The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [99]
Just this year we have seen what “normal” people can do when it comes to genocide. In Nigeria, at the beginning of March, 550 people were slaughtered in three villages. Some recounted to journalists how they killed families of Christians with machetes, knives, and cutlasses in a brutal act of sectarian retribution. The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group hell-bent on death and destruction. One of the killers proudly told a reporter how he had set his victims’ house on fire so that they would run outside. Then he killed two women and one man, first by beating them senseless with a stick and then stabbing them with a short knife.
It is difficult to embrace the scenario of being born in Nigeria or Nazi Germany or Cambodia or Rwanda or Sudan, and more difficult still to wonder if we, too, would have engaged in the mass murder that has occurred in those places. Perhaps some of us would not, have but I suspect most of us might have succumbed to the mob. Or contemplate the situation of being ordered to kill Jews in concentration camps like Belsen or Birkenau or Cambodians in a Khmer Rouge prison and ponder if it is possible to resist. Again, perhaps some of us would have, but many of us, normal as we are, would not.
Dexter and most other psychopaths, I would suggest, would be the category of persons least likely to engage in genocide. Maybe that is why when I go to bed at night I don’t worry so much about the Dexters of this world. I worry instead about the rest of us.
Professor Paul Wilson is a criminologist and forensic psychologist at Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. He is the author or co-author of over thirty books dealing with crime, forensics, and justice issues. Paul gives evidence in court, works on miscarriages of justice cases, and recently was appointed on the expert witness list to the International Criminal Court based in The Hague. His recent writings focus on wrongful convictions and persons involved in genocide.
How do they do it? How do the writers of Dexter get millions of ordinary, non-murderous viewers to root for a killer? Then, once the episode is over and those everyday people start to look at themselves instead of the screen, how do they make sense of what just happened? How do they reconcile the people they believe themselves to be with the people who, just moments before, were cheering on a serial murderer? Dexter is an extraordinary show, but the psychological processes that guide us as we watch are stunningly ordinary.
FASTER, DEXTER! KILL! KILL!
MATTHEW E. JACOVINA, MATTHEW A. BEZDEK, JEFFREY E. FOY, WILLIAM G. WENZEL, AND RICHARD J. GERRIG
When Dexter premiered in 2006, millions of viewers found themselves in the unusual role of rooting for a W serial killer to dispatch his victims. When reruns began airing on broadcast television, the advocacy group Parents Television Council condemned the show because it “compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered.”33 We believe that each of these claims is true for many viewers—which is exactly why they continue to watch. But how is Dexter able to convert so many otherwise law-abiding citizens into knowing accomplices to a psychopath’s killing spree? We suggest that Dexter exploits viewers’ ordinary psychological processes to yield extraordinary enthusiasm for Dexter’s murderous exploits.
Rooting for Dexter in the Moment
People who watch Dexter often confess to experiencing a shiver of delight when he lands another victim: as an episode unfolds, viewers feel themselves applauding Dexter’s continued success as a murderer. To be sure, people like to see bad guys get punished. 34 However, this general tendency does not sufficiently explain why people support Dexter’s particular methods. We suggest that people support Dexter because the unfolding story draws them into his narrative world. When people are transported to narrative worlds, they often respond as if they were participants in the events.35