Fictional heroes seen as political allies and villains as opponents

People think that Harry Potter, Spiderman and Gandalf would vote the same way they do, whereas Darth Vader, Cruella de Vil and Joffrey Baratheon would vote for the rival party.

New research from the University of Southampton shows how people in the UK and U.S. believe that fictional characters they admire would share their voting preferences, while those they dislike would vote the other way.

The paper “Heroes and villains: motivated projection of political identities” is published in Political Science Research & Method.

The researchers also found that around one in six people recalled the party affiliation of a charitable or corrupt politician in a news story, despite it not being revealed. Again, people thought the ‘good’ politician was from their party, while the ‘bad’ one was from the party they oppose.

Researchers say this political projection could be fueling polarization in politics.

“If we see ‘villains’ as belonging to the other side, then we also tend to associate more and more negative attributes with that group,” says Dr. Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, lead of the study from the University of Southampton. “This is not only bad news for polarization, but also makes us more easily susceptible to misinformation that confirms the existing biases we hold about the voters of certain parties.”

In the first of two studies, researchers from the University of Southampton and the University of Vienna surveyed 3,200 people in the UK and U.S.—1,600 from each country.

In a series of questions, people were presented with two familiar characters from popular franchises, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Games of Thrones and Star Wars.

They were asked which character they thought was more likely to vote Labor or Conservative (in the UK), or Democrat or Republican (in the US). The answers were then cross-referenced with information about the respondents’ political leanings and affiliations.

People were 20% more likely to project their own politics onto a hero than a villain. The effect was equally strong when assigning opposition politics to a villain, with respondents also 20% more likely to say a villain would vote for the opposing party than their own.

In the second study, around 1,600 people in the UK were shown one of two contrasting news stories about a local councilor—one in which the councilor donated money to a local charity and another in which they’d stolen money from the charity.

Respondents were then asked some questions about the story they had read, including one about which party the councilor represented—information that was missing in both stories.

Around one in six people falsely ‘remembered’ which party the councilor represented, with a strong tendency to see the charitable donor as a member of their party, and the thief as a member of their rival party.

When people who said they didn’t know or didn’t recall seeing the information were asked to guess, they also did so along partisan lines.

Dr. Turnbull-Dugarte said, “People believe heroes are more likely to belong to their group but can accept a proportion might not. Respondents were much more consistent when identifying a villain as belonging to the other group.

“In a context where polarization is high, projection appears to be more about defining who we are not, than who we are.”

The tendency to see heroes on their side and villains on the other was greater among those with stronger political identities. Those on the political left were also more inclined to do so than those on the right.

Dr. Turnbull-Dugarte added, “To overcome increasing political division, we need to recognize this tendency to project heroic and villainous traits along partisan lines and recognize that reality is always more complex and nuanced than our biases would have us believe.”