Fictional characters seem more real to lonely people

Getting absorbed in a story, whether that's a novel or TV series, can leave us with real emotional attachments to the characters. Far from just being passing connections, research shows that the beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes of our favourite characters can influence our own, and that fictional people can give us a sense of belonging. 

Now, a new brain-scanning study finds the gap between fictional connections and real ones may be closer than we'd assume. This recently published paper suggests that lonely people even think about their favourite fictional characters similarly to real friends. 

Timothy W. Broom at Dartmouth College, US, and Dylan D. Wagner at Ohio State University, US studied 19 healthy adults who were all fans of the HBO TV series Game of Thrones. At the time of the study, the seventh season was showing in the US. All of the participants were watching it, and had already seen all 60 previous episodes. 

The researchers chose nine characters from the series for their study (Bronn, Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Davos Seaworth, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, Petyr Baelish, Sandor Clegane, and Ygritte). Before their brain scans, each participant used scales of 0 to 100 to make a series of judgements about each character: how familiar the character was to them, how close they felt to them, how similar that character was to them as a person, how much they liked that character, how emotionally attached they felt to them and, finally, the extent to which they saw that character as a friend. The participants also identified nine real friends or acquaintances of varying degrees of closeness, and provided the same 0 to 100 scale ratings for these people. 

Broom and Wagner then used fMRI to scan the participants' brains while they were repeatedly shown all of these names, plus 'self' (meaning the participant). Each name was always paired with a trait, such as sad, trustworthy, or smart. All the participants had to do was to indicate whether or not this trait matched the individual — a task that meant they had to think about each character and real person, including themselves. After their scans, the participants completed other surveys, including a measure of loneliness. 

In their analysis of the fMRI scans, Broom and Wagner homed in on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which earlier work has shown is active when we think about ourselves and other people. In the least lonely participants, the researchers observed that there were two distinct patterns of activity in the mPFC: one when they were thinking about real people, and one when they were thinking about the Game of Thrones characters. 

However, in the more lonely participants, this distinction was blurred. In fact, in some cases, it almost vanished. "Whereas clear boundaries between real and fictional others are evident… for the least lonely participant, the boundary between these two social categories is almost non-existent for the loneliest participant," they reported. For those who are more lonely, then, it seems that there's an overlap in how real friends and favourite fictional characters are processed. 

While the pattern of neural activity when a participant thought of themselves was more similar to that observed when thinking of a friend, as opposed to a fictional character, this difference was also diminished in more lonely participants. This suggests that, unlike people who feel satisfied by their social connections, lonely people may be incorporating fictional people more into their sense of who they are. 

While it may seem like this phenomenon is only found in the most lonely participants, that's not the case. Whether a participant was particularly lonely or not, analyses showed that when they thought about their own favourite character in the show, the pattern of activity in their mPFC was most similar to the pattern seen when they were thinking about actual friends. This suggests that, no matter how lonely we are, our favourite characters seem almost real to us.

One limitation of the study, though, is that because all of the participants were big fans of the show, the researchers don't know whether people who aren't into fiction would show the same differences in activity when thinking about real versus fictional others. As they suggest, it would also be interesting to see work on whether people process their favourite non-fictional TV personalities, or even podcasters, more like real friends and acquaintances. 

It would be interesting to see work on fans of reality TV, in particular. Perhaps one reason these shows are so popular is that by putting viewers 'inside' the lives of real people, they may be even more effective at leading viewers to think of these people as real friends — so meeting a social need, especially for lonelier people. Only further research will tell. 
 
Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad237