Archetypical resonance study brings new meaning to ‘know thy self’

Archetypical resonance study brings new meaning to ‘know thy self’

(December 2009 Issue)

By Jennifer Chase Esposito

Can your Netflix queue, your favorite homepage and your iPod playlists shed light on your personality? Absolutely, according to two University of New Hampshire researchers, who through a pilot study and a follow-up, have tested whether our associations with popular characters in our lexicon can act as our own personality barometer.

A research assistant in the marketing department at the UNH Whitemore School of Business and Economics, and a psychology professor and expert on emotional intelligence, respectively, Michael Faber, Ph.D., and Jack Mayer, Ph.D., had their study's results published in a June 2009 Journal of Research in Personality article titled, "Resonance to Archetypes in Media: There's Some Accounting for Taste."

Under Mayer's tutelage, Faber's goal was to demonstrate through archetypical pictures and descriptions that people's taste and preferences in popular media can somehow inform their personality.

The study comprised Faber's research conducted between 2005 and 2006 as part of his master's degree. It was sparked by undergraduate work at University of Michigan based in social personality psychology - an amalgamation of study that according to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, examines forces within a person such as attitudes, goals and traits and situational forces like social norms and incentives to better understand things like prejudice, attraction, friendship, group interaction and aggression.

Based on a mix of theoretical approaches, Faber and Mayer created a study on the premise that social cognition - a person's resonance with a person, place or thing - is a type of automatic processing; that once we see a character on stage, page or screen, we react to it fairly automatically, rather than thinking to ourselves when we see Yoda talking to Luke Skywalker, "Oh yes: In this movie he represents the age-old literary character of a wise sage handing down advice to the inexperienced youth."

The idea was that how people react to and are affected by characters in pop culture can predict their personal media preferences and life themes.

"To the best of our knowledge, this research has never been done before," says Faber, "so we had to do a pilot study so we could identify archetypical characters." Faber brainstormed a list of descriptors relative to media, music, art and television that were largely qualitative and gave it to 100 UNH undergraduate students who were asked to classify them according to a character category. That scale was then used with 125 additional participants in a second study, from which the actual research numbers came.

Faber and Mayer clustered people's answers into five archetypical categories: the knower (archetypical characters akin to sages, magicians and creators); the carer (care givers, lovers, "the innocent one," or just an overall good character); the striver (a hero or ruler); the conflictor (an outlaw or shadow figure); and every person, (a category comprising the carefree explorer, the jester, the person who lives within their means). Through their scale, they deduced that generally, someone identifying with a jester archetype would be more extroverted; that someone relating to a magician or sage likes to learn about the world and teach; and so forth.

"Our preference in pop culture - in 'rich culture' - appears to tell more about us than we ever thought possible," says Faber. That kind of self knowledge is useful in everything from advertising to matchmaking. The study can help give people a cursory map to themselves, as learning about who someone is through what they like versus who they think they are can be as helpful in a psychologist's office as it can be waiting in line at Office Max.

"You meet somebody at a bus stop and in conversation you find out they really like horror movies, metal music and playing WarCraft online. You get a really good picture of this person," says Faber. But, he says, compare that interaction to when you meet someone who uses everyday trait descriptors like, "I'm pretty ambitious, but not really a go-getter. I'm pretty organized...." "[That] is also helpful, but it's not so immediately inferred," says Faber. "It's much more relative to find out what people like and use that to really figure out what they're about."

The most intriguing application for this research, says Faber, is to be a way for people to increase their self knowledge; an unobtrusive measure of personality.

"I think this information is extremely useful in living our daily social lives....It's not just about traits. It's about life themes. And you find themes through media. You internalize attributes through characters."

But Faber reminds that a lot of what he and Mayer have found is conjecture. "I don't have any interest in pigeon-holing people," he says. "It's meant more to be a helpful diagnostic assessment tool for people who know what they like, but maybe don't know how it applies to their life and how it should apply to their life and what they can do."