4.4 Identification with villains

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.