Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

So it is not down to Trumpism alone. Should that be a relief? This paper tries to give an answer.

It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fiction’s effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.

The media landscape has changed dramatically in the last several decades. Technologies have diversified, access is vastly improved, and there has been an explosion in media choice, to name only a few of the most striking shifts. Political scientists are breaking ground investigating changes such as the decline in news audiences,1 the resurgence of partisan media,2 and the emergence of “soft news” mixing elements of news and entertainment.3 Yet significantly less attention has been paid to the lion’s share of contemporary media consumption: fiction and entertainment.

Fiction itself these days is often political.

Finally, a great deal of fictional media today is political media in the sense of containing themes and storylines pertaining to the exercise of power, the organization of society, and the ethics of political action. 

How they went about.

We argue here that our understanding of political media will remain incomplete as long as the political impacts of fiction remain under-studied and inadequately theorized in political science. Drawing from communications scholarship, we argue that applying a genre-based approach to the attitudinal effects of fiction offers a stronger foundation for generalizability than the prevailing topical approach in political science, which has examined effects driven by specific topics within idiosyncratic storylines. We focus on the totalitarian-dystopian genre due to its massive popularity and obvious political content. We define as totalitarian-dystopian any fictional work that portrays a dark and disturbing world dominated by an overwhelmingly powerful government or other controlling entity that acts to undermine core values such as freedom and justice. With the explosive rise of dystopian fiction in recent years, a number of “folk” hypotheses have arisen about the impact of this trend, making it an excellent test case for the study of fictional genre effects on political attitudes. 

They found for example

Scholars have found that the individual movie The Cider House Rules fosters more pro-choice attitudes toward abortion in the case of incest; exposure to particular episodes of Law and Order and other television dramas shapes attitudes toward the death penalty and the criminal justice system; and the film Wag the Dog increases support for conspiracy theories.

Not everything is dystopian.

Second, and more optimistically, some have also speculated that the frequent presence of ass-kicking heroines in specific examples of dystopian fiction may cultivate a greater sense of feminism. For instance, a critic at the LA Times wrote, “Katniss, with her bow and arrow, has inspired a generation to lift up their weapons, both literally (the surge in archery lessons) and otherwise.” 

Stay clear of consumers of the Hunger Games because ...

We also investigated whether prior exposure to the Hunger Games series, age, and gender moderated the effects of our treatment (table A3, in online Appendix A). Consistent with our expectations, prior exposure to Hunger Games was associated with being significantly more willing to justify violence. (Interacting prior exposure and an indicator for the Hunger Games treatment resulted in coefficients that were consistently positive but not statistically significant.)

Conclusions

Our research not only reinforces past work showing that people often fail to distinguish between fact and fiction in learning about the world, but also illustrates that the lessons of fiction may not be what they seem. While much ink has been spilled lamenting the darkness of the world presented through dystopian books and movies and analyzing the implications of Katniss as a feminist heroine, the actual impact of dystopian fiction like The Hunger Games and Divergent appears to be far afield from these anxieties. Rather than creating political cynicism in readers and viewers or showing them that girls can be powerful too—both lessons that are at this point probably amply supplied by the American news media and lived experience—dystopian fiction seems to be teaching them a more subtle and perhaps more concerning message: that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly.

These results should also highlight the peril for political scientists in assuming that fiction is just entertainment. The stories we tell ourselves have profound implications for how we think about political ethics and political possibilities, and as scholars of politics, we can and should do more to map out the effects of politically-inflected fiction and entertainment.

Fair enough, but these results could also highlight the fact for political scientists to assume that this fiction is perhaps based on real experiences with politics.