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Reflecting on a Serial Killer

Let’s suppose that, in the moment, most viewers’ preferences are in favor of Dexter’s particular form of justice. Is this stance morally acceptable? If we asked viewers whether it would be right for them to murder, even if they had strong reason to believe the person they were murdering was a serial killer, chances are they would respond that murder is usually wrong. Viewers would undoubtedly vary in how strongly they react to the question, but generally viewers have not been inspired by Dexter to go out and hunt down serial killers in the real world. Within the moral and aesthetic world of Dexter, viewers enjoy rooting for a murderer. However, Dexter’s world is different from the viewers’ world. When viewers are prompted to step back from the world of Dexter, they may readily acknowledge that Dexter is not acting morally. Of course, this analysis requires the type of careful reflection that isn’t often possible in the heat of the moment. In fact, moral judgments are very much affected by the mental resources people have available as they make them.40 When people are absorbed in an activity, they have fewer mental resources left over to engage in other activities. While watching Dexter, viewers are participating in the action of the show—giving mental advice, making judgments on characters’decisions—leaving fewer cognitive resources available for stepping back and evaluating the morality of the show. Thus, one interesting consequence of Dexter viewership is that people have to reconcile what they want (as evidenced by their responses in the moment) with what they believe they should let themselves want (upon reflection). In our experience, even after reflection, many viewers are able to continue to root for Dexter. How could this be the case?

We suspect that the shift from participation to reflection often results in a state that psychologists have labeled cognitive dissonance.41 Cognitive dissonance occurs when people hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously. In a classic study of cognitive dissonance, participants first engaged in an unpleasant activity for an hour.42 Afterward, the experimenter asked participants to tell another student that the experiment was fun and exciting in exchange for a monetary reward. When the participants complied, they were in a state of cognitive dissonance: they had experienced a boring task, but they had publicly claimed that the task was exciting with little justification (i.e., only a trivial reward). To alleviate this dissonance, participants in this condition changed their beliefs. In a follow-up interview, the participants who received only one dollar for misleading their peer rated the task as being more enjoyable than participants who received twenty dollars (the large reward provided enough justification so that a “white” lie caused little dissonance), and control participants who were not asked to mislead a peer at all (and thus did not experience dissonance).

This classic study demonstrates that when people experience cognitive dissonance, they often seek to reconcile the conflict by changing their beliefs. In the study, the obvious way in which participants could eliminate the dissonance was to report that they had enjoyed the (actually quite dull) task—to convince themselves that the task they had experienced was pleasant, and thus what they told the other students wasn’t a lie. In more complex circumstances, people may reduce dissonance in any number of ways. Consider how people justify smoking cigarettes in the face of evidence that the practice is deadly: they may anchor on their small number of daily cigarettes or an otherwise healthful life style to minimize their discomfort. People reason, “Smoking may be bad, but it isn’t bad for me.”

Dexter provides an abundance of means by which viewers can reconcile their dissonance to conclude, in a sense, that serial killing isn’t that bad for Dexter. To begin, there’s Harry’s Code. In the series, Dexter follows the rules that his