If movie protagonists go to the polling place with me, who would they vote for? People think that heroes would naturally vote for the candidate from the party they support, while villains choose the opposing party. Even when watching the news, they only remember distorted information favoring the party they support. Experts analyze that this phenomenon of projecting one's tendencies everywhere exacerbates political polarization.
◇Projection of partisanship onto fictional characters in movies
A research team from the University of Southampton's Department of Politics and International Relations stated on the 17th (local time) in the international academic journal Political Science Research & Method, "People in the United States and the United Kingdom believe that their favorite fictional characters share their voting preferences, while they think that disliked characters would vote in the opposite direction." This means heroes are on my side, and villains are on the opposing side.
The research teams from the University of Southampton and the University of Vienna surveyed 3,200 people, with 1,600 from the United Kingdom and 1,600 from the United States. They presented characters from popular movies created by Marvel and Disney, as well as from Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars, and asked participants to select characters more likely to support the Labour Party or Conservative Party in the UK and the Democratic Party or Republican Party in the U.S. At the same time, they also inquired about the political tendencies or party affiliations of the respondents.
According to the results, people were 20% more likely to project their political tendencies onto heroes than onto villains. This means heroes are believed to vote for the party I support. Conversely, villains were 20% more likely to be thought to vote for the opposing party.
The researchers noted that this kind of political projection could foster political polarization. Professor Turnbull-Dugarte mentioned, "If we consider 'villains' to be part of the opposing side, there is a tendency to assign increasingly negative attributes to that group." He added, "This makes voters more susceptible to misinformation that further reinforces biases against particular parties."
◇Information also distorted by political bias in memory
In fact, the researchers found a bias where good news is thought to pertain to people from our party, while scandals are associated with the opposing party. In other words, a 'good' politician is from the party I support, and a 'bad' politician is from the opposing party.
In a second study, the researchers showed two contrasting news articles about a constituency representative to over 1,600 British people. One article detailed charitable donations made by the representative, while the other described a story of the representative stealing money from a charity. The researchers then asked which party the representative belonged to in relation to the news.
In fact, neither news article disclosed which party the representative belonged to. However, one in six respondents claimed to remember which party the representative belonged to, indicating a strong tendency to view the charity donor as affiliated with their supporting party and the thief as affiliated with the opposing party. This shows how partisanship distorts memory.
When those who answered that they had not seen the news or did not remember were asked to guess which party the representative belonged to, they also guessed based on their partisan tendencies. Professor Turnbull-Dugarte stated, "To overcome the increasingly deepening political division, we need to recognize these partisan tendencies and biases."
The reality is not a simple world like movies where heroes and villains fight. To ensure that society does not become extremely divided over politics, we must first correct the mindset that considers those with different opinions as villains.
References
Political Science Research & Method (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2025.10