Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture Matters for Images of International Relations

Abstract

Many researchers assert that popular culture warrants greater attention from international relations scholars. Yet work regarding the effects of popular culture on international relations has so far had a marginal impact. We believe that this gap leads mainstream scholars both to exaggerate the influence of canonical academic sources and to ignore the potentially great influence of popular culture on mass and elite audiences. Drawing on work from other disciplines, including cognitive science and psychology, we propose a theory of how fictional narratives can influence real actors’ behavior. As people read, watch, or otherwise consume fictional narratives, they process those stories as if they were actually witnessing the phenomena those narratives describe, even if those events may be unlikely or impossible. These “synthetic experiences” can change beliefs, reinforce preexisting views, or even displace knowledge gained from other sources for elites as well as mass audiences. Because ideas condition how agents act, we argue that international relations theorists should take seriously how popular culture propagates and shapes ideas about world politics. We demonstrate the plausibility of our theory by examining the influence of the US novelist Tom Clancy on issues such as US relations with the Soviet Union and 9/11.

Does popular culture have a place in the study of world politics? Even though panels on “pop culture and international relations” fill conference halls and textbooks using zombies find widespread adoption in introductory courses, most international relations scholars’ practices suggest that, when it comes to theorizing, they still regard popular culture as a distraction. Few scholars will go so far as to publicly scoff at work on popular culture and international relations (see Dittmer 2015, 46–47), but the absence of discussion about films, novels, television, and video games in mainstream studies speaks volumes. This neglect persists despite longstanding critiques that overlooking how popular culture generates and disseminates information about the world systematically biases our conception of how ideas about world politics circulate, how people process information, and where important debates about international relations actually take place (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 26–27; Hopf 2002; Hopf and Allan 2016; McNamara 2015; Neumann and Nexon 2006, 8; Shapiro 1988, 7–9).

In this article, we show that wagering against the importance of popular culture in world politics is a bad bet. In particular, we propose a theoretical mechanism describing how people learn about world politics from fictional narrative sources. Drawing on research in other disciplines, especially psychology, we explain how audiences’ all-but-automatic construction of fictional worlds from novels, movies, television, and other sources generates what we term “synthetic experiences”: impressions, ideas, and pseudo-recollections about the world derived from exposure to narrative texts. These synthetic experiences reinforce, induce, and even replace identities and beliefs that affect how audiences behave in the real world.

Because the mechanism we describe should be universal, we argue that the effects of consuming fiction influence (to at least some degree) everyone who is exposed to fictional works. Narratives in fiction and popular culture therefore deserve to take their place alongside respectable sources in the field, such as university courses, formal monographs, and journal articles, in theorizing about the social construction of belief and the dissemination of ideas and identities. Fictional sources provide audiences with information about concepts fundamental to world politics, including the characteristics of actors in international relations, issues important to global politics, and expectations about outcomes of strategies. Movies, television shows, and novels circulate widely. They may therefore be at least as influential—or, under some conditions, even more influential—in shaping people's worldviews as more “respectable” sources. However, because fictional narratives can make even impossible phenomena seem plausible, fiction may persuade people of wrong, or even fantastical, associations. We show that some otherwise inexplicable beliefs and actions become far more comprehensible in light of our intervention.

Focusing on the mechanisms through which people interpret the world challenges the implicit dichotomy between fact and fiction that some international relations scholars naïvely, even blindly, employ. As psychologists and others demonstrate, both information and misinformation contained in fictional narratives often join the store of knowledge and beliefs through which audiences interpret the world. The cognitive processes involved in transforming text or visual stimuli into a comprehensible mental construct complicate discerning fact from fiction. True, the effects of fictional presentations can be influenced by audiences’ background knowledge and preexisting beliefs. For sophisticated audiences, expertise regarding a subject portrayed in a text may prevent the “suspension of disbelief” that allows fiction to transport readers into the story. Yet nobody possesses sufficiently broad-based expertise to immunize them from all fictional portrayals. More important, given that both the mass public and senior policymakers are often nonexpert generalists without specialized knowledge in more than a few realms (Rosati 2000, 58–59), a great many actors in world politics may prove susceptible to accepting claims presented in fiction as factual.

Such effects extend beyond obscure or unimportant topics. For example, nobody has ever fought a nuclear war, but most of us can imagine what one might be like. Those images mostly derive not from academic accounts or journalism, but from sources like the 1982 TV movie The Day After, which reached nearly 40 million US households, or the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which may have reached more than 100 million people. Such images affect almost everyone's expectations about what such a conflict would entail. In a recent panel, a distinguished scholar of international relations discussed how films can make international relations theories come alive, observing that The Day After showed students “what a nuclear war would really look like.” If, as Hopf (2012, 26) argues, offhand remarks reveal unstated assumptions, then we should take such utterances seriously. Moreover, fiction serves more commonplace—but potentially equally important—functions of reproducing stable identities, “informing” people about the world, and making an inherently chaotic political universe comprehensible. If influence scales with audience size, such sources may produce impacts orders of magnitude greater than expert judgments about the world.

Our work both complements and differs from earlier efforts to integrate popular culture into international relations. Establishing the criteria through which a text can induce synthetic experiences can tie together various strands of international relations and political science scholarship on constructivism, culture, and politics. By specifying a process grounded in findings from cognitive science and psychology, we offer a basis for further theorizing and research that bridges constructivist (“idea-ist”) and psychological explanations for how people make sense of world politics (Shannon 2012). By situating ourselves at the interface of the cognitive and the cultural, we also supply a new way for those who already take popular culture seriously to answer objections from the unconverted, such as how any fictional source can exert influence on the world. More profoundly, if scholars admit that ideas and identities exert any influence on behavior in world politics (for example, Goldstein and Keohane 1993), then demonstrating how fictional narratives can change audiences’ beliefs implies that they also can change how people act in the “real” world. We demonstrate this point through a study of the connections between the novelist Tom Clancy's fictional portrayals of great-power politics and the international relations beliefs and actions of conservative American audiences (both mass and elite).

How Popular Culture Matters for International Relations

Despite a longstanding scholarship on “ideas and international relations” (for example, Goldstein and Keohane 1993; Laffey and Weldes 1997), few regard popular culture as a source of ideas relevant to political action or belief.¹ Exceptions exist: Brassett's (2016) theorizing of satirists’ resistance to Western domination, Hansen's (2011) application of securitization theory to explain the importance of images such as cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, Young and Carpenter's (2016) investigation of autonomous weapons and science fiction films, and Hopf (2002) and Hopf and Allan (2016), which employ novels as sources of evidence about national identity. Yet these interventions are rarer than studies of how experts, the media, and ideologues shape ideas and behavior (for example, Yee 1996; Bieler and Morton 2008; Lindvall 2009). As Shannon (2012, 2) writes, most mainstream international relations theorists adopt a position that “rationalism, objectivism, [and] universalism” characterize the explanatory concepts necessary to explain phenomena in world politics. Such a perspective excludes almost by construction the possibility that popular culture matters because it assumes that people can readily discern fact from fiction. Consequently, scholars often act as if people engaging in international relations should never be swayed by falsehoods or stories but only by facts. For instance, Saunders (2011) establishes how American presidents’ experiences and education influenced their actions in Vietnam, but even this careful study does not consider how fiction could have influenced actors, as Logevall (2015) shows the novel (and the movie) The Quiet American affected actors.

We argue that the line between fact and fiction proves more permeable. To establish the plausibility of our argument, we consider the argument from George (1993, xvii), who claimed that academic knowledge becomes relevant to policymakers when it provides:

1. a conceptualization of strategies: “a conceptual framework for each of the many different strategies and instruments available to [policymakers] for attempting to influence other states”;

2. a source of general knowledge about each strategy's effectiveness; and

3. inputs for developing actor-specific behavioral models: “a sophisticated, insightful understanding of each of the state-actors with whom they interact…in lieu of a dangerous tendency to assume that they can be regarded as rational, unitary actors.”

We demonstrate below that popular culture can, in principle, work through each channel—not only for mass audiences but also for officials and other elites. We do not claim that popular culture can do so because it provides information of the same complexity or veracity as scholarship. Our claim is, instead, that information from popular culture can fulfill even elites’ needs despite not being as reliable, vetted, or sophisticated as academic work.

Regarding George's first point, an implicit bias common among academics holds that ideas circulate most effectively when they wear respectable guises. Nye (2008, 596) argues that “academics can also help the public and policymakers by framing, mapping, and raising questions even when they do not provide answers”; he cites Fukuyama and Huntington as models.² Yet essays in magazines of ideas may not constitute the most effective means of communicating with the public. Fictional accounts also change opinion and motivate action. Antislavery beliefs circulated before the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but its portrayal of slavery both recruited new abolitionists and changed how abolitionists made their case (Levine 1992).³Lembcke (1998) documents how the influential trope of American veterans returning from the Vietnam War being spat upon by protesters derived more from cinematic portrayals than from reality. Relatedly, ideas circulated in fiction affect officials’ views of appropriate foreign policy. Dunn (2003, 6) shows how Western observers invoked Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to explain conflict in central Africa: “discourses and imagery [about] the Congo's identity…directly influenced political policies toward the Congo.”

Popular culture also supplies “knowledge” about effective strategies. Toye (2008) establishes that Winston Churchill not only read H.G. Wells's speculative works but changed his policy positions in response (see also Toye 2010). The Great Pacific War, a 1925 novel that described a successful Japanese attack on the American Navy, affected the Japanese naval staff's views on conflict with the United States (Maycock 2002). After watching the 1983 film War Games, featuring a hacker's attack on US nuclear command and control systems, President Ronald Reagan worried about the vulnerability of US strategic forces and asked the principals of the National Security Council if the film's plot was plausible. Although many officials dismissed Reagan's query as wild speculation based on a silly movie, a review pursuant to his queries found that US systems were vulnerable, prompting the first US document on cyber defense (Kaplan 2016, 1). President Bill Clinton increased US investment in biodefense after reading Richard Preston's thriller The Cobra Event, which described a bioterror attack on the United States (Smith 2014, 111). “Ironically, everything that Clinton had previously learned about biological terrorism from official sources did not have as much effect on him as the Preston novel” (Mangold and Goldberg 2000, 363)—even though experts found the novel's premise extremely unrealistic: “No way in hell would [the recombinant virus in The Cobra Event] work,” said one US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert (Hall 1998).

Finally, popular culture can provide information about specific actors and issues, especially regarding subjects about which audiences know little or nothing. Audiences of the satirical 2006 film Borat “appreciated [the film's] humor largely because of a near-total ignorance of the real Kazakhstan” (Schatz 2008, 54). But the movie, although portraying a caricature of Western prejudices of Central Asia, nevertheless tarnished Western audiences’ views of the real country, prompting Astana to launch a public relations counteroffensive. Michael (2010) investigates how extremist fiction, such as the novel The Turner Diaries, can radicalize fanatics to pursue strategies of violent extremism by providing schemata about actors like government officials.

IR Scholarship and Popular Culture

These examples suggest that the typical, even if unstated, objection to popular culture studies in international relations—that popular cultural artifacts are trivial and irrelevant—is unwarranted. Yet listing examples does not establish why, how, or how much popular culture and fiction matter for politics and international relations. Many scholars have put forward arguments about these points (for more complete reviews, see Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009; Caso and Hamilton 2015). Neumann and Nexon (2006, 11–17) divide studies of politics and popular culture into four categories.⁴ The first, politics and popular culture, comprises studies that examine topics like the international political economy of the popular culture industry or the “real world's” impact on popular culture (for example, Hozic 1999). Although scholars in this vein study important topics, we do not directly engage with this literature.

More important for our projects are studies that fit within Neumann and Nexon's other categories. Their second category, popular culture as mirror, comprises work that uses “popular culture as a medium for exploring theoretical concepts, dilemmas of foreign policy, and the like.”⁵ Such work appears most prominently in classroom applications but includes other spheres, as with Clapton and Shepherd's (2016) arguments that Game of Thrones “subvert[s] both the disciplinary mechanisms that divide up knowledge and the related marginalization of various knowledge claims” in a way that affects ‘real-world’ arguments” (see also Fishel and Wilcox 2017). A third category, popular culture as data, includes studies that treat popular culture “as evidence about dominant norms, ideas, identities, or beliefs, in a particular state, society, or region,” as with Valeriano and Habel's (2016) investigation of enemies in video games (see also Hopf and Allan 2016; Fey, Poppe, and Rauch 2016; Ciută 2015; Press-Barnathan 2016; Gemmill and Nexon 2006).

Neumann and Nexon's fourth category, containing studies that view popular culture as “constituting norms, values, identities, and ideas,” proves most relevant to us. Scholars in this camp view popular culture, representations, and cognate phenomena as potentially constituting or otherwise directly affecting world politics (Der Derian 1990, 2009). This category subverts the “real world's” assumed ontological priority by proposing that narratives can impact “real” politics by encoding arguments about how the world works, delimiting and reproducing identities relevant to understanding relations, and proposing effective strategies for action. Weldes (1999, 119) highlights the role of popular culture like Star Trek “in providing a background of meanings that help to constitute public images of international relations and foreign policy.” Carpenter (2016) describes how NGOs interested in preventing the spread of autonomous military weapons (“killer robots”) overcame the “giggle factor” catalyzed by The Terminator and other science fictional presentations. Connolly (2005) argues that political coalitions such as the George W. Bush–era alliance between Christian conservatives, national security activists, and free-marketeers were held together in part by cultural artifacts such as the Left Behind novels (see also Robinson 2015).

Each of these categories proves compatible with a diversity of methodological and ontological approaches. We do not aim to assert the primacy of any ontological or methodological approach. As we detail below, we deal largely with concerns about how fictions influence the real world that seem to fall outside the Neumann and Nexon typology. Nevertheless, we think that other questions require investigation. Do fictional works merely present correspondences and juxtapositions of symbolism that audiences translate into referents that allow themselves to act? Do narratives provide useful mnemonic devices assisting political action? Do stories matter because they serve as a simple conveyor belt for delivering facts, or are they sites for the independent creation of theories and explanations about reality? In other words, how does the narrativist or idea-ist rubber meet the political road? Beneath all of these questions lies a fundamental puzzle: why does fiction matter for world politics given that it is not real? Lacking answers to such questions makes it easy for skeptics to dismiss studies of popular culture as lacking rigor or importance—even when, as we show below, the “serious” view that facts and fictions are easily separable proves more naïve.

To answer these questions, we investigate the point at which the social world of knowledge, meaning, and imagery contained in cultural artifacts meets the individual audience member: the cognitive and psychological mechanisms that allow for the comprehension of inputs both “fictional” and “real.” Like Shannon (2012), we anchor our approach in an individual-level theory of cognition and psychological mechanisms. Doing so helps link constructivism as “idea-ism”—the social ecology of narratives, imagery, and so forth that cultural artifacts preserve and circulate—to the mechanisms through which individuals decode those texts. We conclude that fiction matters for international relations theory in part because the nature of cognition makes it harder for people to tell fact from fiction than they may realize—or than theorists want to admit. Our answer may not be the only one to the questions skeptics pose—in fact, it almost certainly is not—but we believe it helps broaden the debate by building bridges to other disciplines while also opening the space for conversation about these issues in international relations theory.

Fiction, Audiences, and Synthetic Experiences

Shannon (2012, 5), rightly in our view, describes mainstream international relations theories as presuming that “the world is real, clearly comprehensible, and commonly perceived by all actors” and that “the external environment can be accurately described by the scholar and accurately surmised by world actors.” In this view, which we term “naïve sophistication,” audiences understand when what they consume is fictional and when it is fact and can easily keep such categories straight. In principle, such a view could accommodate even works fitting in Neumann and Nexon's “constitutive” fourth category. Under such assumptions, popular culture could play a role in constituting world politics because its fictional elements would simply be glue holding separable facts together. Audiences watching Star Trek could discard the fictional chaff (starships, Klingons, and warp drive) from the relevant wheat (benevolent liberal hegemony leads to perpetual peace) and easily apply arguments encoded in the text to the real world (support liberal containment policy, not aggressive anti-Communist rollback). Fiction, then, would serve as an alternative site for theoretical or political contestation because the fictional elements of the story could be segregated from the “serious” parts. Reality would reign supreme even though fiction served as the vector for presenting the argument.

Prentice and Gerrig (1999) summarize this view, which we describe as the naïve sophistication model, as “presuppos[ing] that fictional information is compartmentalized from real-world knowledge…[a] separation…necessary from a normative standpoint to ensure that readers are not misled by unreliable fictional assertions” (536).⁶ Despite the normative appeal of this view, we term this perspective “naïve” sophistication because it proceeds from an idealized model of how people make sense of representations of the world. Prentice and Gerrig (along with others) argue that preconscious, automatic processing of fictional input makes distinguishing “fact” from “fiction” far harder than the naïve sophistication view assumes. Fact and fiction comingle because of how people decode representational inputs. A more sophisticated and empirically sound view of cognition, which we call “sophisticated naïveté,” accepts that the automatic nature of interpreting texts (or films or other input) makes human cognition mostly trusting. People are inclined to accept inputs routinely and automatically as representing truths about the world. Conscious skepticism may interrupt such processing, but only with effort. Skepticism will thus be rarer than naïve sophistication predicts.

Instead of a model in which audiences discard fiction and retain facts, we propose that when audiences encounter texts and audiovisual narratives, they produce “synthetic experiences” by creating a comprehensible mental construction based on fictional inputs. Such synthetic experiences affect how readers understand the world and, therefore, their behavior in political environments. We employ the term “synthetic experiences” similar to how Perla and McGrady (2011) used it in a more limited context: to describe the mental constructs audiences produce to make sense of immersive sources (movies, games, novels, television shows, simulations, etc.). We use the term more broadly to summarize recurring findings in other disciplines about how fictional inputs affect real-world behavior, to simplify diverse cognitive mechanisms that produce those phenomena (for technical details, see Mar 2011), and, most important, to describe a theoretical mechanism through which researchers can conceptualize the transmission belt through which data, images, and correspondences contained in fiction can affect action in the “real world.”

Synthetic experiences—which can be produced by narratives, fragments of a story, descriptions of a place, impressions of a culture, dramatized portrayals about “real” processes, or illustrations of a strategy's consequences—affect how people interact with the real world through pathways similar to memories and knowledge derived from textbooks or data analyses. They encode information in ways that affect judgment and can even displace factual information through other sources because narratives allow for the portrayal of unrealistic or unprecedented events as being naturalized. They thereby enable fictional sources to influence world politics not because the fictions serve as a delivery mechanism for factual content but because they prompt the inward experience of a fictional reality.

Automaticity and the Production of Synthetic Experiences

The notion of synthetic experiences rests on the idea that comprehending an argument or a narrative requires, even for a moment, accepting it as true. This argument in turn has roots in the “dual-process model” of cognition, perhaps best known from Daniel Kahneman's (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes rapid, automatic processing of stimuli as “System 1” and more difficult, conscious, and explicit reasoning processes as “System 2.” Such models generally converge on assumptions in which limited capacity, least-effort processing, seeking an end to doubt, constructing meaning, and attaining control all describe people as having a default strategy in which [the appearance of] “truth” is achieved at the cost of systematic attempts to examine the data. Instead, heuristics, schemas, stereotypes, and expectancies are used to draw conclusions (Moskowitz, Skurnik, and Galinsky 1999, 29).

The implication of dual-process models for how people comprehend fiction leads to important conclusions. Dual-process models “call into serious question the notion that information is ever greeted with default disbelief” and instead “point to people's inherent credulity—their tendency to allow any information, reliable or unreliable, to gain entry into their store of knowledge and to influence their beliefs about the world” (Prentice and Gerrig 1999, 530; italics added). Although some of us flatter ourselves that “slow” thinking constitutes the basis for our beliefs, we are mostly processing inputs using “fast” thinking—employing heuristics that check only minimally for veracity. The most extreme presentation of the “sophisticated naïveté” view comes from Gilbert (1991): “People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.” As Gilbert, Tafarodi, and Malone further argue, “You can't not believe everything you read” (1993; italics added). Although Prentice and Gerrig present somewhat more measured assessments than Gilbert, even they conclude that dual-process models have “overturn[ed] the notion that the processing of fiction is characterized by special mental operations” (1999, 544).

Because doubt entails cognitive costs, we regard acceptance of “data” from fiction as the default manner through which readers interact with a text: “People must engage in effortful processing to disbelieve the information they encounter in literary narratives (as well as other types of narratives); otherwise, that information will have an impact in the real world” (Gerrig and Rapp 2004, 267–68). This condition is not limited to textual fictions: “The content of the narrative is far more important than the form when predicting a story's possible engagement of social processes or communication of social knowledge” (Mar and Oatley 2008, 186). Much of cinema and television depends on tweaking presentations to sustain the suspension of disbelief to engage viewers, despite the extreme artificiality of cinematic presentations of reality (Prince 2004; Hasson, Landesman, Knappmeyer, Vallines, Rubin, and Heeger 2008). The automaticity of this process explains why, when watching a movie, “we feel no skepticism at, say, Spider-Man's webbing his way among the skyscrapers” (Holland 2008, 312). When watching a movie or reading a book, audiences do not suspend their disbelief—they automatically construct meanings from sources they trust.

Not all scholars agree that everyone will process every fictional input automatically as an accurate representation of reality. Such qualifications and dissents, however, serve to qualify, not overturn, the fundamental implications of the “sophisticated naïveté” view. Some argue that people may have “fast” systems that monitor inputs for validity simultaneously (or almost simultaneously) (for example Richter, Schroeder, and Wöhrmann 2009; Hinze, Slaten, Horton, Jenkins, and Rapp 2014). Richter et al. (2009) demonstrate that readers with background knowledge of a subject better resisted inceptions of factually untrue knowledge through fictional narratives. However, they note that their work “do[es] not falsify [the Gilbert] model…[but] contribute[s] to a clarification of its scope by highlighting the availability of strong background knowledge as an important moderator of routine, fast, and efficient validation processes.” Hinze et al. (2014) experimentally demonstrate that one influential factor in mediating whether either automatic or effortful doubting is engaged is the plausibility of misinformation—whether propositions seem true rather than are true: “Misinformation that overlaps substantially with prior knowledge may not invoke noticing and evaluative scrutiny” (Hinze et al. 2014, 318).

Nor is it easy to check for validity even using “slow” thinking. Marsh, Meade, and Roediger (2003) demonstrate that readers exposed to stories assimilate both information and misinformation presented in those narratives instead of compartmentalizing data learned from fiction and from nonfiction: “Story reading led to an illusion of truth” (535). Explicit warnings to monitor fictional works for veracity can mitigate, but not eliminate, fictitious texts’ ability to forge new beliefs (Marsh and Fazio 2006). Perhaps surprisingly, Rapp, Hinze, Kohlhepp, and Ryskin (2014) argue that exercises designed to prompt validation may backfire by prompting the encoding of inaccurate information through repetition; in their experiments, despite cues to combat false data, “Participants’ use of misinformation was never completely eliminated” (21). From this, we conclude, in the language of Richter et al. (2009, 552), that the Gilbert model most strongly applies “when comprehenders have little or no strong background knowledge to bear on the validation of a message…[as] when laypeople process medical information or episodic information about events they have not witnessed themselves.” As Prentice and Gerring (1999, 531) conclude, “Are readers compelled by the real-world implications of these fictional worlds? Both anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that the answer…is often ‘yes’”.

Narrative Transportation and Synthetic Experiences

The commonplace assumption that people can reliably distinguish fact from fiction turns out to have unsteady foundations. We now elaborate how these automatic processes enable the production of synthetic experiences from the fictional world encoded in texts and the lasting effects such engagement produces through those automatic mechanisms.

Psychologists refer to a fictional narrative's ability to engross a reader in its world as “transportation” (Gerrig 1993, 2–17), with more engrossing narratives being more transporting (and therefore more persuasive) than less engrossing ones (Green and Brock 2000). One consequence of automatic engagement with fictional texts is that readers “lose awareness of [their] self and surroundings” and leave the ordinary “real” world and enter “the story world,” defined by its own “set of implicit constraints and rules that indicate what is possible” (Busselle and Bilandzic 2008, 259, 261). To produce transportation, a fiction must obey its story world's rules about the reality being portrayed: a Cold War thriller set in 1960s East Berlin cannot feature a character using a cell phone (Busselle and Bilandzic 2008, 259). However, transportingness may arise from a sense of verisimilitude even if the scenarios depicted are fantastic: “Books that fail [to present a recognizable psychology] are derogated as ‘cheesy’ or not believable, whether the setting is a faraway planet or downtown Toronto” (Mar and Oatley 2008, 185). Crucially, a text's ability to transport readers exists independent of literary quality: “some works that may not last through the ages may be transporting during a certain time period. Best-seller status could be a mark of transportingness. Detective thrillers or romance novels may not be ‘great’ literature, but thousands eagerly devour such books” (Green and Brock 2000). Creators craft their fictions to achieve transportation: “The act of creating a fictional world is a complicated balancing act, in which the audience has to be induced to suspend their disbelief in the untrue aspects of the fictional world while clinging to those aspects that command acknowledgment or recognition” (Jackson 2013, 19).

Transportation proves crucial to understanding why fact and fiction comingle in ways that matter for students of world politics. The images, quasi-memories, background data, lessons about “cause” and “effect,” and so on that people experiences in those narrative worlds enable the production of synthetic experiences. Even though Richter et al. (2009, 538) argue that “accessible, certain, and relevant background knowledge” can help individuals “reject false information fast and efficiently,” they also note that effective transportation can shut down such epistemic monitoring: “Readers who are mentally transported into the fictitious world of the narrative are subject to a temporary suspension of disbelief that makes them susceptible to implicit persuasion” (Richter et al. 2009, 552).

Narrative transportation enables changes in inward beliefs, including audiences’ identification with fictional characters, how audiences perceive themselves, and their beliefs about the state of the world. Johnson (2012) demonstrates that experimental participants who are more transported into a narrative's story world become more likely to engage in prosocial behavior. Appel and Richter (2007) find that fictional narratives induce more strongly persuasive effects over a longer term, consistent with transportation theory. Sestir and Green (2010) find that experimental participants come to identify their personality more strongly with traits displayed by characters in a film clip. Gabriel and Young (2011) find that experimental participants assigned to read passages from Harry Potter identify with wizards, while those assigned to read passages from Twilight identify with vampires.

Experiments suggest that such effects matter for attitudes beyond those directly associated with the text. Diekman, McDonald, and Gardner (2000) show that reading romance novels portraying sexual behavior resulting from overwhelming passion makes women less likely to use condoms—but that including a safe-sex message reverses those effects. Mulligan and Habel (2011) find that exposure to the pro-choice film The Cider House Rules changes audiences’ interpretation of the morality of abortion in line with the movie's position; Mulligan and Habel (2012) find that political science students who watched the conspiratorial film Wag The Dog became more likely to accept conspiratorial explanations for political behavior; and Holland (2014) shows that exposure to episodes of The West Wing changed students’ views on US military intervention. Kearns and Young (2014) find that respondents become more likely to support torture after viewing depictions of effective torturing, a finding that resonates with reports that the television show 24’s depiction of effective torture so strongly affected US military interrogators that the officials vainly beseeched the show's producers to demonstrate ineffective torture (Mayer 2007).

If people could easily discern fact from fiction, then novels or movies would have few effects on behavior separate from their ability to provide valid data. Yet, consistent with the sophisticated naïveté view and inconsistent with the naïve sophistication view, fictions may convey false information that can replace correct data. Butler, Zaromb, Lyle, and Roediger (2009) find that students exposed to film and text better recalled inaccurate information from films than factual information from textual sources. Similarly, Aoki Inoue and Krain (2014) evaluated the film Thirteen Days as a teaching tool for explaining international relations and the Cuban Missile Crisis, finding that in class discussion, almost all students, in seeking to explain the actual Cuban Missile Crisis, referred to it cinematically, as in “the scene where…” or “Kennedy looked tired.” Despite having also been exposed to written historical analysis of the event, “for every thirteen explicit and appropriate correct references to the film in class discussion, students referenced the articles just once.” Butler et al. (2009) warn teachers against using popular history films for this reason. In much of the real world, of course, few authorities can restrict access to fictional inputs on this basis.

Synthetic Experiences and International Relations

As de Graaf, Hoeken, Sanders, and Beentjes (2012) write, “It is by now well-established that narratives can have effects on readers’ real-world beliefs and attitudes” (2012, 802). Our mechanism suggests how this effect matters for international relations scholars. Thinking about synthetic experiences suggests a warrant for how researchers can treat popular culture, and information about texts’ or tropes’ reception, as providing data about public opinion. For instance, Buzan (2010) speculates that the shift from the optimistic universe of Star Trek to the pessimistic one of Battlestar Galactica (2003) indicates that the United States could be headed toward isolationism. But why engage in literary criticism to establish the point when much better data sources already exist to measure public opinion?

One answer is that variations in when audiences found what texts transporting could justify such an investigation, inasmuch as identifying how fans and critics engage with what they perceive as “realistic” (or convincing) about a text may supply a better understanding about their worldview by showing what fits with their background knowledge. Researchers may therefore sometimes prefer a close study of a text and its audience instead of other data because of the nuanced choices that creators make and the responses that audiences may have. Investigating the circulation of texts, fictional universes, and recurring tropes among general and particular audiences, while bearing in mind the preconditions for transportation (knowledge and plausibility), may reveal richer debates about, for instance, national identities (for example, Hopf and Allan 2016).

Even though our focus has been in individual cognition, these considerations underscore that the production of synthetic experiences does not constitute a strictly individualistic process, inasmuch as background knowledge and beliefs—supplied through social processes—will influence what audiences will find transporting. Researchers can consequently learn from variations in transportingness across audiences by considering variations in background knowledge or assumptions, a strategy akin to the “cultural match” Checkel (1999, 87) describes. Stephanson (1998) notes that Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the tensest part of the Cold War) pitted Bond against Soviet-directed conspiracies. By contrast, Bond movies, produced a few years later, featured “supranational and non-Soviet threats” (64), a shift Stephanson explains by appealing to the decline of US-Soviet tensions and the consequent loss of verisimilitude in portraying Soviets in terms of 1950s Cold War idioms.

Researchers employing this perspective may find that investigating works of fiction that are not explicitly about international relations or foreign policy may nevertheless shed light on relevant discourses of identity (Hopf 2013, 325). The Left Behind novels, detailing one perspective of Christian eschatology in a contemporary setting (including a portrayal of the UN secretary general as the literal antichrist), proved a massive commercial success among evangelical and conservative American audiences, but failed to resonate outside those audiences (Gribben 2009). Looking for such portrayals of reality that appeal to one group but not others can reveal divisions within coalitions or highlight the precise terms of disagreements at the mass level—as well as the operations of logics that actually govern behavior, rather than justifications offered in public for external consumption. Such considerations suggest that scholars need to broaden their agenda beyond familiar science fiction and fantasy texts in their investigations of popular culture and politics. As Henne and Nexon's (2013) characterization of researchers studying Galactica as “scholar-fans” suggests, academics’ interests in texts often derives more from private enjoyments than research designs that seek to maximize variations or explanatory leverage. This line of criticism does not imply ignoring films and programs that scholars enjoy but doing more work to bring the “popular” back in to popular culture studies—less Star Trek, more NCIS.

Further, exploring the breakdown of the fact-fiction divide in perceptual mechanisms may help explain why many critical scholars—and artists—view creative work as a site for the construction and contestation of rival images of politics. The literature and findings we review suggest that fictional and nonfictional representations may indeed be interpreted, at least partly, through the same mechanisms. Cognitively, then, “fact” and “fiction” should be viewed as a continuum rather than a sharp binary. Neumann and Nexon's description of “first-order representations” (7) noted that fictional presentations were different only in degree from “the kind of representation involved in a politician's speech” or “television and print journalism.” More important, because narratives present a setting and plot that is entire, whole, and known (Dyson 2015, 7–9), fictions can depict a world that is less detailed or complicated than reality but more narratively, and hence cognitively, satisfying than nonfictional portrayals. It should thus come as no surprise that President Clinton “learned” more about bioterrorism from a novel than from briefings: transporting narratives will more easily command an audience's attention and supply plausible, coherent representations than nonfictional representations. The more one contemplates the mixing of fact and fiction in narrative, the harder it becomes to resist Weber's (2006, 568) conclusion that “Maybe IR theory is just a bunch of stories that, like popular films, mixes and mythologizes fact and fiction.”⁷

Finally, this suggests we can distinguish between Neumann and Nexon's claim about how popular culture can help constitute world politics and a related claim that texts will, under certain conditions, influence how audiences behave. Popular culture can matter for audiences mass and elite because its mixing of fact and fiction makes it more powerful at disseminating ideas, images, and “knowledge” about the world than standard, respectable sources. Perhaps policymakers and other audiences can check the influence of fiction through careful deliberation (with all the caveats we adduce above). Yet the time demanded by such processing means that on many other issues policymakers and other elites will form opinions without careful thinking. Scholars have long known that policymakers employ informal knowledge and analogies to guide decisions (Neustadt and May 1986; Khong 1992; Bennett 1999; and, more skeptically, Press 2005); the findings of psychologists and others should make international relations theory more open to the idea that fiction matters for these purposes too. Defense policy analyst P. W. Singer explained that he chose to write a novel (with co-author August Cole) about US military preparedness because officials dreaded reading tedious policy “white papers,” while he found that fiction proved a reliable way to get officers’ attention (Kunzig 2015). Neither Reagan nor Clinton chose their escapism with a view to changing policy, but their movie- and book-consuming habits nevertheless changed federal priorities.

Skeptical readers may remain unconvinced that fictions can have such impacts. We suggest that introspection and close observation of the circulation of ideas from fictions confirms at least the plausibility of our account. Some “alternative facts” can be found only in a fictional universe but nevertheless serve as referents for people's beliefs about “reality.” To more concretely bridge the abstract notion of “synthetic experiences” with the “real world,” we invite readers to imagine what it's like to work as a speechwriter in the White House or as a hotel owner during a genocide. We suspect that these experiences have never happened to anyone who will read these words, but some combination of the West Wing and Hotel Rwanda probably shaded how readers interpreted the previous sentence. Or, perhaps, imagine what a velociraptor pack would look like while attacking a Tyrannosaurus rex. That task will be easier for readers who have watched Jurassic Park than those who have not. Of course, for readers who have seen Jurassic Park, their image of a raptor is almost entirely wrong. Raptors are not person-sized (they stood about half a meter high) (“Dinosaurs” 2009), may not have been intelligent (Feldman and Wilson 1998), and physically resembled “kickboxing turkeys” (Smithsonian 2012). Indeed, artists modeled every aspect of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs’ movement on contemporary (usually mammalian) animals’ behaviors (Baird 1998, 90–95). The plausibility of the pseudo-dinosaurs’ movements and behavior, in other words, stemmed from their resemblance to completely different—but familiar—animals.

Extending this argument to the assertion that, for instance, the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown could change how people perceive actor-specific traits of the monarch, or that Americans’ beliefs about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service derive more from the TV franchise NCIS than personal observation, seems reasonable. Otherwise difficult-to-explain phenomena do seem to fit with the idea that fictional texts circulate ideas with no basis in reality. One former US congressman reports that the William Forstchen novel One Second After, which depicts a devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States (destroying US infrastructure and killing 90 percent of Americans), so greatly moved him that he left Congress and became a survivalist, “cutting logs, tending gardens, and painting walls” in the woods—even though there is ample scientific evidence that the novel dramatically inflated the effects of an EMP (Mizokami 2017).⁸

Any given text's influence will likely prove slight when measured in aggregate terms or when considered in light of the multitude of conflicting messages—fictional and nonfictional—audiences encounter. However, when considering the sources of opinion formation, identity production and reproduction, and meaning-making more generally, such considerations do not require dismissing the importance of fiction. The consequences of a lifetime's worth of exposure to synthetic experiences may thus include emphasizing (or de-emphasizing) issues, changing opinions about strategies’ effectiveness, reinforcing misapprehensions, supplying data (true or false) about otherwise unobservable processes or identities, generating lasting beliefs about what is plausible or sensible, and helping to produce or reproduce identities relevant to action.

Hypotheses

We focus on two observable implications of our mechanism:

H1:Synthetic experiences help constitute worldviews.

If synthetic experiences enable texts to consciously or subconsciously affect images of world politics, then we should expect to see influential fictions become part of the rhetorical commonplaces that elites and other actors employ—but that these will be taken as “real,” not as a shared ideational or metaphorical construct.

H2:Transporting texts will generate synthetic experiences that influence perceptions of unexpected events.

If synthetic experiences help to constitute observers’ worldviews, then we should find evidence of this when actors experience events unlike “real life” experiences but resembling fictional events they have (synthetically) experienced. Such events should stimulate evaluations and responses following the logic of the synthetic experience, at least until displaced by newer, more appropriate knowledge.

In both cases, the null hypothesis is clear: fiction does not influence how people see the world. This does not constitute a strawman but describes the default position of international relations theory.

Methodology

Much of the work on which we rely to substantiate our theory is experimental. Our purpose is not to look for evidence of the synthetic experience mechanism's operation since that explanation is already well established in the psychological and cognitive literatures. Instead, we seek to provide explanations for otherwise-inexplicable outcomes that involve synthetic experience as a causal mechanism. We aim to establish that synthetic experiences have mattered in the “real world,” which necessitates an observational quest for evidence of influence. Consequently, we employ contemporary process-tracing methodology to mitigate concerns about endogeneity and to ensure that the observable implications about process prove congruent with our theory's predictions.

We first seek to process-trace falsehoods or errors in texts. If a reader already favors some category of ideas denominated X, but a particular data point, belief, idea, or other concept (X₁) is present only in a particular text among the many that claim X, then researchers can be more confident that a reader's understanding of X has been shaped by the text if she acts (thinks, speaks, writes, etc.) in accordance with X₁ after reading the text. Reasonable (if informally derived) Bayesian prior beliefs about the relative likelihood of an actor expressing X₁ without exposure to the book can help us make informed judgments (see Humphreys and Jacobs 2015; Bennett and Checkel 2014). Second, we seek actors’ admissions that a text influenced him or her, especially when such admissions are (as lawyers say) “against their interest”; we weigh these more heavily than we would weigh considered, formulaic invocations of socially approved texts (Jacobs 2014, 45–46). Practice-tracing methodologists agree that researchers should focus on data from consequential observations, such as what slips out in moments of stress, or ways that considered uses of “low culture” references could reveal motivations and thoughts that political actors might normally conceal. As Hopf (2012, 26) argues, “If we are trying to get at the lived, intersubjective world…then what [people] understand about identity should be evident from when they are not talking about it. It should just come up incidentally, in asides, as taken-for-granted knowledge.” We draw inspiration from Pouliot's (2014) efforts to establish “practice-tracing”—finding local causality (specific representations in specific contexts) in the presence of practices (or, here, cognitive mechanisms) that can be described more abstractly.

We stress that these conservative approaches should bias any results away from the conclusions we want to support. These procedures will not pick up any influence from a text that may have been important in shaping an actor's thought, but which the actor then masks out of social desirability bias—nor will they detect influences on actors who may have been affected by a text but who have corrected some erroneous point based on other information. However, given that the conventional wisdom in international relations scholarship makes such a strong prediction—that fictional effects will be washed out by the pressures of the real world—we believe it is fair to evaluate our empirical claim in this manner. Accordingly, our task is both demanding and simple: to establish that fiction mattered in the ways our posited mechanism predicts it should.

Case: Tom Clancy and Conservative World Views

To investigate these hypotheses, we assess the influence of the American novelist Tom Clancy. We choose Clancy because of his considerable commercial success, his presentation of a fully formed worldview, and his ties with the Reagan-Bush-era Republican establishment. In one sense, Clancy represents a “most likely” case for us: our theory suggests that these factors should make his work influential. In another sense, the case constitutes a tough test since (in our experience) many realists in the academy, and conservatives in the real world, balk at the idea that officials’ images of world politics could be affected by something as “unserious” as fiction.

Audiences Perceived Clancy's Books as Transporting

We first establish that Clancy's books were transporting. For mass audiences, sales figures offer prima facie evidence to substantiate our claim. Clancy wrote four of the fifteen bestselling US novels of the 1980s, including the decade's best-selling novel, Clear and Present Danger (Wall Street Journal 1990).⁹ In keeping with our proposition that transportingness depends on audiences’ preexisting beliefs, Clancy appears to have been more popular with conservatives and Republicans than others. True, Clancy's prose style left some readers untransported: Der Derian (1990) criticized Clancy's novels as “jammed with technical detail and seductive ordnance, devoid of recognizably human characters.” Contra Der Derian, many readers did find the characters relatable: “As a kid, you might have trouble imagining yourself as the national security adviser—seriously, what does that guy do? But you could see how you might enlist in the Navy to drive a submarine or join the CIA to become an intelligence analyst” (Simpson and Carter 2013). The conservative writer David French (2013) later recalled that “I know this sounds silly, but I can remember once in Iraq—after feeling extremely jittery on a foot patrol that just didn't feel right—silently asking myself, ‘What would Jack Ryan do?’” Such discrepant receptions fit with our expectation about variations in what different audiences will find transporting.

Most important, Clancy's appeal was not just a mass phenomenon but resonated with a subset of elite US actors. Unusually direct evidence testifies that many US officials have read and endorsed Clancy's novels. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1987) glowingly reviewed Clancy's 1987 novel Patriot Games in the Wall Street Journal, and President Ronald Reagan praised Clancy's first novel, The Hunt for Red October, accelerating its rise on the best-seller charts (Gailey and Hunter 1985).

Audiences Acted as if Clancy's Fictions Changed Their Minds

Observing variations in transportingness raises concerns about endogeneity: how can we establish that Clancy's readers were affected by the novels if they already agreed with his politics? We do not claim that reading The Hunt for Red October could turn Mondale voters into Cold Warriors. Recall, however, that our test of influence rests on subtler implications: the second- and third-order beliefs Clancy's universe may have supplied for his audience. We seek evidence of changes in beliefs on matters like how the Cold War should be fought.

We now show reason to believe that audiences changed their beliefs because they read Clancy. Some of this evidence derives from overt actions. In the late 1980s and afterward, Clancy and his fictions were cited on the floor of Congress. Legislators not only invoked Clancy as a shorthand for “military technology” or “power politics”¹⁰ (as one might use “Stephen King” as metonymy for “horror story”¹¹)—they cited details from the books as evidence of the real-world necessity for specific policy changes. For instance, Senator Dan Quayle quoted Red Storm Rising as proving the utility of anti-satellite weaponry (Osterlund and Rheem 1988). Arguing for a bill to support the US shipping industry, one congressman cited “a current best-selling novel, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, [which] makes the argument for a strong merchant marine…that probably has more impact than all the charts and graphs we could pull together.”¹²

Perhaps such invocations only served as means for politicians to connect with voters, but policymakers also read and quoted the books when mass audiences were absent. Reagan read Red Storm Rising, Clancy's novel of a US-Soviet conventional war in Europe, to prepare for the Reykjavik summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Cannon 2008, 252). Griffin (2017) attributes part of Reagan's confidence in proposing a nuclear-zero arrangement at Reykjavik to Reagan's having read Red Storm Rising. The book's portrayal of a Third World War helped persuade Reagan that US conventional superiority rendered nuclear weapons not merely superfluous but dangerous and destabilizing. During a conversation with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in which Reagan deprecated the importance of nuclear deterrence in Europe, Reagan also recommended that Mrs. Thatcher read Red Storm Rising in preparation for an upcoming UK-Soviet summit because it provided “an excellent picture of the Soviet Union's intentions and strategy” (Mohdin 2015). Such private communications carry extra weight in demonstrating the validity of an ideational explanation (Jacobs 2014, 52–54). We therefore conclude that at least some elites acted as we would expect them to behave if they really thought that Clancy's fictions provided meaningful guides to reality.

Observers Interpreted Novel Events in Light of Clancy's Writing

If, as we argue, popular culture plays a role in constructing schemata through which people interpret the world, then prominent popular cultural artifacts should help supply narratives when audiences confront new evidence. Invocations of Clancy's work after September 11, 2001, provide that evidence. Many commentators spontaneously acknowledged the parallels between the attacks and the end of Debt of Honor, in which a pilot crashes a 747 airliner into the Capitol during a presidential address to a joint session of Congress. So strong did observers find the apparent parallels that CNN interviewed Clancy on the afternoon of September 11 as an expert on terrorism (CNN 2001). Host Judy Woodruff began by observing, “People in our newsroom have been saying…that what's happening today is right out of a Tom Clancy novel.” Several days later, on the Fox News Network, Bill O'Reilly began an interview with Clancy about the attacks by observing (Fox 2001):

I thought of you…about an hour after [the attacks] happened, because I'm a big fan, and I have Debt of Honor, the passage, right here—it is so close to what really happened. And my question in my mind was, if Tom Clancy can write about this and put forth a very plausible scenario—and I know all the intelligence guys in the United States read your books…why wasn't there more urgency to make it more difficult to do what happened?

What matters is not whether Clancy “predicted” the manner of the 9/11 attacks.¹³ The critical point is that Clancy's fictions were so embedded in the consciousness of the news media that his fiction leapt to mind as an interpretive frame through which to make meaning of unprecedented events—and made Clancy a well-enough-regarded authority to be promoted as an interpreter of the attacks because he seemed to have foretold an otherwise inexplicable event.

Evidence from Errors in Clancy's Presentations

That elite and popular audiences lauded Clancy's fictions as “realistic” informs us about how audiences judge the verisimilitude of a work because many of the details he depicts are oversimplified, conjectural, or wrong. The novels rarely distinguish between actually existing weapons systems (like aircraft carriers or Ohio-class nuclear submarines) and prototype or hypothetical weaponry (like the laser anti-ballistic missile shield in Cardinal of the Kremlin or the silent “caterpillar drive” of the Soviet missile submarine Red October) (Terdoslavich 2006). All receive the same degree of realism. Nor were Clancy's descriptions of social environments any more accurate. From the beginning of The Hunt for Red October, Clancy bids to establish his story world's realism by establishing Ryan's identity as a bureaucrat, not a James Bond–style secret agent: “Ryan had the ability to sort through a pile of data and come out with the three or four facts that meant something.… Analysts had none of the supposed glamour—a Hollywood-generated illusion—of a secret agent in a foreign land.” Clancy's still-too-glamorous depiction of agency life inspired a team of CIA employees to write a collaborative parody, The Hunt for Red October: The Untold Story (Nolan 2013, 180–95). The parody more realistically depicts the turf battles, memo writing, and “soul-crushing…layers and layers of review” that Ryan's real-world analogues inhabited (130–34)—a far cry from the nimble, competent agency of the Ryanverse.

We do not criticize Clancy on this score. As a novelist, Clancy had no responsibility to the truth. What matters is that we can establish that audiences found Clancy's work plausible despite its errors and distortions—and some (including President Reagan and Senator Quayle) relied upon its presentations as reliable guides to reality. These and other errors in Clancy's presentations help us to mitigate the problems with endogeneity that we outlined above because such errors reflect trust in Clancy's accuracy. We can thus be more confident that, even though readers of Clancy's fictions already tended to sympathize with his politics and worldview, his fictions nevertheless influenced many members of his audience because they viewed him as reliable even though he was not.

Discussion

We confidently reach two measured conclusions. First, the balance of evidence supports our contention that Clancy's fictions influenced audiences by buttressing the ideological edifice of Reagan-Bush-era policies. Such influences included helping to naturalize and propagate ideas about the United States’ proper role in the world and of the military and intelligence community in US foreign policy. True, these effects were strongest among groups who already evinced some level of support for the policies that Clancy also supported. This observation, however, only qualifies our estimate of the effect size, not our confidence that the causal mechanism exists.

Second, we conclude that Clancy's novels constituted an independent, influential source of knowledge for both mass and elite audiences through each of George's three pathways. They depicted actors competing for influence using seemingly realistic strategies; they were technically rich enough to provide both plausibility and “knowledge” about complex weapons systems and strategies; and they provided actor-specific models of behavior that elites could employ in their own decision-making. Reagan used Clancy novels as summit briefing books, Quayle cited them as evidence about the need for satellite weaponry, and they helped shape coverage of the 9/11 attacks in real time. Quantifying this effect size would be difficult, but scholars should not assume it is null. If those trying to resist the Bush 43 administration's framing of the attacks found contesting this rhetorical frame difficult (Krebs and Lobasz 2007), it is not implausible that their efforts were complicated by preexisting, vivid narratives about how fictional “Americas” responded to fictional terror attacks, conditioning the rhetorical battleground for the administration's offensive. Although establishing the size of the effect again proves difficult, we satisfy our goal of gathering enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

Conclusion

If fictional narratives do help shape how people come to know world politics and their place in it through the production of synthetic experiences, then international relations scholars should consider three propositions. First, although it wounds our professional pride, we should realize that more people have learned how the world works from Steven Spielberg than from Stephen Walt. Second, we should regard “inexpert” images of world politics as worthy of investigation, not dismiss them as naïve or ignorant. As a corollary, we should not assume that policymakers and other elites will be swayed by the most prestigious or rigorous sources; as with other audiences, the degree of transportation of a source will matter greatly in determining its effect. Third, because novels, movies, and other sources influence audiences’ ideas about issues central to international relations, we must treat such sources seriously—both as researchers and as citizens.

One implication of our theory speaks to the “bridging the gap” debate. Science educators complain of (and study) the deleterious effect of mass-market movies on students’ grasp of scientific concepts (Barnett et al. 2006; Ross, Duggan-Haas, and Allmon 2013). To combat this problem, a relationship between science “advisors” and film producers has evolved in which researchers provide verisimilitude (and marketing credibility) in exchange for showing audiences more up-to-date research (Kirby 2003). Given the prevalence of political settings in popular culture, it may be worthwhile for political scientists to lobby creators to institute similar protocols.

Another implication includes the idea that popular culture may reveal a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) detailing the fears, hopes, and logics that audiences entertain when they do not feel pressured to hew to “respectable” ideas. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of the “invasion novel,” books portraying how a war between the European states would proceed. The popularity of books like The Battle of Dorking (Chesney 1871), which imagined the United Kingdom's defeat by Prussia, suggests that the symbolic dynamics of the “long peace” were less pacific than the lack of wars would indicate (Reiss 2005). Such fictions, which portrayed quick, decisive wars, may also have persuaded “the citizens of the pre-1914 world to believe that a future European war would be a short affair—without immense casualty lists, fought with conventional weapons, and conducted in a reasonably humane way” (Clarke 1997).

Such observations may not lie only in the past. In 2015, August Cole and P.W. Singer published Ghost Fleet, a novel describing a future war in which a Sino-Russian coalition vanquishes the United States by exploiting factors like U.S. de-industrialization (a reliance on Chinese-made components enables the sabotage of US aircraft) and weak US institutions (such as senior officials colluding to purchase lucrative but ineffective weapons). Singer told a Pentagon audience that he wrote the book because he hoped it would help the United States prevail in an inevitable new world war (Nissenbaum 2015). Influential generals and admirals endorsed the book (Copp 2015; Seck 2016), and even some academics report that it changed their opinion on world politics (Blattman 2016). Ghost Fleet’s reception suggests something about assumptions within the military establishment that would be hard to discern from white papers alone—and our theory indicates that the novel may be more effective at converting readers than conventionally presented arguments.

Popular culture is more than a diversion from the serious stuff of international relations. It plays a greater role in shaping the world than mainstream international relations has recognized. This observation, and the bases on which we make that claim, raises ontological, methodological, and theoretical questions about what counts in international relations and how scholars in the field should study the world. Our aim in writing this piece has been both to advance a new way for scholars to think about these issues and also to force these issues into the mainstream. We hope that we have provided another set of tools that researchers can employ as they grapple with these questions.

Footnotes

1

Although our theory a fortiori applies to all cultural artifacts that present representations of political life, we intentionally label them as “popular culture” to emphasize that the sorts of artifacts we care about extend beyond those with high status or literary quality. Doing so heightens the contrast between our wager—that even seemingly trivial, escapist fictions may affect how actors view the world and their place in it—and that of existing accounts of ideas and world politics.

2

Although even Huntington employed narratives as part of his argument for a racialized vision of civilizational clashes (Musgrave 2017).

3

President Abraham Lincoln may never have told Stowe, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” but, as Kytle (2014, 116) writes, the anecdote “nonetheless reflect a broadly shared sentiment in the nineteenth century: Stowe's book changed the young nation.”

4

Carpenter (2016, 55–56) divides work into “pedagogical,” “interpretive,” and “explanatory” genres, which leads to similar conclusions.

5

For example, Drezner 2011; Dixit 2012; Blanton 2013; Salter 2014; Carvalho 2014; Dyson 2015; Lobasz and Valeriano 2015; Allen and Vaughn 2016; Horn, Rubin, and Schouenborg 2016. For a critical perspective of pedagogical approaches, Hannah and Wilkinson 2016.

6

We follow the convention in the literature of using “readers” to apply to readers, hearers, players, watchers, and viewers—that is, consumers of any fictional text within our parameters. We will use “readers” and “audience” interchangeably for convenience.

7

Taken to an extreme, such arguments could lead to blurring the lines between formal theory and artistic depiction as representations of world politics (Bleiker 2001; Neumann and Nexon 2006, 17). Shapiro (1988) reached similar conclusions, and Weldes's (2001) description of globalization as science fiction illustrates an application of this approach. See also Clapton and Shepherd (2016).

8

In conservative circles, this reaction to the book does not seem particularly unusual. For instance, “The Survival Mom” blog discusses survival tips based on the book (http://thesurvivalmom.com/15-things-i-learned-from-one-second-after/), and conservative writer Nancy French writes that the book terrified her and convinced her the scenario it describes is a matter of “if, not when” (French 2016).

9

Cox, Meg. “A Tom Clancy Book Is Said to Set Record for Biggest Advance,” The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 1992, B6, via ProQuest.

10

Congressional Record, September 21, 1998, S10653.

11

Congressional Record, June 18, 1986, 14474.

12

Congressional Record, December 19, 1987, 36671.

13

Although a passenger aircraft served as a weapon in both reality and Debt of Honor, the parallels between 9/11 and Clancy's scene were far from exact. In the book, Clancy's use of the Japan Airlines jet was meant to evoke not modern-day terrorism but instead a World War II kamikaze.

Author notes

Authors’ note: For their assistance in developing our ideas and this manuscript, we thank Charli Carpenter, Jesse Crane-Seeber, Tyrone Groh, Yu-Ming Liou, Jay M. Parker, Brian A. Smith, Joanna Spear, and Steven Ward. We also thank participants in a panel at the 2016 American Political Science Association annual meeting in Philadelphia, the 2016 meeting of the International Studies Association-Northeast in Baltimore, and participants in a roundtable at the 2017 meeting of the International Studies Association for their thoughts. We particularly thank the editors of this article and the three anonymous reviewers. Any errors remain our own.