The cognitive complexity of Miss Piggy and Osama Bin Laden: Examining linguistic differences between fiction and reality.

Abstract

Is fiction a reflection of reality? Previous psychological research presents a contradicting picture. While Tetlock's value pluralism model (Tetlock, 1986) and research focused on the complexity of lying (Repke, Conway, & Houck, in press;Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards, 2003) would argue against fiction being a reflection, the concept of prototypes (Rosch, 1978) argues for it. The subsequent paper presents 2 studies that hopefully provide a clearer picture and an answer to the aforementioned question by comparing the integrative complexity of fictional characters to their real-life counterparts. Study 1 utilized a deep-but-narrow approach, comparing a single salient, prototypical category, while Study 2 utilized the opposite approach, comparing 10 varied, prototypical categories. Overall, both Study 1's and Study 2's result upheld a clear, overwhelming divergence between fiction and reality (the fictional characters were consistently simpler than the nonfictional characters); however, an intraclass correlation in Study 2 revealed surprising and significant levels of overlap between fiction and reality that differed depending on the unique category. While this research is still too raw and novel to do more than speculate on the exact reasoning behind the differing levels of overlap, the mere existence of the levels of overlap themselves indicate a nuanced answer to the research question. Fiction is both psychologically a representation of reality and a divergence from it. Public Policy Relevance StatementFiction is an inescapable aspect of the human experience, and yet little research directly addresses its underlining psychology. As such, we believe our studies and findings are significant because they provide a novel insight into the relationship between fiction and real-life. Even more importantly, our studies provide a strong foundation for future research into the psychology of fiction.

The curious case of left‐wing authoritarianism: When authoritarian persons meet anti‐authoritarian norms

“…Consistent with this possibility, LWA in one study was significantly, but only moderately (r = .31), correlated with attitude extremity/strength on an environment-based item (Conway et al, 2018a). Conway, 2011;Conway et al, 2011) using the standardized and validated Automated Integrative Complexity system (for validation and evidence pertinent to the system, see Conway, Conway, & Houck, 2020;Houck et al, 2017;Houck et al, 2018;McCullough & Conway, 2018a, 2018bZubrod et al, 2020).…”

Understanding the Role of Linguistic Complexity in Famous Trial Outcomes

“…For instance, more recent studies comparing expert human scorers to AutoIC have shown higher correlations than the original validity paper Houck et al, 2018;McCullough & Conway, 2018a;Prinsloo, 2016). Further, there is ample evidence across various domains to suggest that AutoIC produces theoretically interpretable findings: terrorism (Houck et al, 2017;Putra et al, 2018), fictional versus real dialogue (McCullough & Conway, 2018b), decision-making (Prinsloo, 2016), the film industry (McCullough & Conway, 2018a), religion (Houck et al, 2018), and social media ( McCullough & Conway, 2019). In addition, recent tests reveal successful AutoIC replication attempts of prior hand-scored IC studies in health, ideology, and presidential leadership.…”

Validating automated integrative complexity: Natural language processing and the Donald Trump Test

“…AutoIC has similarly advanced our understanding of the individual stability of complex thinking (Conway & Woodard, 2019), the complexity of real versus fictional writings (McCullough & Conway, 2018a), educational interventions (Felts, 2017;Prinsloo, 2016;University of Montana Psychology Department, 2018), the popularity of movies (McCullough & Conway, 2018b), the rated quality of video game dialogue (McCullough, 2019a), the success of fan fiction (McCullough, 2020), critical response to horror films (McCullough, 2019b), and the complexity of twitter (McCullough & Conway, 2019). Thus, AutoIC has begun to offer theoretical insights into multiple important psychological arenas.…”

“…At the paragraph level, the overall correlation was r = .46; for prospective tests only, the paragraph level correlation was r = .41. Since the original paper, several additional studies have also correlated expert human scorers with AutoIC across religious documents (Houck et al, 2018), comparisons of fictional versus non-fictional characters (McCullough & Conway, 2018a), decisionmaking scenarios (Prinsloo, 2016), and health (Test 3, this paper). As can be seen in Table 1, the correlations with human scorers exceeded the tests from the original validity paper in every case.…”