The Interpreted Mind: Understanding Acting

Acting is everywhere: TV, movies, and theater. Yet psychologists know surprisingly little about how acting is processed and understood by viewers. This is despite popular, scholarly, and journalistic obsession both with how actors are able to create characters with fully realized personalities, emotional arcs, physical attributes, and skills, and with whether actors and their characters merge during or after performance. Theoretically, there are several possibilities for how audience members process actors and acting: as literary fiction; as if someone is telling a lie; like essentialist traits and states; or like the personalities and emotions of real people in our every day lives. The authors consider each of these possibilities in turn. They then present 3 studies investigating the amount audiences conflate actors’ and characters’ characteristics (N = 231) by asking participants directly how much they perceive actors as experiencing the characteristics they portray (Study 1), by showing short video clips of actors and asking participants how much they thought actors were experiencing what they portrayed (Study 2) and by asking participants to judge the overlap in personality characteristics between actors and characters (Study 3). Overall, audience members are conflating actors and their characters. However, how much depends on the characteristic being portrayed and the knowledge of the audience. We propose a theoretical model of when and how audience members think of actors and their characters as blended, and we lay out a research agenda to determine how acting and actors are understood.