Category Archives: Story Psychology

Leap of Faith or Creep of Faith?

The “leap of faith” story is not the only kind that occurs. Equally reflective of our own mind’s processes is the slow change story where the Main Character gradually shifts his perspective until, by the end of the story, he is seen to have already adopted the alternative paradigm with little or no fanfare.

Usually, in such stories, a particular dramatic scenario occurs near the beginning of the story and is then repeated (in some similar manner) near the end. The Main Character reacted one way in the first scenario and then the audience gets a chance to see if he responds the same way again or not. In the Slow Change story, the Main Character may never even realize he has changed, but we, the audience, are able to evaluate the worth of the journey the Main Character has been through by seeing whether the Main Character has been changed and whether that is for better or worse.

In our current Western culture, especially in Hollywood-style motion pictures, the leap of faith story is favored. In other media and cultures, however, the Slow Change story predominates. In theory, each reflects the way our minds shift belief systems: sometimes in a binary sense as a single decisive alternation, and other times in an analog sense as a progressive realignment.

How Characters Solve Problems

It is the nature of people and characters as well, to try and find a source of joy and a resolution to that which hurts them. This hurt might be physical suffering or mental torment. The resolution may be to rearrange one’s environment or to come to terms with the environment as it is. Regardless of the source of the inequity or the means employed to resolve it, all thinking creatures try to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. That is the primal force which drives us in our lives, and the dramatic force that drives a story.

If our environments would instantly respond to our desires and if our feelings would immediately adjust to new attitudes, all inequities between ourselves and our environments would be equalized at once. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Rather, to solve external problems we must apply effort to rearrange the material that surrounds us, and to solve internal problems we must adopt a series of paradigm shifts to arrive at a perspective that minimizes our anguish.

Good Intentions Between Characters

If we step into the story and see a misguided character doing hurtful things to others and even to ourselves, from OUR life experience we determine that character must be stopped. Perhaps we argue with them, try to educate them, fight with or kill them or just write them off, severing our emotional ties and letting them spiral down into self destruction because it is the only way to avoid being dragged down with them.

Or, we might argue with them and find ourselves convinced of their point of view, try to educate them but learn something instead, fight with them and lose or be killed, or be written off BY them or hold on to them and be dragged down as well, or drag them down with us.

The point is, both Main and Obstacle characters will feel they are right, believe in what they do, try to convince or thwart their counterpart and ultimately prove to be correct or misguided.

 

Character Life Experience

As we are driven by life experiences and since the experiences of each of us are unique, it is no wonder we come into conflict and confrontation over most everything we can think of. Stories are about the incompatibility of two life experiences as they relate to the best way to resolve an inequity.

If a character stands by his life experience, then it stands to reason his approach served him well in other scenarios. Similarly, his counterpart has had different life experiences that served him equally well. In the context of the current inequity in question, each life experience generates an approach incompatible with the other. In one context, each set of experiences was problem solving. In the current context, one will be seen to be problem solving, the other justification.

al Awlaki, the “Uncanny Valley” and Writing Empathetic Characters

Recently, al Awlaki (the infamous “American” Al Qaeda) was killed by American forces. He was viewed as a great threat because of his ability to speak to the domestic population of the United States in their own language and culture and to inspire terrorist acts by those susceptible to his message of jihad.

While these allegations are certainly true, they alone do not explain the intensity with which Awlaki was both feared and despised. In fact, there is another quality he possessed that amplified the trepidation and derision he precipitated: he fell into the “Uncanny Valley.”

“Uncanny Valley” is a term generally used to define any non-human entity whose attributes are just human enough to be disturbing. For example psychological test have been run that chart an empathy line against robots whose features range from fully mechanical to completely human in appearance. At first, the results were predictable: the more human the robot appeared, the more empathetic people were to it.

But, as the human qualities reached a point where they became “almost human” there was a sudden drop-off in empathy as steep as a cliff. In fact, the reaction to such an entity reached a point where it plummeted below zero empathy into the realm of negative empathy, documented as “revulsion.”

The same test was also run using stuffed animals and the results were essentially the same – our empathy increases as human likeness increases until a sharp break point is reached where additional increases quickly reverse the trend. Once the line hits bottom and as human similarity continue to increase, eventually empathy rises again into the positive, and ultimately reaches maximum when the non-human entity appears absolutely identical to a human, even though one knows it really is not.

Now this aspect of human psychology has tremendous implication for writers, especially in the creation and development of characters. While it has been explored directly in such works as the I, Robot novels by Asimov (and especially well handled in the movie, Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams) it is always at work in the relationship between an audience and the fictional entities that populate the stories it reads and watches.

Let me propose that the Uncanny Valley not only pertains to the visual qualities of non-human entities, but to how we intuitively sense their humanity, almost as if we were automatically and subconsciously performing a Turing Test on every person we meet.

I believe we are. I believe we are prepared to accept something totally alien as a risk of unknown potential, while any creature we can identify as of human essence is a known quantity and, therefore, a predictable risk at worst. But some one or some thing that is just off-kilter enough is loose-canon when it comes to threat. We might find ourselves lulled into complacency only to be set-upon when our guard is down.

For example, we are afraid of an earthquake or tornado because it is random and chaotic. We are afraid of bears in a different way because they share our emotions and we understand what they might do. But a Terminator or a demonic spirit is far more terrifying for while we are able to frame it as an entity in our minds, we are unable to fathom its motivations or to predict its behavior, which are often contrary to humanity.

In contrast, consider animated cartoons in which cars, cattle, or cantaloupes may all engender empathy from an audience because they are carefully (albeit intuitively) crafted to fall far enough from human-looking to avoid the Uncanny Valley on one side, and close enough to human in spirit to avoid the Uncanny Valley on the other.

Many of the disfigured humans of fiction are often drawn to revolt us in appearance while connecting to us in their humanity. And, of course, many characters are written to illustrate that even the most beautiful can have revolting souls.

Now for the sake of a mental exercise, consider how this holds true in real life. For example, most of us find the Elephant Man uncomfortable to look at, yet empathize deeply with his heart. But what of those in our own live who have been badly burned or born with physical defects? What must that life be like when you are constantly reminded, subliminally, that others shun you as non-human? There are lessons here for our spiritual growth and stories to be told.

Let’s shift gears, for a moment, and go to the opposite extreme – the science of mind, the neurology of psychology. If you go to Wikipedia and look up Uncanny Valley you’ll find graph that shows the sudden dip and re-rise of the empathy line.

I was immediately struck by how similar that line is to the “action potential” of a neuron in the brain. After a neuron fires, it is chemically inhibited from firing again immediately. Rather, the “action potential” goes from maximum, down a steep cliff during the actual firing to a negative action potential until the forces that lead to the ability to fire recharge.

I’m going to make a leap here and share with you an aspect of the psychology behind Dramatica – a theory we call Mental Relativity. As part of the theory we propose (because of what we have observed in our model of story structure) that dynamics in the electro-chemical operations of the brain are reflected, almost as fractals, in the high-level dynamics of psychological processes. Simply put, psychology exhibits sympathetic vibrations of the patterns of physical brain function.

Now, I realize there are no studies (to my knowledge) that explore this, but is absolutely is a prediction of the Mental Relativity theory. But why would this be? Consider one potential explanation…

It is one of our most essential survival tools to be able to recognize objects, patterns, edges, what is part of something and what is not. The same curve we see in neurons or in the Uncanny Valley actually is just a reflection of our ability to define the limit of things.

We use this to see a rock in our path or to determine if figure coming through the mist is a friend or foe. It is what allows us to describe the nature of an object or a person and the scope of an argument or a story.

And so, with an aspect of our minds that is so foundational and all pervasive, a wise author would give it heed when building characters to be attractive or off-putting, a wise person would think twice about from whom they turn away (and why), and as for al Awlaki, well, he was American enough to connect with those who felt isolated, but just a little bit too non-American to avoid our ire.