How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?

Abstract

Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story’s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (“Consider the world of Jane Eyre . . .”), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world. But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if a real person is in the character’s world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author’s implicit contract with the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only implicates as part of the work’s background.

Appendices

Appendix A

Stimulus passages from the novels and story collections of Experiment 1

Jane Eyre:

My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium. “Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonizing stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression--as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die. What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—WHY I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

From outside came the occasional cry of a night-bird, and once at our very window a long drawn catlike whine, which told us that the cheetah was indeed at liberty. Far away we could hear the deep tones of the parish clock, which boomed out every quarter of an hour. How long they seemed, those quarters! Twelve struck, and one and two and three, and still we sat waiting silently for whatever might befall.

Suddenly there was the momentary gleam of a light up in the direction of the ventilator, which vanished immediately, but was succeeded by a strong smell of burning oil and heated metal. Someone in the next room had lit a dark-lantern. I heard a gentle sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though the smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then suddenly another sound became audible—a very gentle, soothing sound, like that of a small jet of steam escaping continually from a kettle.

The Great Gatsby:

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

Appendix B

Norming experiment: Fame

To confirm our judgments of which individuals in Experiment 1 were more famous, we conducted a norming study. Thirty-one Mechanical Turk participants rated the fame of each real-world political leader from Table 1, on a scale from 1 (“least famous”) to 7 (“most famous”). Those we designated more famous received a mean rating of 3.99, and those we designated less famous a mean rating of 1.75, F(1, 30) = 307.72, p < .001, η_p² = .91. The names of the more and less famous political leaders appear in Table 1, with the more famous leader preceding the less famous one within each cell of Columns 2 and 3.

Appendix C

Norming experiment: Explicit mentions

The goal of Experiment 1 is to see whether people believe that real individuals can appear in the world of a novel, even if the novel never mentions them. We therefore picked real political figures whose names (see Table 1) do not appear in the novels, according to text searches. However, to make sure that people do not think the novels named these figures, we conducted a norming study. For each novel, we used the names of eight people—the four actual political leaders from Table 1 and four characters from the novel. For example, the characters from Jane Eyre were Edward Rochester, Bertha Mason, Helen Burns, and Adèle Varens. On each trial of the norming experiment, participants saw the eight names associated with a novel in a randomized list, and we asked the participants to rate each name according to how likely it is that the name appeared in the novel. The participants made their response by clicking a button along a scale labeled “very unlikely,” “unlikely,” “somewhat unlikely,” “somewhat likely,” “likely,” and “very likely.” We encoded these responses for analysis as numbers from 1 (“very unlikely”) to 6 (“very likely”). Each participant saw four trials in random order, each trial corresponding to one of the four novels.

Fifty Mechanical Turk participants took part in the study. The mean rating for the real people was 2.84 (between “unlikely” and “somewhat unlikely”) and for the characters 4.21 (between “somewhat likely” and “likely”), F(1, 49) = 70.08, p < .001, η_p² = .59. The purpose of this norming experiment was to see if participants who are similar to those of Experiment 1 could reliably distinguish the real political figures from the fictional characters. We therefore recruited participants for the norming experiment in the same way as in Experiment 1. These data therefore include participants who had not read some of the works. However, the results are similar if we omit data from participants who hadn’t read the relevant book. Mean ratings from the remaining participants were 2.56 for real people and 4.52 for fictional ones, F(1, 49) = 60.41, p < .001, η_p² = .55.

Appendix D

Attribution of people and place

Experiment 1 asked participants whether fictional worlds could contain particular people, but this leaves uncertain how people construct these worlds on their own. Do people also populate fictional worlds with real individuals when they are under no constraints to do so? To find out about this, we conducted a follow-up study with a new group of participants, using the same novels and passages that appeared in Experiment 1. This time, however, we asked participants to “Please imagine that you are an observer of the action that takes place in the book. You exist along with the characters and have access to all the information that a normal person in that world would have. We would like you to ask yourself what people and places you would be able to know about as an individual in that world.” The instructions also told participants to “Please describe a specific individual, not just a type of person or place.”

For each novel, participants read the same information about the novel (author, publication date, and the name of the narrator) that we had used in Experiment 1, but we omitted information about the real-world political figures. They also read the appropriate passage from the novel (the one in Appendix A). We then asked the participant to consider the world of the novel and to write the description of four people and four places from that world. Participants typed this information in text boxes. The order of the novels was randomized anew for each participant. After entering their descriptions for all four novels, participants then saw each of their own descriptions, and they indicated whether the description was of a fictional or a real individual by clicking on a radio button. The study balanced whether participants first produced descriptions of people or descriptions of places, and the order of the response choices (“fictional” or “real”). Forty Mechanical Turk workers took part in the study.

In examining the results, we first eliminated any cases in which a participant repeated a person or place for a given novel, uninformative or irrelevant responses, responses taken directly from the passage or from the description of the novel (e.g., “the parish clock”), responses that consisted of just a single word (e.g., “house”), responses that were not of people or places (e.g., “easy-going”), and cases in which a participant listed a person when asked for a place or a place when asked for a person. After this filtering, 699 responses remained.

The central point of interest is whether the participants included real people or places among these descriptions. In fact, they did. Of the total number of descriptions, 35% were real, according to the participants’ judgments at the end of the study. In the case of places, the real items were often well-known landmarks (e.g., “the grounds of Buckingham Palace”) or more ordinary places that could plausibly exist in the novels’ setting (e.g., “a dark foggy alleyway” and “the local hospital”). Similarly, real people included famous individuals from the same period (e.g., “Charles Dickens”) or more generic individuals that the participant could infer would exist in the same setting (e.g., “a shoe cobbler”). Fictional people or places were typically more specific individuals that the author might have included in the novel (e.g., “Mike Wiley, the bartender at Walsh Street pub”).

These results confirm the open-world theory’s claim that when people contemplate the world of a novel, they are willing to include in their representations individuals they regard as real. Participants believe that real people and places have a position in fictional worlds, even when these individuals are not specifically identified and even when there are no experimental demands to include them. This provides reassurance that the results of the main experiment are not an artifact of our means of eliciting responses.