What’s in a Story? How Sociomoral Narratives Can Inform Our Approach to Superhero Media
As someone who has been fascinated with superheroes since elementary school, I am amazed at the explosion of superhero media (cartoons, live-action shows, and films) since the mid-90s. As a scholar, I find myself considering how this boom may be partially related to the core features of superhero narratives—features that have little or nothing to do with superpowers and larger-than-life missions. In particular, I am intrigued by the intersection of children’s development of sociomoral concepts (how youth understand actions that have moral consequences) and the superhero content they consume. Can these stories influence how children develop their sense of morality, particularly when co-viewing sparks family discussions? I will dig deeper into this question. But first, I want to begin with some research into how children process sociomoral concepts through the stories they tell.
Note: Although my scholarly interests lie in superhero narratives, these features are often present in other forms of children’s media. I am also aware that for various reasons, parents and guardians may have different views on the appropriateness of superhero media given the amount of violence.
What are some core features of narratives?
Since 2000, scholars investigating sociomoral development in children and adolescents have turned to narratives – asking children to recall or discuss morally consequential social interactions – to better understand how youth make sense of these experiences. Their findings can be broken down into three key features. These are youth’s ability to use storytelling to: (1) distinguish between different interpersonal acts, (2) attend to varied perspectives, and (3) appreciate the complex nature of certain moral acts.
Comparison of different interpersonal acts. In a study examining children’s stories about times where they have harmed a friend and have helped a friend, researchers found that the participants tended to reference emotions when they had done harm more often than when they had been helpful. In an earlier study involving mother and child relationships, emotional consequences tended to be applied differently. In these instances, the child’s feelings, such as pride, were considered more frequently in the help narratives. In the harm narratives, the discussion focused more on how the others involved might have felt, such as sadness.
Comparison of perspectives within interpersonal acts. In addition to distinguishing between harm and help narratives, research in this area has also compared viewpoints in narratives where someone was harmed or treated unfairly. In these cases, children described situations where they harmed someone (perpetrator) and situations where they were harmed (victim). Researchers found that in stories where the child was the perpetrator, they were more likely to: (1) consider both their own perspective and that of the other person and (2) justify the harm by arguing it was necessary. When narrating experiences related to social exclusion, youth referenced a victim’s hurt feelings and anger when they were the victim more often than when they were the perpetrator.
Comparison of age differences. Although important, evidence pointing to the roles of the nature of the act (harm vs. help) and the person’s vantage point within the situation (perpetrator vs. victim) make up only part of the story. Indeed, evidence suggests that in many ways age also matters. With respect to harm narratives, trust violation as a feature of the social experiences was more common in the narratives of adolescents than those of children. Moreover, in the same study it was found that compared to preschoolers, older children and adolescents were more likely to reference their own attempts to make sense of or construe the harm incidents. In the social exclusion study, older children and adolescents tended to describe themselves as active perpetrators as opposed to passive perpetrators. In both of these studies, older participants more often provided mixed evaluations of the harmful/exclusionary acts (e.g., thinking it was wrong in some ways but not others).
In essence, these studies show that youth can understand and articulate their experiences as perpetrator and victim, and as those who help and those who harm; especially as they get older. However, they sometimes have difficulty considering: (1) emotions associated with and (2) multiple perspectives within those experiences. Such findings present an opportunity for superhero content creators to rethink how they use characterizations and plot points to broach moral concepts for their audience, particularly children and adolescents. Parents may also use these superhero narratives as a potential aid with their youth’s development of these sociomoral concepts.
How might these findings inform content creation and co-viewing?
Given that: (1) social life inevitably includes instances of harming and being harmed by others and (2) superhero media prevalently features harm-related (i.e., violent) events, below are three practical suggestions related to family viewing of superhero media based on the above findings (concerns with the violent content of superhero media notwithstanding). These recommendations apply to both content creators and parents/guardians.
Actionable Insights
Differing motivations of superheroes and supervillains. Since superhero narratives contain conflicts between superheroes and supervillains, one recommendation for content creators is to make the motivations behind characters’ actions salient (e.g., through flashback episodes and origin stories). This would allow parents/guardians to discuss the characters’ differing motivations with their youth, focusing on the potential link between characters’ emotional experiences and their subsequent decisions to harm and/or help others.
Shifts in perspective to explore diverse consequences of harmful actions. Another recommendation for creators is to explore parallel worlds, or the idea that in a different world, the same character lived a very different life. These kinds of events can provide opportunities to engage youth in “what if” discussions focused on the potential relationship between a person’s vantage point or perspective within an event involving harm, and their understanding of that event.
Morally complex or morally gray characters and actions. Lastly, through the use of narratives that include morally complex acts or characters, content creators can provide opportunities for families to consider issues or events that contain both moral (e.g., harm and fairness) and nonmoral (e.g., psychological) elements. How youth attempt to make sense of these events may offer some insight into the extent to which they believe certain social experiences were morally complex, and thus not as “black and white” as the parent/guardian may have initially assumed.
Justin Martin, Ph.D.
Professor at Whitworth University
Smart Empathy: Why More is Not Always Better When it Comes to Using Tech to Increase Empathy
Smart Empathy:
Why More is Not Always Better When it Comes to Using Tech to Increase Empathy
In 2006, when then Senator Barack Obama proclaimed that “we have an empathy deficit” he believed that empathy was essential for promoting caring behaviors and societal well-being. And there is plenty of evidence to support this idea. Researchers have found that people who are more empathic are more likely to help strangers through volunteering or donating to charity and are also more likely to help the people they love in times of difficulty. However, some types of empathy can leave us distressed and overwhelmed by the suffering of others, so much so that we are left less able to help. How can we encourage the benefits, but not the potential harms of empathy?
As with many human traits, empathy is more complex than it first appears. One definition of empathy involves care and compassion for others. Compassion is focused on others peoples’ needs irrelevant of our own thoughts or feelings. Yet other definitions of empathy involve reflecting the other person in ourselves. This mirroring can be achieved by feeling echoes of other persons’ emotions or imagining another person’s situation from their perspective. The first type—feeling others’ emotions—is called emotion contagion and is not a problem when others are feeling positive but it easily becomes overwhelming when others are in severe distress. The second type - involving perspective-taking – is called cognitive empathy and can also be draining because it requires a lot of mental effort. So much effort in fact that research finds that people often actively avoid perspective-taking if given the choice. But effort in this case may pay off, since working harder can motivate increased care and compassion.
Not all empathy is created equal, and storytellers should think carefully about which they intend to evoke.
Consider, for example, seeing a story about a refugee child on the news. She is far from home and scared for her future. Some viewers may watch this story and use their head to reflect on how difficult being a refugee would be for a young child. As they sit and imagine how the girl feels and what she needs, these viewers are activating their perspective-taking skills. Research has found that this type of perspective-taking is likely to inspire warm feelings of compassion and motivate people to help. Many people choose to act when they learn of such suffering, for example, by calling their political representative or donating their time or money to charity. However, while seeing this story, other viewers may be overwhelmed because they viscerally feel the child’s fear and hopelessness. To avoid the pain of emotional contagion, people may change the channel or leave the room. Once they do so, that strong empathic feeling they had will fade almost as rapidly as it was elicited, leaving little motivation to help.
The transitory nature of this type of emotional empathy warrants a healthy dose of skepticism towards any claim of a quick-fix empathy solution, such as virtual reality (VR). However, there has been a proliferation of such attempts in the tech world since the viral 2015 TED talk in which entrepreneur Chris Milk claimed that VR was “the ultimate empathy machine.” Chris may have been speaking in hyperbole, but since then charities, governments, and non-profit organizations have invested heavily in telling stories of human suffering through immersive VR technology. For example placing people in refugee camps, homeless shelters or suffering from racial discrimination. The power of VR is assumed to lie in its ability to remove the burden of empathizing. VR automatically generates a rush of emotions without the user having to use their own imagination. However, because VR leaves so little to the imagination it is unlikely to lead to improvements in long-lasting perspective-taking skills. We recently confirmed this limitation by combining the results from 43 different research studies. We found that virtual reality only creates emotional empathy responses in viewers, but it does not improve perspective-taking.
That’s not to say that transitory emotions have no use for social good. Fundraising campaigns may find that VR or other highly emotional storytelling is more than sufficient for their purposes, assuming they can capitalize on the rush of emotion with a well-placed donation bucket or web-link. However, those interested in creating longer lasting improvements in empathy may want to consider telling stories in such a way that they challenge people to use their perspective-taking skills.
Here are some actionable insights storytellers and content creators can use to encourage perspective taking in their audiences:
Tell stories about people, places and events (both real and fictional) that are different from readers’ own experiences.
Create complex and well-rounded characters that do not always adhere to social stereotypes or literary tropes and who challenge the audience to adjust their perspective.
Give listeners an opportunity to read between the lines and pick up on subtle indicators of how people are thinking and feeling.
Allow viewers the space to build their own understanding of the situation by leaving some ambiguity.
Create enticing stories that encourage people to take the perspectives of others even though it is effortful.
Today we are bombarded with intense, graphic content that rapidly arouses our emotions automatically and does not require perspective-taking. Long gone are the days of imagining the suffering of people in a far-off land. That suffering is brought into our homes on our TV screens, and taken with us on our commute via our smartphones. Given this new world, we are much more likely to experience empathy with our hearts and not our heads, which can result in emotional burnout.
In order to create a more compassionate society overall, we don’t need to empathize more, we need to empathize smarter.
Alison Jane Martingano, M.A., M.Phil.
Teaching Fellow, The New School for Social Research
Sara Konrath, M.S., Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
Visiting Professor, The New School for Social Research
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Cultivating Greater Love for Yourself and Others
As Leo Tolstoy aptly put it in his famous Anna Karenina, “I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts”. Tolstoy was right, there are so many different kinds of love – whether it’s romantic love, platonic love, or lust. Love can take the form of a friend cooking food for a loved one in the hospital, or a mother looking at her infant child for the first time, or a child sharing their last piece of candy with their best friend. Most people consider love to be “adult” emotion and therefore may not prioritize teaching children about it. However, Dr. Richard Weissbourd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education encourages us to look at love through a different lens when it comes to children; he thinks self-maturity, respect, and deep appreciation are important aspects of love to focus on when cultivating this virtue in children. Teaching children how to cultivate and practice self-love from an early age may be key to raising adolescents and individuals who can then appreciate and love others well.
Psychological Research on Love
Many studies in psychology focus on two concepts based in mindfulness practices: loving-kindness meditation (LKM) and compassion meditation (CM). The practices are used to enhance unconditional, positive emotional states of kindness and compassion. In one such study, participants were randomly assigned to either the LKM condition or an imagery condition. In the LKM condition, people were instructed to imagine two loved ones standing on either side of them and sending their love. Then, they were told to open their eyes and redirect these feelings toward the photograph of a complete stranger. In the imagery condition, participants did almost the same thing except they imagined two acquaintances standing next to them.
They found that Loving Kindness Meditation had a significantly greater effect on explicit and implicit positivity toward strangers. Implicit positivity was measured by response time to a particularly emotionally-charged word.Implicit positivity means that though a person might not be able to express that something has changed, a change in their behavior (like response time) tells us that something has indeed changed within them. They also found that LKM was associated with greater implicit positivity towards the self as well. This study found that a short exercise of loving-kindness meditation could lead to big changes in how people thought of others and themselves.
Emotional Shifts
Another study investigated if Loving Kindness Meditation could help enhance daily experiences of positive emotions. Researchers conducted 60-minute LKM sessions over the course of 7 weeks and found that this specific type of meditation led to shifts in people’s daily experiences of a wide range of positive emotions including love, joy, contentment, gratitude, pride, hope, interest, amusement, and awe. Even more impressive, these emotional shifts lasted for a number of weeks after the course ended.
Teaching Children About Love
Dr. Weissbourd believes that for children and adolescents in particular, love is an important virtue to cultivate intentionally because society tends to focus heavily on preparing young adults for work, but not love. If children were taught to love themselves and others the way they’re taught to work hard, maybe intimate relationships with partners, family, and friends in young adulthood and beyond would prove to be easier, healthier, and more successful.
Creating content that can help children cultivate positive, loving emotions toward the self and others is therefore an essential skill that shouldn’t be shoved off until adulthood. Love, in all of its forms, will be present all throughout life. Therefore, it is crucial that the media children consume teach them about love by depicting healthy relationships with others ways to love and care for themselves.
Recommendations for cultivating love in children and adolescents through media:
Dr. Weissbourd recommends showing children positive representations of healthy relationships.
Create apps that promotes engagement of Loving Kindness Meditation for 5 minutes every day – think of a loving moment in your life, focus on the emotion of that loving feeling, try to project these feelings onto others you visualize.
Cultivate self-love by encouraging writing what you like about yourself!
Create media that demonstrates characters exercising self-love and self-care practices.
Julia Schorn is a second-year Ph.D student in Psychology at UCLA, with a focus in cognitive neuroscience and memory. In her free time she enjoys playing the harp and making science accessible to everyone!
http://juliamarieharp.com/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-schorn-4128258a/
This blog was originally created to support Baylor University in hosting its Technology Innovation Request for Proposal: Improving Character Strengths of Adolescents through Technology Innovation.