significant correlations between the extent to which subjects identified with a character and their moral approval of that character’s behaviour that was independent of the way the play was directed. However, the subjects’ psychological explanations for a character’s behaviour (attribution) were independent of whether or not they identified with, or morally approved of, the character. These data extend previous findings by showing that moral approval plays an important role in facilitating identification even in live drama. Despite being transported by an unfolding drama, audiences do not necessarily become biased in their psychological understanding of why characters behaved as they did. The psychology of drama offers significant insights into the psychological processes that underpin our everyday social world.

Highlights

Storytelling is a uniquely human activity whose evolutionary function remains unclear, it likely provides a means of transmitting a culture’s core beliefs and the worldview that forms an important basis for creating a sense of community (Dunbar, 2014)
We ran MANOVAs to determine whether the ratings on the five outcome variables were influenced by character, familiarity with the texts or staging
We have shown that members of an audience reliably differentiate between characters in two canonical tragedies from very different historical periods in terms of their ability to identify with characters, their moral approval of the character’s behaviour and their attribution of the psychological causation of a character’s behaviour

Summary

Introduction

Storytelling is a uniquely human activity whose evolutionary function remains unclear, it likely provides a means of transmitting a culture’s core beliefs and the worldview that forms an important basis for creating a sense of community (Dunbar, 2014). In contemporary huntergatherer societies like the Kung San, fireside conversations that involve stories predominate in the evening (Weissner, 2014). Such stories commonly include origin stories and accounts of travels, they have probably always included fictional or semi-fictional accounts. Fictional stories have come to play an unusually important role, providing a corpus of well-loved stories that define a culture and forms of entertainment on which we are willing to spend considerable amounts of time and money. Even in traditional societies where storytellers are not paid for their efforts, people are willing to spend considerable time being entertained by them, at no small cost in terms of potentially more functional uses of their time.

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Discussion

Conclusion