 If you speed read a bunch of fancy literature, just so that you can impress a rich family that comes from old money, aren't you just putting on airs? When I was a young Josh, my parents told me on many occasions that I had a fantastic imagination. Now, usually that's a compliment, but for me sometimes it was more of a reminder, or a warning. You can probably guess why I wasn't allowed to watch a lot of scary movies. However, I was allowed to read a lot, and like any kid, I found myself imagining what it would be like to be some of the characters in my books. More than that, I sometimes found myself unconsciously behaving like some of those characters. If I was reading a book about con men and heists, I might find myself casing security of restaurants and supermarkets, but still. To this day, whenever some media I consume has a character with a notable trait or mannerism, I'll sometimes catch myself behaving a little bit like them. This is actually a relatively well-known phenomenon among people who tend to immerse themselves deeply in media, commonly referred to as fiction lag, which you'll have to admit is probably the coolest thing that's on Urban Dictionary. Fiction lag isn't just feeling strongly for a fictional character or choosing to emulate one. It's more about directly and mostly unconsciously incorporating a character's beliefs and behaviors into your own. It's not just losing yourself in a story, it's putting yourself in the shoes of a character so strongly that you end up coming away with a part of them. And it turns out it's not just a weird thing that nerds like me do, either. It's actually a regularly observed psychological phenomenon with some very interesting implications. Jeff Kaufman and Lisa Libby recently published a paper summarizing several different studies about this phenomenon, entitled Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience Taking, which is a nice title, I guess, but I still think that fiction lag sounds cooler. In the first study, they found that people who were more tightly focused on their own thoughts and feelings before they started reading a short story tended to view the main character's actions as something that someone else was doing, rather than projecting themselves into that character and coming away with part of them. On the other hand, if they were given a task that got them a little bit out of their own heads before they started reading, they were more likely to experience fiction lag and to describe themselves similarly to how the character was represented. It also helped as the story was told in the first person, which is pretty boring and intuitive. Unless you start thinking about how rapidly virtual reality technology is improving. That technology might make it even easier for people to cast themselves as the protagonist of a story, and, in so doing, make fiction lag an even more powerful force for shaping thoughts and behavior, which might be a good thing. In another one of the experiments, if it was revealed near the end of the story that the protagonist was of a different demographic than the readers identified with, like if they were of a different sexual orientation or race, those readers were significantly less likely to express negative opinions or stereotypes of those demographics. So, fiction lag can make people less prone to bigotry if they're exposed to unfamiliar demographics and stories. That's pretty cool. We could probably use more of that. But we can also use it to harness stereotypes in a way that doesn't just affect behavior or perception, but ability as well. In 2008, Adam Galinsky's research team found that people who were encouraged to envision themselves as professors before taking a test actually performed better at analytic tasks than people who were encouraged to envision themselves as stereotypical cheerleaders. Subjects in the latter group were more inclined to describe themselves as feeling sexy or attractive, but they weren't so hot at crunching numbers. That might be really useful. Consuming media about people who are confident, intelligent, funny, whatever might suffuse our own personalities with those qualities, at least temporarily. But the same goes for negative qualities as well. Kaufman and Libby's research suggests that it's possible to control the amount of fiction lag you experienced to some degree by either focusing closely on your own thoughts and feelings or being more open to outside narratives. But that control isn't absolute. And not everyone is vigilant about what sort of media they expose themselves to, or what fiction lag from that media might mean. People have experimented with mantras and affirmations for millennia to try and cultivate certain states of mind. Maybe it's possible to do the same sort of thing without meaning to by reading certain books or watching certain movies or playing certain video games. Should we be more deliberate about what sort of media we expose ourselves to? Is it possible that with enough exposures and unfamiliar behavior brought on by fiction lag could become an ingrained habit? None of these are easy questions to answer, but they are interesting questions and I'm pretty sure we're going to hear a lot more psychological research about fiction lag in the near future. Only they'll probably call it something lame-er. Of course, until then, you could probably try some experiments yourself. After all, all you need is a good story and a decent imagination. Have you ever experienced fiction lag? Is there a fictional character who has some quality that you'd like to take on for yourself? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe while I share and I'll see you next week.