Resonance to archetypes in media: There’s some accounting for taste

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Abstract

Modern mass media typically employ archetypes—prototypical characters—in their narratives. This research proposes that people’s affective reactions to and preferences for these characters in rich cultural media—their “resonance” to archetypes—may be an indicator of their own personality and life themes. In the first of two studies, a Rich Culture Archetype Scale (RCAS) was constructed based on media examples from popular music, movies, and classic art representing certain archetypes. In the second study, the RCAS was compared with other scales of personality and of archetypes. Results indicated that there exist five clusters of archetypes to which people resonate, and that people’s resonance predicts their personal life themes and media preferences.

Introduction

People have been cultivating and refining mass communication for centuries (Dominick, 2002). We have long communicated to one another through etching, sculpture and painting, and music. In our contemporary information age, much of our life is dominated by such mass commercial media as movies, television, and the Internet (Bogart, 1991). The stories and characters that appear in these mass media are essential means of sharing human experience with one another. Some people discuss, converse, and analogize about television. Others infuse movie plot analogies and metaphors into their professional presentations in order to communicate a sense of tangible, shared understanding (Downing, 1991). Social institutions such as book clubs and Internet chat rooms often are organized around their respective media (Dominick, 2002). These phenomena suggest that there exist internal, psychological forces that allow us to respond in common ways to stories and story characters.

One part of personality proposed to explain our captivation with cultural phenomena is the archetype. An archetype is an internal mental model of a typical, generic story character to which an observer might resonate emotionally (Jung, 1961–1963/1983). Examples of archetypes include the Hero, the Jester, and the Sage, and they have been proposed as key elements in a common language involving the stories that people tell one another (e.g., Campbell, 1949; Downing, 1991; Mark & Pearson, 2001). Archetypal characters help promote actions in stories by embodying characteristic motives and other qualities that everyone can recognize (e.g., for the Hero, growth, courage, and triumph over adversity). People who hear such stories may respond quite differently to a figure such as the Hero, and those patterns of different responding may represent important personality qualities.

A number of studies have traced proposed archetypes through the stories of various cultures (e.g., Jadot, 1975). Such research, however, typically employs bibliographic, cultural approaches. Using literary approaches, for example, several theories have attempted to organize various specific archetypes into groups. A few studies investigate the connotations of archetypal symbols; several others use self-report scales to infer an individual’s identification with an archetype such as the Explorer (e.g., how strongly a test-taker agrees with the statement “I feel restless”; Pearson & Marr, 2002b). But to what degree do individual judges recognize archetypes? Can they identify archetypes in media, and do they respond to them emotionally?

We first discuss the origin of the archetype concept and update the theory, introducing a “neo-archetypal” approach. Study 1 presents a new psychometric procedure for testing the existence of classes of archetypes (see Goldberg, 1992, Saucier and Goldberg, 2002). Study 2 examines individual differences in people’s emotional responsiveness to such archetypes, linking those differences to personal preferences in mass culture and establishing connections between tastes in media and personality.

Section snippets

What is an archetype?

The concept of the archetype may provide important explanations of how people respond to other people, story characters, and media. Archetype theory began with the work of Carl Jung (1875–1961). The portion of Jung’s theory of particular interest here is that archetypes represent personifications of behaviors—characters who embody behavior patterns (Jung, 1964, Jung, 1968). Jung first proposed the concept of an archetype in the context of his clinical observations and discussion of the

Neo-archetypal theory

The neo-archetypal theory we develop in this section retains key aspects of Jung’s theory while leaving out its less substantiated parts. We have drawn on the work of several contemporary theorists in the area (e.g., Mark and Pearson, 2001, McAdams, 1993, McGowan, 1994, Pietikainen, 1998), as well as many researchers in related areas. In neo-archetypal theory, archetypes possess five key characteristics. Specifically, archetypes: (a) are story characters, (b) are represented psychologically as

Research on archetypes

Jung’s work on archetypes was initially embraced by many scholars in the humanities, but was welcomed less warmly in the sciences. For example, Jung’s theory was extensively explored and developed by Joseph Campbell, in his (1949) seminal text, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. By using the metaphor of the “hero’s journey,” and archetypes such as the orphan, the warrior, and the saint, Campbell traced many archetypes and symbols across the mythological literatures of many different cultures,

Overview of Study 1

An important assumption of neo-archetypal theory is the belief that individuals conversant with the theory can correctly identify archetypes (cf. Huston et al., 1999, Lewis and McCully, 1994, Lockhart and Siegel, 1976, McCully, 1987, Solomon, 1991, Rosen et al., 1991, Squyres and Craddick, 1990, Stevens, 2000). To test that assumption, we identified 156 rich cultural stimuli: 12 examples each of the 13 archetypes identified in Table 1. Of the 12 examples per archetype, four each were drawn from

Participants

100 college students (26 male, 74 female) enrolled in introductory psychology courses participated in Study 1 and received experimental course credit; their responses were identified only by number.

Materials

Each of the 13 archetypes shown in Table 1 was represented with four stimuli in each of three rich cultural media (music, movies, and art), for an overall total of 156 items, which were block-randomized for administration. The 52 music stimuli were contained on audio CDs and played aloud for all

Overview of Study 2

People’s mental models of the world may influence their feelings about the things they like. For example, people may prefer rich culture media that represent a specific archetype to which they are attracted. Additionally, preferences for specific story characters may relate to socioemotional traits such as the Big Five (Mayer, 1995, Mayer, 2005, McAdams et al., 2004, McCrae and Costa, 1999). Recalling that people are thought to respond to archetypes by experiencing cognitively-accessible

Participants

Data from 125 college psychology students (52 male, 73 female) were used in all analyses for Study 2. As in Study 1, students received experimental course credit for participating in the study.

Materials

The materials used for analyses in this study were (a) the RCAS, (b) the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator (PMAI; Pearson & Marr, 2002b), (c) a scale of self-to-archetype judged similarity, (d) a 100-item measure of Big Five unipolar trait descriptive adjectives (Goldberg, 1992), and (e) a modified scale

Summary of findings

At the outset of this paper, we argued that people establish models of themselves and the world (Mayer, 2007), and that some of these concern archetypes—that is, culturally important prototypical story characters (McAdams et al., 2004). In our neo-archetypal theory, such archetypes (a) are story characters, (b) represent mental models, (c) elicit intense emotional responses, (d) operate at an automatic or unconscious level, and (e) are culturally enduring, since they are easily learned and

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Laura A. King, Richard E. Lucas, Victor Benassi, David Pillemer, Rebecca Warner, and three anonymous reviewers who commented thoughtfully and helpfully on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Erin Goforth, Rachel Rogers, and Stephen Underwood for their help in coming up with archetypal items for the media pool in Study 1.

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