Catch up on the LAS Research Highlights podcast and to know our LAS faculty, their backgrounds and current research initiatives with Genia Olesnicky, Ph.D., professor of biology and Associate Dean of Research.
This episode's guest is Maja Krakowiak, Ph.D., professor in the communications department, who shares how her love of entertainment guided her to the communications field and discusses her research on morally ambiguous television characters, viewers' reactions to them and how her studies have changed as the entertainment industry does.
Find the full episode and transcript here, and check out the episode highlights below.
Summary
"I've always been fascinated with entertainment."
Maja Krakowiak's love for the entertainment industry helped her go from being unsure what to study at school, to earning her Ph.D. in media studies.
"When I got to college, I had no idea what to major in," said Krakowiak. "I went to the University of Utah, and I found the Department of Communication, and specifically Mass Communication, and it really spoke to me as something that I could actually study. I ended up double majoring in Mass Communication and Political Science at the University of Utah, and I went on to get my Ph.D. at Penn State University in media studies. That's where my research took off and my love of entertainment research really grew. I had a fantastic advisor. Her name is Dr. Mary Beth Oliver, and she's just a superstar in the field."
While Krakowiak's overall research is the study of psychological and social effects of media, with a focus on entertainment and morality, she is especially interested in why and how viewers respond to morally-ambiguous characters, such as Walter White from "Breaking Bad" or Tony Soprano from "The Sopranos."
"Dexter Morgan of 'Dexter' is another example," said Krakowiak. "He's a serial killer who's nice and charming, so we, as the audience, are supposed to root for him. Why it is that we are drawn to these characters, and why we enjoy these characters? Previous research in media has talked about how people like good characters and want them to succeed and root for them, and that's how enjoyment happens. And if a character is immoral and does bad things, we dislike that character. We, therefore, get enjoyment when bad things happen to them when they get punished. But morally ambiguous characters don't really fit into either of those categories."
Krakowiak noted that one theory for rooting for these types of characters is the realism they bring and how they are easier to identify with than a character that's completely altruistic or evil. Another theory is that we, as viewers, are willing to disengage with "bad" actions and choices if we feel a character's motive is altruistic, or if the outcome of their actions is something we see as "good" regardless of the choices they made to achieve it.
"If a character does something really bad, but the outcome isn't so negative, or if we don't witness the outcome and it happens off screen, then we are more likely to accept that behavior and explain it away," Krakowiak explained. "So all of these narratives come into play, and we excuse these behaviors as a result."
Krakowiak also discussed how the shift in the entertainment industry affects her research.
"I see it with my students when I try to talk to them in my classes. I think increasingly it's becoming difficult for students, and younger individuals particularly, to locate that. Increasingly, the entertainment content that they are exposed to is in these short videos on TikTok or YouTube, and that's not necessarily the kind of thing that I was trained to study and to research. And now, when a series finale airs, it's not a big social thing that everybody experiences at the same time."
"Entertainment itself has changed quite a bit and that makes it so that I have to adjust the way I ask questions of people and participants and and things like that," she continued. "The other thing that's changed is that it's harder to get good samples. I feel like people are really surveyed out and they are constantly being asked to fill out surveys. So it's harder to get genuine responses in a self-report survey, which is a lot of the research that I do."