A new study published in Psychology of Popular Media sheds light on why some people are drawn to morally ambiguous fictional characters, such as villains and antiheroes. The research suggests that antagonistic personality traits like Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism—collectively known as Dark Tetrad traits—are associated with admiring and identifying with these types of characters. This association appears to reflect how individuals view their own values, motivations, and personalities in relation to these fictional figures.
Fictional heroes, antiheroes, and villains play a central role in popular media, captivating audiences with their moral clarity, ambiguity, or outright malice. Previous studies have established that people are often drawn to characters who share traits with themselves, but much of this research has focused narrowly on single types of characters or excluded key personality traits like everyday sadism. This study sought to expand on that foundation.
“Fiction is a big part of a lot of people’s lives, and a lot of people have pretty personal relationships with their favorite fictional characters. What draws certain individuals to certain characters?” said study author Eliott K. Doyle, a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon.
“Antiheroes and villains are exciting parts of stories, but for some of the people who like them, the appeal might be deeper than that. Personally, I’m often intrigued by villains in fiction; I have some guesses about why that is for me, but what about for consumers of fictional media more generally? Some past research has found that people tend to like characters who behave in a way that is moral according to the culture they live in, but not everybody from a given culture is necessarily in total agreement about what ‘good’ values and behaviors actually are. So, we wanted to look at the variability in character preferences based on individual differences in these kinds of attitudes.”
To explore this question, researchers recruited 473 undergraduate students from a university in the Pacific Northwest. The participants, mostly women with an average age of 19.78, completed a survey assessing their personality traits and preferences for various fictional characters.
The researchers used a dual approach to evaluate character preferences. First, participants rated 25 popular fictional characters, including heroes like Disney’s Mulan, antiheroes like DC Comics’ Harley Quinn, and villains like Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter. Participants rated their familiarity with each character, and responses for characters they were unfamiliar with were excluded. For each character, participants rated how admirable they found the character and how similar they felt to them.
In the second approach, participants evaluated brief written descriptions of archetypal heroes, antiheroes, and villains. These descriptions were stripped of specific narrative contexts, focusing solely on the values and motivations associated with each archetype. This allowed the researchers to assess whether the appeal of these archetypes extended beyond familiarity with specific characters.
To measure antagonistic personality traits, participants completed several validated questionnaires. These included measures of Machiavellianism (manipulativeness and cynicism), narcissism (self-centeredness and grandiosity), psychopathy (impulsivity and lack of remorse), and everyday sadism (enjoyment of cruelty).
The researchers found that individuals with more antagonistic traits were more likely to admire and view themselves as similar to antiheroes. Psychopathy and everyday sadism demonstrated the strongest correlations, indicating that individuals high in these traits are particularly drawn to antiheroes, who often operate in moral gray areas and exhibit a mix of virtuous and questionable behaviors. Machiavellianism and narcissism were also linked to positive evaluations of antiheroes, but the associations were somewhat weaker. These findings align with the idea that antiheroes embody complex, multifaceted personalities that resonate with those who exhibit similarly complex antagonistic traits.
Villains showed a similar pattern, with antagonistic traits positively correlated with both admiration and perceived similarity. However, the associations with villains were generally weaker than with antiheroes, especially for traits like Machiavellianism. This may reflect the fact that, while villains often share traits like cunning and self-interest, their overtly malevolent actions and lack of redeeming qualities make them less relatable than antiheroes. Nonetheless, individuals high in psychopathy and everyday sadism were more likely to admire and feel similar to villains, suggesting that these traits may amplify the appeal of characters who embrace chaos or cruelty.
“The biggest takeaway from the study was that all of the antagonistic traits were linked to admiring and feeling similar to fictional villains and antiheroes,” Doyle told PsyPost. “This was the case for both antiheroes and villains from popular culture, and for descriptions of archetypal antiheroes and villains. The link was the strongest for psychopathy and everyday sadism.”
In contrast, heroes were rated as the most admirable overall, but they were not strongly associated with antagonistic traits. Participants high in Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism often rated heroes as less similar to themselves, reflecting a mismatch between their own personality characteristics and the virtuous, altruistic qualities typically associated with heroes. The only exception was narcissism, which showed a weak positive correlation with similarity to heroes, potentially reflecting narcissistic individuals’ admiration for heroic qualities like leadership and recognition.
“The associations between fictional heroes and narcissism were somewhat surprising,” Doyle said. “We found that three of the four antagonistic traits (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism) were negatively associated with both similarity to/admiration for heroes, but the trait of grandiose narcissism was positively associated with similarity to heroes from popular culture.”
“Interestingly, this wasn’t the case for narcissism and descriptions of archetypal heroes, just heroes from popular culture, which might suggest that higher narcissism is related to feeling similar to fictional heroes’ presentations in stories more than relating to archetypal heroic attitudes.”
The study sheds light on the psychological factors that drive admiration for morally ambiguous fictional characters. But the researchers warn against overinterpreting the results: “I would mostly caution people not to use these findings diagnostically in daily life,” Doyle said. “Someone who likes fictional villains isn’t necessarily high in antagonistic traits, and someone high in antagonistic traits won’t necessarily behave like a fictional villain!”
Future research could explore other characteristics of antiheroes and villains that contribute to their appeal. For example, some characters may resonate with audiences due to shared experiences of marginalization. Investigating how these factors interact with personality traits could deepen our understanding of why people are drawn to certain fictional figures.
“I would like to investigate other features of antiheroes and villains that a subset of fiction consumers latch onto,” Doyle said. “Our study demonstrates that some of the appeal of antiheroes and villains is attributable to those characters’ archetypal traits, but there might be other features that are probably appealing in different ways. For example, some subtypes of antiheroes and villains might have had experiences of marginalization (e.g., disability, economic disadvantage, minoritized identities) that are less common to find in heroic characters. It’s possible people who have also had those kinds of marginalizing experiences end up admiring/feeling similar to antihero and villain characters for those reasons, regardless of personality.”
“I am also interested in seeing how these perceptions of characters hold up contextually. How people tend to perceive character archetypes is probably heavily informed by stereotypes they’ve formed based on other similar characters they’ve encountered in the past. Even though our archetypal hero/antihero/villain descriptions weren’t presented in the context of stories, the participants in the study might have been making assumptions that the villain description, for example, would be in an antagonistic role.”
“But what if a character who seemed like an archetypal villain did something most people would agree was good?” Doyle continued. “What if a character who seemed like an archetypal hero did something most people would agree was bad? I’m interested in complicating these findings — and potentially also investigating how they apply to perceptions of figures from popular media who aren’t fictional, like celebrities and political figures.”
The study, “Rating Heroes, Antiheroes, and Villains: Machiavellianism, Grandiose Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sadism Predict Admiration for and Perceived Similarity to Morally Questionable Characters,” was authored by Eliott K. Doyle, Cameron S. Kay, and Holly Arrow.
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