Seeing yourself in a favorite character

Do people see a character's traits in themselves when they feel close to that character? We tested it with adult fans of one show and its six main characters.

My role: Contributing author (second of three)
Status: Published, Psychology of Popular Media, 2022 (brief report)

Rarity, E., Leitao, M. R., & Rutchick, A. M. (2022). Identification with characters in parasocial relationships predicts sharing their personality traits. Psychology of Popular Media, 11(2), 111–116. doi:10.1037/ppm0000389

Read the paper (DOI)

Who: 829 of 1,518 recruited fans. Mean age 23.8. 78.7% male, 15.9% female.
Measures: Closeness to each character (the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale) and ratings of six traits.
Data: Figures are rebuilt from the printed tables.

Main findings

Fans saw themselves in the traits of the characters they identified with

The team asked 829 fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic how close they felt to each of six characters. They also asked how much each of six traits described them.

Closeness to Pinkie Pie predicted humor (β = .329). Closeness to Fluttershy predicted kindness (β = .284). Rarity predicted generosity (β = .202) and Rainbow Dash predicted loyalty (β = .139).

β = .329

closeness to Pinkie Pie and humor

The strongest matched pair.

Two matches did not hold

Applejack stands for honesty, but closeness to Applejack did not predict honesty (β = −.082). Twilight Sparkle stands for friendship, and her share of the variance was near zero.

Fluttershy was linked to lower honesty (β = −.098) and lower friendship (β = −.148). These results ran against the show’s themes.

β = −.082

closeness to Applejack and honesty

Opposite to the match the show suggests.

The matched character carried most of the explained variance for humor and kindness

Pinkie Pie accounted for 73% of the explained variance in humor. Fluttershy accounted for 58% for kindness.

Each model explained a modest share overall (R² from .02 to .15).

Humor

73.0

Generosity

41.0

Loyalty

38.0

Honesty

32.0

Kindness

58.0

Friendship

1.0

Matched character’s share of explained variance (%).

The evidence

Matched character and trait

What to look for. Dots right of zero are matches that held. Dots left of zero are ones that did not.

Who explains each trait

What to look for. Each column is one trait. The total height is the variance explained, and each color is one character’s share.

Pinkie Pie
Rarity
Rainbow Dash
Applejack
Fluttershy
Twilight Sparkle

View as a table

Trait	Pinkie Pie	Rarity	Rainbow Dash	Applejack	Fluttershy	Twilight Sparkle
Humor	9.7%	1.4%	0.5%	1.1%	0.5%	0.1%
Generosity	2.6%	5.1%	0.5%	1.2%	2.6%	0.2%
Loyalty	0.8%	0.3%	2.4%	2.0%	0.8%	0.1%
Honesty	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.7%	1.1%	0.2%
Kindness	2.0%	2.8%	0.7%	0.3%	8.6%	0.4%
Friendship	3.7%	0.4%	1.0%	0.3%	1.5%	0.1%

Table 1. Fit of the six models

What to look for. Humor and kindness are best explained. Honesty is barely explained.

Trait	R²	F
Humor	.133	21.022
Generosity	.124	19.457
Loyalty	.063	9.164
Honesty	.022	3.037
Kindness	.148	23.889
Friendship	.069	10.109

From the paper's Table 2. The text gives the degrees of freedom as 6 and 828; with 829 people it would be 6 and 822, so I have left them out of the table.

What this means

Closeness to a character tracked self-perceived traits. The match was strongest for humor and kindness.

Limits. The sample was mostly young men who chose to take part, and it was cross-sectional. The data cannot show whether fans took on traits or chose characters who already matched them.

How this page was made

Every value is from the printed paper. Percent shares are each matched character’s relative weight divided by the model’s total R².