Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 19: ‘The Leftovers’ Carrie Coon & the Science of Good TV

Carrie Coon burst onto the scene in 2014 with two remarkable performances in David Fincher’s Gone Girl and HBO’s The Leftovers. We are honored to speak with her! How would you react if 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappeared, including your husband and two children? This is the premise for Carrie Coon’s character Nora Durst on the hit HBO show The Leftovers, now in its second season. The show is co-created by Lost’s Damon Lindelof and the author of the novel, Tom Perrotta. We speak to actress Carrie Coon about her work on The Leftovers and what season two will bring for her character, what it was like to work with David Fincher on the psychological thriller Gone Girl and how the roles for women on television are evolving. Then we ask the question – can watching television increase your emotional intelligence? New research shows that watching award-winning television shows, such as Mad Men, Lost, The Good Wife or The West Wing, can increase our ability to read emotion and to empathize. We speak to Professor of Psychology Jennifer L. Barnes to find out what this research means for avid viewers like us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 48m
Broadcast on:: 06 Nov 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Well, here it is. A new study has found that watching high-quality television dramas like Mad Men or Lost, can actually increase your emotional intelligence. Later in the show, I talk to the author of that study, psychologist Dr. Jennifer Barnes. But first, last season I got hooked on HBO's unflinching drama The Leftovers. And now in season two, which started in October, it has me convinced that it's a real masterpiece. The series is co-created by Lost's Damon Lindelau, and the author of the novel The Leftovers, Tom Parrata. In season one began with the sudden departure, a random, never-explained disappearance of two percent of the entire Earth's population. The book in the series really take on the effects and catastrophe for those left behind. The grief, the survivor's guilt, turning to religion, to cults, who remain standing and why. One of the characters is Nora Durst. Her two children and husband disappear from the breakfast table as Nora's at the kitchen sink with her back turned. In just a few seconds, her life and family gone without explanation. I was transfixed by the actor playing Nora, this remarkable performance bringing to life one of the most complex characters on television right now. A straightforward performance of grief, aggression, liberation, all mixed into one. And then a few months later watching David Fincher's Gone Girl, there she was again, playing Ben Affleck's twin sister in another story with complex female characters and giving another amazing performance. The actor is Carrie Coon and she's one hell of a talent. A long time theater actor, she was nominated for a Tony for her role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 2012. And in 2014 she exploded on the scene to a wider audience in Gone Girl and the Leftovers. Now in season two of The Leftovers we see Carrie as Nora Durst, but not in the original town of Mapleton anymore, but in Jardin, Texas, a small town nicknamed Miracle because it's not lost a single person to the sudden departure. Masses of people, all religions and experiences seeking solace and maybe protection are migrating to Miracle, including Nora Durst, who is now together with police chief Kevin Garvey played by Justin Thoreau, his teenage daughter and a baby they found on his doorstep. I love this too. But now everywhere I look, all I see is what's gone. I can sit around and cry if I have the world ending or I can start it up again. When I heard about this place, I'd be lying if I told you I understood it, but I understand it now. Is it real? It's real. What you're looking for is to feel safe, a little safer here than anywhere else. He didn't come home last night, she was out with her friend, they're gone too. We came here because you said it was special. Miss Kari Koon, thank you so much for your time. That's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I thought I'd start off with a little bit of a coincidence or kiss me. A while back, I was really lucky to interview the legendary casting director, Ellen Lewis here on the show. Oh, I love her. And while I was working on that, I noticed that she and her office cast the leftovers. I remember thinking, "Yes, Kari Koon, now that is perfect casting and here you are." And I think Ellen Lewis for that, she was a real champion of mine when we met and I'm grateful. What do you think she thought of you for the leftovers? You know, I had just gotten to New York that winter and spring because we were doing music for a Virginia Woolf on Broadway, the Steppenwolf Theater from Chicago. We had transferred a production and she had seen it because Ellen Lewis gets out and sees theater in New York and that's how she sort of discovers actors. So when my agents called her to set a general meeting with her, she already knew who I was because she'd seen our show, which had been very critically well received, but played to mostly half out of this because we're not, you know, J-Lo on Broadway. And so, you know, we had a great general meeting. I think she brought me in just a couple of weeks later for the leftovers. It was one of my first and only auditions for her while I was in New York. So she's a Chicago gal, you know, we're from Chicago and she's in Midwestern gal. I like her. I went in, I went on tapes from Meg and for Nora. I just went in and taped and then a couple of weeks later, they said, "Great, we want you to come meet Damon's and the loss." And I thought, "Oh, I'll probably read with him." But we just sat down and had a chat. I mean, Damon and I'd probably talk for half an hour. And then I expected that I would be put through the ringer and that I would have to audition for HBO because normally you have to get approval from the network before you can get cast. And that never happened. I just got a call a couple of weeks after that offering me the part and that was pretty amazing. It's not the story I had heard. It wasn't what I was expecting. Okay. That was it. What is Damon Lindelov's process with the actors? How much do you know week to week? We could say that season one ended where the novel ended. So you're now sort of on new ground. Right. Yes. We're kept largely in the dark. If there's something we feel we need to know for our processes, actors, we can ask Damon and he's very generous. He'll share with you. But he's not going to share anything beyond that. I think often because he's so responsive to what the actors are doing and to what we're bringing to the table that he's not exactly sure where he's going to take the story because it's often being massaged in certain directions based on what he's seeing in us, which is actually wonderfully collaborative. And I don't think very typical of television. Oh, so he's changing week to week for you, sort of. He cares a little bit. I mean, I think it's more subconscious. I think he's just taking in information and putting it into his magnificent brain and then whatever's coming out of him is somehow deeply connected to each of us, which is incredibly satisfying to do that work. And I just don't think TV normally operates that way. But certainly the scripts are not written ahead of time and we're often getting our scripts just a couple of days before we start shooting, so sometimes we don't know what's about to happen. We never know what's coming. And talking about Damon, I really want to say congratulations to you, of course, for the amazing performance of Nora, but also to Linda Love and Tom Perron and several of the amazing directors like Mimi Leader for making such complex female characters on this show that maybe people aren't talking about so much. Not just Nora, but Amy Braneman's character and Regina King and Andow. There's some special writing for women here, would you say? Completely. I completely agree. I mean, that was the appeal. You know, even when I knew that The Leftovers was just the scope of Tom's book, I was already interested in Nora. She was already a very fascinating character that Tom Perron had written. But man, the scripts I read are mostly supportive girlfriends, nagging wives, and lesbian detectives, you know, that are tough on the outside, but very vulnerable. And I read the same tropes over and over and over again in scripts. And there's just nothing quite like this. And we're entering into a very interesting time on television for women. A lot of the Emmy winners were over 40. You know, we had the African-American women winning those awards for the first time. I mean, things are changing and TV is pushing the envelope and hopefully it's going to drive changes in the film world as well, but no, it's an incredible privilege to be working on something that demands so much of me, because that's what whenever I read a script, I discover that it's just not asking you to do anything. And I'm not going to say yes to that thing. I want to be challenged, just like any actor does. It's like they don't ask women to do much, you know? Now, this series takes some brain power. I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity. But even the start of season two, which was an amazing sort of powerful motherhood thing, I mean, Terence Malek-esque-tikes start at it. Do you see that this show is a lot sort of about motherhood and women or that there's a strong theme there? Oh, that's interesting. I think it is about elemental things and timeless things. And it's about spirituality. And of course, all of the earlier cultures that preceded Christianity were mostly female centric. The woman's power of reproduction was the center of the spiritual life in a community. And that was just before we discovered things like possession and territory, you know? And so I believe that inevitably, if you're dealing with spirituality and sort of the root of that, you inevitably find yourself dealing with the maternal and motherhood and motherhood and therefore earthy beginnings of things. And I think Gaiman's very deeply respectful and connected to that. And yes, I think you're right, I think it's absolutely in there, definitely. Because I mean, everyone's trying to analyze that beginning. I'll just say if someone hasn't started yet, it's basically an eight minute prehistoric woman giving birth and something very tragic happened. And then we never get back to that little story again. So of course, it just sort of sets the tone. But I want to go back-- Don't get back there. Yeah. Not yet. Okay. Oh, good. You know, you may find that it's a perhaps an oblique connection, but I think it's very thoughtful. There's nothing arbitrary about what they're asking. Well, as a mother, it made me cry the whole story. Oh, wonderful. But talking about Nora a little bit, many can relate to her. Maybe not the getting shot by prostitutes in order to feel something, but the sort of soldering on in grief that no one else is there to help you on sentimental type of thing. I can certainly respect that. What kind of reactions do you get to her? Oh, I mean, I do occasionally read about how people are responding to Nora. I never get recognized, so I very rarely have personal experiences with people who are watching the show. They just don't-- Oh, really? Yeah. I almost never get recognized in public, which is a blessing. No matter what, not welcome that conversation. But I've seen people who go through that, and I think it seems very stressful. But I guess a few times, people seem to really respond to her fiercereness and her practicality and her directness. I find her very, in some ways, shrewdly practical. And the fact that she even has a bit of a sense of humor in spite of what's gone on, I think that's really important. I find it in life when things are challenging for me. My family certainly relies on the dark gallows humor to get through a dark time. And I think there are hints of that, and Nora, that make her seem more realistic, like a person in the world. And I think the theme of that resilience of human capacity to endure is quite real. We see it all the time. We see communities or countries devastated by war or freakish events, still also with an airplane, a terrorist attack, unfortunately, in America, school shootings, all the time. And you see these communities continue to live and thrive and try to learn from that. And I think that's a very deeply human instinct. And Nora seems to, in the writing, embody that instinct a little bit. I think that maybe people are connecting on a very biological level to that. I'd say Gretchen here. You smoked him while you were out sleepwalking. Where'd you go? I woke up in a, uh, drained pond, and I crawled out, there was a car parked up on top, white Mercedes. It was empty. And I saw another car coming, and it was a giant neighbor. The sun was with, I think my phone was probably up there. I got to find, I think I should tell the cops. Tell them what? You can just say you don't remember anything before you woke up in the exact spot where a neighbor's daughter and her two friends disappeared from. And you were saying you were talking a little bit about the collective grieving process that this show is, is so much about. What has it taught you about grieving? Oh, I mean, I have never endured the kind of punishing event that Nora has gone through. I read the memoir of Sonali Derry and Agala, who lost her family in the tsunami. She lost her parents, her two children, her husband, and that was the closest equivalent I could, I could come up with, I don't have children myself. I've been married to my husband for a couple of years, and we hope to have a family. But you know, there's something about an actress who doesn't have kids trying to play a person who does that can be really tricky. And I wanted to make sure I was honoring that very deep connection. And so reading her book, which is a spare, unstinting look at grieving and the insanity really that comes with it. And yet this ability to survive it, you know, even shocking oneself, you know, that what the kind of tragedy that she sort of experienced in her life is, it was really, it's an extraordinary book. And I think that taught me more about grieving than any process of mine, you know, not being able to relate very personally. But I just think what I've learned is that it's highly personal and it's different for everyone. And that we shouldn't assume we know how someone else should do it. Has it taught you anything about how to behave around others grieving? You know what? I don't know that it has. Like I said, because it's so personal in some ways, then what is expected of someone approaching a grieving person is to not really have any expectations for what that's going to be, and certainly don't tell them to get over it. Right. Yeah. And I think there's a lot about Joan Dydian's the year of magical thinking that you almost sort of are a little bit out of your mind for that first time when someone who loves so much is gone. And I see that a lot in the show. Has it made you understand anything about people joining sects or religions or people sort of searching for answers? I think as an actor, I believe one must believe as an actor that human beings are capable of anything because we are as actors invited to imagine ourselves doing all kinds of things. And sort of the baseline where you have to start from is that human beings can do anything. And that any person you know is capable of the best or the worst impulse you can imagine. And if you're starting from that premise, then in some ways there are no surprises. And what I guess I mean is that as an actor, you can't go into any story or any character with judgment or else I don't think you can play them very authentically. And so I think it's more just an extension of my approach as an artist in the first place. You know, it's not to judge those things because you can't play them. In season one, Nora's guilt that feels, and I know you've spoken of this before, there's a guilty feeling of a bit of liberation that she was a housewife and then all of a sudden she doesn't have to be the housewife anymore. So now in season two, in the first few episodes that we've got to see, she's sort of starting this family again and going into a family with small children and everything. How do you think it's going to go for Nora? Well, I think what's interesting about playing Nora this season is that tension, that her obligations disappeared and she almost got away. And instead she chose to reinvest in these roles that she has been playing, albeit in another iteration. And so I think that fight or flight response is still very strong in her. I think her awareness that she almost started over is part of what fuels her challenge in dealing with Kevin. Kevin, who's not able to show up for her in the way that she needs right now, she needs safety and security and stability. And Kevin is not the partner for that. And of course, Kevin and Nora don't know each other very well. They haven't been together that long. And now they're embarking on this new sort of family unit and journey together. And they actually are still learning each other. And that's very challenging. Very challenging. And again, Nora is all in. I mean, she's 100% invested. But most certainly that's going to be tested by Kevin's particular neuroses at this point in the story. And of course, the mysteries of Miracle. Nora has this little alarm bell going off. And she senses that all is not as it seems, but she can't put her finger on exactly what that is. And so she's kind of on high alert at the same time she's trying to pretend that she's quite comfortable and happy and handling everything. You know, Nora's going to handle it. But one does feel that she will handle it. I mean, she needs love and someone, you know, touching or anything. But one has this sort of feeling that she can, she can take care of that stability. But maybe it'll be interesting to see what she goes. Yeah. How that plays out. I love that, though, that people feel that people feel when Nora comes into the room that someone's going to take care of things. I think that's great because I think that's a very empowering position as a woman and as a female character that when that character comes on screen, instead of instability, you see capability. And I think that's one of the things people respond to in Nora. You, the playing of it and the writing of it is just an amazingly, I mean, and ambiguous. I don't think everyone loves her, but that's the thing that's so interesting about her and also that she's a woman and that she makes us feel that way when she comes in. No, no. Very, very well. Do you mind if I ask you a fincher question? Sure, please. I know that he's a man of many, of many takes. Was that a new experience for you coming from the theater? Well, everything. Yes. I mean, it was all new because I had never made a movie before and my first movie was with David Fincher, which is a really intense, crucible for learning that sort of thing. So of course for me, there was a tremendous benefit for me in doing multiple takes. I wanted as many take as I could get. The thing about Fincher and Fincher and I worked really well with the other. I really, really respect David and I love David because he was a perfectionist. And I'm a perfectionist. And when you put two perfectionists together in a room, they're going to work together all day so they can't write. And that was sort of our dynamic, you know. He could see that I was trying and he wanted what he wanted and we would work together to try to get to that place. And I really found that incredibly satisfying. And in addition to that, David also realized who he was getting. And that was somebody who was not entirely familiar with the vocabulary of film. And once he learned that he had to teach me a little bit, things went really smoothly from there. So he would actually say, "Carry, come here, look at this." You see the monitor. You see how I have this framed up. This is why I need you to glide on the frame on your right foot, you see what I'm doing. And I was like, "Oh, of course, yes. Now that I can connect what I'm doing with what that vision is, I can execute it." And so I learned so much from David in that about film and about, you know, process because he runs a very respectful set. And then after that, I moved right into the leftovers, you know, shooting the first season. And we were going so quickly that I just felt really primed and lubricated and ready to go because, you know, because I had been at Fensher School for a while. That's amazing. And I know, I mean, you've been working for years, but for me as a viewer, that 2014 was like, "Who is this person? This is amazing." You just sort of shot on the scene. I know you said that you don't get recognized, which I'm sure you will assume, but how has it changed your life radically from 2013 to 2015? I mean, in some ways, the biggest change is that I got married, but that year, thank you. I mean, that year, what really changed my life was who just read the Virginia Wall, which is the play I did in Chicago. They went to New York. They went to Broadway. And going to Broadway changed everything about my life because I was able to have access then to that TV film stuff that was happening in New York. I met my husband doing that play. Yes, he's in the play, or he was in the play. Yes, he played George. His name is Tracy Lutz. He's a playwright and an actor and a remarkable actor who was playing George in our production who's very original. Amazing actor and screen and writer. He's kind of an extraordinary dead film, and I won't lie. And so I got married, and I booked this television show on HBO, and I booked this David Fensher film. And I just can't imagine ever having a year in my life that will be like that ever again. It was kind of extraordinary, and I've been so grateful for it. But really, all it did was create opportunity for me. So I still have to fight for projects I want to do. I still have to audition for things. But at least I have a little bit of street cred going into those conversations with the kind of directors I want to work with, and I have great representatives who are helping me carve out and make the career I want to make. And that puts me in an incredibly privileged position as an actor. There are many, many wonderful actors I know in Chicago who just don't have the access I have. And yet would be equally, you know, lauded and doing great work if they were in the position that I'm in. And I recognize privilege of that. But you've done some amazing performances and some really interesting roles. Do you have any new projects? I do. I'm actually working on an independent film right now with Holly Hunter, directed by Katherine Deakman, and it's a great, it's a wonderful story. It's really about relationships and it's about women, but it's about this particular woman who's played by Holly Hunter, who's lost her son to suicide and is sort of trying to understand the circumstances of that. And she's just, Holly Hunter is just a remarkable actor and I'm learning so much from her doing things with her. It's just been extraordinary for me. And then following that, I'm doing a big Blumhouse thriller with Lee Pace, who I also think is an incredible actor. And we have this great little story we're going to tell. And it's Karen Monke, who's a lovely actress turned director. So I've got a great viewpoint. And then hopefully after that, I'm doing my husband's new play in Chicago, which is a, what is that? It's called Mary Paige Marlow, and it's the story of one woman's life, 11 things from her life, and she's an accountant from Ohio. And she's played by eight different actresses, because, you know, my husband believes looking back on his life that he feels like he was a different person, and he is this wonderful. It's a Joan Didion quote, actually, which I would butcher if I tried to paraphrase it, I'm sure you could find it, and it's just the most beautiful play, and I do anything to be in it. So that's, I'm setting my sights on that for spring. That's amazing. I can imagine that the coon lets household, not a bad piece of writing passes by your drawer. It's true. We're total snobs. We're total snobs about, about writing and strip, which is great, but I admit it, I admit it. No, that's what should be. Kevin's a screenwriter, as well, I can tell you so he's, and then he loves your husband's work. But that's great. Before I leave you, just what, what, anything you can give us a little hint on, on Nora coming up the last ten episodes? Oh, you know, I can, I can say that I think this, I think the second season where it's headed is just unlike anything I've ever seen on TV, regardless of me in it. I just, I'm really proud of it. I'm really proud of how bold it is and the questions it's asking, and though I can't say anything about what happens, I can say that next week's episode is, is very heavy with Nora and Regina King's just, this just, um, fierce, she's just amazing. So I hope people enjoy that because we get to, we get to kind of, we get to kind of get after it a little bit. When Regina was cast, I was so hoping I was going to have a chance to work with her and indeed, I have. So. That's good. Newly minted. Yeah. Enjoy. Jumping and screaming and crying when she won. I was just so happy. And next year is your year. So she'll be jumping. Ah, we'll see. Thank you so much. Thank you. I won't count off. Thank you. I really appreciate you supporting the show. This is, this is a lot of fun. Thank you. Carrie Kuhn. Don't miss the leftovers. Season two is on HBO, HBO Nordic right now. A new study published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity in the Arts found that watching high quality television dramas like Mad Men, The West Wing, or Lost can actually improve your emotional intelligence. I'm not kidding. Conducted by University of Oklahoma psychologist Dr. Jennifer Barnes, together with her graduate student Jessica Black, their work built upon another study that found that reading literary fiction makes us more emotionally intelligent. A new study aimed to see if the same was true for award winning television. And yes, they found that engaging in complex fictional narratives can increase a person's capacity for empathy, for example. I needed to go to the source to see if this was really true. Dr. Jennifer Barnes graduated from Yale with a degree in cognitive science and received a Fulbright to do autism research at the University of Cambridge in England. She recently completed her PhD in developmental psychology at Yale, and today she's a professor of psychology at Oklahoma University. She's the author of this new study titled Fiction and Social Cognition, the effect of viewing award winning television dramas on theory of mind. Dr. Barnes, welcome to the show. Thank you. Is this really just an excuse for you to watch a lot of TV instead of working? Sometimes it is. I have another graduate student who's working on a project right now that it required her to spend about a month on Netflix, looking for stimuli. So all the other graduate students were kind of jealous of her research work. But honestly, I spend a lot of time watching television and reading books anyway. So as a psychologist, you can study whatever you love, and I love stories in all mediums. And one thing I had noticed is that there was all this great work on written fiction and what it can do for us. But no one was asking those questions about other mediums, and if someone who spends a lot of my time on Netflix and DVR-ing shows and binge-washing things, I really thought that these effects probably existed in other media as well. Tell me about that other research part, the one about literature. Right. So that one was actually started in large part by a guy named Dr. Raymond Marr. And he had shown correlationally. So just measuring your past exposure to fictional books and your past exposure to nonfiction. And then looking at, say, your ability to read emotions or your empathy. And so he'd shown in many studies that prior exposure to fiction was correlated with higher ability to read emotions and higher empathy. But what no one had done at that point was saying, is this just a correlation or is it actual causation? So you could imagine, for instance, that people who are already very empathetic might be very into literature. Because if you're high in empathy, you're interested in other people, you're interested in emotions, care about these things. So you might be driven to books or movies or television shows in the first place. And that could explain this correlational result. So research group, Dr. Kidd in Castano, looked at whether if you just randomly assign people to read either literary fiction or nonfiction or popular fiction. And then afterwards did this emotion reading test called The Reading the Mind and the Eyes Test, what you read, what you have read affect your performance on the test. And they found it didn't. Specifically, they found that if you had read an award-winning literary short story or the beginning of an award-winning novel, you performed higher on this test that requires you to read emotions. And you've chosen, you wanted to go and do this on TV shows, but why is this award-winning so important? Because you've also specified in the study award-winning TV. The reason they chose to start with award-winning fiction was that A, that's what they'd found it for with literature. And B, that the fact that these shows have very complex emotions and relationships. And to some degree, they make you work to understand these people. So it's not the kind of fiction where the characters are always telling you how they feel. They're not saying, you know, I'm so angry, I can't even look at you. You know, it's all in the small moments. The expression on one of these characters' faces is they turn away. They've got hard to understand relationships. So the idea is that when you watch a television show, when you read a book, some of the work is being done for you. And some of the work you have to do yourself to figure things out. So one theory is basically the more work you require of the audience member, the harder the audience has to work to figure out what people are thinking and feeling and who they really are, the more you might be exercising this capacity called theory of mind. Which are the shows you chose? So we used four shows. So in our first experiment, we used Mad Men and West Wing. And in the second experiment, we used the Good Wife and Lost. And who were some of the people that participated? How did the study go? So we ran this with our introductory psychology subject pool. So all of the participants were students enrolled in an intro psych class, who for their class have to participate in some experiments. So we get a lot of students signing up for our experiments because they have to choose between other psychology experiments and coming in and watching television for an hour. This was a pretty good one. So if you have to spend an hour doing a psychology experiment, spending 42 minutes of that hour watching an episode of Lost is not the worst way to spend your time. So they come in and they watch this. And how are you actually testing them for emotional intelligence? So what we're actually testing, I would call it emotion reading ability, which would be one sort of subset of emotional intelligence, but not the whole category of emotional intelligence. So we used a test created actually in the autism research literature called The Reading the Mind and the Eyes Test. And this is a test that has a bunch of pictures of people's faces, but only the eye region. So it shows you the eyes of a person, and then it's a multiple choice test. It'll list four sort of emotional adjectives that the person might be feeling. So it asks you, are they distracted or flirtatious or concentrating? And then you have to choose which of those emotions you think most aptly describes the eyes. And the reason we use this test is it's actually a fairly difficult test. There are relatively few tests where you can get these individual differences in adults because adults are actually really pretty good at reading emotions and understanding other people. But when you just give them the eyes, what we see is some people are really good at intuiting what emotion goes with that facial expression, and some people find it a lot more difficult. So and before they looked at these eyes and this test and told you, they were asked to watch documentaries as well, which were those? Right. So for documentaries, so we had Shark Week, how the universe works, Nova, and through the wormhole. So these are, again, TV shows, usually that air on a weekly basis, but they were documentaries and specifically they were documentaries that didn't focus on people. So they focused on something other than people such as an animal or a scientific concept. And were some of the group only watching the television shows and some of them watching the documentaries? Yes. So every person who came into the lab was assigned to watch only one episode of television. And the assignment was random. So you come in and we use a random number generator and you're either assigned to watch one of the fictional dramas, so either Mad Men or West Wing or one of the documentaries, Shark Week or how the universe works. So everyone's just seeing one episode of television. And so they watch that and then you give them the test. So what happened? So what we found was that people who had been randomly assigned to watch the fictional dramas, so you watched Mad Men, West Wing, The Good Why for Lost, performed significantly higher on the emotion reading test than people who had been assigned to watch the documentaries. How much more? How big was the difference? You know, I would actually have to look, I think if it's on par with the reading literature, it's really only a difference of one or two questions, if that. So it's a statistically meaningful difference, meaning that you see the difference in a significant proportion of the people. And so you can say there's less than a 5% chance that this happened randomly. So there's a 95% chance that there's something systematic going on here. We found it twice, which means there's a very high chance that there's something systematic going on here. But in terms of real world effect, it's not like it's making you massively better at reading emotions. It's just increasing performance by a little bit. But what's so amazing about this is that these people just watched one episode of television, right? So we know nothing about how much television they watch in their lives up till now. They start with vast individual differences. So even if you just brought people into the lab, they watch nothing. Some people are going to score very highly on this test. Some people are going to score lower. So the fact that the group on the whole is scoring higher at all after watching, just in one case it was 26 minutes of a television show and the other case it was an entire episode, is really quite remarkable. Why do you think this is? What is it in the television compared to the documentary? I think there are a couple different things that could be going on here with this one time exposure. One thing that could be going on is that watching these television shows with people in complex relationships and emotions might basically just throw you into people mode. So it might be that we all have a certain expertise about thinking about people in relationships and emotions. And after you've spent some time watching television, you're very in tune with that. So it might not be that you're actually in 42 minutes learning something. It might be that that capacity was in there, but watching television is kind of activating it. Were you surprised that this one? I was not terribly surprised at this one because as a TV watcher, I thought that we would probably get the effect. And yet this is an effect that did surprise a lot of other people who didn't necessarily think that this would work with television. All of our parents who have told us to turn off the television were surprised. There were theoretical reasons to think maybe it wouldn't work. So when you read something, you have to do a lot of imaginative work. So you have to imagine the expressions on people's faces. You have to visually create things yourself. You have to read between the lines. So there's a little more imaginative work going on when you're reading something. When you're watching something, it's right there in front of you. It much more resembles reality than reading a book does. So there are some people who thought that extra imaginative work was what was doing basically the work of making you better at reading emotions and written fiction. So to some people, it was really surprising that the TV results would work. It wasn't terribly surprising to me because again, I spend a lot of time watching television in a lot of time reading books. And I can see the parallels because at the end of the day, they're stories. They're about people and relationships and emotions. And I feel like we're driven to them for very similar reasons. I got really interested in something I read that you had written about fictional morality. What is that? Oh, so this is an area we're researching that basically looks at the idea that there may be some key ways in which fictional morality is different from real world morality. So take the domain of television and look at some of the characters and shows that are very popular these days. So you might hear something like House of Cards or Breaking Bad. And these aren't necessarily about people who are shining examples of humanity who make the right choices. So we're in an era, not just of anti-heroes, but of heroes who actually sometimes do these horrible things. And so the question is, is a fictional bad act as bad as a real bad act? Are there some things that if you put them in fiction are no longer bad? Are there some characters and archetypes that we find very appealing but only as long as they aren't real? Ooh, what's the conclusion? It's fascinating. I got very into this question while I was in grad school and I used to call it the Chuck Bass vs. Spencer Pratt effect. The reality show The Hills was on and Spencer Pratt was kind of the antagonist jerk guy on that show. And the television show Gossip Girl was actually also on. So one day I went to Facebook and I typed in Chuck Bass, which is the name of the kind of jerk making bad decisions guy on Gossip Girl. And all the Facebook groups that came up were like, we love Chuck Bass, we're the Chuck Bass appreciation society like fans of Chuck Bass, you type in Spencer Pratt and everything that came up was like, we hate Spencer Pratt, Spencer Pratt made me throw in my mouth. They're all negative. And so there are many differences between those characters, but you could actually make the argument that the fictional guy is actually way worse. He's actually done many worse things than some of the real guy. And yet in fiction, we kind of love him. So that's one area we're interested in. So we're just starting to do research. But that's okay, we're still sort of sane people for loving these fictional, breaking bad characters. Well, the thing is when you love a fictional character, you don't have to worry that that fictional character is going to go off and commit real murder. At worst, they're going to go off and commit fictional murder. So in fictional acts, no one is actually being hurt. People are just being fictionally hurt. But does it feel a need in us somehow to watch these characters with these bad morals? I mean, it might. We've got some other research that looks basically individual differences, because what you find is some people love these shows with these morally questionable characters. And other people just don't even want to watch them in the first place. So there are plenty of people out there who just say straight up, no breaking bad, no house of cards, I just don't like watching fiction about people doing bad things. And for those people, it seems that even the fictional bad things make them feel very uncomfortable. So we've been doing some research looking at something called imaginative resistance, which is basically when we hit an imaginative stumbling block and actually tell a television show or a book, no, you got that wrong. When it happens, it's usually in a moral case. So it's like the moral world of a book or TV show is telling you that something is okay and you think it's not okay, so you think they're actually wrong. And the reason psychologists find this interesting is that we know that people can imagine all sorts of things. Like we can imagine that Hogwarts exists, we can imagine that the Hunger Games are happening. But if you ask us to imagine, even in a fictional world, that it's a good thing that the Hunger Games are happening, that you know, rich people should kill children every year. Even in a fictional world, people will say, no, that's not right. Is there some example that you can remember offhand where there's been like a moral outcry over something fictional like that? Well, there's always a moral outcry by someone over something fictional. So if you look through the news as I often do, there's always someone boycotting some show, and I think it comes down to this fear that we might be infected by the morality of fictional characters, that by watching people do something that you think is bad, by watching a show that endorses a morality that's different from yours, you might somehow catch that morality. As a psychologist, do you think there's any truth to kids seeing too much violence or whatever that would be? I mean, there's been a lot of work on children and violence, again, a lot of it's correlational. And a lot of it's not as complex. I do think, you know, there are a lot of open questions and there's a lot of research that suggests, yes, maybe there are some times when some fictional things can affect us in some ways. I think what gets undervalued is, you know, fiction's potential to change people's beliefs isn't just negative. So for example, if you are watching a show and there is more diversity on that show than there is in your everyday life, there's psychology to suggest that we form relationships with fictional characters that are much like real-world people. So in some sense, you can have fictional friends that say belong to a group that maybe faces prejudice or bias or stereotyping in the real world. And there's this very real possibility that I were hoping to research in lab further that maybe making fictional friends with people from these groups can really change real-world prejudice bias and so on. We do have evidence also that the people who are least likely to want to engage with alternate moralities and fiction, so the ones who don't want the characters who are doing bad things, the ones who don't want to be confronted with moralities other than their own, are also the people who rate highest on discussed sensitivity in a domain of morality called purity. So again, we think it has to do with at least the fear of moral contagion. So we don't have evidence about whether you actually can be morally contaminated or have your morality pushed around by fiction, but the people who are least likely to engage are the ones who are most afraid that that might happen. I love that. We have to write a TV show about moral contamination. It's like a zombie thing, but with sort of housewives being. And just lastly, I just want to ask a little bit about your fascinating autism research. Have you studied sort of autism in correlation with fiction and narrative? I have. So I've done a couple of studies. So I did one study where I was just interested in comparing children and adults and adults on the autism spectrum in terms of what kinds of stories they find most appealing. And for this one, we manipulated two variables. One was fictionality, so fiction or nonfiction. Did it really happen or isn't make believe? And the other was the subject, either about people or about objects. So you had nonfiction about people, nonfiction about objects, fiction about people and fiction about objects. And what we found is that neurotypical adults don't care if something is fiction or nonfiction as long as it's about people. So they won't go based on the label. They're going based on the content of the story and they want the content to be social. People with autism show the opposite effect. So they're significantly preferring true stories over ones that aren't true, but that's actually seems to be driven primarily by a liking for nonfiction about objects. So a significant proportion of them ranked as their first choice and encyclopedia entry over a fictional story or a nonfiction story of any type. That's fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Burns. This was great. Thanks, Christina. Thank you so much, Dr. Barnes, and thank you to Carrie Kuhn from HBO's The Leftovers. And thank you guys for your feedback and for your tweets about where you're listening from. Next week we've got from Umio, from England, from New York City. Please send us more at the Twitter handle @podpopculture. Get more info on the homepage popcultureconfidential.com. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Karl Boy, produced by Renee Ditristet and myself, Christina Yerling-Biro. Thank you so much for listening. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly built. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, What were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]