Social Cognition and Literary Villainy: from stereotype to
causal analysis
Enrique Cámara Arenas
Abstract
This paper starts from the premise that attention to the cognitive processes by
which readers/spectators construe certain characters as villains will lead to a
better understanding of literary villainy itself, and it will help us design
adequate concepts, tools and methods for its analysis and its academic
discussion. Whether we do it through unconscious first impressions (as in
stereotyping) or after thorough analysis, construing villainy is the result of
the observers‟ processing of external stimuli. The gradual development
undergone by Psychology and Social Cognition over the last decades may
offer literary scholars and critics very interesting tools and insights which
will make it possible to redefine and analyze aspects of villainy which,
outside the domain of psychology, can only be vaguely addressed and
described —such as a villain‟s charming or repulsive properties, or the
observer‟s tendency to sympathize, etc. I intend to examine the potential of a
number of psychological perspectives in defining, analyzing, classifying and
qualifying literary villainy.
Key Words: characterization, constructivism, reading, cognition, person
perception, personality types, folk-psychology, common-sense
*****
1.
Introduction
Renown scholars like M. Pfister (1988) or S. Chatman (1978),
adopting a clearly humanizing approach towards characters, have pointed out
the convenience of exploring psychology and sociology in search for
methods, concepts or specific semiotics which could help literary critics and
theorists to better understand and explain characters and characterization.
More recently, Lancaster professor J. Culpeper (2001) has begun to realize
what our precursors recommended. However, let me advance that I do not
turn to psychology, nor does Culpeper in my opinion, in the hope that it will
lead us to the discovery of things we have never seen before, but with the
idea that it may help us provide clear formulations of what we have already
discovered and so often felt after many centuries of exposure to fictional
villains. A deeper understanding of villainy will naturally emerge as we
approach it through a more precise and technical language, such as the one
we can derive from psychology.
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But, although Psychology is a very young science, it is already vast
and complex, rich in theories, methodologies and approaches; so, to which
psychology should we turn in search for inspiration and ideas? Once we have
decided on a humanizing approach to villainy1, I suggest the exploration of
two specific disciplines: the Psychology of Personality, and Social
Psychology.
For rigor‟s sake, I must begin by admitting that, according to the
traditional divisions, the Psychology of Personality does not strictly belong to
the domain of Social Cognition. However, it is also a commonly
acknowledged fact that within psychology, the frontiers are often
conventional, operational and even diffuse. From a theoretical point of view
the divide is clear and unproblematic. Personality psychologists are
concerned with personality as an objective reality, whereas social
psychologists, and more specifically social cognitive researchers, are more
interested in personality ―person schemas or prototypes― as construed by
external observers in social contexts. So, psychologists in personality
research would want to know, among many other things, what are the
personality types that there actually exist or what the biological basis of
personality are; and those in social cognition are concerned with the
personality prototypes that inhabit the observer‟s mind.
The distance between the two spheres of interest has been shortened
with the generalization of the cognitive shift; if we accept that our notion of
reality is always a cognitively construed version of the real world, once we
understand that the discoveries of personality psychologists may be
popularized and turned into schemas2 in the observer‟s mind, then we see that
a large area in the domain of personality is located in the intersection of both
approaches. In relation with the construal of villains we are, naturally, more
interested in the reader‟s or spectator‟s construal processes than in any real,
biologically based or genetically determined notions of villainy; that is why
the present paper, even when incorporating materials from the Psychology of
Personality, is written under the title of Social Cognition.
As I have pointed out, the whole argument here starts from a
humanizing understanding of characters. Admittedly, not all villains are
complete anthropomorphic entities: cinema has offered us anything from
diabolical dogs, to seemingly intelligent volcanoes and a conspiracy of
vegetable forms of life, as is in M. Night Shymalan‟s The Happening. In
these cases, I will argue that there is no real villainy unless there is a certain
degree of personification ―an element of intention, and some kind of
reactive and adaptive intelligence. The introduction of personification already
opens the door to the psychological approach.
The literary scholarly world has known of previous incursions of the
psychological in the form of Freudian psychoanalysis, which have generated
among some a markedly anti-psychological attitude. Psychology has much
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more to offer than a way of uncovering the writers‟ or readers‟ shadowy
repressions. Psycho-criticism in the style of Charles Mauron‟s study of
Mallarmé (1950) is oriented to the truth behind fiction, that is, to the writer‟s
unconscious meanings expressed by his or her work. Personally, I am more
interested in psychological approaches that might be helpful in illuminating
the fictional level itself, and the way it is construed.
The relation between literature and psychology has for long been a
fruitful one. The first attempts at describing personality have traditionally
been considered literary, although Theophrastus, who wrote his Characters3
between the 4th and the 3rd century BC, was actually more of a philosopher,
disciple of Aristotle and author of books on logic, physics and metaphysics,
than a literary writer. Since then, fictional characters have been a constant
inspiration for psychologists, and writers have often benefited from the
discoveries of psychology in their creation of coherent and realistic
characters (Pelechano 241-255).
2.
Two-layered villains: Psychoanalysis and Transactional Analysis
Personality has been studied from many different angles in the
history of Psychology. There is, of course, a psychoanalytic and even neopsychoanalytic approach. There is cognitive and a social cognitive research
going on. There is a phenomenologist-humanistic school, among others. We
are going to focus for a moment in two causal approaches to personality. The
term causal, as the opposite to descriptive, implies the existence of a theory
of human mental and/or biological structure, and the belief that such hidden
structure causes the different modes of behaviour. Descriptive approaches do
not deal with causes, but with the classification and organization of traits, and
meaningful behaviour, without investigating its causes (Totton, 9)4.
The psychoanalytic approach to personality is characteristically
causal, and pathological ―as opposed to stylistic. It has the property of
distinguishing between an inner man and an outer man. The inner man is
basically a collection of impulses ―libidinal and thanatal― which are
symptomatically expressed in behavior.
An interesting, and quite literary, aspect of personality under this
perspective is that people are often in the inside exactly the contrary of what
they seem to be from the outside. So classifying someone in this fashion is
always making a revealing discovery of the hidden, which constitutes in itself
a valuable literary/filmic (dramatic) effect. Besides, since psychoanalysis
views character as pathological by definition5, this kind of approach seems to
be quite appropriate for a number of villains. A common psychoanalytic
typology of personality, like the one used by Lacan, distinguishes between
three basic types: the neurotic, the psychotic and the perverse. If we take into
account the popularized definition of these terms, we cannot but realize that
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many famous villains could be typically described as at least psychotic and/or
perverse.
In other versions, psychoanalytic typology is developed into 8 types,
consisting in the sublimatory and reactive versions of the four famous basic
types, known as: oral, anal, phallic and hysteric characters. To give an
example, the sublimatory anal type could be described by the following
bundle of traits: “Messy and chaotic, often aggressively so. Often drawn to
money and/or working with hands. May show masochistic or sadistic
(crushing) traits.” (Totton, 23)
A causal approach to personality is useful when dealing with villains
that have been developed by the artist in a way that they could be considered
protagonists, or anti-heroes. This perspective is used, unconsciously I would
say, by professor A. C. Bradley (1904), when he analyses the character of
Iago in Shakespeare‟s Othello, distinguishing between „Iago-the-inner-man‟
and „Iago-the-outer-man‟. It is protagonist-villains like Iago, or Dr. Hannibal
Lectern6, that will welcome a properly structured and developed approach in
the form of a casual typology.
The problem with a character typology which is based on a theory is
that it really makes sense insofar as you are acquainted ―and agree― with
the theory beneath. Not all theoretical constructions are intuitive from the
point of view of lay readers. We are very likely to handle popularized
categories like the psychotic and the neurotic; but we would never, as
naturally, refer to a character as an oral reactive type, unless we are very
familiar with psychoanalysis. I think that in exploring psychological literature
in search for useful concepts and methods we should always stay close to the
readily intuitive.
On the other hand, the psychoanalyitic consideration of two-layered
characters ―and two-layered villains― clearly falls under the reaches of lay
intuition. This may be due to the popularity of the Freudian conception; the
fact is that cinema has provided us with a rich gallery of psycho-villains, who
live and act under the ghostly influence of their subconscious mind, propelled
by traumatic past experiences or a maddening education. Norman Bates, the
celebrated villain in Hitchcock‟s Psycho (Paramount, 1960) is a good
example of this kind of villainy.
One can find in the psychological literature other theories which
develop quite intuitive conceptions of two-layered personality types; a very
popular one is known as Transactional Analysis. According to this theory,
people organize their behavior around five basic inner drives or conditions,
under the belief that they will be OK if they abide by them: Be Perfect, Be
Strong, Try Hard, Please (People), Hurry up. These drivers combine to form
dispositional tendencies which permeate discourse, speech tonality, gestures,
body postures and facial expressions. The resultant typology is causal, like
the one used in psychoanalysis, but it is stylistic rather than pathological, as
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befits a humanistic approach to personality. One consequence for us is that
Transactional Analysis is almost villainy-blind. However, the notion that
villains, like people, may behave in certain ways under the influence of
unconsciously accepted life mottos is certainly intuitive and could be in some
cases a valid key for construing the psychological coherence of certain
villains ―Lady Macbeth, as a possible “Be Strong”, type comes to mind
here.
3.
The contribution of cognitive approaches to personality
In dealing with people, and in dealing anthropomorphically
conceived villains, we process all relevant input and organize it into
categories, which in the case of personality means associating individuals and
characters with traits that have not been manifested yet, but which are
predictable.
This has a number of implications in fiction. In certain types of
movies we only need to take a look at the external features of a villain, like
Darth Sidious in Star Wars, to categorize them as the baddies, and associate
them instantly to a number of ominous personality traits. It is important,
nevertheless, to appreciate the exact value of such categorization technique in
fiction. In cognitive psychology, as has been often proven, the process of
categorization is an energy-saving and time-saving mechanism (Macrae,
1994). Perceiving through categorization allows our mind to be free to
process other aspects of the input. However, I do not think that writers or film
directors resort to the physical characterization of the villains intuitively as a
way of saving energy or time. Villains have their own esthetics, which is
valuable in itself. Rather than appealing to the time-saving properties of
instant categorization, I would invoke A. Pilkinton‟s (2000) notion of poetic
effect here. What the overt physical characterization of the villain seeks is a
lengthy exploration on the part of the reader/spectator of all the potential
cognitive effects weakly suggested by the villain‟s physical appearance, and
we do so because this kind of processing „feels good‟.
However, it is still true that after recognizing the villain, we will be
quite ready to ascribe him/her a specific set of personality traits. It is obvious
that such bundle of traits exists readily structured in our mind, as a sort of
person schema. According to cognitive psychologists, we all have our own
implicit theory of personality (Pelechano: 122), that allows us to categorize
people according to pre-established character types or personality
dimensions, and which we use in deciding how we must interact with the
people we encounter. As with other theorized cognitive structures, the
problem with the implicit theories of personality is to bring them down from
the abstract into the descriptive level. A problem we will tackle later.
Other interesting contribution we owe to the cognitive approach in
the study of personality is the role played by concepts like beliefs and desires.
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These are mental entities have no place in behavioral approaches to conduct.
However, by combining the notions of beliefs and desires, lay people do
often find satisfactory enough an explanation for the behavior of others: „he
did it because he thought (believed) that by doing it he would obtain such and
such, which he desires very much‟, this is the traditional folk-psychological
formula for the explanation of behavior. Cognitive Psychologists like J.
Rotter have offered more sophisticated versions of the same principle: BP =
f(E&RV), i. e., Behavior Potential is a function of the Expectancy of reaching
a certain reinforcement and the value attributed by the individual to the
reinforcement ―reinforcement value. In other words, if one is very sure that
by doing something, one will obtain what one desires very much, one is very
likely to do that something (Pelechano: 136). Many villains and their villainy
could be successfully analyzed and discussed by applying the simple method
of determining their likely sets of beliefs and desires, and the way they are
interconnected with their actions.
There is a clear continuity between this approach and those explored
in the last section; beliefs and desires may be located as drivers and/or
libidinal impulses within the subconscious spheres of anthropomorphically
conceived villains, although they can also be located at more superficial
levels, even within the reach of the villain‟s consciousness ―which is what
happens if the villain states his or her motives openly to other characters or to
the fourth wall ―as Shakespeare‟s Iago does. The ascription of motives to
the inner subconscious layer or to the outer conscious one will, in the end,
make us perceive and „feel‟ the villain differently.
4.
The multivariate factorial approach and NEO PI-R
If it is true that in dealing with people and characters we handle lay
theories of personality which include person categories, and that the presence
of certain manifested traits often lead us to expect the appearance of other
traits not yet manifested, this can only mean that through our socialization we
have acquired a certain logic of character traits. Cognitive researchers do not
reach an agreement as to the exact form and functioning of such a mental
structure (Pelechano: 122), but there are certainly a number of interesting
proposals to consider here.
One way to approach this matter is by giving credit to antique
intuitions that have survived over the centuries within the western world. One
such intuition is the classical distinction between the melancholic, the
choleric, the phlegmatic and the sanguine temperaments. German
psychologist H. J. Eysenck re-located the four classical temperaments along
modern psychological lines. In his formulation, the melancholic and the
phlegmatic were both introverted types, and the choleric and sanguine were
extraverted. The phlegmatic and the sanguine were both emotionally stable,
while the melancholic and the choleric were both neurotic types (Pelechano:
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61). To the axes of Extraversion and Neuroticism, Eysenck incorporated that
of Psychotism. These constituted for the German psychologist the three basic
dimensions of personality; the personality of any individual would be
satisfactorily measured by determining his or her score within the three
respective scales. Eysenck‟s approach was deductive, since it started from an
intuited hypothesis ―that of the existence of three basic dimensions of
personality― which was then confirmed through experimentation and factor
analysis.
Within Eysenck‟s conception, it is very clear that villains would be
typically psychotic. Although Eysenck is traditionally considered alien to the
cognitive milieu, he offers valuable clues about categorizing. In observing a
villain, we would pay attention to a number of specific responses; we would
see that some of them are repeated over time, to the point of becoming
habitual responses; we would associate those habitual responses to a number
of traits; and all possible human traits would be organized along the three
basic types. The traits that define the psychotic type are: aggressive, cold,
egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, creative and
tough-minded (Eysenck: 246). This is an accurate profile of many literary
and filmic villains.
A similar approach was adopted by Carl Gustav Jung; similar in the
sense that his typology was formed around intuitions concerning the
dimensions of personality. For Jung the axes came to be after a classification
of cognitive styles. There are two preferred ways of making judgments
―thinking and feeling―, and two preferred ways of obtaining objective
information about reality―intuition and sensation. People‟s behavior is
influenced by their being predominantly perceiving, or predominantly
judging types, and then by resorting preferably to thinking or feeling,
intuiting or sensing. A third axis, that of extraversion and introversion, plays
also a role in Jung‟s conception (Totton: 54-68).
Jungian thought has been developed into the famous Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator (MBTI) which offers 16 personality types (Myers, 1985). It is
a causal stylistic typology based on a very specific conception of the
functioning of the human mind, which, however enlightening from a
psychological point of view, is perhaps too complex to be readily intuitive
from a lay perspective.
Far more intuitive, in my opinion, is the model proposed by McCrae
and Costa, known as the NEO personality trait inventory (NEO PI-R)
(McCrae, 1992), which is the result of a long tradition that goes back to R. B.
Cattell‟s factor analysis of common English personality descriptors 7.
Following a rigorously inductive approach and by applying factor analysis,
Cattell managed to reduce the list to 16 fundamental factors. This would
mean that anything a lay person might say about someone‟s personality
would have to do with at least one of these factors.
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There is an obvious connection between this so-called lexical
approach to personality, and the cognitive approach. Cattell‟s analysis
presupposes that if something is not registered in everyday language, it does
not really exist; in other words, common language contains everything we
can cognize, and everything we may possibly need to cognize. A personality
trait that is not contained in common English, is non-existent or unnecessary.
This presupposes also that language reflects our cognitive structures. A
frequent criticism against this approach is that it reflects the structure of the
observers‟ mind (Pelechano: 93) rather than that of the individual‟s
personality. As readers of fiction who construe and entertain virtual
anthropomorphic entities such as villains and heroes out of mere texts, the
discovery that we are all cognitively bound to recognize and apply a reduced,
close and limited set of personality adjectives to anyone‟s description, is
certainly valuable.
Cattell‟s work has been continued by others, and many different
researchers have found in different languages that when factor analysis is
continued, we finally reach a point when the list is reduced to five basic
factors, which are therefore referred to as the Big Five. This means that
absolutely anything we could possible say about the personality of a villain
will have to do with one of these five basic dimensions of personality, which
in the case of McCrae and Costa‟s model are: Neuroticism, Extroversion,
Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. If this is correct, we are
blind to anything which is outside this list; if this is correct, there is nothing
besides these dimensions concerning personality that we need to be aware of
in our daily interactions or our readings of fiction.
Neuroticism has to do with the tendency of an individual to
experience negative emotions ―like guilt, anger, sadness, etc. Extroversion
is related to tendency to establish and maintain social relations. Openness (to
experience) describes the tendency of an individual to accept and enjoy the
new, or reject it. Agreeableness has to do with the readiness of the individual
to trust others. And Conscientiousness refers to the ways the individuals face
their duties, work and plans ―acting and controlling versus postponing and
neglecting.
The NEO inventory is descriptive, which has the advantage that the
only theory required here is the acceptance of it exhaustive character. But it is
also stylistic, and therefore, as with other systems mentioned before, slightly
blind to villainy. Perfectly healthy individuals may characteristically tend to
feel negative affects, or may be introverted, or close to experience,
disagreeable or more or less conscientious. As the authors often point out
(McCrae: 14, 15), extremely high or low scores in some of the scales might
be indicative of personality disorders.
One of the advantages of McCrae and Costa‟s NEO PI-R is that on
the one hand it benefits from the simplicity and apprehensibility of the Big
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Five approach, and on the other, each of the factors or domains is further
developed into six facets allowing for very precise and exhaustive
descriptions. Simplicity is combined with a rich and quite sensitive
descriptive potential.
Agreeableness, for example, is subdivided into: Trust,
Straightforwardness, Altruism, Compliance, Modesty and TenderMindedness. I do not think I am risking too much if I say that villainy is
fundamentally associated to a low score in Agreeableness. This is what
McCrae and Costa would say about villains as low scorers, according to each
of the facets:
Trust: villains “tend to be cynical and skeptical and to
assume that others may be dishonest and dangerous”
Straightforwardness: a villain “is more likely to stretch the
truth or to be guarded in expressing his or her true
feelings”.
Altruism: they are “somewhat more self-centered and are
reluctant to get involved in the problems of others”.
Compliance: a villain “is aggressive, and prefers to
compete rather than cooperate, and has no reluctance to
express anger when necessary”.
Modesty: villains “believe they are superior people and
may be considered conceited or arrogant by others. A
pathological lack of modesty is part of the clinical
conception of narcissism”.
Tender-Mindedness: they are “hard-hearted and less moved
by appeals to pity. They would consider themselves realists
who make rational decisions based on cold logic”.
(Adapted from McCrae: 17)
I would say that the description above would represent the
commonly shared aspects of the villain-category. Still, we could expect
villains to differ among themselves in two senses: they may differ in some of
the core characteristics ―those related to low Agreeableness; or they may
differ in peripheral characteristics, that is, in relation to the rest of the
domains. Villains can be Neurotic or emotionally stable, extraverted or
introverted, open or close to experience, conscientious or non conscientious.
And in any of these aspects, some facets may be more salient than others.
The number of combinations and, therefore, the possible number of
peripherally different villains is immense. And all these differences may be
expressed, exposed and rationally discussed ―accepted or rejected by
different readers― by resorting to the NEO inventory.
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Differences in core characteristics point to realistic and complex
villains, who at times may show pity, or trust, or admiration towards the hero,
or remorse, etc. These differences may also be changes due to the
psychological evolution of the villain. In any case, the important thing here is
that NEO PI-R offers us a method for the systematic and exhaustive
description of villainy, which may also account for individual differences and
evolution.
5.
Social Psychology: a warning against detective-like reading
According to M. Augustinos and her colleagues (1995), Social
Psychology comprises four basic approaches: Social Cognition, Social
Representations Theory, Social Identity Theory and Discursive Psychology. I
will focus here on some general insights into the domain of literary villainy
which can be derived from Social Cognition and Social Identity Theory.
Social Cognition invites reflections about the role of the reader in
construing villains and villainy. We might try to decide, for example, whether
the average reader approaches character construing as a naïve scientist, as a
cognitive miser or as a motivated tactician. These are the terms used by social
cognitive researchers in relation to lay construal of reality (Augoustinos: 2021). When dealing with literary matters such as characterization, we must
remember that writers and movie makers rarely write or film for
psychologists, or for any specialized elites. That is the reason why I have
emphasized the importance of keeping within the domain of intuitive theories
which are, in some, ways formalizations of common-sense.
I would say that, when not suspended in fascination in response to
the villains looks or actions, the average reader is a cognitive miser, who
construes character as fast and loosely as he or she can, and would be clearly
reluctant to invest too much time and effort in deciding whether the villain is
extroverted or introverted. This means that in our specialized analyses of
characters and villains, if our goal is not to depart too much from a
consensual interpretation of characters, we should consider as character
indicators only those features which are undoubtedly salient. How such
salience is to be defined and measured is a matter of further thought and
research that I must leave for future papers.
The average reader construes the villain through an automatic
process that occurs at a level of sub-attention and which requires no effort.
The detective-like reading of a psychologist is, on the contrary, a controlled
process (Augoustinos: 24). Perhaps we should, as normal readers, indulge in
the automatic process, and then, as specialized readers, try to bring the
process to the surface of awareness and turn it into knowledge.
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6.
Are villains born or made?
One of the concerns of Social Psychology is the process through
which lay people understand why others behave the way the behave. Around
this concern the so-called Theories of Causal Attribution have been
developed. There are three foundational contributions to this area of interest:
F. Heider‟s theory of naïve psychology; Jones and Davis theory of
correspondent inference; and H. H. Kelley‟s covariant model of causal
attribution (Hogg: 78-108; Augustinos: 149-158; Kelley, 1967).
What we learn from these theories is that we tend to see the behavior
of others as part of a sequence of causes and effects. When one tries to
superficially estimate the possible answers to the question „why would
someone behave this way?‟, the number of possibilities seems astronomical.
Surprisingly, Kelley‟s covariant model proposes that there are actually three
general answers to the question. Bringing the results to our field, we would
say that from a causal point of view, the villain‟s actions may be perceived as
(1) the direct response to a given stimulus that justifies it; or as (2) a way of
acting which is being influenced by a set of circumstances; or as (3) a
manifestation of the villain‟s personal dispositions. The first two cases are
often reduced to the notion of external cause ―versus internal cause―,
although they are not the same thing8.
Now, H. H. Kelley proposes a rather detective-like kind of method
for deciding and arguing in favor of one of the three attributions ―to
stimulus, to circumstances, or to subject‟s dispositions. Although the method
is endowed with an infallible ―non-demonstrative― logic, it represents a
controlled process, too slow and sophisticated for cognitive misers. Literary
scholars like A. C. Bradley may write pages and pages trying to explain why
Hamlet or Iago behave the way they do; but the average reader is more likely
to decide on the run, through an automatic process.
It is part of a coherent humanizing approach admitting that in fiction
as in reality, readers will tend to make what is known as the fundamental
attribution error (Hogg: 91), only that perhaps in fictional worlds it could
well be an expectation rather than an error. This fundamental error simply
means that even when we usually justify our conflicting behaviors by
alluding to our circumstances ―„I had had a very bad day‟, etc.―, the
conflicting behaviors of others are invariably linked to their inner
dispositions. In the case of villains, they behave badly just because they are
bad. This statement, which is perfectly valid for the most stereotyped villains,
must be qualified when we are dealing with more complex and richer villains.
Under Kelley‟s covariant logic we find common-sense intuitions:
villainy is qualified, for example, when we have access to the villain‟s
circumstances and we find elements there that would to some extent explain
his or her manifested malice. Also, when something comes up that makes us
reinterpret his or her anti-epic as the response to excruciating stimuli ―like
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the blackmailed villain who is forced to commit a crime. In sum, by
presenting mitigating factors the author of a fiction may change our
perception of villainy. In detecting such factors readers would modify or
reorient their ascription of personality to the villain.
These mechanisms have much to do with what Kelley calls high
consensus, that is, the notion that most people would react in a similar way
when faced with the same factors. Villains treated this may very well stop
being villains altogether, depending on how high consensus is.
But there is another way in which the perception of the villain is
qualified in a more interesting way, and it is related to Kelley‟s notion of
distinctiveness. Villainy has a low distinctiveness in a character to the extent
that it is his or her generalized way of responding to a wide variety of stimuli;
in other words, villains are always as villainous as they can be, whatever the
stimuli and whatever the circumstances. But sometimes fictional villains
surprise us by behaving in ways which break such expectations. It is in such
cases that readers get perplexed and may leave their position of cognitive
misers to become motivated tacticians; now automatic processes of
perception may be substituted by controlled processes through which we
weigh up all possible mitigating factors, as well as the personality types we
are used to handling, and our implicit theory of personality, in a process of
making sense of the villain which, again following Pilkington, I would say
that simply „feels good‟. We like contradictory villains, and enjoy dwelling
on their possible motives and circumstances.
7.
Conclusion
I reach this final section of the paper with the conviction that much
more could and should still be said about literary villainy following the lines
presented here. But it is necessary to finish somewhere, and I will do so
presenting the guidelines for a programmed kind of reading that might lead
the reader to rich experience of any villain. This would be a controlled
construing of villainy. But these guidelines could also be used in a different
way: after being exposed to the story and its villain, one might find out
whether any of the points in the program are specially relevant according to
one‟s intuition. Here is the program.
1.
Analysis of the Inner-Villain
a. Subconscious level. Look for
- unconscious desires (libidinal, thanatal, etc.)
- unconscious/unchecked assumptions
- life mottos
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b.
Interior-conscious. Look for
- manifested desires
- manifested beliefs
- manifested plans
RELATE TO VILLAINOUS BEHAVIOR
2.
Analysis of the Outer-Villain (character traits)
a. Core Traits. Verify whether there is
- [Lack of] Trust
- [Lack of] Straightforwardness
- [Lack of] Altruism
- [Lack of] Compliance
- [Lack of] Modesty
- [Lack of] Tender-Mindedness
IS THE VILLAIN STEREOTYPICAL?
b.
Peripheral traits
- Neuroticism
- Extraversion
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
ARE THERE POSITIVE TRAITS?
3.
Causal Analysis
a. Can you find mitigating factors?
- Analyze consensus (everybody/nobody would
have acted like that)
- Analyze consistency (he/she acts badly whatever
the circumstances)
- Analyze distinctiveness (he/she shows malice in
everything he/she does)
RELATE CIRCUMSTANCE, PERSONALITY, BEHAVIOUR
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Social Cognition and Literary Villainy
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
In dealing with characters there are two traditional approaches, the
humanizing and the dehumanizing. Those of us in the humanizing vein claim
that the average reader tends to interpret characters as if they were real
people. (Culpeper, 10; Toolan, 92; Emmot, 58)
2
Freudian psychoanalysis offers a classical example of popularization (see
Moscovici, 1961).
3
The first English translation I know of is that of Francis Howell (Howell,
1824).
4
In everything concerning Psychoanalysis and Transactional Analysis I will
draw from Totton and Jacob‟s work on personality types (Totton 2001)
5
In a sense, people in psychoanalysis are classified according to the disorders
they are more likely to suffer (Totton, 18)
6
Protagonist-villain in J. Demme‟s The Silence of the Lambs (MGM, 1991)
7
An accessible history of the emergence of the Big Five from Allport,
through Cattell, to McCrae and Costa can be found in Pelechacho (89-95) and
in O. P. John (1990: 66-71)
8
In the first case, attribution to stimulus, the subject acts because there is a
stimulus, and the nature of the stimulus justifies the style of the action. In the
second case, the subject may well act in response to a stimulus, but the style
of the action is justified by the circumstances surrounding her.
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