The Most Influential People Who Never Lived

The Most Influential People Who Never Lived Photo by ALA Staff via Flickr. The idea of experience-taking, and the fact that voters were able to identify so quickly with a first person narrative, begs us to question the effects long-time and well known, popular characters have on us. For instance, if you think back to one of your favorite characters, be it from a novel or movie, you will probably recall certain events the character went through that made you empathize with them. This empathy plays a large role in how we bond and identify with characters and causes their experiences to feel real because weve been through a similar experience ourselves. “We’d have no way of processing a character cognitively if we didn’t have experiences with people outside of the fictional world,” explained  Howard Sklar, post doctoral researcher in the English Philology Unit at the University of Helsinki in an article on character bonding. “The experiences with fictional characters resonate with us because of the fact that we’ve had deep experiences with people throughout our lives,” he said. We begin to sympathize with characters and invest ourselves in their well-being, just as we would family members or friends, which gives us the distinct impression, even if only for a moment, that theyre real people. In fact, as the article suggests, we may even know these characters more deeply than even our loved ones, as we tend to fill in the gaps of their past and then get a glimpse into their most private thoughts and compulsions, causing us to fully know their personality. “If you can get people to relate to characters in this way, you might really open up their horizons, getting them to relate to social groups that maybe they wouldnt have otherwise,” Lisa Libby,  assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University,  told the Edmonton Journal. Libby makes a great point in how its possible, through using more storytelling and experience-taking techniques, that we can begin to pave a way for not only students, but for a vast majority of individuals to begin seeing groups outside of their circles and cliques in a different light. Also, knowing their effect, we can begin to see how fictional characters possibly did have a role in creating some of our modern technological advances and social culture, and how their ideas could spur certain trains of thought in innovative individuals. After all, ideas occur in the realm of fiction before theyre conceived; maybe it takes the push of a beloved characters personality to follow them through.