Egocentric Projection onto Story Characters

Understanding how audiences perceive narrative characters is important to understanding how audiences engage in a story and how persuasive and/or entertaining narrative messages work. The current studies examine to what extent and when do audience members understand a character’s mental processing by egocentric projection—projection of the audience member’s own mental processes into the mind of the character. The results of two experiments indicate that this depends on a number of factors including familiarity with the character, whether audiences anchor on the self, availability of mental resources and existence of competing stereotypes. Overall the results support theories indicating that egocentric projection is most likely for unfamiliar characters. This study helps clarify some common misunderstandings of egocentric projection and shed light on the mechanism of narrative processing.