VIL_1 Introducing the psychology of our relationships with fictional villains About this free course This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised for your device. You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University – www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/introducing-the-psychology-our-relationships-fictional-villains/content-section-overview There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.

First published 2024. Unless otherwise stated, copyright © 2024 The Open University, all rights reserved. Intellectual property Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence v4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en. Within that The Open University interprets this licence in the following way: www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/frequently-asked-questions-on-openlearn. Copyright and rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons Licence are retained or controlled by The Open University. Please read the full text before using any of the content. We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality educational experiences is cost, which is why we aim to publish as much free content as possible under an open licence. If it proves difficult to release content under our preferred Creative Commons licence (e.g. because we can’t afford or gain the clearances or find suitable alternatives), we will still release the materials for free under a personal end-user licence. This is because the learning experience will always be the same high quality offering and that should always be seen as positive – even if at times the licensing is different to Creative Commons. When using the content you must attribute us (The Open University) (the OU) and any identified author in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Licence. The Acknowledgements section is used to list, amongst other things, third party (Proprietary), licensed content which is not subject to Creative Commons licensing. Proprietary content must be used (retained) intact and in context to the content at all times. The Acknowledgements section is also used to bring to your attention any other Special Restrictions which may apply to the content. For example there may be times when the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Sharealike licence does not apply to any of the content even if owned by us (The Open University). In these instances, unless stated otherwise, the content may be used for personal and non-commercial use. We have also identified as Proprietary other material included in the content which is not subject to Creative Commons Licence. These are OU logos, trading names and may extend to certain photographic and video images and sound recordings and any other material as may be brought to your attention. Unauthorised use of any of the content may constitute a breach of the terms and conditions and/or intellectual property laws. We reserve the right to alter, amend or bring to an end any terms and conditions provided here without notice. All rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons licence are retained or controlled by The Open University. Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University Introduction and guidance This free course explores psychological theory and research on the relationships we form with fictional characters. Throughout the course you will hear from leading crime writers, who will talk about how they create and write about their characters. The course involves interactive components designed for you to discover something about your own thinking and behaviour. You will learn about why fictional villains might be attractive to us, in a way that real villains are not. You will also learn about how the relationships we form with fictional characters can influence our psychological engagement with the real world around us. This free course lasts 12 hours, with 4 weeks. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further week. After studying this course, you should be able to: understand how crime writers approach creating and developing villainous fictional characters understand what parasocial relationships are, and why we might form them with people we read about understand how engagement with fictional characters can affect our own sense of self understand how our relationship with fictional characters can, in turn, alter our relationships with people in the real world. Throughout the course you will hear from leading crime writers – Lin Anderson, Gordon Brown, Val McDermid, Sir Ian Rankin and Craig Robertson – who will talk about how they create and write about their characters. The opportunity to work with these authors arose due to their participation at the Bloody Scotland festival.

Moving around the course In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you will find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page of the course. It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page, to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button in your browser. You can do this by holding down the ‘CTRL’ key (or CMD on a Mac) and left clicking the mouse button; or right click and ‘open in new tab’. Go to Week 1. Week 1: Fictional villains Who is your favourite fictional villain? From Voldemort to Moriarty, from Hannibal Lecter to Cruella de Vil, villains are often the most thrilling aspect of a story and can be more exciting than the hero. It is argued that ‘villainy is integral in narratives that reflect the innermost fears of the human psyche and is often a significant part of the construction of loss whether it is loss of innocence, loss of loved ones, loss of power, or loss of self and/or identity’ (Fahraeus and Yakah-Çamoğlu, 2011, p. vii).

An illustration of Cruella de Vil. An illustration of Cruella de Vil.

Villains are designed to be morally reprehensible, yet they are often popular and celebrated characters in books, films and other media (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen et al., 2021). While your attraction towards heroic characters in fiction is easy to understand (they are pro-social, positive characters whom you may see as being role models), the attraction that you feel towards your favourite villain is perhaps harder to explain and has been something which psychologists, alongside authors of fiction, have been interested to explore. By the end of this week, you should be able to: consider your favourite villainous characters and start to understand why they might be attractive to you, despite their despicable behaviour and intentions understand how various authors create villainous characters and how they feel about their creations think about the different ways in which writers, like psychologists, consider personality and character. It might sound a little unusual to have the words ‘love’ and ‘villain’ together in the heading to this section, but despite their often reprehensible character traits and behaviour, villains are often memorable and popular characters in fiction. In the following video you will meet Zoe, Graham and Siobhan who are the creators of this course, and they will discuss the fictional villains that they are most drawn to, and explain why they are interested in villains in fiction. ZOE WALKINGTON OK, so thinking back, then, to the books that you’ve read in your life so far, who would you say are the most memorable villains that you’ve come across? GRAHAM PIKE For me, the most memorable is Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So psychologists distinguish between different types of memory, one of which is autobiographical, which is essentially what you put in your autobiography. And I would put Nurse Ratched in mine. She was very influential on me. So she is a nurse in a mental asylum in America in the ’60s. But she’s not bad. But she’s like a machine. She doesn’t listen. She just enacts bureaucracy. So for me, there was this terrible sense of injustice, that she wasn’t trying to help people. She was just trying to make them conform. So she really stuck in my memory and I think had quite an influence in my choice to become a psychologist, but then in my career to try to do something about situations that lead to Nurse Ratcheds. ZOE WALKINGTON Interesting. So mine is much more from-- drawn from early childhood. And my favourite villain is Rumpelstiltskin. And that is because I can’t understand why he’s so angry. I don’t really get his backstory. He gets involved in spinning gold. And he gets himself into a situation with a young girl, where he says that he’s going to take her firstborn child unless she can guess his name, which she eventually does. And he gets so angry that he puts his foot through the floor. And that was always such a memorable image for me, this idea of someone stamping their foot right through the floor. And one of the reasons I think I really like Rumpelstiltskin is I don’t understand his motivation at all, so found him quite fascinating. What about you? SIOBHAN CAMPBELL Well, I suppose I would think about Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, the novelist-- the novel by Patricia Highsmith. And initially, he’s, of course, extremely charming. And he worms his way into this group of friends because he’s really a good mimic. So he can almost mimic their mannerisms back to them, which, of course, is what leads him to bad doings as the novel continues. But it’s really how his initial charm turns to what becomes revealed as really a murderous intent. But however, he’s not the murderer without making mistakes. He continually makes mistakes, leading necessarily to further murders. And so the charm quickly wanes and you realise, gosh, he is dastardly. ZOE WALKINGTON So you mentioned his charisma there. In terms of the sort of villains that you feel most drawn to, perhaps not the most memorable, but are there particular villains that you’ve read about that you found almost attractive in some way? SIOBHAN CAMPBELL Well, I suppose I think about the novel Misery by Stephen King, where Annie Wilkes is an ex-nurse. She finds the novelist Paul Sheldon after his horrendous car accident in snowy Colorado, takes him back to her home, nurses him with what you think is tender loving care. You might even think, gosh, maybe something could bloom between the two of them. She’s clearly a Paul Sheldon fan, although is she too much of a fan one begins to think. Because bit by bit, you realise, oh, dear, he’s actually her prisoner. Not only that, she makes him addicted to the painkilling drugs that she will only dole out when he writes the novel she wants him to write. And it goes from bad to worse. ZOE WALKINGTON Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, that sense of a gradual reveal of a character is quite similar with the one I’m most drawn to, which is Count Fosco in The Woman in White, which is written by Wilkie Collins. And Fosco is this unusual character. He’s very charming. He’s very sophisticated. People like him. Animals like him. And we’re always taught to trust anyone in a novel that animals like. They’re nearly always a good person. And yet, he turns out to be the arch manipulator behind the plot, really. He is the ultimate villain. But you only gradually start to realise that as the story goes along. GRAHAM PIKE So you might be surprised by this. The one I’m really drawn to is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And it’s a gradual reveal there, too. Now, reading this in modern day, that’s surprising because the second you see Dracula, you know he’s a vampire. You know he’s evil. But read the book, and it’s revealed quite gradually. So it’s told through various devices, such as diary entries, newspaper entries, and ships’ logs and things like that. So we get one of the main character’s diaries at the start, who begins to suspect something’s up. And that suspicion grows and grows before there’s the full realisation of just how evil this character is. And he’s pure evil. One of the reasons I think so many people are drawn to Dracula is he’s inexcusably and completely evil. He speaks to a darkness within us that we wouldn’t dare give voice to. And particularly in Victorian England, where this is set, he represents the old mystic ways coming to-- literally coming to England and being exposed to science. He’s also the face of sexual desire compared to the societal norm in Victorian England that was a lot more button-down and repressed. He gives a face to these-- the darkness within us that we try to keep within us, which is why he’s so compelling. ZOE WALKINGTON Yeah. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, the reason that we feel drawn to these characters that we know are really awful?

You will now turn to think about your own favourite villains from fiction. Activity 1 Baddies I have known and loved Think back to your own reading of books over the years and make a list of some of the fictional villains that you can remember. These might be from very far back in your childhood, perhaps from fairy tales or fables, or could be much more recent characters, perhaps the latest baddie in some crime fiction you are reading. Looking at the list of characters you have generated are there any that jump out at you (excuse the pun) as being particular favourites? If so, what is it about those favourite villains that you enjoy? Try and write a couple of sentences summarising why you found that particular character so appealing. There are any number of reasons that you might have found a villainous character appealing. It might have been that you particularly like the setting that the villain was in. For example if you enjoy history and period drama you might have found that your chosen villain is one who stalks the corridors of an old stately home. It might have been that there are particular aspects of the chemistry between the villain you chose and some of the other characters in the story (including the hero) that made that particular character appealing or it might have been that there are aspects of that person’s disposition or character traits that drew you to them (something that you will come back to later on in the course). It is also possible that the reason that you were drawn to a particular character is because of how they have been written by the author that created them, and in the next section you will meet some authors of crime fiction and learn a bit more about how they have created fictional characters, particularly villains.

Throughout the ages a popular genre of fiction has related to crime, and particularly in Britain there has long been a lot of interest in detective stories, as Andrew Marr suggests in this excerpt from the BBC OU co-production, Paperback fiction, Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers. ANDREW MARR When it comes to stories of crime and detection, we have long been a nation obsessed. But why do we British so enjoy reading about a spot of murder? Detective fiction isn’t simply a story. It’s a carefully crafted mechanism made up of a particular set of parts. These familiar components give us that comforting feeling of the classic whodunit, a reassurance that we know precisely what we’re going to get. We know that we’re being set an entertaining puzzle which revolves around a mystery, typically an ingeniously despicable murder in an exotic milieu. And we know that after sleuthing around, investigating some very dubious characters, and 250 pages of puzzling, there will be a solution. The paradox is, yes, it’s a mystery, but there is nothing at all mysterious about the product. It’s completely reliable and incredibly addictive. The great poet W.H. Auden said that these books were as addictive as cigarettes or alcohol, two subjects on which Auden was a world-class expert. I want to get inside these books and understand how they work. SPEAKER 1 It’s so simple. And so it can be summed up, I think, by the equation A plus B equals C. I’m A. You’re B. And C is the reason why you want to murder me. ANDREW MARR I am meeting crime writers to talk about pioneers like Agatha Christie, geniuses who figured out how to keep us compulsively turning the pages-- SPEAKER 2 She was almost like a sort of philosopher of the crime novel. You can see in many of her books, she thought to herself, how much further can I take it than I’ve taken it already? ANDREW MARR --and to find out why we are drawn to stories of murder and crime, dispatches from the dark side of human experience. SPEAKER 3 We get that buzz, I think, of excitement, of controlled fear. Same as when you go on a roller coaster. You go on the roller coaster, you scream your head off, and then you join the queue to do it all over again. ANDREW MARR It’s so easy to develop a habit for these books because they’re underpinned by a specific set of rules, elements you will find throughout detective fiction, regardless of whether you are reading Conan Doyle or Ian Rankin. When these elements are skillfully assembled, manipulated, and rearranged, they become a machine, a storytelling machine.

Activity 2 What makes a good crime drama? In the video you have just watched, Andrew Marr suggests that such novels are a storytelling machine. What do you see as being the central elements of that machine or what is it about these stories that keeps you reading? For instance, an antagonist who has redeeming features, an intriguing setting, or a side-kick who provides comic relief might appear in some stories. Are there particular things that you feel could make a good detective story even better? While many different genres of fiction will include villainous characters, crime fiction is a genre in which villains are often central to driving the narrative of the book, or even a whole series of books. In the following sections you will meet several crime writers who will tell you about how they created villains in the books that they have written. After you have watched the videos in which the authors outline their different approaches you will be asked about the different approaches of the authors. These interviews were recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, and so were recorded over video conferencing. As you watch the videos make a note of anything that strikes you as interesting.

A photograph of Ian Rankin. A photograph of Ian Rankin.

Sir Ian Rankin is a best-selling Scottish crime writer who created a series of books based around a fictional Scottish Detective named John Rebus. The fictional detective was born in the late 1940s in Fife and joined the army before joining the police. His antagonist, the ruthless Morris Gerald Cafferty, is an Edinburgh organised crime gang boss. The two characters meet in several of Ian’s novels. In the following video you will meet Ian Rankin as he introduces us to his villain, Morris Gerald ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. IAN RANKIN An easy question to ask, how do you create a baddie, it’s a complex question to answer. They come from everywhere. The crimes that I use in my books often come from newspapers and magazines and things that have actually happened in the real world. So real miscreants have been at the heart of those stories to begin with. But the crime story, the fictional crime story, demands something else. It demands that the criminal be interesting and charismatic. And if you’ve ever met any real criminals, they very often are not. There aren’t too many Hannibal Lecters out there in the real world, if any. Even the most rococo serial killer in real life is usually quite a bland individual when you end up interviewing them. So you’ve got to heighten reality, in a way. And I’ve always been fascinated by Jekyll and Hyde. I mean, that’s my kind of ur text is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because within us, I think we all have the potential to be good and to be evil, or at least to carry out acts of evil, inhuman acts, given the right set of circumstances. And what I’m interested in is what pushes people over the line or what leads them into that territory. But yeah, it’s a complicated thing. But when I get a good villain, I’m very loath to let them go. So Morris Gerald Cafferty, Big Ger, who was the gangster figure, Rebus’s nemesis in my books, was only meant to be around for one book. He was meant to have a very small role in book three. But he just demanded that I bring him back. And there was a lot I could do with him and Rebus, that Holmes and Moriarty thing, where they are quite similar in some ways. Their backgrounds are similar, but their paths, the trajectory of their lives, have been very different. But there’s an empathy there, and that’s what I enjoy, is playing with that empathy. I think perhaps authors themselves must be morally questionable people in order to write about morally questionable characters. We do contain multitudes. All the facets of every character I’ve ever created exist in some form inside my head. Therefore, I am all the goodies and all the baddies in my books, or I contain the possibility of containing all these people.

A photograph of Lin Anderson. A photograph of Lin Anderson.

Of course this is just one author’s approach to creating villains. In the next video you will see the author Lin Anderson talk about her approach to creating a baddie.

Lin Anderson is a crime novelist and screenwriter, known for her character Rhona MacLeod, a forensic scientist. Unlike Ian Rankin, her villains tend to change from story to story. She is one of the founders of a festival for crime writers in Scotland called ‘Bloody Scotland’. LIN ANDERSON Yeah, how do I create a baddie and how do they emerge in my imagination? I don’t normally pre-plan the villain. I come to a realisation of who the villain is via the evidence of the crime that’s been committed. As this is examined, a picture builds up of the character who may have committed the crime. On occasion, I’ve had the perpetrator’s point of view running through a book as in Sins of the Dead and Follow the Dead. This was very interesting to do as they evolved, as I wrote, just as your protagonist does. Character is shown by what we do in the circumstances that we are presented with. None of us know what we are capable of until we are put in difficult and sometimes terrifying situations. My favourite quote here about that was from a former principal at Napier University. Come to speak to the school I was teaching at. And she said, a woman is like a tea bag. You don’t know her strength until you put her in hot water. So in terms of Rhona McLeod, my protagonist, I always try and remember that. And then I learn something new about her. I think the same is for your villains.

A photograph of Gordon Brown. A photograph of Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown is a crime thriller author, and tends to set his novels in Scotland, Spain and the USA. He is also a board director of the crime writing festival Bloody Scotland. GORDON BROWN In many cases, I don’t set out to create a baddie. I’m not one for planning a book. When working, I tend to be writing about 2000 words a day, so I’m not advance plotting. My characters tend to form as they write, so the unfolding story will dictate which are goodies and which are baddies. Some start out as goodies, become bad. Some start out as baddies, become good. My stories often have a vein of character redemption through them at some point, so therefore, there may be a baddie that becomes better, if that makes sense. And that can be slowly or that can be a road to Damascus moment. Some characters are in the book are just there to complicate, frustrate or even destroy the main protagonist’s life. And their badness can either be organic, i.e. they’re just bad because they’re bad for the sake of it. But some are better than that in terms of characterisation because they’re more Machiavellian. They have their own end game in sight. They’re willing to lie, to cheat, use violence, etc to get their way. The latter are better because they add more to the plot, and they also leave the reader asking the question, why are they doing that? I tend to approach characters by seeing them as manipulators first and foremost. In this way, I can give them a reason to act badly, which in their head, if you can talk about being inside a fictional character’s head, gives them justification and motivation to do what they’re doing. I remember watching a podcast of a CIA official in America a good number of years ago talking about what goes on inside a terrorist’s head. They were trying to find out. And one of the things they realised is that no terrorist sees them self as the bad guy. They may be doing bad things, but their internal justification is important. Because that’s what they’re working on. And therefore I’ll often say to my baddies, OK, what do they really want? And if I manage to do that, I can then just let my imagination run riot, and then try and describe what it is they’re going to do to get it.

Activity 3 Villainous creatures Having watched three different authors talking about how they create villains, note down your observations about the different approaches to creating villains. Perhaps try and concentrate on the noticeable differences, as well as the similarities in what the authors have outlined. The authors revealed a variety of approaches to creating villainous characters. Some take a dispositional approach, i.e. they appear to start with the personality or disposition of the individual (e.g. Ian Rankin, who mentions charisma). Others take a more situational approach, i.e. they focus more on the character emerging out of the circumstances (e.g. Lin Anderson who talks about the needs of the story/plot). Gordon’s answer seems to draw on both of these elements (the situation and the disposition).

Three faces with different emotional expressions. Three faces with different emotional expressions.

The focus on both the ‘internal’ or dispositional factors versus the ‘external’ or situational factors in creating characters in fiction has an interesting parallel with psychological theories regarding personality. A key aspect of psychological study has been to try and determine what differs between people and makes one individual distinctive from another (psychologists refer to this as ‘individual differences’). Activity 4 What makes people tick? To explore your own theories about personality, try to answer the following questions: A. Think of the last time you were late for something (e.g. work, an appointment, a bus/train or meeting someone). Which of the following is the best description of the main reason you were late? Put an ‘X’ in the right-hand column.

1. You had too much to do and too little time to do it.
2. You are not very good at planning your time.
3. Events conspired against you, causing delays.
4. You are not really fussed about being late, so tend to take your time getting ready and setting off.

B. Think of the last time you won in a competitive situation (e.g. a board game, a race, a game of tennis or golf, an online game). Which of the following is the best description of the main reason for your success?

1. It was mostly good luck as everything just seemed to go your way.
2. The result was because of your own skill and talents.
3. It was mostly due to the mistakes made by your competitor(s).
4. Although you don’t like to brag, on this occasion you were just better than your competitor(s).

C. Imagine you are at a social gathering. You notice someone who seems to be avoiding contact with the other people there. What do you think the most likely explanation for this is?

1. They have had a tough day and are struggling to find the energy to socialise.
2. They are an unfriendly person that prefers their own company.
3. They had some bad news on the way to the gathering, which they are still thinking about rather than talking to others.
4. They are a shy person that can find it difficult to talk to others.

D. You are at a restaurant. The person serving you takes a long time to come to your table and then is not polite when they finally do show up. What do you think the most likely explanation for this is?

1. The people at the two previous tables they served were rude and abusive, so they needed a few minutes to calm their nerves and are still feeling upset.
2. They are probably quite a rude person generally.
3. They dropped a plate in the kitchen, and cleaning it up delayed them, plus the head chef shouted at them leaving them feeling anxious.
4. They are probably quite an arrogant person that does not think they need to be punctual or nice to their clients.

Look back at the answers you gave. For each question, answers 1 and 3 described situational factors while answers 2 and 4 described dispositional factors. The first two questions were about you; did you tend to provide a situational or dispositional explanation? The last two questions were about other people; did you tend to provide a situational or dispositional explanation? If your answers about yourself were different to your answers about someone else, why do you think that might be? You will come back to this question later this week.

In Activity 4 in the previous section, you explored situational and dispositional factors and how these can explain our actions. Another way of saying this is that the activity allowed you to explore whether you feel that our actions come from our personalities or are a response to a specific situation. It might surprise you to hear, though, that within the academic study of psychology there is not agreement about exactly what constitutes personality. However, most psychologists, regardless of the approach they take to studying behaviour, accept that some form of ‘personality’ does exist (Ellis, 2024) that can to some extent be measured, although their view on what exactly constitutes personality can often differ. Trait theory (which within the history of psychology is a more traditional or older idea) relies on the notion that people have consistent personality traits (i.e. tendencies to think or behave in particular ways) that are reasonably stable both across time and in different situations. Psychologists who take this approach look to measure different dimensions of personality through personality tests based on questionnaires. At some point during your life, you may have taken such a test, possibly as part of a recruitment activity if you were applying for certain types of employment. However, the developments made in personality psychology by some psychologists (e.g. Mischel, 1968) have moved away from the idea of fairly stable traits which predict consistent behaviour over time. You might understand why if you think about your own behaviour in three different situations, such as ‘in work’, ‘out socially with your friends’, and ‘when discussing a health problem with your GP’. You may think that actually you behave quite differently in each, depending on the particular constraints of the situation. Psychologists have carried out research which suggests that people are not always behaviourally consistent, arguing that we behave quite differently depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in. Mischel (1968) posited the idea of ‘if… then…’ behavioural contingencies, i.e. if X happens (a situation) then behaviour Y is likely to happen as a result (Rubenstein and Terrell, 2018). This theory prioritised the situation as opposed to the personality traits of the individual in explaining human behaviour. These debates in the academic discipline of psychology between the influence of both people’s dispositions or characters, and the influence of the situation, also seem to be reflected in comments from the authors regarding how they create characters. More than that though, these debates are also important when we move on to considering how we relate to other people in the real world. Specifically, what we understand about ourselves, and other people, is an important aspect of living in a society which involves living and working with many different types of people, and doing so in a way that is (hopefully) peaceful and pleasurable.

A head in profile with the word ‘Bias’ written in it several times. A head in profile with the word ‘Bias’ written in it several times.

As you discovered in the last section, there are theories in psychology that draw on assumptions about how much of what is thought of as our ‘personality’ comes from our fundamental disposition, and how much of it comes from the situations we find ourselves in. Psychologists take an interest in our thought processes, as well as our behaviour, and in researching this have noticed a number of ways in which our thinking can be less than perfect and can be biased. One such bias that is important when considering how we understand other people is that we tend to view our own behaviour as being determined by our circumstances, or the situations we find ourselves in (e.g. I was late for work because I was stuck in traffic) but we tend to assume the behaviour of other people is in some way down to who they are, or their disposition (e.g. you were late for work because you are disorganised and set off too late). The tendency to make this error is called the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (Ross, 1977). As you will discover in later weeks of this course, this error is just one of the ways in which human thinking can result in biased interpretation of what we observe about others. Think back to your answers to Activity 4. Did you provide a situational answer (answers 1 and 3) to the first two questions that asked about your own actions, and a dispositional answer (answers 2 and 4) to the last two questions that asked you about the actions of someone else? If so, your answers demonstrated the ‘fundamental attribution error’, because you saw your own actions as resulting from situational factors and the actions of others being caused by dispositional factors. If you did, don’t worry, this is a really common bias in human thinking, hence the name ‘fundamental’.

In the previous sections you explored the importance of both situational and dispositional factors in how we explain human behaviour, but do these feature in the creation of fictional characters, particularly those that undertake extraordinary behaviour, such as villains? In the video below Ian Rankin talks about his creative process, which is fascinating in itself, but also demonstrates that a fictional villain’s behaviour is not always simply a product of their personality. Instead, Ian discusses the necessary creative complexity involved in creating a believable and complex character, and how the author must not locate the cause of that behaviour simply through reference to either situational or dispositional factors. IAN RANKIN I mean, I’m possibly not the best person to talk to about this. I was never-- I didn’t read crime fiction until I started writing it. I’m the only crime writer I know who was not a fan of crime fiction before they began writing crime fiction. I grew up with the American novel, with cinema, with TV cop shows, and with Scottish literature. I grew up with Jekyll and Hyde. I grew up with dark Gothic tales set in Scotland or written by Scottish authors. And the first Rebus novel I wrote was meant to be an updating of the theme of Jekyll and Hyde. You were meant to think the detective Rebus, who was only going to be around for one book. You were meant to think he’s potentially the killer. He has blackouts during that book. He wakes up not remembering what he did the night before. He has a locked room in his flat. And I was trying to make the reader think this person is potentially Jekyll and Hyde. But then he stuck around. So then he suddenly wasn’t that anymore. But I don’t think too much about it. I start with a theme that I want to explore, a question I want to explore about the way the world is. I find a plot that allows me to explore that theme. And then I think, OK, what characters do I need? So, oftentimes, when I start a book, I have no idea who the killer is. And it’s only through writing the first draft of the book, i.e. playing detective, getting to know the characters, and how they connect to each other, and people’s possible motives. It’s only then that I start to discover who the culprit is and why they did what they did. And that’s always worked for me. I don’t know if it would work for too many other writers. But one book, The Hanging Garden, I think I was on the second draft before I worked out who the killer was. I just had these big blank bits that had to be filled in later on. And it was only in reading through the first draft that I started to go, well, wait a minute. If he did that, then possibly this person who we met earlier in the book might have been connected to that and might have ended up killing him because of that. That all came about quite late on in the process. And some people would panic at that. I think a lot of writers would panic at not knowing where a story is meant to go. James Ellroy, famous American crime writer, writes 300-page synopses of his books before he starts. I start with a handful of pages. Usually, which run out by the time I’ve got to page 50. Because by then, I’ve used up all the ideas I had. And by then, hopefully, the story has gone off on a tangent that’s quite interesting. And I just follow it. I just grab onto the story and hope it will lead me in a direction that wants me to go in and reveal to me who the killer is and why.

Activity 5 What a state I’m in Think back to the favourite villain that you nominated at the start of this week or pick another one whom you feel you know well. Make a list of things you know about them. These can relate to how they live or to the ways they act. Once you have completed your list divide it into two columns. One column for the information that relates to the villain’s character or disposition and another column for information which relates to the situations they found themselves in. You may find that dividing them up gives you more to add in each column.

Character or disposition	Situations

It is likely that you may have written more about your villain’s character than you wrote about the situations they found themselves in. This is because of our tendency to see the actions of others as resulting from dispositional factors. In other words, we think the villain acts the way they do because of who they are (their personality) and not because of the situation they find themselves in. After all, we would never act like a villain even if we found ourselves in the same situation as them! This is the fundamental attribution error at work again. Take a look at your list and see if this was the case for your particular favourite villain.

So far this week you have explored your relationships to some fictional villains that you have previously read about and have listened to crime writing authors talking about how they create the villains they have successfully written about. You have also started to think about some simple concepts in psychology that relate to character and personality and begun thinking about how people’s behaviour might reflect a combination of more enduring characteristics, and more situational or ‘in the moment’ circumstances. You have also learned about the ways in which we think about the behaviour of other people (as opposed to ourselves) might be subject to bias. Activity 6 Villainy of my own making There is a well-known phrase that we ‘all have a novel in us’, and it is very common for people to have imagined writing a story. Having thought about your own favourite villains that you like to read about, and having heard about the creation of fictional villains from different crime writers you can now start to think about the type of villain you might be interested in creating yourself should you decide to write a story. Begin to jot down notes about a fictional character that you might like to create. You can write in sentences or just in short ideas or phrases. You may not need any prompts, but you might find it helpful to answer the following questions as a way of structuring this activity. Is your character human or some other kind of entity? What would people first notice about your character in terms of how they appear physically? Are they attractive or unattractive, tall or short, what is their stature? Do they have any interesting facial characteristics? How would you describe the way your character moves? Is there anything noticeable about their gait? What does your villain particularly like and dislike? What sorts of other characters is your own villain drawn to and why? Is there anything distinctive about how the character sounds or speaks? Do they have anything distinctive about their accent, any phrases they like to use, or any other sounds that they make? Do you have an idea yet about what sort of behaviour your villain might engage in? What does your character regret in their life? Do you have any ideas as to what might be driving those behaviours? What does your character want in life? What sort of situation do you imagine your character might find itself in? Does it fit into mainstream society? Does it hold power? Is it rich or poor? What has it been successful at? When did it last fail? Finally give your character a fictional name and an address or location where they might be found. Make any notes you want to in the box below You have now started to think about a villainous character that you might find interesting. Keep your notes on this character as you will return to these later on in the course. This week you have started to recall and think about fictional villains you have met in your previous engagement with books. You have started to create your own fictional villain, using your imagination, and have learned a little about how established authors have created their popular villains. Next week you will build on this foundation by starting to think a little more about the concept of empathy, and why it is that we may feel more empathy with certain types of people than others. You will explore how important empathy might be to both writers and psychologists and consider some of the real world applications of empathy. You will also move along to thinking about whether or not it is possible, or a good idea, to feel empathy with characters who do not seem similar to ourselves, such as villains. You can now go to Week 2. Week 2: How literature affects us psychologically Although not everyone reads, and certainly not everyone is a ‘bookworm’, reading fiction has endured despite the many competing entertainment options that now exist, such as streaming TV series, online gaming, watching films and even experiencing virtual worlds through VR headsets. Given all these options, why has reading remained so popular? One answer to that question is something that you might not previously have given much thought to, which is the idea that who you spend your time reading about might be both changing your sense of self, and also your relationships with other people. This week you will learn about the power of a story to affect you psychologically. You will learn about some of the research that has been carried out by psychologists and other social scientists to try and discover ways in which you might relate to what you read about, such as how you respond to particular characters, and the extent to which you feel immersed in the story worlds you read about. By the end of this week, you should be able to: understand some of the ways that reading can change us psychologically, according to research understand what is meant by transportation into narrative worlds learn about the impact of reading on empathic responses towards other people.

A child wearing wings. A child wearing wings.

Before you explore how reading fiction can affect the reader, you will look very briefly at just how prevalent and powerful stories are, and have been, within human culture. Stories are thought to be a universal form of communication among humans (Rubin, 1995), meaning that storytelling is not limited to particular cultures or geographies. They have been popular for thousands of years and the evidence suggests that early humans exchanged stories (Donald, 1991). Alongside their value in providing entertainment, stories have been recognised as devices that can play a part in bringing about significant societal change. The Indigenous peoples saying that ‘the one who tells the story rules the world’ recognises the rhetorical power of stories to effect change. You may well be aware of recent examples that demonstrate how stories can cause cultural change. In 2024 in the UK, ITV broadcast a drama series about the Post Office submasters who were wrongly accused of fraud due to failures in the accounting system that they were forced to use. This series had a substantial impact despite the fact that the issues the post masters faced had been reported factually for several years in the news. The story portrayed in the series captured the imagination of the viewers to the extent that it raised the profile of the submasters’ plight to one of the most important national issues of the time and led to policy change and legal consequences. It may seem surprising that the drama was what led to this change, when the same story told factually in the news had failed to have the same effect. However, researchers who study the impacts of stories will not have found that surprising at all, as stories are known to be capable of substantial persuasion. Before you consider this persuasion in more depth, you will return to how reading a story can affect the reader and some of the benefits that result from reading.

A person reading a book and smiling. A person reading a book and smiling.

Reading is known to have a number of health benefits, and this finding is not a recent one. During the First World War (1914–18), Helen Mary Gaskell set up a war library which organised donations of books to sick and wounded soldiers wherever they were based. During this period the practice of ‘bibliotherapy’ emerged. Bibliotherapy is ‘the use of literature to improve people’s mental health’ (Mårtensson and Andersson, 2015, p. 62) or ‘the therapeutic use of literature’ (Howie, 1983, p. 287). The effect of reading books is argued to impact not just the mind but also the body. Bavishi, Slade and Levy (2016) carried out a longitudinal study of individuals aged over 50 years old, and found that people who read books actually lived slightly longer than those that didn’t, with reading books reducing mortality risk by 20%. They also found that reading books (as opposed to magazines and newspapers) rather than simply reading versus not reading was important in the survival advantage.

One of the arguments about why stories involve us so much is that they are ways of simulating the complex social world around us and also allowing us to imagine and rehearse taking part in social interactions (Mar and Oatley, 2008). Moreover, when you read a book about a social situation you are able to gain an insight directly into the inner workings of the mind of the character you are reading about (and potentially also the minds of other characters, depending on how the book is written). When you take a moment to consider this idea you can see how reading might be quite a powerful exercise enabling us to take the perspective of someone else. Activity 1 Switching places Take a moment to think about a conversation you recently had. It might be simplest to choose the very last conversation you had, no matter who that conversation was with, reducing the amount of work you need to do to select a conversation. This might have been a conversation at home with a family member or friend, a conversation in the workplace, or even an interaction where you spoke to your dog, cat or other family pet. First, jot a few notes down about the context: where you were, when it was, and who the ‘characters’ were in this conversation. Who was present and who had a speaking role? If you can remember approximately what was said, make a quick note of it. Don’t take more than two minutes to make these notes. Remember that this might have been quite a fleeting interaction. If you are struggling to come up with something, there is an example response in the discussion below. An example of this exercise: ‘My good friend Paula just popped round to my house. She was dropping off a pair of trousers which she had bought but didn’t fit her, and she wondered if I might want to try them on. She didn’t come in. We stood at the door and chatted briefly. She was on her way to the gym. It was 9am. I had been in my office upstairs at the computer working. My two dogs both came to the door to see Paula.’ Next, choose any of the other people (or animals!) who were involved in the interaction BUT DO NOT CHOOSE YOURSELF. You are going to write a description of the same conversation but this time from the point of view of the other character you chose. This means they will be observing what you said, and how you behaved, but from their own point of view. In writing this description, think about what the other person might have noticed about what you were wearing, or other things about your appearance. Also think about what they might have observed about your behaviour, for example did you appear tense or relaxed, upbeat or more subdued? Take about ten minutes to write this description, and rather than in note form, write a more fully formed paragraph or two that could be a part of a novel or short story, about that conversation. Even though you are writing from the perspective of one of the other characters in the scene, you should write in the ‘first person’, i.e. as though you are actually the person in question (e.g. using I or me or my). It doesn’t matter if you only really capture a minute or two of the conversation. Again, if you are struggling to come up with something, there is an example response in the discussion below. An example of this exercise: ‘As usual I am rushing. It is a beautiful morning and as I pull up outside Zoe’s house there is no free parking. I just stop the car in the quiet lane she lives on, grab the trousers, and quickly climb the steps up to Zoe’s house. I notice that her garden is looking a bit overgrown, she needs to get the secateurs out. There are loads of overhanging plants. Clematis, Honeysuckle, Ivy. Even on a morning as beautiful as this some of it is wet and the moisture catches on my skin as I head up her steps. I’m dressed for the gym so it doesn’t matter. Maybe she is too busy to tidy her garden, I know she is working hard, something I don’t need to worry about anymore. God, I’m glad those days are behind me. I’d prayed for redundancy for months and just four weeks ago it had finally come. I knock and the dogs start barking. When she opens the door, she looks older than I remembered. She isn’t wearing any make up. She might be thin enough to get into the trousers I am holding but it wouldn’t hurt her to run a brush through her hair before work.’ The activity that you have just undertaken has asked you to take the perspective of someone else while interacting with you. You may have found it rather strange to imagine how you may have appeared, sounded and come across to someone else. You will come back to learn more about this task of perspective taking shortly when you learn more about empathy. First though you will learn a little more about one of the potential reasons that reading books might have a positive effect on health by learning a little about what psychologists call social cognition.

The idea that reading provides a window into the minds of fictional characters seems obvious, after all the author can literally state to the reader what the character is thinking. What may seem more surprising is that reading can actually help us see into the minds of real people! Not literally of course, but research has suggested that reading about fictional characters can increase our capacity to interact effectively with other people in the social world outside of books. Socio-cognitive ability refers to ‘one’s ability to perceive, interpret and respond to social information’ (Dodell-Feder and Tamir, 2018, p. 1713), where ‘socio’ relates to social interactions and ‘cognitive’ relates to the processes that take place in our brains. In their research, Dodell-Fayer and Tamir re-analysed a broad range of research which had been carried out in this area by other research teams (using what is called a meta-analysis) concluding that there is a causal effect of reading fiction on improving social-cognitive ability. However, they argued the reasons for this effect remain unknown. It might be that readers of fiction are able to practice social interactions through reading, or it might be that concrete information or knowledge about how to interact socially is transmitted through reading. The suggestion that the reader is actually practising social interactions, requires a level of engagement with the story in which the reader is immersed in the world of the story to the extent that they might actually feel as if they are part of what is taking place. The degree to which individuals get involved in the story worlds that they read about is a phenomenon that psychologists call ‘transportation’.

You may have experienced times when you became fully immersed in, or swept along by, a story. You may have had the experience of reading a book, and almost feeling like you were actually in the story world described in the book, to the extent that things going on in the room around you faded completely into the background. This sense of immersion is referred to by psychologists as ‘transportation’, where the reader is (mentally) transported into the world of the story. Conversely, you might have had the experience of wanting to read a book, but feeling that you ‘just can’t get into it’ and rather than feeling immersed in the story you have to consciously force yourself to keep reading. That feeling would be referred to as a lack of transportation. One definition of transportation is ‘the state of feeling cognitively, emotionally and imaginatively immersed in a narrative world’ (Sestir and Green, 2010, p. 274). Research has found that the extent to which the individual is transported into the story world has important impacts psychologically. For example, the extent to which people feel like they are ‘in’ the story affects the degree of empathy readers feel for the characters (e.g. Bal and Veltkamp, 2013; Walkington, Ashton Wigman and Bowles, 2020). The degree to which a reader is transported can even affect pro-social behaviour towards others. For example, Johnson (2012) found that readers who were transported into a story world during an experiment were more likely to subsequently help a researcher who dropped their pens on the floor. It has also been found to be an important determinant in health-related behaviours. Bannerjee and Green (2013) found that transportation into stories about the negative effects of alcohol use led to negative expectancies about alcohol use, and suggested this might be because information which is presented in a story form is accepted more readily than facts and figures. Next you will read about how crime writers feel they draw readers into their narrative worlds. Of course, to crime writers the term ‘transportation’ in and of itself, and particularly its psychological consequences, might not be something they necessarily recognise given the subject matter they write about. However, all authors want to achieve transportation, in as much as they want to draw readers in to their books and the stories they tell.

A photograph of Val McDermid. A photograph of Val McDermid.

Val McDermid is a best-selling and international award winning Scottish crime writer. She is perhaps best known for her Wire in the Blood series which features a clinical psychologist (Dr Tony Hill) and DCI Carol Jordan, but she has written three other series of crime fiction. Alongside crime fiction Val has written graphic novels, non-fiction and a children’s picture book, as well as writing for both radio and theatre. In this video, Val McDermid was asked about how she draws readers into the story worlds that she creates. VAL MCDERMID For me, the main technique, I suppose, that I’m aware of using to draw people into my world is that sense of creating rounded characters, of not making them one-dimensional, but to try and give them a life, a hinterland. And it’s one of the things that I felt very strongly when I started writing crime fiction, that I’d read too many books where the victims were treated so casually. They were kind of just cardboard cutouts who were only there to be murdered and mutilated and strewn around the highways of America. And I was determined that one of the things that I would do would be to give my victims a hinterland, to give them a life, to try and have the reader feel something, at least for the lives that had been snuffed out and not just to treat it like a parlour game. So for me, I guess, I suppose what I’m always trying to do is to have my readers invested in characters, because that’s what makes you read. That’s where suspense comes from. It’s caring what happens next. Not as a bare fact, but because it has an impact on characters you care about. When you’ve got-- when you end a chapter with a car going over a cliff that has suspense, not because there’s a car going over the cliff, but because who’s in that car? Why do they matter to me? Or who’s sitting on the beach down below that car? It’s their fate that matters. And that’s where the suspense comes from. So for me, it’s always about trying to build that sense of engagement with characters.

So, to Val the key to engaging readers and immersing them in the story world is through the creation of characters that the reader both understands and cares about. Next, you will consider how a different author engages their readers.

In the following video Gordon Brown talks about his technique for engaging readers. GORDON BROWN One of the main techniques I use to transport the reader into the world is I write in present tense first person. And the reason I do that is it gives a real immediacy to what’s going on around you and an insight because you’re actually inside the character’s head all of the time. It does have its limitations, though. And therefore, I have to find ways around it. So, for instance, the reader can’t-- or sorry, the character can’t be in places they’re not in. So I have to rely on other characters to tell them what happened, or I have to come out of first person point of view. Or in other cases, I’ve also got to be careful because I have to take my foot off the gas now and again. First person can be quite relentless if you’re reading it. So I have to find ways out of that. And one of the ways I like to get out of that, and I use it a lot is I’ll put material into my book like a clipping from a newspaper, or an email, or something written. And I’ll give you a good example. At the moment in my new book, 31 Bones, all the way through the book, I’ve actually used transcripts from Spanish police interviews to introduce the characters. By doing that, you can give a real level of insight to people that just comes from a slightly different angle. A couple of other things I like to do. The show don’t tell adage is still worth its weight in gold. Just avoid the telling bit and do the showing bit. And the other thing to do or the other thing I like to do is to shorthand my way into how someone is thinking, or what somebody is seeing, or what somebody is feeling is to use analogies. But just twist them slightly. Just change the ones that are there, just to give them a little bit of surprise when people are reading it.

Gordon talks about the specific point of view he uses when writing, which in his case tends to be first-person present tense narration. As he points out, this is a very involving technique as it allows the reader to fully inhabit the mind of the character, and it also allows the writer to develop an authentic and strong voice. There are disadvantages, as Gordon points out, in that this stylistic choice means the author needs to work to alleviate the relentless nature of the first-person present tense, while still allowing other angles on characters. One way around this is to intersperse with other material which allows the reader to pause and change the pace, and also allows insight into other points of view. Having considered transportation into narratives you will next move on to explore how transportation, as well as being an enjoyable experience for readers, can lead to change in affective responses, by learning a little about empathy.

The word ‘Empathy’ spelled out with letters on wooden blocks. The word ‘Empathy’ spelled out with letters on wooden blocks.

One useful way to start to conceptualise what we mean by empathy is to look at where the word itself emerged from. There are two routes underpinning the origins of the word. One is the ancient Greek word empatheia which means passion or physical affection (Jamieson, 2014). The second route is the German adaptation of the term em (into) and pathos (feeling). This sense of ‘feeling into’ someone else’s emotional state is a useful way of conceptualising empathy and one that sets it apart from sympathy. To put it simply, sympathy is saying ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ when a friend (for the purposes of this example let’s call her Joanne) tells you that her cat has died. Empathy is much more involved than sympathy and means psychologically experiencing someone else’s cognitive perspective and emotional state, while still maintaining a sense of your own identity as separate (Coplan, 2011). Being empathic towards Joanne would involve thinking it through from her perspective, such as thinking, ‘Oh no, I know Joanne lives on her own, and she works from home, and the cat is really good company for her, the house will seem really quiet without anyone else around’. Empathy is, therefore, argued to be a process that involves imagining what it is like to be the other person, rather than just imagining how the circumstances that have befallen someone else might feel if they happened to you.

Two men hugging. Two men hugging.

Empathy is something which is studied by a wide range of different academic disciplines, including philosophy, psychology and areas of the arts too, so it is perhaps unsurprising that there are quite a range of definitions, although all tend to share a common focus. A book written by a philosophy academic referred to empathy as ‘using our imaginations as a tool so as to adopt a different perspective in order to grasp how things appear (or feel) from there’ (Matravers, 2017, p. 1). A different philosophy scholar states: ‘I propose that empathy be conceptualized as a complex, imaginative process through which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other differentiation’ (Coplan, 2011, p. 40). Suzanne Keen, a professor of English, refers to it as ‘a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect’, also suggesting that in empathy ‘we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others’ (Keen, 2006, p. 208). Psychologists tend to separate out empathy as having elements that are cognitive (i.e. to do with thinking) and elements that are emotional, and tend to view both aspects as being skills or abilities. Bal and Veltkamp (2013) define empathy as ‘a cognitive and intellectual ability to recognise the emotions of other persons and to emotionally respond to other persons’ (Bal and Veltkamp, 2013, p. 2). Psychologists such as Davis (1983) have designed ways in which the cognitive and emotional aspects of empathy can be measured separately using a scale such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. This way of measuring empathy breaks it down into four different qualities of empathy: the first is the personal distress scale which ‘measures “self-oriented” feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings’ the second is the empathic concern scale which ‘assesses “other oriented” feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others’ the third is the perspective taking scale (the most clearly cognitive element of empathy) and considers ‘the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others’ the final one is the fantasy scale which ‘taps respondents’ tendencies to transpose themselves imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books movies and plays’. (Davis, 1980, p. 1) You might have a feeling that you vary on the different aspects of empathy that Davis outlines. NOTE: If you want to complete the Interpersonal Reactivity Index you can do so in the next activity. Activity 2 Empathy and me The following statements enquire about your thoughts and feelings in a variety of situations. For each item, indicate how well it describes you on a scale from A, does not describe me well, to E, describes me very well, by choosing the appropriate letter on the scale. When you have decided on your answer, click on the appropriate letter. For example, you may find that you are not that high on the fantasy scale (i.e. you don’t get so immersed in a book that you almost feel like you are one of the characters) but that you take the perspectives of other people, in meetings with colleagues for example, really quickly and easily. In the text box below, reflect on your empathy scores and which of the scales you were higher or lower on. Do the results surprise you? In the following sections you will find out what some of our crime writers think about empathy with characters.

Your own experience as a reader probably tells you that empathy is quite important in literature. After all, if you don’t care what the characters are feeling you probably won’t enjoy the book and if you find yourself experiencing the same emotions as the characters you are probably fully immersed in the story. Now you have explored a little of the psychology of empathy and also how you yourself might experience it, you will look at how our crime writers use empathy in their stories. In this video Val McDermid outlines some of her thoughts on empathy with characters. VAL MCDERMID I don’t explicitly set out to construct a sense of empathy with the villains, but I do want them to be rounded human beings. I don’t want them to just be baddies. I want them to have more to them than that. In the same way that when I’m writing protagonists, I don’t want them to be straightforwardly uncomplicatedly good people doing good things for all the right reasons. Sometimes we do the right things for the wrong reasons. And sometimes we do the wrong things for the right reasons. And so I want to try and make all my characters have that kind of balance. And if I’ve done my job properly, then the readers will have a sense of empathy, not just with the villains, but with other characters in the book, even characters who have quite a fleeting role. I want them to care.

In this video Sir Ian Rankin talks about a particular problem he faced with his character Cafferty, which was brought to light by a reader comment at a book signing. IAN RANKIN I did have a slight issue with my figure Cafferty a few books ago when someone came at a reading to get a book signed. And they said I love Cafferty. He’s such a big, cuddly bear of a guy. And I thought he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be someone you fear, someone you don’t want to get too close to. And I realised that maybe I’d been doing what Thomas Harris did with Hannibal and just falling in love a little bit with my character, enjoying writing about him too much. And so he became safer. And so I drew that out in the next book I wrote. I made sure that he went at somebody with a hammer and some nails and pinned him to the floor of a boxing gym. Because I felt that he was getting too comfortable. I was getting too comfortable around him and readers were getting too comfortable with him. And I didn’t want him to be a bit more dangerous than he was proving to be. So there’s that. I did write one non Rebus book years ago, which I enjoyed a lot called Bleeding Hearts. And the challenge for me was that the main character is a hired assassin. I thought, OK, so he’s the villain of the piece. But actually, I want him to be the hero. I want the reader to empathise with him. So what I did was give him a flaw. He’s a haemophiliac. So if anybody punches him or bruises him, or whatever, he can die. And then I’ve got a private detective who’s out to catch him. And that private detective, I made a scurrilous seedy figure, a really sleazy guy. And so that made the reader empathise and sympathise with the assassin rather than the forces of law and order who are out to bring the assassin down.

You will notice that the writers so far have pointed out that they can vary who the reader feels empathy with to achieve different effects with their readers and that is also a feature picked out by Craig Robertson in the next video.

A photograph of Craig Robertson. A photograph of Craig Robertson.

Craig Robertson is a former journalist and now full-time author writing crime novels based in contemporary Glasgow. His crime series centres around DS Rachel Narey and police photographer Tony Winter. His first novel, Random, was a New York Times bestseller. CRAIG ROBERTSON The question of empathy with villains is a tricky one. And I think it varies author-to-author. And it certainly varies book-to-book. I’ve had villains who are mostly off page whose identity has been the villain or the killer. It’s not revealed till later in the book. So in those instances, it’s not as important. But I’ve written three, four books where the villain, the killer is upfront and obvious in plain sight. And in at least two of those cases, I have sort empathy, sympathy. The terms are not necessarily that useful. If I can make my reader understand and I know I’ve sometimes toyed with their emotions of putting them on the side of the villain, and they don’t always like that. I’ve had people say, mainly jokingly, you made me root for someone who’s been killing people. And I felt uncomfortable with that. And I took that as a bit of a badge of honour. I’m fine with that. Again, people don’t come in black and white. They come in shades of grey. And if we’re going to have any understanding of the human psyche, then at times, we’re going to be in one side or the other. So I have invested characters with empathy. And that’s again about making them real, about motivations. You might not agree with what someone does. But if you have a sense of why they’ve done it, and think, well, maybe if I was pushed to the edge, and in that circumstance, I might have done the same thing, then I think readers will go along with that. They’ll buy into that if you do it properly.

Having viewed the videos, you will see that the crime authors are not only interested in making us feel empathy with their protagonists, they are also at times trying to create empathy with their villains. You will also notice, particularly in the last video, that the authors realise that readers might not always like being put on the side of the villain. Psychologists have tended to suggest that the empathy that can be built through reading is most readily experienced for people who seem like us (Keen, 2006). How might this translate though when the characters involved are people we see as not being similar to us, such as villains? Later on in the course you will return to why readers may feel this way in much more detail, and will examine further whether or not it is possible for us to feel empathy with villains, and still enjoy ourselves, and feel comfortable as readers.

Assorted books on a shelf. Assorted books on a shelf.

Research suggests that there is a relationship between transportation into story worlds and empathy. Bal and Veltkamp (2013) found that participants who were highly transported were found to be more empathic than their less transported colleagues, and Johnson (2012) found participants who were more transported were more likely to help the experimenter in a study if they had been transported. While some research has not found the same sort of relationship between transportation and empathy (e.g. Koopamn, 2015), a recent meta-analysis by Van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti and Wetzels (2013) found transportation had a large effect on affective responses. In the latter meta-analysis, it was also found that when individuals were highly transported they engaged in fewer critical thoughts about the material they read. This suggests that when the reader is transported into a story world, they are less likely to counter-argue the information they are presented with, and more likely to accept it uncritically. This greater acceptance of story messages when highly transported into a story world is one of the reasons that psychologists believe that story can be so persuasive.

This week you have learned a little about the potential effects that reading can have on individuals who read. You have explored the concepts of transportation into a story world, and you have learned about empathy with characters, and how crime writers might deliberately want to manipulate who we feel empathy with. You have considered some of the real-world consequences of reading fiction on empathic responding towards others in the real-world and have been introduced to the idea that reading stories may be persuasive in changing our attitudes. Next week you will develop your learning with a more specific focus on the relationships that you form with the characters you read about and will learn a little more about how these relationships might help reduce loneliness, and improve your self-concept. You can now go to Week 3. Week 3: Relationships with fictional characters: para-social relationships

A child looking at their shadow. A child looking at their shadow.

We read to know we are not alone. C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands (Attenborough, 1993) Reading is very often an activity that is undertaken alone. Indeed, as you saw in the previous week, even if you are surrounded by other people, when reading you can become so immersed in a book that you stop being aware of your surroundings. This can make reading sound like a solitary and isolating thing to do. Even though that can be, in some sense at least, true of the physical act of reading, the psychological engagement with the story and the world(s) it depicts tends to act in the opposite way. Research has found that engaging with fictional characters and fictional worlds can replicate many of the psychological benefits that result from interacting socially with real people in the real world (Liebers and Schramm, 2019). Of course, anyone who is an avid reader of fiction knew this already … but it is always nice to have some evidence in support! By the end of this week, you should be able to: explore the relationships that readers can form with fictional characters understand what is meant by para-social relationships understand some of the psychological and health benefits that can result from reading such as meeting our need to belong and reducing loneliness.

A person sitting on a picnic blanket, surrounded by levitating cups and saucers and a tea pot. A person sitting on a picnic blanket, surrounded by levitating cups and saucers and a tea pot.

Have you ever re-read a novel several times, eagerly awaited the next book in an ongoing series or indeed watched a TV series multiple times or become addicted to a long-running programme? Of course, sometimes it is the excellent writing or acting that brings us back but more often it is a sense of familiarity, like we are visiting old friends. In other words, we form a relationship with the characters depicted in the story, and it is these relationships that bring us back. It is also, of course, possible to read a novel only once, but become so deeply immersed in the story that you form a relationship with the people within it. This raises an important question, and one which we will look at this week, which is whether our relationships with fictional characters are similar to those we form with real people? Below, the course authors (Graham, Zoë and Siobhan) reflect on some of the relationships they have built with fictional characters. Graham I am a big fan of sci-fi and one of my favourite authors is C.J. Cherryh. I started reading her novels as a teenager and still have them in a cherished place on my bookshelf to this day. Two of her books, Downbelow Station and Merchanter’s Luck, which depict life in an interstellar war-torn future, became firm favourites of mine, and reading either is like returning home to catch up with much loved old friends. Admittedly I am prone to getting lost inside my own fantasies, but I have spent many, many hours not just reading these two novels but imagining myself as a new character within them: maybe an interstellar hitchhiker with a dark origin story that saves the hero before becoming their best friend and falling in love with the shy and unassuming ship’s navigator. These books, and many others, have great meaning to me because of the relationships I have with the characters and because of the time I have spent (mentally) visiting the worlds in the stories. Unlike relationships in the real world, these never become problematic and can be revisited after many years without any awkwardness. Zoë I absolutely love the novels in the Bridget Jones series. I discovered them when I was in my thirties, and the protagonist Bridget is a 30-something single woman, working in London. The group of friends who form Bridget’s ‘urban family’, and who convened in the pub most nights after work, reminded me of my own friendship group at the time, but it was Bridget herself who I particularly bonded with. Because the books are quite comic and Bridget repeatedly gets into scrapes, often involving too much wine and not enough self-control, I found her to be light-hearted company. A character who was able to laugh at herself and the ridiculous situations she found herself in. I felt like I knew her, like she could so easily be in my own circle of friends if she were real. I have read all of the novels several times and must have spent countless hours listening to them on audiobooks. Years later they came out in film format, and so of course I had to watch the films too. Even now, at the time of writing in my early fifties, if I am ever feeling like I need cheering up, or have had a stressful day, I would turn back to these books so that I can hang out with Bridget. I can’t imagine it will be much different when I am 70. Siobhan It’s the enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s sharp wit and social observation, that brings me back to her books again and again. One character in particular, who draws me in every time, is Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte is the particular friend of Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, but Charlotte is not particularly striking in terms of looks, nor are readers given much access to her inner life. We do however see that she is pragmatic and makes key decisions about her own trajectory. Understanding fully the social scaffolding that essentially requires women of no fortune to marry, she becomes engaged to the odious Mr Collins just hours after Elizabeth Bennet rejects him. This leads to an awkward encounter between the friends as Elizabeth cannot believe that Charlotte would marry so far beneath her own level of intelligence. But this is what is so appealing about Charlotte – she is a woman of many parts. When we see her later in the novel, she has carved out quite an independent life, even while being the wife of Collins and having to operate carefully within the patronage of the insufferable Lady Catherine de Bourgh. At one point, her husband reveals how she encourages him to spend more time in his garden while we, the readers, totally get that this is Charlotte’s way of being as free as she can! Charlotte is driven by reason and realism, rather than by the pride or the prejudice of Elizabeth or of Mr Darcy. She doesn’t subscribe to the underlying romantic notions which seem to imply that the match of Darcy and Elizabeth is destined to be happy-ever-after. She’s a deliciously portrayed character to my mind and I’m glad she’s in the novel.

A person stepping into a book. A person stepping into a book.

Like the course authors, you may well have cherished relationships with the fictional characters you have read about, particularly maybe in those stories you have returned to several times. Psychologists, and researchers from other academic disciplines such as sociology and communication studies, refer to these relationships with fictional characters as being ‘para-social’ – where ‘para’ has its usual meaning as a prefix, namely ‘resembling’ or ‘beyond’. Although the exact definition can vary, para-social relationships tend to be seen as those that are formed between a person and someone that they do not know personally. Thus, it is possible to have a para-social relationship with a character in a book, an actor on stage, an influencer on social media or indeed a famous person that you read about in a magazine. This means that it is possible to form a para-social relationship both with a fictional character and also with an actual person (as long as you do not actually know them). Although more and more research is exploring para-social relationships formed on social media platforms, here you will restrict yourself to a focus on fictional characters. As relationships with fictional characters are studied by researchers from many different academic disciplines, different terms and ways of conceptualising the relationships tend to be used. So, while some researchers use the term para-social relationships, others might use a different term (which is something to bear in mind if you decide to explore research in this area further). Activity 1 Friends with (fictional) benefits Think about some of the fictional characters that you might have had a para-social relationship with and also some of the relationships you have had in real life. Jot down one major thing about two or three relationships you have with fictional characters in terms of how you characterise your relationship to them. Jot down one major thing about two or three relationships you have with real people in your life. Consider what you think are the similarities and differences between these two forms of relationship. Here are some the key similarities and differences that you may have come up with. Differences: Para-social relationships are one sided while real relationships require both people to be active participants. Para-social relationships require no effort on your behalf, and no significant investment (apart from reading the book). However real relationships require the investment of time and energy to maintain the relationship. Forming a para-social relationship with someone who continues to behave in appalling ways (such as a villain) feels more likely than forming a real friendship with a real person that does. Real relationships require some form of proximity, in that you have to actually meet the person, while para-social relationships are formed with characters that are put in front of you. In a para-social relationship you can imagine the best possible version of yourself interacting with the other person. In a real relationship, it will be your ordinary, flawed self interacting with another person. Similarities: Forming either sort of relationship is unlikely if the person is not someone we inherently find interesting. Both forms of relationship can elicit genuine emotions, and these can be both positive and negative. It is possible to worry about what is going to happen to the person in both forms of relationships, although it is often the case that real relationships might cause more worry. In both forms of relationship you can have a sense of looking forward to hanging out with the other person, and might even feel like you miss the other person when you are apart from them. In the next section you will hear from our crime authors about how their readers form relationships with the characters they create in their stories.

First you will hear from Lin Anderson about the relationships that readers form with her characters. LIN ANDERSON To what extent do I think readers form a relationship with my characters? This is interesting. It is undoubtedly at the heart of a series. Readers come back for more because they want to be back with the characters. They want to experience them at work and at play. They become real. That’s very important. If you have a long-running series that has a major villain as a character, which some series do. I’m thinking about possibly in Rebus. These got a major character that goes throughout and they become part of that world and play important roles in it. So they are very important, both your protagonist and your villain. We empathise with our difficulties and successes. People get annoyed, readers get annoyed or angry with them when they make what they think are wrong decisions in their relationships and in their world of work. They also enjoy the humour and the camaraderie. They become, and I quote from many readers, ‘old friends’.

In this video Lin describes the importance of relationships in forming the ‘heart’ of a series and being what keeps readers coming back to revisit what they have described as ‘old friends’. She also makes it clear that her readers engage with the characters as if they were real, getting cross if they make bad decisions and enjoying the camaraderie.

The idea that it is the relationships that readers form with fictional characters that keeps them reading a series of novels is something Sir Ian Rankin also recognises. In the following video he also explores the para-social relationships that people form with the characters in his books. IAN RANKIN There’s no doubt in my mind that my characters are more real to my readers than they are to me. People are very worried about John Rebus, my detective, his health, the fact he has very few friends. He drinks too much. Until recently, he smoked too much. He’s now got emphysema. So he’s stopped smoking. But he’s getting on a bit. He’s had to move from a second floor apartment to a ground floor because he can’t manage stairs anymore. They’re not worried about me, these readers. If I say I’ve got a terrible cold or the flu, just keep writing. But tell us about Rebus. What’s Rebus up to? We’re really worried about him. And people like Cafferty as well was literally walking past-- walking down the street where I live yesterday, and a guy said to me, how’s Cafferty getting on? Because he knew that Cafferty lives in the same part of town as me and always has done. Now, that’s weird. My hero, John Rebus, lives in the street I lived in when I was an impoverished student and started writing these books. But when I got successful, I started to move into the circles, the social circles that Cafferty, the successful businessman / gangster, moves in. So I had a big Victorian house and a lovely tree lined street. And that’s where he lived. And then he moved to a penthouse apartment in a new development in central Edinburgh. And blow me down a couple of years later. I moved there as well. Now, I could say to you that wasn’t my choice. That was my wife’s idea for us to downsize and move to this area of town. But maybe subconsciously, I’ve been following the bad guy around Edinburgh rather than following the good guy around Edinburgh. So, potentially, if a psychoanalyst got me on the couch, they would find there’s a lot more of the evil character, the bad character, the nasty character in me, than there is the goodie.

It would be very interesting to get Ian on a psychoanalyst’s couch and explore the relationship he has formed with the villain in his stories, a person who he appears to be following around Edinburgh in real life!

Val McDermid also sees the para-social relationships with villains to be an important element of how people engage with stories. VAL MCDERMID It’s quite clear to me that over the years that my readers have very strong relationships with my characters, both the protagonists and the villains. And I totally understand that, because I’m a reader, first and foremost. And I have exactly that same response. There are certain series that I pick up the next one excited to find out what’s going to happen to the protagonist next, because I care about them. So, yeah, it’s important to me that readers form that relationship. And I think that one of the things that makes me feel most heartened about my work is the way that readers do respond to those characters.

A person holding a book to their chest and smiling. A person holding a book to their chest and smiling.

Interpersonal attraction, namely forming a ‘positive perception of warm feeling’ towards someone (McCroskey and McCain, 1974), tends to be an important factor when it comes to forming a social relationship with someone in real life. Such attraction can have elements that are either physical, finding someone’s appearance to be attractive, or social, such as whether they fit easily into your own social circle. Researchers have suggested that when it comes to initiating a relationship when two individuals meet for the first time, the formation of positive first impressions tends to be characterised by both high attraction and high uncertainty; in other words, we are attracted (including socially, not necessarily physically) to someone, know little about them but are driven to find out more (Knapp, 1978). Researchers have tended to assume that the formation of para-social relationships follows a similar pattern (Tukachinsky, Walter and Saucier, 2020). A very simple way of putting this is that to want to start either a real social relationship or a para-social relationship with someone, we have to like them. An interesting question is how, and indeed whether, likeability and attraction feature in crime fiction, where the subject matter and many of the characters pose problems for everyday definitions of what and whom we should like and be attracted to. In the previous section you heard from the authors that their readers do seem to form para-social relationships with their villains (such as with Cafferty in Ian Rankin’s books), but does that mean that the readers liked and were attracted to the villains? In the next section you will hear from our crime authors with regards to how (and whether) they approach the likeability of their characters and particularly their villains.

In the following video, Lin Anderson talks about how she tackles the issue of the likeability of her characters in terms of how readers form para-social relationships with them. LIN ANDERSON Do I worry about the likability of my villains and how do I approach their likability? Well, I would say loveable rogues are wonderful characters to write and read about because they encompass our own diverse traits. They both exasperate and excite us. As readers, we experience the positive and negative in our own character. We learn about ourselves. An interesting and well-formed villain is necessary for conflict with our main character. If they’re overcome too easily, there is no drama. They should have a clear chance of winning. Otherwise, we can never take our protagonist into their most difficult place and see them overcome their obstacles, both physical and mental.

Lin raises an interesting issue, which is the extent to which our relationships with fictional characters can teach us something about ourselves, an issue you will return to later.

Gordon Brown also acknowledges the importance of likeability. GORDON BROWN I would say a completely unlikable character doesn’t really work in a book, unless there’s some rogue element that’s just in there because you need them for a moment. Readers often say that if they don’t like a character, they can buy a book or they won’t like a book. I’m not always sure it’s likeability. I would say in some cases it’s whether they can relate to the characters more important. But I might be wrong. If you mean do I rationalise the behaviour in my books, and as much as it gives justifications for the baddies’ actions, then the answer is yes. That’s not to say that a rational random violence, or bullying, or cheating, or any of that might not play a part once in a while. But as I said earlier, if the reader doesn’t approve or understand of what’s being done by the baddie, then they will just buy out of it. Even if the reasons are warped, as long as they understand, I often talk about the handbrake moment when I’m writing a book. That’s the bit, when you’re reading a book, you get to a certain passage, the character does or says something, or there’s something in the book that just makes you go, really. And you buy out of the book. And you want to avoid that like the plague. And one of the ways that can happen is if you insert irrational behaviour that the reader just doesn’t buy into.

In describing the role of likeability for a fictional character, Gordon covers similar factors that govern whether we like a real person, including that we might be able to continue a friendship with someone who did something ‘bad’ as long as we are able to understand the rational for that behaviour and can justify it to ourselves. He notes that readers may decide to stop reading if something happens that makes them go ‘really?’, and it is easy to imagine that ‘handbrake’ moment happening in a real relationship too.

Val McDermid has a slightly different view on likeability. VAL MCDERMID I want my baddies to be comprehensible to my readers. Because in my experience, generally, people who do terrible things have a very good reason for it inside their own heads. They don’t just do it at random. They don’t just think I'm going to wake up tomorrow and do something totally hideous. Within their own heads, it makes sense. So when I’m writing a character, I want it to make sense to the reader so it feels authentic to them when they’re reading it. It feels believable to them. So, in that sense, I have to-- if not quite, have my readers identify with the character to find what they do comprehensible and believable. I don’t particularly worry about their likability because I think, by and large, my readership is pretty sophisticated. They can identify the difference between a person doing bad things and a person doing good things. I don’t want to make my bad characters the heroes of the book, though. Even when I’ve created characters, the readers want to see come back like Jacko Vance in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books. In my head, it’s always very clear that they are not the heroes of the story. It’s not their story. It still remains the story of my protagonists.

Val raises a point about the difference between heroes and villains, and of the importance in her stories for the villain not to become the hero.

Craig Robertson touches on a similar theme in discussing likeability. CRAIG ROBERTSON When it comes to likeability of villains, I guess there's two questions. One is, do you worry that people don't like them, and do you worry that they do? And I think the answer to both is the same, is you have to write the character for who they are, and not get yourself bogged down whether people are going to be on their side or not, because people will take different sides, and that's OK. I’ve written characters, the main character from my first novel, it was written from first person, from the point of view of the killer. Now, he’s not meant to be likeable, but there is questions of empathy. And I know that readers took either side of that, and that’s OK. There is no right or wrong answer here. So the character has to be who they are, and that’s key. And you cannot veer away from that. And worrying about the likeability would be a mistake. It’s not like going to school and want everybody to be on your side. It’s treat them as they are. I think if readers don’t form a relationship with my characters, our characters, then we’re really not doing our job, and the book will not work. There has to be a symbiotic relationship from writer to character to reader. Again, they may not like them. That’s OK. Many characters are meant not to be liked. They’re meant to be hated or feared. But there has to be a relationship there. The reader has to be immersed with the character, involved with the character. They can root for them, or they can boo them. But if they ignore them, then we’re lost. So whatever message we’re trying to get across, whatever story we’re trying to tell, it’s vital that readers are invested in the characters. Likeability very much a second option, but they have to have a relationship with them. If they ignore them or don’t care about them, the book’s not going to work.

Craig asks an insightful question and worries as much that people will like his villains than as they may not. As he notes, a book will not work if the readers do not form a para-social relationship with the characters even if this relationship is characterised by fear or hate. As Lin noted, relationships can be both positive and negative, and both types can be useful in revealing something about ourselves. You will return to explore how forming para-social relationships with villains might actually have some benefits next week. In the next section you will explore the nature of para-social relationships in more depth by looking at how research in this area has developed.

Three dogs on a fence. Three dogs on a fence.

Early research (e.g. Levy, 1979) into para-social relationships tended to see them as being a substitution or compensation for relationships in the real world (Tukachinsky, Walter and Saucier, 2020). As para-social relationships were one-sided and illusory they were seen as offering a means of forming a relationship to those who might struggle to form relationships in the real world, without risk of rejection. As such, it was suggested that it was people who struggled with their social lives, who were lonely and/or shy, that formed para-social relationships. In other words, they formed relationships with people they did not know as a substitution for forming relationships with people who they did know. Although there is an undoubted logic to this suggestion, it does presume that people who are socially active would not form para-social relationships because they would not need to. Subjectively this feels wrong to anyone who has formed a para-social relationship who also has friendships, social networks and an active social life. Research in the area also did not find a great deal of support for the idea that para-social relationships only happened to those who may struggle socially. For example, a meta-analysis of para-social relationship research found that although there was a link between the intensity of the para-social relationships formed with people who have an ‘anxious attachment’ style (meaning people who struggle to feel secure in their relationships), there were no links with loneliness, gregariousness nor self-esteem (Tukachinsky, Walter and Saucier, 2020). An alternative explanation is that the same cognitive mechanisms that underpin us forming real relationships are also used in the formation of para-social relationships. This makes sense when we consider that the human brain evolved in response to the need to make relationships with real people. When you imagine a visual scene you use the same cognitive mechanisms, and the same parts of the brain, that you use when looking at a real scene in front of you (Pearson, 2019). That is why it is so hard to imagine a complex scene while you are also looking at one and why you tend to close your eyes or look at a blank space when using your imagination. If forming a para-social relationship uses the same processes involved in forming a real relationship, shouldn’t it be the case that those people who struggle to form real relationships would also struggle to form para-social relationships? In other words, if both forms of relationships use the same mental processes, then it will be people who are able to form strong social relationships that will also tend to form strong para-social relationships. The same meta-analysis (Tukachinsky, Walter and Saucier, 2020) found support for this hypothesis in that a number of factors linked with forming a strong actual relationship (such as the interpersonal factors you looked at before including perceived physical and social attractiveness) were also linked with forming para-social relationships. What to conclude? One answer is that research is very much ongoing and is likely to reveal more about para-social relationships in the near future. For now, it seems premature to conclude that there are some people that form para-social relationships and some that do not because of their ability to form real social relationships. It is more likely that para-social relationships are a sufficiently powerful and complex phenomenon that they can act as both substitution for those that are lonely and as extension for those that have active social networks but love to get lost in a book. There are other factors that affect whether and how strongly someone will tend to form relationships with fictional characters, including one you read about previously when considering aspects of empathy, which is how prone they are to fantasising. For example, Liebers and Straub (2020) studied the links between fantasy and romantic para-social relationships (think of Graham and his ‘shy and unassuming ship’s navigator’) and found that fantasy enhanced the intensity of the relationship formed. The authors drew a similar conclusion in noting the complexities involved in what leads people to form relationships with fictional characters and also that further research is needed: ‘We assume that while an individual’s level of fantasy is important, it is just one of many personal characteristics that shape romantic thoughts, feelings, and behaviour toward media characters and we hope that future studies will investigate additional personal predictors’ (Liebers and Straub, 2020, p. 11).

A graphic of a person hugging a fictional character. A graphic of a person hugging a fictional character.

In the previous section you looked at what para-social relationships are, who might form them, how they might be formed and what form they might take. In this section you will look at how forming a relationship with a fictional character might change the reader.

A murmuration of starlings. A murmuration of starlings.

Psychologists have considered the possibility that simply engaging with characters in a story, regardless of how they are written about, might have an impact on us. One of the greatest influences that relationships with characters in books might have on readers is giving them a sense of ‘belonging’ or ‘fitting in’, of forming (para)social connections with groups of people. Fitting in with a social group is a fundamental element of the human condition and one we have evolved internal mechanisms that drive us to join, and indeed create, social groups (Stevens and Fiske, 1995). In addition, being part of social groups will tend to make us experience increased satisfaction with life, pleasure and other positive emotions (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). One thing that seems to help us become part of a social group is to make ourselves more like the other people in the group. For example, we might adopt attitudes and behaviours that help us to fit in (DeMarree, Wheeler and Petty, 2005). You may well have had this experience yourself, even if it might have been to avoid expressing opinions or behaving in a way that you knew would not fit in with the wider group. Psychologists refer to this process of taking on the characteristics of a group as ‘assimilation’, a process you will return to later. The course has already explored the idea that relationships with fictional characters might be a substitute for real social relationships or that they might be an extension of our real social relationship that use the same mental processes. Can such relationships, therefore, fulfil our fundamental desire to belong? Certainly, there do appear to be some clear benefits of forming relationships by engaging in fiction. Although their research looked at TV programmes rather than novels, Derrick, Gabriel and Hugenberg (2009) found that when people feel lonely, they have a tendency to turn to their favoured programmes and that simply thinking about these TV programmes can mitigate reductions in self-esteem, mood and feelings of rejection. There is also evidence that engagement with a narrative can help people to learn social rules, such as how to interact with others (Mar and Oatley, 2008), and also how to empathise (Oatley, 1999). Additionally, research has found that our own self-concept can change, albeit temporarily, as a result of exposure to a narrative; in other words, we can actually take on the traits of the character we are reading about (Sestir and Green, 2010). Interestingly, neuroscientific research using an MRI scanner (that can determine which parts of the brain are activated) revealed that people tend to use the same part of the brain when reading a narrative as they would when processing that type of information in real life (Speer et al., 2009). Thus, the parts of the brain used to process visual, motor or conceptual features of an activity were also activated if those same features were present in the narrative. For example, if the narrative involved a character interacting with an object, the parts of the reader’s brain associated with grasping hand movements would show an increase in activation. It seems clear then that reading a narrative and forming a relationship with its characters can have an impact on us as the reader. It is also clear we have a strong drive to fit in and that engaging with fictional characters can not only stave off loneliness but that the reader might even adapt their self-concept in a similar fashion to someone altering their attitudes and behaviour in order to ‘belong’.

A dog wearing a superhero mask. A dog wearing a superhero mask.

When we say that in order to feel like we belong to a group comprised of fictional characters that we might take on their attitudes and behaviour, do we mean that we would simply adopt these in our imagination or do we mean that people really adopt them to the point where their actual personality, opinions or even behaviour might change? In other words, when Zoë is reading Bridget Jones’ Diary, does she actually adopt some of Bridget’s personality traits? As mentioned earlier, this is a process called assimilation, which has often been researched by asking participants in a study to read a passage from a story and then to rate themselves against a series of statements that describe various personality traits associated with the character they had read about. Research exploring para-social relationships and assimilation has found that rather than comparing themselves to a fictional character and feeling bad if they do not measure up in some way, that readers rather tend to assimilate those characteristics and that this can make them feel better about themselves (Derrick et al., 2008). Young, Gabriel and Hollar (2013) demonstrated this (in a paper titled ‘Batman to the rescue!’) by studying the impact that para-social relationships with superheroes had on men’s body image. They found that being shown an image of a muscular superhero made men feel bad about their own bodies, unless they had a para-social relationship with that superhero, in which case there was no negative impact on their body satisfaction and instead actually led to an increase in their strength measured using a dynamometer (which measures hand-grip strength)! In other words, they had assimilated the superheroes characteristics of muscularity and strength. Activity 2 Becoming Count Dracula In Week 4 you will learn more about a study Zoë conducted (Walkington, Wigman and Bowles, 2020) to explore ‘The impact of narratives and transportation on empathic responding’. This included looking at whether reading either a narrative or non-narrative account about a young woman experiencing difficulties related to drug-use might lead the reader to assimilate any of the characteristics of an individual involved in drug-use. In other words, can a narrative make us respond more emphatically towards someone we previously might have felt negatively towards. This was tested by asking participants to rate their own personalities against a series of ‘assimilation items’, such as: Compared to the average person, I engage in more risky behaviour I have a more addictive personality than the average person You are now going to create some assimilation items for yourself. Read the following passages taken from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, which feature The Count talking about his upcoming move to England: Well, I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble. I am a Boyar. The common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, ‘Ha, ha! A stranger!’ I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation. And I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you will, I know forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand. I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day, and after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young, and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken. The shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may. If you were conducting research on assimilation, what assimilation items might you construct to test whether your participants who read the above passages had taken on any of the characteristics of Dracula? It might help to think of the personality traits that are being revealed in the text; and remember to phrase your items in the first person like the ones used above, which means using the first person and a structure something like ‘I have/am/feel/desire … more than is normal/the average person’. Here are the assimilation items that you might have come up with: I have an above average desire to travel and have new experiences I strive for perfection more than the average person I feel the weight of responsibility more than is average I desire to be alone more than is normal I like to go unnoticed in crowds more than the average person I try to hide my feelings by using pleasantries more than the average person I think about death more than is normal In some ways I operate at a higher level than the average person I have more sensibilities than the average person

A person dressed up as a character from Harry Potter. A person dressed up as a character from Harry Potter.

The research and concepts described in the previous sections, particularly that on belonging, led Gabriel and Young (2011) to propose that engagement with narratives can provide the same sense and positive experience of being part of a social group or collective. They referred to this idea as the ‘narrative collective assimilation hypothesis’. The important point is that not only does this hypothesis involve the idea that a fictional story can provide many of the benefits associated with being part of a social group but that it actually predicts ‘collective assimilation’, namely that a reader will psychologically adopt key characteristics of the social group depicted in the story. Gabriel and Young came up with a fascinating method of testing their hypothesis using passages taken from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK) (Rowling, 1999) and from Twilight (Meyer, 2005). As they were testing their hypothesis, that readers will adopt characteristics of the social groups in the narrative, this meant that their prediction was that reading about Harry Potter and Hogwarts would lead participants to feel like they had ‘become’ wizards, and that reading about the Cullen family in Twilight would lead to participants feel like they had ‘become’ vampires! Before you go any further, take a moment to consider this. Do you think it is possible that readers can become so immersed in a story and develop para-social relationships with the characters to the extent that they (psychologically at least) start to feel like they had become a wizard or a vampire? Next you’ll take a quick (heavily abridged) look at how they went about testing this hypothesis. The participants were 140 undergrads from the University of Buffalo (with an average age of 19) who were asked to read either a passage from Twilight or from Harry Potter as they would as if they were reading a story normally for their own pleasure. The passage from Twilight was Chapter 13 (‘Confessions’), in which Edward (a vampire) describes what it is like to be a vampire to Bella (a human). As you may know, the romantic relationship between Bella and Edward is one of the main plotlines of the series. The passage from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was both Chapters 7 (‘The Sorting Hat’) and 8 (‘The Potions Master’), in which Harry and friends are first sorted by a magical hat into one of four school houses (and all end up in Gryffindor House) before starting their lessons including Defence Against the Dark Arts, History of Magic, Charms and then a double period of Potions with Professor Snape. Once they had read their passage, the participants completed what is known as an identity Implicit Association Test (often abbreviated to IAT), which uses decision time (literally how long it takes you to answer the question) to assess how strongly someone identifies with a particular social group. In this case the social groups in question were vampires and wizards. As predicted by the collective-assimilation hypothesis, the IAT revealed that the participants who read the Harry Potter chapters tended to associate themselves with wizards, while those that read the Twilight chapter tended to associate themselves with vampires. The authors concluded that this is evidence that narratives can alleviate loneliness by providing the reader with access to a collective identity which they can psychologically assimilate. If you would like to find out more about IATs, please visit Project Implicit.

A vampire. A vampire.

As well as the IAT, Gabriel and Young (2011) also made use of a more explicit measure, which they referred to as the ‘Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective-Assimilation Scale’. This consisted of three questions, embedded among a number of other questions, to measure collective assimilation of Twilight vampires, which were: Compared to the average person, how high do you think you could jump? How long could you go without sleep? How sharp are your teeth? And three questions to measure collective assimilation of Harry Potter wizards, which were: How British do you feel? [Remember that the participants were from the University of Buffalo] Do you think, if you tried really hard, you might be able to make an object move just using the power of your mind? Do you think you might ever be able to make yourself disappear and reappear somewhere else? Again, before you go any further, what do you think the results of this more explicit test will reveal? Can reading Twilight really make someone think their teeth are sharper, and can reading Harry Potter really make you think you could move objects using your mind? Analysis of the data collected in response to the six explicit questions did indeed reveal that the participants who read the Twilight chapter tended to self-identify more with the traits associated with vampires (e.g. being able to jump higher than average) and those that read the Harry Potter chapters tended to identify more with the traits associated with wizards (e.g. being able to disappear). This means that the Harry Potter readers were more likely to believe they could make objects move with their mind and the Twilight readers thought their teeth were sharper! In other words, there was clear support for the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective-Assimilation Scale. This study clearly shows the power of narratives and of the para-social relationships that we form with fictional characters. These relationships provide a way for us to connect socially and to be part of social collectives to the extent that we assimilate the characteristics of that collective … and that can mean believing ourselves capable of telekinesis when the collective we are reading about are wizards. In conclusion, Gabriel and Young state that: The pleasure of immersing oneself in narratives is not surprising or novel to anyone who has ever been lucky enough to get lost in a good book. However, the current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment. (Gabriel and Young, 2011, p. 993) Next week, you will explore more impacts that forming relationships with fictional characters can have on a reader, by looking further at how such relationships can change our own self-concept and how they can also change our attitudes towards other people.

This week you have learned about the different sorts of relationships we might form with fictional characters including para-social relationships and collective assimilation. You have learned a little about the theories psychologists have developed about why we might form such relationships, and how the relationships we form with fictional characters share many of the elements that are usual in ‘real’ relationships, such as the importance of likeability and wanting to find out more about someone. You also explored some of the positive impact that relationships with fictional characters can have, including reducing loneliness and providing us with a sense of belonging. Importantly, throughout this week you looked at research which has demonstrated the power of fictional relationships, including that they can affect our body image, increase our strength and that we can even assimilate the characteristics of vampires and wizards. You can now go to Week 4. Week 4: ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’: engagement with villains

A dictionary entry for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. A dictionary entry for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’.

So far in the course you have learned about relationships with fictional characters and started to get a sense that psychologists believe that such relationships can have significant impacts on the reader. This impact can be to our levels of loneliness and sense of belonging; but also in our behaviours and attitudes towards others. This week you will build on this knowledge and consider some views of both authors and academics about the implications for the self of reading about, or hanging out with, characters who are unlikely to be considered role models: in other words, villains. In real life people are generally repulsed by the idea that they might be similar to people who act immorally, or are negatively viewed (Wan and Wyer, 2019). Yet, as you will learn this week, the same is not always true if the character is fictional. By the end of this week, you should be able to: understand a little about the views of both authors and academics about the risks and rewards of our relationships with fictional villains understand what is meant by self-expansion, and how this might relate to fictional characters consider how hanging out with fictional villains might have a relationship with your sense of self consider that greater empathy with fictional baddies might be a positive thing. Before you start to find out more about a couple of the academic theories regarding how people are able to develop a fondness for villains that are fictional, as opposed to real villains, first let’s hear from two of our crime writers about their own thoughts and experience about the differences between fictional and real criminals.

Watch the following video of Sir Ian Rankin. IAN RANKIN I got access to a guy who was on death row in Texas, a drug addict, a member of a gang who had broken into a woman’s house and killed her to rob her in order to get drug money. And he’d been on death row for 12, 13, 14 years at that stage. And unknown to me, the producer/director got in touch with Ian Brady’s mother, the Moors murderer Ian Brady, to see if we could interview her about what it’s like to have a serial killer in the family. She passed that on to Ian Brady, who then replied to the director from Broadmoor Secure Hospital to say, no, no. Mr Rankin doesn’t talk to my mother. He comes here and talks to me. And that was another point at which I said, no, I don’t want to do that. Thank you very much. Because once Ian Brady is inside your head, he ain’t leaving. It’s one thing to talk about and think about and write about fictional psychopaths, but when you meet these people in real life, you cannot then unmute them. And Brady, I knew from a reading of his horrible nonfiction book, The Gates of Janus glories and gets a thrill from playing mind games with people. That’s all he had left to him in Broadmoor was playing mind games with researchers, with people who communicated with him, wrote to him and with the families of the victims. And he wouldn’t give them closure by telling them where some of the bodies were buried. So I said, no, I don’t want to meet this guy. And I won’t meet this guy. So I shied away from that, which is a roundabout way of answering the question. But I am fascinated by evil. I am fascinated by the existence of evil. But very often when you talk to historians, psychiatrists, they will tell you that these people are very bland. The people who carry out these acts and themselves are very bland, nondescript people. They almost have no personality. It’s an incredible thing. You’re looking for Hannibal Lecter, and you end up with the blandest person imaginable carrying out a terrible act of evil.

Ian’s interview makes clear that for him there is a clear separation between his willingness as a writer to ‘hang out’ with villains that are fictional and criminals in reality. There is a very clear moral element to Ian’s decision, as well as a palpable revulsion towards the idea of spending time in the company of a real murderer.

In a similar fashion to Ian Rankin, Craig Robertson also discusses the morality of both crime writing but also reading crime fiction the video below, and talks about the influence reader feedback has on his writing. CRAIG ROBERTSON Are character is going to change readers? That seems less likely. I do not have the fear. I’ve never had the fear that writing about a killer is going to encourage a reader to go out and act in some kind of nefarious way. I don’t think that’s likely. Anyone who was minded to do that was minded to do that anyway. I’m not writing a how to manual. I don’t have worries on that front. We do encourage readers to think about situations for good or for bad. If they find themselves empathising with a villain, I would think they can see the consequences of this villainous action. And they’re much less likely to act that out. I don’t think that we are in any danger of turning people to a life of crime or to commit murderous acts. I’m hoping that that’s the case. I think I’m lucky enough not to have had too many angry letters of complaint of people being offended by what my characters do. I think most crime fiction readers understand that a) it’s fiction. And b) that by the nature of it, we are going to have characters who do terrible things. So they expect that. So it’s happened that people have been outraged, maybe sometimes in a couple of my earlier books, at the level of violence that’s there, people can be outraged at that. And they are because not everyone wants the same level of that. Some are just not ready for it at all. And yet I have taken feedback on board, particularly early on. And I think you’d be foolish not to listen to your readers. If enough people tell you something, then maybe you should be buying into that. So, yeah, there is a relationship there. It’s an education process both ways. But at the end of the day, you have to make your own decisions. Learn from feedback, but you have to write your own books.

Authors often take part in writing panels (or author panels). These typically take place in book shops, or at conferences or literary festivals. Normally they involve several different authors with a moderator who facilitates the audience, who are able to ask questions of the authors. In this interview Gordon Brown talks about a question he is often asked at such events by his readers. GORDON BROWN In terms of the impact the character has on a reader, one of the favourite questions or a couple of the favourite questions that get asked at writing panels when you’re doing crime writing panels is, you know, what you write is bad. Aren’t you scared someone’s going to copy it? Or, why do you write about that stuff? Why are you writing about the bad stuff? I often point out, actually real life is far worse. There’s things out there in real life that I would never put in a book. There’s stuff I will not write about, and I won’t put it in. And the stuff that my editor would turn around and say to me, do you know what? That just doesn’t work. What I hope can be taken from mine-- from my writing, is that the reader gets to connect in some way to a world that they don’t inhabit, and maybe makes them think on that and think on what’s happening inside that world, even outside of the book.

The crime writers therefore all have a clear awareness that their work is very much viewed as fictional by their readers, and give a sense, if you like, that different rules apply in the fictional world. There isn’t a sense that writers are worried that readers will copy what they do, and there is an awareness from the authors that one of the benefits of reading might be to connect readers (safely) to worlds they don’t inhabit. One of the potential benefits of fictionally inhabiting worlds we might not want to access in real life is that this experience, obtained through reading, leads to the potential for growth, which is what you will learn more about in the next section.

A child measuring their height against a wall. A child measuring their height against a wall.

One of the theories concerning how we might change to become like the characters we read about is the theory of self-expansion. As you learned last week one of the advantages of relationships with fictional characters is that they are a safe space, as there is no risk that the fictional friend will reject us (Nell, 2002) unlike in our face-to-face relationships. On top of that, and importantly for what you will learn this week, this means that fictional worlds can be good spaces to foster connections with people that you wouldn’t necessarily connect with in real life, or in settings that you might consider too dangerous to inhabit in reality. The idea that reading therefore allows us to ‘live dangerously’ in a way that we might not want, or be able, to in reality, is probably not something you have considered before, but it becomes especially important when you consider that these fictional connections might provide an opportunity for self-expansion.

Self-expansion is the idea that through our interpersonal relationships we actually gain resources (both physical resources but also social resources) that help us to achieve the things we want to achieve in life (e.g. Aron and Aron, 1997; Lewandoski and Aron, 2002). While this might sound rather mercenary when put on paper, a good way to reflect on this is by selecting an example from our own experience. Activity 1 What’s in it for me? Take a moment to select one of your close personal relationships. The first one that pops into your head is fine for this activity. Write a list of the ‘resources’ you have gained as a result of your friendship with that person. This doesn’t just mean physical things that they have given you but instead try to think more broadly about things like social connections, interests, hobbies or knowledge they might have that you are able to access, and so on. For example, your friendship with Sandra might have started because you first met in the woods walking your dogs, which could sometimes be a little lonely but you now have a friend to share some of the walks with. Sandra might also have put you in touch with a friend of hers who does dog sitting, and that might have changed your life because you now have someone reliable to dog sit, meaning that you can join the darts team you were interested in playing in on a Tuesday night. The examples you select don’t have to be quite so practical as this one. They might include a particular friend having introduced you to other people who have since become friends and so on. Note down your thoughts. Spend just ten minutes on this activity. It’s likely that the resources you have listed above are examples of how you might have expanded your own sense of self through your relationship with someone else in the real world. Self-expansion opportunities gained through our relationships in the real world are argued to be so important that they might actually contribute to our initial attraction towards other people, as well as the motivation to continue the relationship. This is particularly argued to be the case when the person provides experiences that are novel or challenging (Mattingly, McIntyre and Lewandowski, 2012). It is likely that to be attracted to someone initially you need to be sufficiently similar to that person and also to have a sense that the person can also offer you the potential for growth. In short, we want people to be similar enough to make us think that we will get along, but different enough to make us find them interesting. Not only that, but the experience of the growth we obtain from other people is said to improve how we feel, which then translates to how happy we feel with the relationship (Reissman, Aron and Bergen, 1993).

In the video that follows in the next section Lin Anderson will give an example of how a form of self-expansion might happen in our relationships with fictional characters. In the following video Lin Anderson gives a great example of the types of self-expansion she hears about from her readers LIN ANDERSON Well, readers often declare an interest in entering their world. For example, young women come and tell me they’re studying forensic science or have actually qualified in that area because of reading the books. They were introduced into that world and decided they liked it. However, no one has returned to tell me they decided one of my baddies was their role model. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

This is a great example of self-expansion through fiction, where reading a particular novel might inspire career progression in a particular direction. Given the parallels between real world relationships and our relationships with fictional characters, Shedlosky-Shoemaker, Costabile and Arkin (2014) proposed the idea that self-expansion might also be possible through our relationships with fictional characters. In a series of studies, the researchers measured cognitive overlap between people’s sense of themselves and the characters they read about using the ‘inclusion of other in self scale’, which was developed by Aron, Aron and Smollan (1992). This picture below is the measure that Aron et al. developed and that shows various differing degrees of cognitive overlap of the self and the other. If you were asked to use this scale, you would be asked to circle the picture which best describes your relationship (i.e. how the degree of overlap between yourself and another person) from the seven options shown.

Figure 1 The inclusion of other in self scale by Aron, Aron and Smollan (1992). A number of circles labelled ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, overlapping in various ways. A number of circles labelled ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, overlapping in various ways.

This simple visual representation is one you can use to think about your own relationships. If you are in a close romantic relationship with someone you might feel it is best depicted by the sixth or seventh images where the self and the other person are almost completely overlapping. Your relationship with a colleague at work might be more at the opposite end of the scale, depicted in the first or second image on the top line, where there is a much clearer separation of your identities. Shedlosky-Shoemaker et al. asked participants to select the set of circles they felt best represented their relationship with the fictional character, to measure the degree of cognitive overlap. They also measured ‘self-expansion’ via a short questionnaire which asked questions such as ‘Reading about the character has helped expand my sense of the kind of person I am’ (2014, p. 561). Their results suggested that just like with real people fictional characters did offer readers the opportunity for self-expansion. They also found that with books this effect was mediated by transportation into the text. They viewed transportation as a form of ‘para-proximity’ (2014, p. 559). The more transported into the story world readers felt, the greater cognitive overlap they felt with the character, and the greater perceived self-expansion they felt. This study again supports the importance of transportation (or para-proximity) into the story world as being a vital part of any changes in the self.

Voldermort from Harry Potter. Voldermort from Harry Potter.

The idea of self-expansion sounds like a positive thing, but you might already be wondering about what you heard from Lin Anderson, Craig Robertson and Ian Rankin in the videos earlier. What might the effects be of self-expansion if the character involved is not a pro-social role model, but instead is a villain? Might reading about villainous characters actually be bad for us?

There is no doubt that many people actively enjoy reading about villainous characters, indeed the genre of crime fiction is a very successful one, even despite there being something unsettling about seeing any sorts of similarities between yourself and a villainous character in a book. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry himself expressed his own revulsion to the idea of being like Lord Voldemort: ‘I don’t think I’m like him!’ said Harry, more loudly than he’d intended. (Rowling, 1999, p. 332) According to psychology, humans want to maintain a positive view of themselves, or to hold what is called a positive self-concept. Making and maintaining a self-concept is a demanding activity both in terms of thinking and behaviour (Siegel, 1999). To maintain a positive sense of self we tend to support positive self statements more than negative (Benenson and Dweck, 1986). Our self-concept is not only tiring to maintain, it can also be quite limiting, for example we are limited to experiences we can realistically have, so the opportunity to escape from both the effort and the constraints of our self-concept might mean that the experience of stories is inherently attractive, as a form of ‘holiday’ from the self and one in which we are able to temporarily abandon our own limits (Slater et al., 2014). In the real world, then, people avoid information that threatens their sense of self, for example by association with others who are similar to us but who have negative traits, physical features or values. It is argued (e.g. Miller, Downs and Prentice, 1998; Krause and Rucker, 2020) you are likely to want to keep a distance from negative others, in case it reveals something negative about the self. As you have learned previously though, books are an example of a safe space, and both Krause and Rucker (2020) and Slater et al. (2014) both suggest that this separation from the real world (through fiction) might mean that self-threat is mitigated in instances when we are dealing with characters who are fictional. Activity 2 My villain and me In Week 1 you made up your own fictional villain. Dig out your notes for that activity and look down the list of what you had written down. Take a few moments to go through the list and underline any similarities you had written into your own villain that you can also see in yourself. This activity might have reminded you of the quote from last week from author Ian Rankin who started to follow his own fictional villain around Edinburgh! Of course though, readers of fiction are more interested in the characters they consume (by reading about them) rather than those they create. It has been found that in real life similarity to a bad person tends to feel threatening to the self and is likely to lead to us avoiding such people. Krause and Rucker (2020), however, conducted an interesting study to illustrate that this is not the same when the characters we engage with are fictional. They used a data set from Charactour What and Who to Watch. This is a website that is a fan site for characters, allowing users to choose their favourite characters, and also allows the user to take personality tests (please note that you do need to join the site to be able to do this). Their analysis across both data from this fan site, and several subsequent laboratory studies, found that people expressed a preference for villainous characters who were similar to themselves, as long as they were fictional and not real people.

Enjoying villainous characters is common among the population (Hall, 2019), and you will have heard our crime authors are very aware that their audiences really enjoy their villainous creations. Of course, villains are not unambiguously bad, instead, as you will have heard the authors allude to, they tend to be complex characters who behave in morally questionable ways, rather than being out and out evil characters. Konjin and Hoorn (2005) drew from the disciplines of art, aesthetics and psychology when they developed a ‘Perceiving and experiencing fictional characters’ theory which is a useful framework when considering why we might find ourselves simultaneously drawn to, yet morally critical of, the same character. Their framework suggests that our desire for involvement with characters and our desire to keep a distance from them is not on a binary continuum. In other words, it is not the case that you are either involved (you wish to invest in the character) or you are distant (you wish to avoid the character). Instead, they argue our wish for involvement with, and for distance from, characters run in parallel as experiences and that both involvement and avoidance together explain our appreciation of fictional characters. In short there can be an enjoyable tension between the desire to approach and avoid. Interestingly, Konjin and Hoorn suggested that in comparing characters to ourselves, both involvement and distance are informed by: aesthetics (ugly vs beautiful); how realistic the character seems; and ethics (bad vs good) alongside. What was particularly interesting in their findings was that characters that were presented as more complex, with some positive and some negative elements (for example someone ethically bad, but beautiful and realistic) were more likeable than characters who were unilaterally good or bad. Konjin and Hoorn’s concept of involvement (measured by items such as ‘I want to be friends with the fictional character’) also captures the concept of identification, which you will look at in the next section (Black et al., 2019).

A child reading a book. A child reading a book.

The concept of identification with characters brings together a few of the related concepts that you have already learned about. According to Black et al. identification is ‘understanding their point of view, empathizing with their plight, and/or finding them similar to the reader’ (2019, p. 2). Identification can also be described as almost feeling that you have become a particular character, or experiencing the characters world vicariously. Identification with characters allows us to see the world from their point of view and to literally access what they are thinking (as authors often explain the thought processes of fictional characters in ways that we can never access when conversing with someone in real life). This access into the interior world of villains might have a number of consequences. Activity 3 Inhabiting Hannibal Choose one of the following literary villains: Hannibal Lecter Count Dracula Lord Voldemort Nurse Ratched Cruella de Vil Mr Ripley Morris Gerald ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty If you do not know these villains well then using a search engine will give you some ideas to go on. Take a moment to write a letter, written in the first person (I/me) as if you were actually that character. Start the writing with one of the following three phrases: People ask me the reasons, I’ll tell you the reasons … If I could explain to my children, I would explain to them this … Finally, I have been caught. This is my last letter. You will not hear from me again. Before I go I must tell you this … Write for ten minutes. Having done that activity you may have noticed that some of what you have written might relate to the predicaments the villain you were inhabiting found themselves in. You might also remember what you learned about in Week 1 regarding ‘situational’ and ‘dispositional’ explanations of behaviour. Look over what you wrote and see how much of it focused on the situations the character you selected found themselves in. Psychologists argue that identification better helps us buy into a character’s motivation (Black et al., 2019). Because the task you have undertaken asked you to inhabit that character, it is likely you wrote some information regarding that characters motivations, and it is also likely that such a first person account would encourage you to think about situations, rather than dispositions.

Before you move on to consider a little more information from the psychological research about the idea of identification, you’ll return to a couple of our crime authors who will give you their view on how they try to encourage readers to identify with their characters. In the following video Craig Robertson gives his view on identification with criminal characters in his writing. CRAIG ROBERTSON By the very nature of writing a crime novel, we are raising moral questions. As crime writers, we have various tasks, the first one being simply to entertain the reader. We have to have them coming away having enjoyed the book, to have been thrilled or scared or amused. But we’d like also to pose questions about society. That is a large part of what drives us to do what we do. And by the very nature of that, we’re at the edges of it. And we need morally questionable acts in the book. And so people have to commit these. So it’s an imperative that we have people behaving in morally dubious ways. And the book would not work without that. So it’s down to us to explore why they do them. And that’s maybe the key part of our books as much as a reveal, as much as a twist or some big action scene is we know why these things are being carried out. And our job is to explore them. Let the reader ask questions. So we need people who are on the edge. It may be the ultimate sin of committing murder. It may be behaving badly, deception. Whatever it is, we need a reason for it. I think it’s important to us the readers identify with their characters. Again, whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys, they have to identify with them. They don’t always have to like them or love them or support them. But they have to have a connection with them. To do that, again, the important thing is to make them as real as possible. Most people come in shades of grey. And so characters in a novel should as well. I never had much fun reading characters who are all good or all bad because I don’t think that’s particularly realistic. So I want mine to have faults, and I want them to have positive elements to their character. And if readers can buy into that, then it will work. And if they don’t buy into it, then I’m not doing my job, and they’re not going to enjoy the book. So it’s about making them relatable, impactful, as much as being likeable. Likeable is a secondary thing. In many cases, we don’t want them to be liked because they are doing terrible things, but as long as there’s an understanding of why they’re doing it.

Next you’ll hear again from Gordon Brown. GORDON BROWN One way I help readers identify with baddies is that when I’m creating the character, I need them, and for them read me, not to sympathise with them, not necessarily, but I do need them to empathise with them. I need them to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Yes, they may still want their comeuppance. People love baddies when they fall over. In some cases, they actively crave that, but they need to have some connection to the character through empathy for their actions and for what they’re doing. And that’s important to me.

In these videos, you can hear that the authors are interested in creating characters who are a combination of good and bad, who are complex and have depth. Relatability and characters that readers can identify with are also important to the authors.

The reasons people identify with particular characters are not currently well understood, but the research and theories that do exist suggest two main suggestions that relate to liking and similarity, both of which you have already covered in this course. One interesting finding in the research literature is that the longer a person spends in fictional spaces (such as avid readers for example) the more likely they are to identify with villains (Sanders and Tsay-Vogel, 2016). This is one potential explanation for experimental research which has suggested that some people do identify with villains, while others don’t.

In this week you have so far looked at hanging out with fictional characters largely from the point of view of the risks such friendships might entail. However, research evidence suggests that in fact there might be plenty of benefits from our villainous friendships, and that we can learn from fictional villains through the act of taking their perspective. It is also possible that this perspective taking might have impacts for us in the real world. In Zoë’s own research (Walkington, Ashton Wigman and Bowles, 2020), people either read two chapters of a novel that was about a fictional character who had a drink and drug problem, or they read a factual account containing the same information. Following the reading, participants took a questionnaire regarding their empathy levels and were then presented with a short case study about another offender. They were told that that this offender had carried out a robbery in a shopping centre and knocked over an elderly citizen during the escape, all while under the influence of drink and drugs. The participants who read the fictional group, particularly those who were the most transported into the story world, were more likely to select empathic questions to ask the offender and showed higher levels of empathy in general on the questionnaire. Empathic questions were questions like ‘I understand that the situation you find yourself in in this interview must be very difficult for you, and I am happy to give you time to consider your responses so please do not rush’. This research suggests that by reading fictional accounts about offenders, our empathy towards such marginalized groups can be improved. This might have all sorts of benefits within society in terms of, for example, improving relationships with, and empathy towards, ex-offenders in the community. Similar findings have been obtained by other researchers who have looked at how literature might lead to the reduction of prejudice. Following the release of the seven Harry Potter books by JK Rowling, a plethora of research followed that investigated various aspects of the novels, which are not only understood as fantasy books with magic, romance and adventure at their centre, but also as detective stories (Saunders, 2020). The novels drew particular attention because they are full of social groupings and hierarchies, with all the attendant prejudice you might expect in the real-world also being paralleled in the books. Stigmatised groups within the stories include ‘muggles’ who are non-magical individuals, elves (who are servants or slaves of wizards) and ‘mud-bloods’ or ‘half-bloods’ who are witches and wizards born out of a family with one magical and one non-magical parent. Researchers Vezalli et al. (2015) found that reading these novels improved attitudes to real world stigmatised groups, such as immigrants and refugees, but interestingly this was only the case when the children identified with Harry. Those that identified with Voldemort showed no effect, which led Wimmer et al. (2021) to conclude that identification is more likely to improve moral cognition that impair it, because while identifying with the hero had a positive impact by reducing prejudice, identifying with the villain did not have a negative impact. This research of course considered prejudice rather than empathy or self-concept (which this course has focused on), but gives a further illustration of the plethora of research that has been carried out into studying our relationships with fictional characters. This week you have considered some of the differences between real and fictional characters and why our reactions to villains who are not real are different to those who are real. You have considered the idea that fictional characters might offer the opportunity for self expansion, and have also considered how we might experience changes in our self concept, expanding into the friendships that we make with fictional characters. You have also learned about a few different theories that scholars have about how we relate to villains and what implications this might have for us outside our own reading, in the real world. You have also heard a little more from fiction writers about how they find readers relate to their characters.

A group of people reading. A group of people reading.

In this course you have heard from both crime writers and psychologists about some of the ways in which we relate to the fictional characters that we read about. The academic research in this area is complicated and fascinating, and is contributed to by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Hopefully the course showed you some of the highlights of this diverse and contested research area. Specifically, you have considered a few of the psychological processes involved in our relationships with fictional characters such as identification and transportation. You have considered the impact that reading about characters can have on your own sense of self. You have also considered some of the ways in which your relationship with fictional individuals might have knock on effects in the real world. Well done, you have achieved a lot and, more than anything, hopefully this course has been an enjoyable introduction to some of the varied thinking that exists about our relationships with people who aren’t real. Here you can find some further information about the crime fiction authors featured in this course. You can also find their full interviews.

Lin Anderson is a crime novelist and screenwriter, known for her character Rhona MacLeod, a forensic scientist. Unlike some other crime writers, her villains tend to change from story to story. She is one of the founders of a festival for crime writers in Scotland called ‘Bloody Scotland’. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you create a ‘baddy’ and how do they emerge in your imagination? LIN ANDERSON Yeah, how do I create a baddy and how do they emerge in my imagination? I don’t normally pre-plan the villain. I come to a realisation of who the villain is via the evidence of the crime that’s been committed. As this is examined, a picture builds up of the character who may have committed the crime. On occasion, I’ve had the perpetrator’s point of view running through a book, as in Sins of the Dead and Follow the Dead. This was very interesting to do as they evolved as I wrote, just as your protagonist does. Character is shown by what we do in the circumstances that we are presented with. None of us know what we are capable of until we are put in difficult and sometimes terrifying situations. My favourite quote here about that was from a former principal at Napier University, came to speak to the school I was teaching at. And she said, ‘a woman is like a tea bag. You don’t know her strength until you put her in hot water’. So in terms of Rhona MacLeod, my protagonist, I always try and remember that, and then I learn something new about her. I think the same is for your villains. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? LIN ANDERSON How do I approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? I really like this question. Well, all drama is character driven. All characters have their own imagined or understood world, their internal logic for what they say and do, however mad or bad it may seem to you. So what is a baddy, or in what circumstances is what they do bad? Characters we align with often have an internal moral code, which readers agree with even although it doesn’t match the rules of the day. The character DS McNab, who was demoted from DI, is probably one such character I’ve written. Exasperated at times by the strictures and the structures he’s forced to work by, he often just goes off grid. He puts what he sees as justice above following rules. Sometimes it’s society that is morally questionable, not the character. In Mcllvanney’s Laidlaw, the question is asked, who is the true monster among us? Might it be the society or its attitudes and moral stance that is the monster? TEXT ON SCREEN Do you worry about the likeability of your villains, and how do you approach their likeability? LIN ANDERSON Do I worry about the likeability of my villains, and how do I approach their likeability? Well, I would say lovable rogues are wonderful characters to write and read about because they encompass our own diverse shapes. They both exasperate and excite us. As readers, we experience the positive and negative in our own character we learn about ourselves. An interesting and well formed villain is necessary for conflict with our main character. If they’re overcome too easily, there is no drama. They shoot at a clear chance of winning. Otherwise, we can never take our protagonist into their most difficult place and see them overcome their obstacles, both physical and mental. TEXT ON SCREEN To what extent do you think readers form a relationship with your characters? LIN ANDERSON To what extent do I think readers form a relationship with my characters? This is interesting. It is undoubtedly at the heart of a series. Readers come back for more because they want to be back with the characters. They want to experience them at work and at play. They become real. That’s very important if you have a long running series that has a major villain as a character, which some series do. I’m thinking about possibly in Rebus. These get a major character that goes throughout, and they become part of that world and play important roles in it. And so they are very important, both your protagonist and your villain. We empathise with our difficulties and successes. People get annoyed, readers get annoyed or angry with them when they make what they think are wrong decisions in their relationships and in their world of work. They also enjoy the humour and the camaraderie. They become, and I quote, ‘for many readers, old friends’. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you consider how your characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion (in the reader)? What about if they are villains? LIN ANDERSON Do I consider how my characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion? What about if they are villains? Well, readers often declare an interest in entering their world. For example, young women come and tell me they’re studying Forensic Science or have actually qualified in that area because of reading the books. They were introduced into that world and decided they liked it. However, no one has returned to tell me they decided one of my baddies was their role model. That doesn’t mean it hasn't happened. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you faced a situation where readers get offended/outraged by your characters, and does this ever affect the way you subsequently write? LIN ANDERSON Have I faced a situation where readers get offended or outraged by my characters, and does this ever affect the way I subsequently write? Sometimes people do get offended, even outraged, usually around the themes of having too much sex, or sex with someone they think is the wrong person, or swearing too much, or drinking too much. None of this changes the way I write. TEXT ON SCREEN What techniques do you use to transport readers into the world you create? LIN ANDERSON What techniques do I use to transport readers into the world I create? I drop them into a scene vividly described as though they were there too. I enter a scene late, so it’s already begun, and leave early, so they want to know what happened after they left. The experience should make them feel they are with the characters and their emotions.

Gordon Brown is a crime thriller author, and tends to set his novels in Scotland, Spain and the USA. He is also a board director of the crime writing festival Bloody Scotland. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you create a ‘baddy’ and how do they emerge in your imagination? GORDON BROWN In many cases, I don’t set out to create a baddy. I’m not one for planning a book. When working, I tend to be writing about 2,000 words a day, so I’m not advanced plotting. My characters tend to form as they write, so the unfolding story will dictate which are goodies and which are baddies. Some start out as goodies, become bad. Some start out as baddies, become good. My stories often have a vein of character redemption through them at some point so, therefore, there may be a baddy that becomes better, if that makes sense. And that can be slowly or that can be a road to Damascus moment. Some characters within a book are just there to complicate, frustrate, or even destroy the main protagonist’s life. And their badness can either be organic, i.e. just bad because they’re bad for the sake of it. But some are better than that in terms of characterisation, because they’re more Machiavellian. They have their own end game in sight, they’re willing to lie, to cheat, use violence, et cetera, to get their way. The latter are better because they add more to the plot and they also leave the reader asking the question, Why are they doing that? TEXT ON SCREEN How do you approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? GORDON BROWN I tend to approach characters by seeing them as manipulators, first and foremost. In this way, I can give them a reason to act badly, which in their head, if you can talk about the inside a fictional character’s head, gives them justification and motivation to do what they’re doing. I remember watching a podcast of a CIA official in America, a good number of years ago, talking about what goes on inside a terrorist's head. They were trying to find out. And one of the things they realised, that no terrorist sees themself as the bad guy. They may be doing bad things, but their internal justification is important, because that’s what they’re working on. And, therefore, I’ll often say to my baddies right, OK, what do they really want? And if I manage to do that, I can then just let my imagination run riot and then try and describe what it is they’re going to do to get it. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you want readers to identify with your baddies? If so, do you use any strategies to help them identify with these characters? GORDON BROWN I believe that a reader has to connect to a baddy in some positive level, but badness is a relative thing. A less bad character in a book could almost be a goody sometimes, and that happens a lot. One way I help readers identify with baddies is that, when I’m creating the character, I need them, and for them read me, not to sympathise with them, not necessarily, but do need them to empathise with them. I need them to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Yes, they may still want their comeuppance. People love baddies when they fall over. In some cases, they actively crave that, but they need to have some connection to the character through empathy for their actions and for what they’re doing. And that’s important to me. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you worry about the likeability of your villains and how do you approach their likeability? GORDON BROWN I would say a completely unlikeable character doesn’t really work in a book, unless there’s some sort of rogue element that just in there because you need them for a moment. Readers often say that, if they don’t like a character, they can buy a book or they won’t like a book. I’m not always sure it’s likeability, I would say in some cases it’s whether they can relate to the characters more important. But I may be wrong. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you rationalise villainous behaviour? If so, how? GORDON BROWN If you mean do I rationalise the behaviour in my books, and as much as it gives justifications for the baddy’s actions, then the answer’s yes. That’s not to say that irrational, random violence or bullying or cheating, or any of that, might not play a part once in a while. But as I said earlier, if the reader doesn’t approve or understand of what’s being done by the baddy, then they will just buy out of it. Even if the reasons are warped, as long as they understand. I often talk about the handbrake moment when I’m writing a book. That’s the bit when you’re reading a book, you get to a certain passage, the character does or say something in the book that just makes you go, really? And you buy out of the book. And you want to avoid that like plague. And one of the ways that that can happen is if you insert irrational behaviour that the reader just doesn’t buy into. TEXT ON SCREEN To what extent do you think readers form a relationship with your characters? GORDON BROWN In some cases, readers can have a very deep relationship with the characters. You can tell this by the way that some readers talk about the plot. They talk about the characters. They talk about if they’re almost real people. Whether they’re willing on their hero, cussing the baddy, hoping love blossoms, waiting in redemption, crying with sadness, laughing with joy, all and much more of that comes from their relationship with the characters. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you consider how your characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion (in the reader)? What about if they are villains? GORDON BROWN In terms of the impact the character has on a reader. One of the favourite questions or a couple of the favourite questions that get asked at writing panels when you’re doing crime writing panels is, Why do you write bad? Aren’t you scared somebody is going to copy it, or why do you write about that stuff? Why do you write about the bad stuff? I often point out, actually, real life’s far worse. There’s things out there in real life that I would never put in a book. There’s stuff I will not write about and the stuff that my editor would turn round and say to me, do you know what, that just doesn’t work. What I hope can be taken from my writing is that the reader gets to connect, in some way, to a world that they don’t inhabit and maybe makes them think on that and think on what’s happening inside that world, even outside of the book. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you faced the situation where readers get offended/outraged by your characters, and does this ever affect the way you subsequently write? GORDON BROWN I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation that I’ve offended or outraged somebody or not that they’ve told me. Although I have to say, secretly, I don’t want to offend someone, but a bit of outrage wouldn’t actually be that bad, because it would kind of mean emotionally they’re engaged with what I’m writing. TEXT ON SCREEN What techniques do you use to transport readers into the world you create? GORDON BROWN One of the main techniques I use to transport the reader into the world is I write in present tense, first person. And the reason I do that is it gives a real immediacy to what’s going on around you and an insight, because you’re actually inside the character’s head all of the time. It does have its limitations, though, and therefore I have to find ways around it. So, for instance, the reader can’t-- or sorry, the character can’t be in places they’re not in so I have to rely on other characters to tell them what happened, or I have to come out of first person point of view. Or, in other cases, I’ve also got to be careful because I have to take my foot off the gas now and again. First person can be quite relentless if you’re reading it, so I have to find ways out of that. And one of the ways I like to get out of that-- I use it a lot-- is I’ll put material into my book, like a clipping from a newspaper or an email, or something written. And I’ll give you a good example. At the moment in my new book, Thirty-one Bones, all the way through the book, I’ve actually used transcripts from the Spanish police interviews to introduce the characters. By doing that, you can give a real level of insight to people that just comes from a slightly different angle. A couple of other things I like to do-- the show, don’t tell adage is still worth its weight in gold. Just avoid the telling bit and do the showing bit. And the other thing to do, or the other thing I like to do, is to shorthand my way into how someone is thinking or what somebody’s seeing or what somebody’s feeling is to use analogies but just twist them slightly. Just change the ones that are there, just to give them a little bit of surprise when people are reading it. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you ever created an amoral world (i.e. a world which is entirely morally deviant, as opposed to a world where just some of the characters are morally deviant)? If so, did you have any strategies for helping readers imagine such a world? GORDON BROWN I probably have created an amoral world. The closest I got was I wrote a book called Fifty-nine Minutes. And Fifty-nine Minutes is about a kid, 16-year-old kid, who, through a whole set of immoral actions and over the next few years, rises to be the most powerful crime lord in the UK, only to have it all taken away one day, literally taken away, and he’s sent to jail for 20 years. When he gets back out 20 years later, he sets out in revenge. But the problem is he’s no longer got the contacts or the power. He’s actually a down and out on the streets. And in order to make that amoral world live, I actually set it in real places, in Glasgow and in Spain. And what I do is everything around about them is normal. What is not normal is the way that they act.

Val McDermid is a best selling, and international award winning Scottish crime writer. She is perhaps best known for her Wire in the Blood series which features a clinical psychologist (Dr Tony Hill) and DCI Carol Jordan, but she has written three other series of crime fiction. Alongside crime fiction Val has written graphic novels, non-fiction and a children’s picture book, as well as writing for both radio and theatre. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you create a ‘baddy’ and how do they emerge in your imagination? VAL MCDERMID I create my bad characters, if you like, in the same way that I create all my characters. I think about them in terms of what I need them to do in this particular story, what tasks they’re required to do, and how they’re going to have to do them. And then I start thinking about what kind of person would do that in that particular way. Why would they choose this particular line of approach rather than the other one? And gradually, over a period of having conversations with myself and thinking about what their function is within the book, they start to take shape. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? VAL MCDERMID I’ve got quite a strong conviction that there’s no such thing as a completely good or a completely bad person. I think we all exist in varying degrees of greyness. And what holds us in place mostly is social expectations. It’s taboos. It’s fear of being caught. It’s fear of disappointing the people we love, all of these things. And so I think that we’re all capable of behaving in ways that we don’t entirely approve of and when we look back at them, we don’t entirely approve of in the moment. So it’s just a case of, I suppose, stretching that beyond what I would do or what anybody I know would do, and imagining another set of choices. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you want readers to identify with your baddies? If so, do you use any strategies to help them identify with these characters? VAL MCDERMID I want my baddies to be comprehensible to my readers because, in my experience, generally, people who do terrible things have a very good reason for it inside their own heads. They don’t just do it at random. They don’t just think, aha, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and do something totally hideous. Within their own heads, it makes sense. So when I’m writing a character, I want it to make sense to the reader so it feels authentic to them when they’re reading it. It feels believable to them. So in that sense, I have to, if not quite have my readers identify with the character, to find what they do comprehensible and believable. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you worry about the likeability of your villains and how do you approach their likeability? VAL MCDERMID I don’t particularly worry about the likeability because I think, by and large, my readership is pretty sophisticated. They can identify the difference between a person doing bad things and a person doing good things. I don’t want to make my bad characters the heroes of the book, though. Even when I’ve created characters that readers want to see come back, like Jacko Vance in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, in my head, it’s always very clear that they are not the heroes of the story. It’s not their story. It still remains the story of my protagonists. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you rationalise villainous behaviour? If so, how? VAL MCDERMID It seems to me that most villainous behaviour has, in the heads of the person who is doing it, a rational reason. It’s not something random. And so even if it’s not the way I would respond or my reader would respond, I want to build in, if you like, to their character a set of preconditions that make it credible for them to respond in that way. Now, that might be a practical set of circumstances. They’ve been dumbed down, as it were, by society. Or it might be a more emotional response. Or it might be a completely dysfunctional response. But it has to be something that’s not going to have the reader going, nobody would do that, because it’s important to me to maintain constantly that sense with the reader believing in what they’re reading. So they go forward on my side, as it were. Asking someone to read a crime novel is asking them to come on a journey of suspension of disbelief. So every step I take on that journey has to be about strengthening that suspension of disbelief. And that means making it all credible and possible. TEXT ON SCREEN To what extent do you think readers form a relationship with your characters? VAL MCDERMID It’s quite clear to me that over the years, that my readers have very strong relationships with my characters, both the protagonists and the villains. And I totally understand that because I’m a reader, first and foremost, and I have exactly that same response. There are certain series that I pick up the next one, excited to find out what’s going to happen to the protagonist next because I care about them. So yeah, it’s important to me that readers form that relationship. And I think that one of the things that makes me feel most heartened about my work is the way that readers do respond to those characters. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you explicitly create villains so that readers will have a degree of empathy with them? VAL MCDERMID I don’t explicitly set out to construct a sense of empathy with the villains, but I do want them to be rounded human beings. I don’t want them to just be baddies. I want them to have more to them than that, in the same way that when I’m writing protagonists, I don’t want them to be straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly good people doing good things for all the right reasons. Sometimes, we do the right things for the wrong reasons. And sometimes, we do the wrong things for the right reasons. And so I want to try and make all my characters have that kind of balance. And if I’ve done my job properly, then the readers will have a sense of empathy, not just with the villains, but with other characters in the book, even characters who have quite a fleeting role. I want them to care. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you consider how your characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion (in the reader)? What about if they are villains? VAL MCDERMID To be honest, when I’m writing, when I’m creating characters, when I’m developing a story, I don’t think about readers. I think when you start thinking about how people are going to respond to the work and you start second-guessing yourself, I think, that way, disaster lies, because you’re not any longer writing what’s in your heart and in your head. You’re censoring yourself every step of the way. And I don’t want to do that. And sometimes, people take offence at what I write. And sometimes, they love it all the more. But what I’m doing when I’m making the book is trying to make it as good as it can possibly be. And I’m not looking over my shoulder at what anybody else might think. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you faced the situation where readers get offended/outraged by your characters, and does this ever affect the way you subsequently write? VAL MCDERMID It’s the case, certainly, that people get upset about what happens to some of my characters sometimes. They have a sense of ownership, I suppose, that makes them feel that I’ve got no right to do the things that I do to my characters. And they can get quite upset if I kill someone off that they particularly like or if I make one of my characters endure some suffering that they’re not very happy about. I have had several encounters with readers who- I mean, it’s not taken to the extreme of actually being abusive towards me or anything like that, but they just go, I’m so disappointed you did that, or, I can’t believe you did that, and why can’t you put this right? And so, yeah. I mean, as a reader, I understand this perfectly because there are times when I’m reading someone’s novel and I’m like, I can’t believe you just did that. So, I mean, it’s- I suppose I take it as a compliment that people get so engaged with my characters. And people often bring up issues of how I’ve approached a particular plot, what I’ve done to develop a particular plot, and asked me why I made the choices that I made. And the most honest answer I can give to that is because it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. For me, it’s always narrative necessity, I suppose, that drives the decisions I make. And sometimes, I’ve looked back at books and thought, I can’t believe I did that myself. I can’t quite- wow. That was a bold move. But at the time, it seemed like the only choice I could make. TEXT ON SCREEN What techniques do you use to transport readers into the world you create? VAL MCDERMID For me, the main technique, I suppose, that I’m aware of using to draw people into my world is that sense of creating rounded characters, of not making them one-dimensional, but to try and give them a life, a hinterland. And it’s one of the things that I felt very strongly when I started writing crime fiction, that- I’d read too many books where the victims were treated so casually. They were just cardboard cutouts who were only there to be murdered, and mutilated, and strewn around the highways of America. And I was determined that one of the things that I would do would be to give my victims a hinterland, to give them a life, to try and have the reader feel something, at least, for the lives that had been snuffed out and not just to treat it like a parlour game. So for me, I guess, that is-- I suppose what I’m always trying to do, is to have my readers invested in characters, because that’s what makes you read. That’s where suspense comes from. It’s caring what happens next. Not as a bare fact, but because it has an impact on characters you care about. When you end the chapter with a car going over a cliff, that has suspense not because there’s a car going over the cliff, but because, who is in that car? Why do they matter to me? Or who’s sitting on the beach down below that car? It’s their fate that matters, and that’s where the suspense comes from. So for me, it’s always about trying to build that sense of engagement with characters. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you ever created an amoral world (i.e. a world which is entirely morally deviant, as opposed to a world where just some of the characters are morally deviant)? If so, did you have any strategies for helping readers imagine such a world? VAL MCDERMID I’ve never created a world where everybody was morally deviant because I would feel- I would struggle to find solid ground to stand on. You have to have a standpoint as a writer. And I know- I have friends, colleagues who are quite capable of imagining this entire universe of deviance and immorality, but it’s not something that I feel comfortable in. And also, I think- I guess it’s a bit old fashioned, but I still think that the crime novel is, at its heart, a moral landscape. And if you don’t take seriously the morality of murder, then you’re writing in a vacuum. You’re writing something that’s essentially empty and meaningless. So for me, there has to be some kind of moral compass at the heart of the book.

Sir Ian Rankin is a best-selling Scottish crime writer who created a series of books based around a fictional Scottish Detective named John Rebus. The fictional detective was born in the late 1940s in Fife and joined the army before joining the police. His antagonist, the ruthless Morris Gerald Cafferty, is an Edinburgh organised crime gang boss. The two characters meet in several of Ian’s novels. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you create a ‘baddy’ and how do they emerge in your imagination? IAN RANKIN An easy question to ask, how do you create a baddy. It’s a complex question to answer. They come from everywhere. The crimes that I use in my books often come from newspapers and magazines and things that have actually happened in the real world. So real miscreants have been at the heart of those stories to begin with. But the crime story, the fictional crime story, demands something else. It demands that the criminal be interesting and charismatic. And if you’ve ever met any real criminals, they very often are not. There aren’t too many Hannibal Lecters out there in the real world, if any. Even the most rococo serial killer in real life is usually quite a bland individual when you end up interviewing them. So you’ve got to heighten reality in a way. And I’ve always been fascinated by Jekyll and Hyde. I mean, that’s my kind of ur text, is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Because within us, I think we all have the potential to be good and to be evil, or at least to carry out acts of evil in human acts, given the right set of circumstances. And what I’m interested in is what pushes people over the line or what leads them into that territory. But it’s a complicated thing. But when I get a good villain, I’m very loath to let them go. So Morris Gerald Cafferty, Big Ger, who is the gangster figure, Rebus’s nemesis in my books, was only meant to be around for one book. He was meant to have a very small role in book three, but he just demanded that I bring him back. And there was a lot I could do with him and Rebus, that Holmes and Moriarty thing, where they are quite similar in some ways. Their backgrounds are similar, but their paths, the trajectory of their lives have been very different. But there’s an empathy there. And that’s what I enjoy, is playing with that empathy. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? IAN RANKIN I think, perhaps, authors themselves must be morally questionable people, in order to write about morally questionable characters, we do contain multitudes. All the facets of every character I’ve ever created exist in some form inside my head. Therefore, I am all the goodies and all the baddies in my books, or I contain the possibility of containing all these people. So that’s interesting to me, that I can get inside the head of someone without having met too many terrible people in real life. Well, how would you know? A very good Mr. Hyde is going to hide behind Dr. Jekyll, and you will never know that you’re meeting a terrible person. Perhaps, later on they will be revealed to have been a terrible person, but you might not know it at the time. And there’s been one or two cases where I have met people who’ve done terrible things, or I’ve been invited to meet people in jail or in secure psychiatric hospitals who’ve done terrible things. And very occasionally, I’ve shied away from it. So I do have-- there are places I don’t want to go. And one Rebus book in particular, Dead Souls, featured a paedophile who’s been released from jail into the community without the community being told this person has served time for paedophilia. And when the local community found out, they basically go after this guy with torches and pitchforks. The scenes from his perspective, I was going to write in the first person, and I did start to do that. But as the parent of two young children, I thought, I really don’t want empathy with a paedophile, certainly, at this stage of my life. So I ended up writing those sections in the third person to put some distance between me and the person who had done very terrible things that I was trying to write about. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you want readers to identify with your baddies? If so, do you use any strategies to help them identify with these characters? IAN RANKIN Crime fiction is very much connected to myth and folklore and folk tales. And sometimes the baddy just needs to be a baddy. The wolf just needs to be a wolf, disguised as a grandma. But other times, you want somebody who’s morally complex, who’s a much more complicated character. I mean, I think Cafferty in some ways is a very complicated character. He has a moral code, for example. And he is, as an older man, now surrounded by younger, more venal, wannabe gangsters who do not have the moral code that he has. Remember that old story about the Krays? They always looked after their own. They were lovely to their mum. They only really attacked you if you had done something to them. Mind you, it might not have been very much that you’d done to them and they would come at you all guns blazing as it were, or all axes swinging. But there is something of the beauty in the beast in someone like, Cafferty, I was going to say, but let’s look at Hannibal Lecter again. I mean, Thomas Harris became completely fascinated by the character of Hannibal Lecter. And in the book, Hannibal actually starts to give him a backstory. And that’s when I ceased to be very interested in. I was much more interested in Hannibal Lecter when I didn’t know-- there was no reason for him to do what he did. There was no horrible story in his background. Nothing happened to him in childhood to explain what he did. He just did what he did. He was a cannibal. A very charming cannibal. And he was an incredibly charismatic character. He was certainly much more interesting than someone like Clarice Starling, the cop who’s trying to bring him down, who seems incredibly bland by comparison. You’d much rather go to a dinner party with Hannibal Lecter than Clarice Starling. You just wouldn’t eat the main course necessarily. There is something about a character who is different from us. Who is evil, who is a killer, who is a serial killer, an assassin, a psychopath. We are absolutely fascinated by the flaws in the human beings around us because we wonder how many flaws we ourselves have that we manage to tiptoe over every single day. I mean, it’s fascinating to me. Why don’t more of us kill people? Why don’t more of us break the law. And when things start to break down, when society starts to break down, you realise how fragile that skin is between people behaving themselves and people misbehaving between order and anarchy. And a lot of the criminals in my books, are making the reader ask themselves that question about order breaking down, about why some people do this and other people don’t. Why don’t I as a reader do this? I could get away with it. People often say that. But crime writers surely is a crime writer. You could get away with the perfect murder. And you go yeah, but I don’t want to. I do plenty of that in my fiction. That’s what keeps me sane and grounded is the fact I write about this stuff in fiction. I don’t have to think about it too much in the real world. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you worry about the likeability of your villains and how do you approach their likeability? IAN RANKIN I did have a bit of a slight issue with my figure, Cafferty, a few books ago when someone came at a reading to get a book signed and they said, I love Cafferty. He’s such a big, cuddly bear of a guy. And I thought, oh, he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be someone you fear, someone you don’t want to get too close to. And I realised that maybe I’d been doing what Thomas Harris did with Hannibal and just falling in love a little bit with my character, enjoying writing about him too much. And so he became safer. So I sort of drew that out. In the next book I wrote, I made sure that he went and hit somebody with a hammer and some nails and pinned them to the floor of a boxing gym. Because I felt that he was getting too comfortable-- I was getting too comfortable around him, and readers were getting too comfortable with him. And I did want him to be a bit more dangerous than he was proving to be. So there’s that. I did write one non-Rebus book years ago, which I enjoyed a lot, called Bleeding Hearts. And it was-- the challenge for me was that the main character is a hired assassin. I thought, OK, so he’s the villain of the piece, but actually I want him to be the hero. I want the reader to empathise with him. So what I did was give him a flaw. He’s a haemophiliac. So if anybody punches him or bruises him or whatever, he can die. And then I’ve got a private detective who’s out to catch him. And that private detective I made a scurrilous seedy figure, really sleazy guy. And so that made the reader empathise and sympathise with the assassin rather than the forces of law and order who are out to bring the assassin down. Yeah I mean, in some ways, The Day of the Jackal was an extraordinarily groundbreaking book, not only because we all know that the killer doesn’t get away with it. So where’s the tension? Where’s the threat? Where’s the danger? But the guy’s a professional assassin, and yet we’re absolutely riveted by him all the way through. He’s the-- it’s his eyes we are looking at the world through. And that was a really daring thing to do at that time. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you rationalise villainous behaviour? If so, how? IAN RANKIN Criminal behaviour can be explained away socioeconomically, psychologically, in terms of the background of the person. Sometimes it can. I mean, sometimes people are just bad. And I did years ago make a TV series for Channel 4, a documentary series about evil. It was going to be a series about crime and punishment. But in fact, the producer and I sat down and we just thought, no, we’ve got to go back to basics. Before we can talk about crime, we need to talk about good and evil. And so it became a series, a three part series on that. And the first episode was, what do we mean when we say evil? Does it mean the same thing in different cultures at different periods in history, or is it malleable? Number two, where does it come from? Nature or nurture. Are people born bad, or made bad by circumstance, or chemical imbalances in the brain or whatever. And then episode three was, what do we do about it? And I was able to-- I got extraordinary access. I mean, I was exorcised in the Vatican by the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. I didn’t know that was going to happen until it happened, but it did. I got access to a guy who was on death row in Texas, a drug addict, a member of a gang who had broken into a woman’s house and killed her to rob her in order to get drug money. And he’d been on death row for 12, 13, 14 years at that stage. And unknown to me, the producer/director got in touch with Ian Brady’s mother, the Moors murderer Ian Brady, to see if we could interview her about what it’s like to have a serial killer in the family. She passed that on to Ian Brady, who then replied to the director from Broadmoor secure hospital to say, no, no, Mr. Rankin doesn’t talk to my mother. He comes here and talks to me. And that was another point at which I said, no, I don’t want to do that. Thank you very much. Because once Ian Brady is inside your head, he ain’t leaving. It’s one thing to talk about and think about and write about fictional psychopaths, but when you meet these people in real life, you cannot then unmeet them. And Brady, I knew from a reading of his horrible nonfiction book, The Gates of Janus, glories and gets a thrill from playing mind games with people. That’s all he had left to him in Broadmoor was playing mind games with researchers, with people who communicated with him, wrote to him, and with the families of the victims. And he wouldn't give them closure by telling them where some of the bodies were buried. So I said, no, I don’t want to meet this guy and I won’t meet this guy. So I shied away from that. Which is a roundabout way of answering the question, but I am fascinated by evil. I am fascinated by the existence of evil. But very often when you talk to historians, psychiatrists, they will tell you that these people are very bland. The people who carry out these acts in themselves are very bland, nondescript people. They almost have no personality. It’s an incredible thing. You’re looking for Hannibal Lecter and you end up with the blandest person imaginable carrying out a terrible act of evil. TEXT ON SCREEN To what extent do you think readers form a relationship with your characters? IAN RANKIN There’s no doubt in my mind that my characters are more real to my readers than they are to me. People are very worried about John Rebus, my detective, his health, the fact he has very few friends, he drinks too much, until recently, he smoked too much. He’s now got emphysema, so he’s stopped smoking, but he's getting on a bit. He’s had to move from a second floor apartment to a ground floor because he can’t manage stairs anymore. They’re not worried about me, these readers. If I say I’ve got a terrible cold or the flu, just keep writing. But tell us about Rebus. What is Rebus up to? We’re really worried about him. And people like Cafferty as well. I was actually literally walking down the street where I live yesterday and a guy said to me, How’s Cafferty getting on? Because he knew that Cafferty lives in the same part of town as me and always has done. Now, that’s weird. My hero, John Rebus, lives in the street I lived in when I was an impoverished student and started writing these books. But when I got successful, I kind of started to move into the circles, the social circles, that Cafferty, the successful businessman/gangster moves in. So I had a big Victorian house in a lovely tree lined street, and that’s where he lived. And then he moved to a penthouse apartment in a new development in Central Edinburgh. And blow me down a couple of years later, I moved there as well. Now I could say that wasn’t my choice. That was my wife’s idea for us to downsize and move to this area of town. But maybe subconsciously, I’ve been following the bad guy around Edinburgh rather than following the good guy around Edinburgh. So potentially, if a psychoanalyst got me on the couch, they would find us a lot more of the evil character, the bad character, the nasty character in me then there is the goody. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you explicitly create villains so that readers will have a degree of empathy with them? IAN RANKIN I don’t think I think too much about the degree of empathy readers will have for villains when I create the villain. The villain is necessary. I mean, I’m possibly not the best person to talk to about this. I was never-- I didn’t read crime fiction until I started writing. I’m the only crime writer I know who was not a fan of crime fiction before they began writing crime fiction. I grew up with the American novel, with cinema, with TV cop shows, and with Scottish literature. I grew up with Jekyll and Hyde. I grew up with dark Gothic tales set in Scotland or written by Scottish authors. And the first Rebus novel I wrote was meant to be an updating of the theme of Jekyll and Hyde. You were meant to think the detective Rebus, who was only going to be around for one book, you were meant to think he’s potentially the killer. He has blackouts during that book. He wakes up not remembering what he did the night before. He has a locked room in his flat. And I was trying to make the reader think this person is potentially Jekyll and Hyde. But then he stuck around, so then he suddenly wasn't that anymore. But I don’t think too much about it. I just-- I start with a theme that I want to explore, a question I want to explore about the way the world is. I find a plot that allows me to explore that theme and then I think OK, what characters do I need? So oftentimes when I start a book, I have no idea who the killer is. And it’s only through writing the first draft of the book, i.e. playing detective, getting to know the characters and how they connect to each other and people’s possible motives, it's only then that I start to discover who the culprit is and why they did what they did. And that’s always worked for me. I don’t know if it would work for too many other writers, but at one book, The Hanging Garden, I think I was on the second draft before I worked out who the killer was. I just had these big blank bits that had to be filled in later on, and it was only in reading through the first draft that I start to go, well, wait a minute, if he did that, then possibly this person who we met earlier in the book might have been connected to that and might have ended up killing him because of that. That all came about quite late on in the process. And some people would panic at that. I think a lot of writers would panic at not knowing where a story is meant to go. James Ellroy, famous American crime writer, writes 300-page synopses of his books before he starts. I start with a handful of pages, usually which run out by the time I’ve got to page 50 because by then, I’ve used up all the ideas I had. And by then, hopefully the story has gone off on a tangent that’s quite interesting. I just follow it. I just grab on to the story and hope it will lead me in the direction it wants me to go in and reveal to me who the killer is and why. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you consider how your characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion (in the reader)? What about if they are villains? IAN RANKIN I don’t think I think too much consciously about the effect these books are having. I mean, very occasionally, someone will come up to me after a book has been written and said, oh, I didn’t like that for this reason, or I was worried about that or these books have written, for example, about perhaps with a transsexual or a cross-dressing killer, which I’ve done for shock effect. And it’s only years afterwards that a member of the trans community said to me, I really didn’t like that you did that. You only did it for a cheap thrill. And they’re absolutely right. And now I would probably think a little bit more, as a man in his 60s, I would think a little bit more about my writing and why I do things and how I use characters, because characters are people. They reflect real people often. I would think more about that than I did when I was a young, vigorous man on his way up, not caring what he did to get his books noticed. A lot of books out there, to get them noticed I used to think you had to put in lots of gore and violence and rococo serial killers. I didn’t stick with that for too long, but for a short period of time, I thought that’s what gets you noticed as a crime writer. That was very much learning the lesson of Hannibal, I guess. No, I don’t think too much about that. I would hate people to lead their whole lives based on the way Rebus leads his life because they probably wouldn’t have a very long, and happy, and healthy lifestyle. He’s certainly not an advert for a healthy lifestyle. Cafferty probably is much-- the villain is probably a much better advert for a healthy lifestyle. I don’t think he smokes, he doesn’t drink to excess, he doesn’t hang out in pubs the way Rebus does. It’s only afterwards that you think about the effect, I think, that these books have had when you start to talk to readers who’ve read the book. And they’ll say, oh, that was an interesting thing you did there, or my granddad was in a POW camp so that was really interesting to me that he used internment camps in that book, or et cetera, et cetera. I mean-- I guess. Does the author have any moral role to play? I don’t want to be on a soapbox, tub-thumping, saying this is the way the world is because I say so, and this is how you should lead your life because I say so. I think readers are much more nuanced, and much more articulate, and intelligent than that. They don’t need me laying things out for them in that way. What I give them are interesting and intriguing stories, I hope, that beneath the surface, if you want to investigate or dig a little bit further, will perhaps be saying something or asking a question about politics, about society, about social injustice, issues of people smuggling, people trafficking, immigration, xenophobia, racism. I mean, these are all meat and drink to the crime writers, especially in the current day, but I’m not a politician. I’m a writer who makes a living by entertaining people. So I’ve got to write. My prime objective is to write something where people will keep turning the pages. And if they find any moral value in that, below that, in the deep structure of the book, then great. If they just read it as an entertainment, to pass the time on a flight, or a train, fine. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you faced the situation where readers get offended/outraged by your characters, and does this ever affect the way you subsequently write? IAN RANKIN There have been a few times when I’ve been confronted. Dead Souls, a book about a paedophile released into the community, was based on a true story that happened in Stirling. And I did an event in Stirling, and sitting in the front row was the real woman who had been responsible for gathering up the community to chase this paedophile out of their community. And she was basically tapping the book and nodding at me. She knew that it was her, that this character in my book was very much based on. So she came up at the end, but she was fine. I mean, we had a nice conversation, an intelligent conversation about the role that her character played, which was different from the real life role that this woman had played. I’ve had immigrants come up to me, asylum seekers, because in one of the books, Fleshmarket Close, there were asylum seekers. And they said, oh did you base that on us? Did you ’cause we were mentioned in a newspaper story and maybe, you know. But again, politely, it didn’t seem to me that they were outraged. One member of the trans community was annoyed that I’d used a cross-dresser as a killer in one book. But again, we had a nuanced debate about it-- not a debate, a conversation. And I’m always learning. I mean, I’m always learning. I don’t think I pull my punches too much. I mean, I am a much more liberal figure in reality than most of my characters I write about. Rebus is much more of an Old Testament guy. He sees the world in absolute, good and evil, black and white. If you’ve crossed the line and become a criminal, to him, you’re always going to be a criminal. But then I’ve got a character called Siobhan Clarke, who is a younger detective, and she’s much more liberal. She’s college educated, she’s a bit more like me in many ways. And she will have an argument with Rebus, or a conversation with Rebus and try to change his mind, as I do, about the way the world would is. To say, and look, there are gradations, there are shades of grey, it's not binary. And I do worry that in this world that we now inhabit, which is much more online-driven than it used to be. Things do seem to be becoming much more binary. There’s not much room on the internet, on social media, for nuanced debate and for middle ground. Very quickly, people have knee jerk reactions. Very quickly, people move into their tribes and only listen to the members of their tribe, and don’t listen to the opposing parties or people who are not a member of the tribe. And so you get entrenched views. Literature is about the opposite of that. Literature is about connecting people. It’s about telling people there’s another world in this. There are other cultures out there. There are things you should know about. There are things I want to tell you about and I do worry that the online world doesn’t have that nuance and doesn’t have that ability to debate in the way the novel can start a debate. And a lot of the crime novels being written now by younger writers, specifically not police procedurals, but any psychological crime novels and standalones, as we call them. The crime novel has always examined the world around it and examined the fears of its contemporary audience. And right now, the fears of the contemporary audience are things like online stalking, people pretending to be your friend online and are not, CCTV being everywhere, people being spied on, people being harassed online. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories around that. People are starting to-- some people are falling into. So a lot of that now in the crime fiction that is being written. It’s fascinating to me that the contemporary crime novel more and more, of course, is dealing with the fears, the potential fears of its contemporary audience. TEXT ON SCREEN What techniques do you use to transport readers into the world you create? IAN RANKIN I write about Edinburgh predominantly. That’s the main place I write about. And I live in Edinburgh. I’m talking to you from Edinburgh. I’ve been living in Edinburgh more or less since I was 18 years old and came here to go to university. It’s a city I know pretty well. And a lot of people who’ve been to Edinburgh visited as tourists or on business or whatever, think they’ve got an idea of what Edinburgh is like as well. So that’s great. I’ve got a recognisable city that I’m starting in, and it’s a small city. It’s not sprawling like Los Angeles or Athens. So it’s containable in fiction in a way that a much bigger city might not be containable. My characters can roam through Central Edinburgh very, very easily, very quickly. It didn’t take long to get from one end of Edinburgh to the other. So there’s that. I’ve always read-- I’ve always read novels from a very young age. And you learn tricks along the way. You learn how to present a place, even if it’s a fictitious place. You learn how to present it in a way that very quickly means that readers can feel they know it too. For the last Rebus novel I wrote, A Song for the Dark Times. It was meant to be set in a real town on the north coast of Scotland called Tongue. And I went to Tongue to explore it and thought oh no, this won’t do. Tongue is too big, too populous, too much is going on. There are too many facilities here. I want somewhere smaller. So I invented a village a few miles outside Tongue and I called it Naver. N-A-V-E-R. Does not exist. There is a River Naver, but there’s no village called Naver. And I thought OK, we’ll have a primary school, it’ll have a pub, it’ll have a shop, it’ll have a post office, perhaps, it’s only open a few hours. A scattering of houses, and people will work in this industry, or that industry, or be self-employed, or be retired. And you just start very quickly with a few brush strokes to put together the place where you’re setting the book. And then because Rebus is Rebus, he’s a guy who likes to get to know a place by walking through it, by walking around it, by going to the pub, by meeting local people, wherever he is in the world, he does that. And that introduces the reader very quickly to the people who live in this village. So I do that. And the big question I had early on in this series, when I was young, was do I make-- how much is it a real Edinburgh in the books and how much is it a fictitious place? And in the early books, it was much more of a fictitious Edinburgh. Rebus drank in fictional bars. Rebus went to fictional parts of Edinburgh. But then people in Edinburgh said, oh, that’s obviously that housing scheme with a different name. And that’s obviously that pub that he’s drinking in, but you’ve given it a different name. And he worked in a police station in a fictitious street. Great London Road does not exist. There’s a street called London Road, but there is no Great London Road. So four books into the series, I think I’ve burned down his fictitious police station and moved him into a real police station, and moved him into a real bar, The Oxford Bar, where I happened to drink, and where a lot of cops happened to drink in the old days. And started more and more to use real bits of Edinburgh. Now I will still use fictional bits of Edinburgh if something horrible has happened. I don’t want to disrespect people living in tough parts of town when they are doing their best to make these places habitable. These parts of town, a nice place to bring up kids and stuff. So if something horrible is happening, I will lightly fictionalise the area of town I’m talking about. But Edinburgh folk know roughly where I am. It’s just I’m doing my best not to disrespect real people who are being brought up in much tougher circumstances, than the circumstances I happen to live in. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you ever created an amoral world (i.e. a world which is entirely morally deviant, as opposed to a world where just some of the characters are morally deviant)? If so, did you have any strategies for helping readers imagine such a world? IAN RANKIN A completely amoral world. The world with just bad people and no good people. It’s a tough one to pull off, you know. Even when you produce characters who are intrinsically bad, sometimes empathy gets you or sympathy gets you. And you start having a kind of soft spot for them, and you make them a little bit less nasty than would otherwise be the case. I’m struggling to think of anything. I mean, I’ve written-- I wrote a short story set in hell. A long, long time ago, in the waiting room for hell. Don’t ask me what it’s called, I can’t remember. And it didn’t feature any cops or anything. It was people sitting in a very hot pub that’s getting hotter, and you start to realise between the lines that they’re actually waiting to go to hell. I did write a comic book once, a graphic novel, called Dark Entries, which was part of the John Constantine, Hellblazer series, but it’s a standalone 200-page comic book which takes place in hell. And that was pretty interesting. But the demons in hell pass their time by watching Big Brother, so that’s quite nice. Yeah, it’s a tough one. I do think that people have redeeming features. I think that’s possibly my flaw. So it’s very hard for me to conceive of writing a story that’s all nasty without the possibility of good intruding. I did my PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark. Muriel Spark is a wonderful Scottish novelist. She wrote a fantastic crime novel called The Driver’s Seat, if you don’t know it, you should read it, about a victim looking for someone to kill them, basically. Spoiler alert. But that’s a fairly venal world that she writes about because the guy doesn’t want to carry out the act, but she kind of makes him do it in a way. So who’s the goody here and who’s the baddy? Muriel Spark was very good at that. Throughout her career, she wrote about these people and you were never sure if they were good or bad or contained elements of both. Miss Jean Brodie is both a hero and a villain of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for example. And there’s a quote from Muriel Spark, which is what I’m getting at, where she said all human beings have within them the ability to do good and the ability to do evil. And what crime fiction investigates is that point where the line was crossed. Why did they cross the line? Who crosses the line? And why don’t more of us cross the line? I remember for that series on evil I did about the nature of evil, I did interview a historian who had looked at people who’d been near the end of World War Two, people in Poland, I think. Men of a couple of villages were rounded up by the Nazis and-- one village sorry, were rounded up by the Nazis and said, look, we’re going to attack the village over there and you’re going to come and kill all the villagers with us. Take one step forward if you will do that. And what this guy had done was go back and interview as many of the people as he could find, the ones who took a step forward and the ones who didn’t. And often the ones who took a step forward said, I did it because the guy next to me did it. I did it because I was afraid what would happen to me if I didn’t do it. It was that kind of thing. Taking one step forward meant you were going to take part in an atrocity. And I was, I’m fascinated by that. Taking that one step forward is what’s at the back of my mind when I write a lot of my crime fiction. Muriel Spark comes back to that in The Mandelbaum Gate, which is a book about-- well, she was in Jerusalem when-- I’m going to forget his name now, Adolf Eichmann, was being put on trial. And Eichmann-- she went to court to actually watch some of it. And Eichmann’s defence was, you know, I just followed the rules, I just followed the orders, I was just a bureaucrat. I wasn’t doing the killing. I was just a bureaucrat shoving bits of paper around. And it’s extraordinary that how many of the Nazis, when you actually look at it, were just basically bureaucrats who thought they were doing a job.

Craig Robertson is a former journalist and now full-time author writing crime novels based in contemporary Glasgow. His crime series centres around DS Rachel Narey and police photographer Tony Winter. His first novel, Random, was a New York Times bestseller. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you create a ‘baddy’ and how do they emerge in your imagination? CRAIG ROBERTSON When I go about creating a new character, whether it’s a villain or a good guy, the process is the same. And I think the process has to be the same. I have to treat the villain with the same respect in terms of the writing process as I have a protagonist. So I need them to be fully fleshed. I need them to be three dimensional. I need to know about their motivation. And I think that’s probably, in terms of the process, the most important part. I need to know what they want. And I need to know why they want it. So it helps me to know the background. Even if sometimes that background doesn’t appear on the page, I need to know. I need to know their makeup. I need to know what drives them. And I think that’s equally as important, regardless of whether the character is, in inverted commas, ‘good or bad’. If I don’t know where they come from and what they want, then it’s unlikely I can let the reader believe fully in that. In terms of whether they spring forward fully fleshed, no, sadly, most often, they don’t. And that is a process-- an organic process-- that they become more alive to me during the writing of the book, and quite often, I might be 1/3, 2/3 of the way in before something else. I learn more about them, and then it’s a question of going back and seating that in so that by the end of the process, I need to know as much about them as if they were sitting in the room beside me, as if they were a member of my own family, although, in many cases, they were better or worse than members of my own family. So I need to know them as well as I can. TEXT ON SCREEN How do you approach writing characters who behave in morally questionable ways? CRAIG ROBERTSON By the very nature of writing a crime novel, we are raising moral questions. As crime writers we have various tasks, the first one being simply to entertain the reader. We have to have them coming away having enjoyed the book, to have been thrilled or scared or amused. Well, we’d like also to pose questions about society. That is a large part of what drives us to do what we do. By the very nature of that, we’re at the edges of it. And we need morally questionable acts in the book, and so people have to commit these. So it’s an imperative that we have people behaving in morally dubious ways, and the book would not work without that. So it’s down to us to explore why they do them. And that’s maybe the key part of our books, as much as our reveal, as much as a twist or some big action scene, is we know why these things are being carried out. And our job is to explore them, let the reader ask questions. So we need people who are on the edge. It may be the ultimate sin of committing murder. It may be behaving badly, deception. Whatever it is, we need a reason for it. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you want readers to identify with your baddies? If so, do you use any strategies to help them identify with these characters? CRAIG ROBERTSON I think it’s important to us, the readers identify with our characters. Again, whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys, they have to identify with them. They don’t always have to like them or love them or support them, but they have to have a connection with them. To do that, again, the important thing is to make them as real as possible. Most people come in shades of grey, and so characters in a novel should as well. I never had much fun reading characters who are all good or all bad, because I don’t think that’s particularly realistic. So I want mine to have faults and I want them to have positive elements to their character. And if readers can buy into that, then it will work. And if they don’t buy into it, then I’m not doing my job and they’re not going to enjoy the book. So it’s about making them relatable, impactful, as much as being likeable. Likeable is a secondary thing. In many cases we don’t want them to be liked, because they are doing terrible things, but as long as there’s an understanding of why they’re doing it. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you worry about the likeability of your villains and how do you approach their likeability? CRAIG ROBERTSON When it comes to the likability of villains, I guess there’s two questions. One is, do you worry that people don’t like them? And do you worry that they do? And I think the answer to both is the same, is you have to write your character for who they are and not get yourself bogged down whether people are going to be on their side or not, because people will take different sides. And that’s OK. The main character from my first novel, it was written first person from the point of view of a killer. Now, he’s not meant to be likable, but there is questions of empathy. And I know that readers took either side of that, and that’s OK. There's no right or wrong answer here. So the character has to be who they are. And that’s key, and you cannot veer away from that. And worrying about the likability would be a mistake. It’s not like going to school and want everybody to be on your side. It’s treat them as they are. TEXT ON SCREEN To what extent do you think readers form a relationship with your characters? CRAIG ROBERTSON I think if readers don’t form a relationship with my characters, our characters, then we’re really not doing our job and the book will not work. There has to be a symbiotic relationship from writer to character to reader. Again, they may not like them. That’s OK. Many characters are meant not to be liked. They’re meant to be hated or feared. But there has to be a relationship there. The reader has to be immersed with the character, involved with the character. They can root for them, or they can boo them. But if they ignore them, then we’re lost. So whatever message we’re trying to get across, whatever story we’re trying to tell, it’s vital that readers are invested in the characters. Likability, very much a second option, but they have to have a relationship with them. If they ignore them or don’t care about them, the book’s not going to work. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you explicitly create villains so that readers will have a degree of empathy with them? CRAIG ROBERTSON The question of empathy with villains is a tricky one. And I think it varies author to author, and it certainly varies book to book. I’ve had villains who are mostly off page, whose identity of being the villain or the killer is not revealed till later in the book. So in those instances it’s not as important. But I’ve written three, four books where the villain, the killer is upfront and obvious, in plain sight. And then in at least two of those cases I have sought empathy, sympathy. The terms are not necessarily that useful. If I can make my reader understand-- and I know I’ve sometimes toyed with their emotions of putting them on the side of the villain. And they don’t always like that. I’ve had people say, mainly jokingly, you made me root for someone who’s been killing people. And I haven’t felt uncomfortable with that. And I took that as a bit of a badge of honour. I’m fine with that. Again, people don’t come in black and white. They come in shades of grey. And if we’re going to have any understanding of the human psyche, then at times, we’re going to be on one side or the other. So I have invested characters with empathy, and that’s, again, about making them real, about motivations. You might not agree with what someone does, but if you have a sense of why they’ve done it and think, well, maybe if I was pushed to the edge and in that circumstance, I might have done the same thing. Then I think readers will go along with that. They’ll buy into that if you do it properly. TEXT ON SCREEN Do you consider how your characters might impact the reader and whether they offer the opportunity for self-expansion (in the reader)? What about if they are villains? CRAIG ROBERTSON I think it’s inevitable that our characters should impact on our readers. Now, they ought to be invested enough in them that they care about the results of their actions, the consequences, about what happens to them. Are our characters going to change readers? That seems less likely. I do not have the fear, I’ve never had the fear that writing about a killer is going to encourage a reader to go out and act in some kind of nefarious way. I don’t think that’s likely. Anyone who was minded to do that was minded to do that anyway. I’m not writing a how-to manual. I don’t have worries on that front. We do encourage readers to think about situations, for good or for bad. If they find themselves empathising with a villain, I would think they can see the consequences of this villainous action, and they’re much less willing to act that out. I don’t think that we are in any danger of turning people to a life of crime or to commit murderous acts. I’m hoping that that’s the case. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you faced the situation where readers get offended/outraged by your characters, and does this ever affect the way you subsequently write? CRAIG ROBERTSON I think I’m lucky enough not to have had too many angry letters of complaint, people being offended by what my characters do. I think most crime fiction readers understand, A, that it’s fiction. And, B, that by the nature of it, we are going to have characters who do terrible things. So they expect that. So it’s happened that people have been outraged, maybe sometimes in a couple of my earlier books, at the level of violence that’s there. People can be outraged at that, and they are because not everyone wants the same level of that. Some are just not ready for it at all. And yet I have taken feedback on board, particularly early on. And I think you’d be foolish not to listen to your readers. If enough people tell you something, then you-- maybe you should be buying into that. So yeah, there is a relationship there. It’s an education process both ways. But at the end of the day, you have to make your own decisions. Learn from feedback, but you have to write your own books. TEXT ON SCREEN What techniques do you use to transport readers into the world you create? CRAIG ROBERTSON I think to bring readers into the world that we create is by making things believable, relatable, that they can think, well, yeah, I know someone like that. I’ve been to a place like that. I like to use place as much as possible. Most of my books are set in and around Glasgow. And I like to use the landmarks, the people, the characteristics of the place. So if I can bring that alive and inject my books with that, then I believe people are going to buy into it. So it’s about taking them on a journey, and you want to play with their minds along the way. But we create a world that they can walk the streets with us. That’s the whole idea. As a writer, sometimes I think when I’m in the shoes of a character, it’s a bit like being an actor in that you take on that persona for the short time that you’re writing their personality. And you try to do the same with the reader. You try to put them in the cast. You try to put them on the street so that they feel that they’re there. And if we get that right, then they’re deep in that book and they’re going to stay in that book until they’re done with it. TEXT ON SCREEN Have you ever created an amoral world (i.e. a world which is entirely morally deviant, as opposed to a world where just some of the characters are morally deviant)? If so, did you have any strategies for helping readers imagine such a world? CRAIG ROBERTSON I’ve never created a world or a book where everyone is amoral or deviant, mainly because I don’t believe such a world exists. I don’t want to be in such a world. I don’t want to write about such a world. I think we have enough problems in society today that we not have to create a dystopian world where everything is bad. So it’s about showing the dark and the light, and I think the contrast of that is quite often what makes a crime novel work. So if everything is bad, there’s no solution, there’s no salvation for anyone. So that’s not a world I want to get too deep into. So I want there to be shades, and I think that’s the way society works. And we want more light by the end of the book than dark. And if we’re going dark from start to finish, from a personal point of view, that’s no fun at all.

If you have enjoyed this course and are interested in further learning opportunities, explore the links below. Free courses There are other free courses from The Open University that might interest you, specifically: What happens to you when you read?: This course is considered to be the ‘sister’ course to the one you have just studied. Investigating a murder with forensic psychology and Forensic psychology: These two courses are psychological rather than literary based, but do focus on criminal psychology. If you’ve enjoyed the creative writing aspect, you might be interested in Start writing fiction: characters and stories. Qualifications If you have enjoyed this course, and wish to study more fomally with The Open University then the following qualifications might be of interest. The Open University has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in psychology, forensic psychology and creative writing. 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(2020) ‘“No More Detective Work, or I’ll write to Mum!”: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and popular detective fiction’, J Pop Cult, 53, pp. 148–69. Shedlosky-Shoemaker, R., Costabile, K.A. and Arkin, R.A. (2014) ‘Self- expansion through fictional characters’, Self and Identity, 13(5), pp. 556–78. Siegel, D. (1999) The Developing Mind. New York, NY: Guilford. Slater, M.D., Johnson, B.K., Cohen, J., Comello, M.L.G. and Ewoldsen, D.R. (2014) ‘Temporarily expanding the boundaries of the self: motivations for entering the story world and implications for narrative effects’, Journal of Communcation, 64, pp. 439–55. Vezalli, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D. and Trifiletti, E. (2015) ‘The greatest magic of Harry Potter: reducing prejudice’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 45(2), pp. 105–21. Walkington, Z., Ashton Wigman, S. and Bowles, D.P. (2020) ‘The impact of narratives and transportation on empathic responding’, Poetics, 80, pp. 1–8. Wan, L.C. and Wyer, R.S. Jr (2019) ‘The influence of incidental similarity on observers’ causal attributions and reactions to a service failure’, Journal of Consumer Research, 45, pp. 1350–1368. Wimmer, L., Friend, S., Currie, G. and Ferguson, H.J. (2021) ‘Reading fictional narratives to improve social and moral cognition: the influence of narrative perspective, transportation, and identification’, Frontiers in Communication, 5, p. 611935. This free course was written by Zoe Walkington, Graham Pike and Siobhan Campbell. The authors would like to thank the Open Psychology Research Centre for supporting the development of this course, Hannah Parish for her expertise and kind help, Andrew Rix for his filming expertise, and Lin Anderson, Gordon Brown, Val McDermid, Sir Ian Rankin and Craig Robertson for their time and insights into the creative process. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence. The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course: Introduction and guidance Images Course image: left; From The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith published by Vintage. Copyright © Patricia Highsmith, 1955, 1959. Copyright renewed © Patricia Highsmith 1983 . Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited; Centre: Misery (1987), Stephen King, courtesy of Robert Giusti; Right: The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York Bloody Scotland festival logo: courtesy of Bloody Scotland board. 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If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Don't miss out If reading this text has inspired you to learn more, you may be interested in joining the millions of people who discover our free learning resources and qualifications by visiting The Open University – www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses. first person writing from the perspective of one of the characters in a story. For example, ‘I saw the dragon approaching’ would be an example of first person, while ‘The dragon approached the knight’ would be an example of writing using the third person. meta-analysis a technique in which a statistical analysis is carried out which combines the results from several different studies, in order to establish the answer to a specific question scale a psychological scale is a form of measurement (often a questionnaire) that measures some sort of construct that is of interest to psychologists. Psychological scales might measure things like ‘separation anxiety’ or ‘self esteem’ or ‘empathy’ self-concept how we conceptualise and think about ourselves, or the image we hold of ourselves self-concept how we conceptualise and think about ourselves, or the image we hold of ourselves.