Marc Wilson: Could a superhero make you think of others first?
I remember seeing the original Batman, with Adam West and Burt Ward in the roles of Batman and Robin. I must have been about 5 or 6, and I cried when the episode ended. Remember back when you had to wait a week to see the next one?
Christian Bale is my favourite big screen Batman, but I really enjoyed Robert Pattinson’s recent turn in The Batman. We meet Pattinson’s Batman interrupting a gang harassing a Gotham commuter, who watches in horror as Batman beats the stuffing out of the bad guys and later begs, “Don’t hurt me, please.”
This is probably not the kind of Batman used in a fun study published last November. Just like The Batman, we have a train – in this case, the Milan metro. Imagine you’re a passenger on that heavily occupied train. A visibly pregnant woman boards; do you offer her your seat? (I know Listener.co.nz readers would.)
In this basic “control” condition, and maybe it’s just Milan train users, Pregnant Lady is offered a seat only 38% of the 77 times she boards. But what if Batman is on the train? On a further 61 trips, Batman boards from a separate door at the same stop. With him in the background, Pregnant Lady is almost twice as likely to be offered a seat. Note, I emphasise in the background, not “while Batman is looking over your shoulder” because almost half of the people who offered up their seat in this experimental condition later said they didn’t notice Batman.
You’ll already have worked out that Pregnant Lady, and Batman, are research confederates. She’s not pregnant, and he’s not really Batman. But 138 rides is a fair sample size.
The research team, led by Francesco Pagnini of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, concluded, “Unexpected events can promote prosociality, even without conscious awareness.” Which isn’t the argument I expected to see them make. I anticipated they’d make the argument that Batman, apart from being a scary vigilante, is a symbol of helping others. This would make it another one of those papers that proposes subtle nudge-like effects because people’s stereotype of helping behaviour is activated.
But no, they’re saying it’s Batman in this case, but it could be any novel or unexpected event that interrupts the “monotony” of our mundane existence. These interruptions wake us up; make us more mindful of what’s going on in the moment. “Ooh, Pregnant Lady. Better get up and offer her my seat!”
On one hand, I want to see more evidence before I start backing ways to inject novelty into otherwise mundane activities, but I would have worried about getting burnt if Pagnini did take the kind of embodied cognition explanation that has led to psychology being burnt before.
I’m thinking specifically of another superhero-based phenomenon, from 2010. In a Ted Talk watched more than 77 million times to date, former Harvard University lecturer Amy Cuddy recommended making a superhero pose for two minutes to feel more confident and assertive. Think Wonder Woman, feet braced, hands on hips, chest up, and staring into the distance. The mechanism was supposedly that standing like this increases testosterone production (making us more assertive) and reduces cortisol (so less stressed). Unfortunately for Cuddy and colleagues, the specific hormonal effects she had reported proved hard to replicate.
A more recent 2022 meta-analysis of studies looking at power-posing vindicated her in part: though the hormonal pathway didn’t stand up, it found adopting this kind of open stance makes people feel more confident. However, there was weak evidence that this affected participant’s behaviour: you might feel more confident but that doesn’t mean your job interview will go better.
For now, if you see Batman on your next commute, look for a pregnant woman to offer your seat to. Particularly if it’s a Robert Pattinson Batman.
