Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture)

by Langley, Travis

  Cocklaphobia—fear of hats (Mad Hatter)

  Coulrophobia—fear of clowns (Joker, Harley Quinn)

  Cryophobia (frigophobia, pagophobia)—fear of extreme cold, ice, or frost (Mr. Freeze, Penguin)

  Egyptophobia—fear of Egypt or Egyptian culture, artifacts, etc. (King Tut)

  Electrophobia—fear of electricity (Maxie Zeus)

  Geminiphobia—fear of twins (Tweedledum and Tweedledee, cousins who look like twins)

  Herpetophobia—fear of reptiles (Killer Croc)

  Hypnophobia—fear of hypnosis (Mad Hatter)

  Iatrophobia—fear of doctors (Crime Doctor, Dr. Death, Hush)

  Leporiphobia—fear of rabbits (White Rabbit)

  Logizomechanophobia—fear of computers (Anarky)

  Mottephobia—fear of moths (Killer Moth)

  Ophidophobia—fear of snakes (Copperhead)

  Ornithophobia—fear of birds (Penguin, Court of Owls)

  Ovophobia—fear of eggs (Egghead, Humphrey Dumpler)

  Phobophobia—fear of fear itself (Scarecrow)

  Pogonophobia—fear of beards (Hugo Strange, Maxie Zeus)

  Pyrophobia (arsonphobia)—fear of fire (Firebug, Firefly)

  Radiophobia—fear of radiation (Dr. Phorphorous)

  Selachophobia—fear of sharks (Great White Shark)

  Sinistrophobia—fear of things to the left (Two-Face)

  Tatouazophobia—fear of tattoos (Mr. Zsazs)

  Zeusophobia—fear of gods (Maxie Zeus)

  Medication works with the brain’s chemistry to relax the individual and help alleviate symptoms of fearfulness, especially for those who suffer panic attacks as part of their phobic response, but medication alone will not teach the person a new way to think. Some phobias require specific methods. Social skills training can help those with social phobia learn new ways to interact with others, and group therapy might prove particularly useful in their case; after all, it’s a form of social interaction in which their social fear already unites them. With some tweaking to adjust for logistical issues like working with a specific visual stimulus as opposed to a complicated situation a person fears, therapists can apply most phobia treatments to any specific phobia. Various therapies for treating phobias amount to different ways of doing one thing: facing the fear.

  We can face our fears in blunt confrontation or in a roundabout manner, rapidly or gradually, directly or indirectly, in our actions or in our heads. Where older approaches like Freudian psychoanalysis would take months or years, however long the analyst might persist in exploring the origins of a client’s fear, behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapies instead identify symptoms and work efficiently to change the phobic reactions in a limited number of therapeutic sessions. With systematic desensitization, the person approaches the fear by degrees, first learning to relax around something resembling or reminiscent of the feared stimulus, like practicing relaxation exercises in the presence of a happy-faced cartoon bat on a Halloween decoration in early sessions, a more realistic rubber bat in subsequent sessions, and so on until reaching the point of being more relaxed that most people would be in the presence of a live bat. Flooding skips those little steps and cuts to the chase: Instead of relaxing the client, immerse that individual in anxiety, keeping him or her surrounded in the feared stimulus until the body naturally tires of feeling such strong fear symptoms. An elevated heart rate eventually slows down. In vivo (“in life”) flooding, probably the most stressful of these techniques, can backfire. Because it has a high dropout rate,4 those who give up by escaping the situation before the anxiety has time to lessen wind up with another bad experience, another bad chapter in their histories with the feared stimuli. Like flooding, graduated exposure provokes anxiety, but, like systematic desensitization, does so by degrees. Where flooding immerses the client in the worst of the fear, graduated exposure plants the client in situations that cause only minor anxiety before moving on to confront greater stressors.

  In the film Batman Begins, the adult Bruce returns to the site where some of his childhood fears first began. After climbing down through an old well, he pauses to stare into a gap in the earth, an ugly mouth of gaping rock that opens to darkness below, dripping water as if salivating at the chance to devour him. In that pause, he confronts the tension he feels there before descending anyway. Down in the cave, he stands, he steps around, he looks for the bats. When he shines a light their way, they fly out. Surrounded, he drops to one knee for only a moment before rising, while the cloud flies around. As he stands there, tall and stalagmite-still, his racing heart does not deter him from learning to bask in the bats. “He stays with the fear until he calms down and sees that he’s okay.”5 For however long it takes, he stays planted right there.

  The Roots of Fear

  As long as a fear’s original cause is not presently a factor in a person’s life, behavioral therapy does not require the therapist and client to unearth that source. They should identify situations and cues that the client associates with the feared stimulus and any reinforcements or rewards the person receives for escaping or avoiding the stimulus, in order to reduce the likelihood that any of these might trigger a phobia’s resurgence. Batman and many of his enemies, especially the Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane, have additional reasons to understand where fear comes from: They like to instill it.

  Phobias often get started through respondent conditioning, known more commonly as classical conditioning simply because Ivan Pavlov discovered it before Edward Thorndike made another kind of conditioning well known. Bruce Wayne does not have to learn to find a fall into a cave frightening. His initial fear is a natural, unlearned reaction—an unconditioned response to an unlearned, unconditioned stimulus. The bats naturally startle Bruce when they fly out. The sight of a bat or the shadows around the estate had never previously scared him to this degree, but through association with unconditioned stimulus and response (the fall and the fear), anything reminiscent of a bat (like a performer’s mask during a play the family sees in Batman Begins’ version of his origin) becomes a conditioned stimulus, a learned trigger, with a conditioned response of learned fear. Gotham’s criminals later learn to fear anything associated with Batman, like the Bat-Signal Commissioner Gordon shines at times to give honest citizens comfort by reassuring them a hero roams the night. While that light on the clouds can’t break the crooks’ jaws or send them to jail, the masked man it heralds just might. The signal meant to summon Batman, comfort citizens, and discomfort criminals can dishearten the city’s police,6 though, because it says they’re not good enough, it says they can’t handle Gotham’s crime.

  Many behaviors intentionally or inadvertently learned via classical conditioning might die out if the conditioned stimulus no longer precedes the unconditioned stimulus. If food no longer follows Pavlov’s bell as it did when he trained dogs to salivate at the sound of the bell, the cessation of the food will lead to extinction, an elimination of the learned behavior, in this case no more drooling upon hearing that bell ring. Unlike many other behaviors, phobias tend not to undergo normal extinction because phobias reinforce themselves via the relief that rewards avoidance or escape. Classical conditioning might cause many phobias, but another kind of conditioning perpetuates them.

  Without disagreeing with Pavlov’s main ideas, Thorndike noted that they were incomplete. Classical conditioning, in which stimulus precedes response, failed to explain the effects of reward and punishment, which follow an action. Thorndike called learning from consequences instrumental conditioning because the behavior is instrumental in determining which consequence will follow, whether the action gets rewarded or punished. B. F. Skinner later preferred to think of this as operant conditioning and referred to reward as reinforcement because some consequences strengthen (reinforce) behavior even when no reward was intended. A grandparent who gives a child a piece of candy to shush a tantrum in the grocery store doesn’t mean to convey, “Oh, that’s so cute—yes, it is—let’s just reward you for tossing that big
ole fit,” but that grandparent has reinforced the behavior nonetheless, skyrocketing the odds that the grandchild will throw another tantrum the next time they go shopping. In addition to fortifying the phobias that classical conditioning creates, operant conditioning can conjure phobias on its own by reinforcing milder fears until they grow massive.

  Reinforcement can be positive or negative. Punishment can be positive or negative too. People confuse punishment with negative reinforcement so often that if you ever hear the term negative reinforcement on television, you almost certainly hear it used incorrectly. They’re not positive and negative in the sense of good and bad, pleasant or unpleasant. They’re positive and negative in terms of math: Something gets added or taken away. Positive reinforcement rewards the individual by adding something; a parent’s hug may reinforce a child’s fearfulness if hugs don’t come easily enough otherwise. Negative reinforcement also rewards the person but by taking something away; covering your eyes keeps you from seeing a feared stimulus and raises the odds that you’ll cover your eyes at other times. Positive punishment delivers an adverse consequence by adding something unpleasant; approaching the thing you fear makes your heart race and your body shake until you can’t stand it. Negative punishment hurts you by taking something away; after going to the movies, you lose your parents to a mugger’s bullets, so you might not visit the theater again real soon. Even if a consequent stimulus is coincidental, emotionally we can still feel reinforced or punished. Any of these can make us fearful or—given different combinations of actions and consequences—promote or reduce any behavior we’re capable of performing.

  Learning alone does not explain every phobia. Heredity invests us with a natural preparedness to learn some fears over others.7 We require less learning from experience to develop fears toward animals or heights, stimuli naturally associated with certain risks, than toward flowers or many other animals naturally unlikely to hurt us. This natural preparedness shows up more clearly early in life. For example, fears of animals (snakes, wolves, cats, bats) or natural environment (storms, heights, water, night) tend to have a childhood onset.8 Batman preys on those fears.

  The Intimidation Game

  What’s the practical value in making Batman’s foes feel fear? Making criminals afraid may (1) deter them from committing crimes in the first place; (2) impede their ability to fight him by making them jumpy, reckless, too scared to shoot straight, perhaps paralyzed with fear; (3) make them panic and abandon each other; (4) drive some out of town (what idiot brings drug trade to Gotham?); (5) extract information; (6) punish them; and (7) make Batman feel big. He’s a bit of a bully—for a good cause. In his head, he’s out to stop crime. In his heart, he’s also out to hurt criminals. Fear hurts.

  Fear is often a less effective motivator than pleasant emotion. As a method of influence, fear arousal more strongly affects changes in attitude than in subsequent actions or intentions.9 We change attitudes more easily than we change our actions. When motivated to reevaluate our actions, we’re more likely to alter our attitudes to justify the way we do things,10 so the frightened criminal may simply come up with additional reasons for committing the same crimes. Protection-motivation theory11 holds that fear induces a motivation to protect oneself (regardless of whether that means protecting via fight or flight), affecting how we appraise fear-arousing threat, and that fear will influence us most when we believe (1) that we should change our behavior because the dangers look serious and probable and (2) that we can change because we have effective-seeming options that we believe ourselves capable of fulfilling. Changing our attitudes regarding any piece of those beliefs (e.g., downplaying the odds of getting cancer or the likelihood of crossing paths with Batman) comes to us more easily than learning new behaviors.

  Fear as a motivator runs into some of the same problems punishment does: Strong deterrents work faster, but mild deterrents last longer. The crook who’s scared of Batman hasn’t learned what’s wrong with crime itself. Strong coercion doesn’t teach people to internalize values.12 Authoritarian parents who focus heavily on fear and punishment as instructional methods foster their children’s extrinsic motivation for staying out of trouble, motivation to do one action or not do another solely to get an external reward or avoid punishment, but fail to help them build intrinsic motivation, the desire to perform an action for its own sake.13 One problem with fear-based training is that these aversive consequences need to follow an action every single time to be effective, which may be impossible to achieve. Every time you break into a store and neither Batman nor the police show up, the thrill of “getting away with it” becomes its own reward, adding an intrinsic thrill on top of the extrinsic reward, whatever loot you took away from the scene. Another problem with focusing heavily on what a person shouldn’t do is that you fail to teach them alternatives as to what they should do instead. Punished behavior is suppressed, not forgotten.14 Plenty of criminals upon release from jail go right back to crime because that’s what they know. Fear-based training and persuasion depend on the target’s proclivity to feel fear,15 a proclivity not everyone shares to the same degree.

  When Batman needs information quickly, like where a kidnapper is holding a victim, and his other methods of gathering and analyzing information have failed him, the pressure of that ticking clock typically drives him to the seedier side of town, where he rattles the lowlifes until somebody surrenders an answer. Growling, “Where’s the Joker?” doesn’t help if nobody knows. Torture victims, interrogation subjects, and others pressed hard enough for information they don’t know may in desperation spit out bogus answers to get a moment’s relief. Knowing Batman might come back for you later may not override the panicked feeling that you need to get him off you right now. How does Batman know they’re telling the truth? He’s like many police interrogators, convinced they can spot a lie despite poor evidence that they really can,16 although Batman doesn’t even read Miranda rights before wresting information out of people. The predominant model of police interrogation used across the United States,17 the Reid method,18 is confrontational and controversial, aimed at intimidating and stressing the suspect into confessing, as opposed to Western European countries, where interrogation is more of a rational, information-gathering process.19 The Reid method starts out like that, beginning as an interview and, after deriving enough information to consider the subject a suspect, progressing into accusatory interrogation. No one can accurately estimate the false confession rate or number of convictions based on false confessions,20 admissions to crimes the defendants did not really commit, but DNA exonerations that have come rolling in reveal that a frightening number of people have admitted to crimes they never committed. “Many of these stories recount horrific tales of psychologically—and, in some cases, physically—abusive interrogations of children and adults, including many who were cognitively impaired.”21 Even after training in deception detection, despite some claims of success rates as high as 85%, the majority of research finds that police investigators and other professionals perform only marginally better than chance when it comes to spotting who’s telling the truth.22

  The polygraph, the so-called lie detector (“lie indicator” would be more accurate), which records physiological signs of stress like changes in heart rate, respiration, and perspiration, is something of an intimidation device itself. Psychologist William Moulton Marston—who, under his Charles Moulton pseudonym, created the superheroine character Wonder Woman with her magic Lasso of Truth—helped pioneer the use of physiological measures to detect deception back in the 1920s, and yet even after all this time no method of lie detection is foolproof. Despite millions spent on the use of polygraphs for spybusting attempts, polygraphs do not catch spies.23 Despite some polygraph promoters’ claims of 90–100% accuracy, laboratory tests show polygraph accuracy rates more consistently around 60%,24 little better than chance, with an error rate where false positives outnumber false negatives by as much as 2 to 1—in other words, experts who make errors are twice
as likely to say innocent people are lying than to say the guilty are telling the truth.25 Physiological and emotional stress, especially when you’re suspected of wrongdoing, does not prove you’re lying;26 in fact, many inveterate liars spin lies more easily than they tell the truth, and psychopaths may feel unstressed telling either. The polygraph is a useful prop. It may deter wrongdoing by those who believe it works27 and it can provide a polygrapher with a theatrical tool to help elicit admissions during post-polygraph interviews.28 For reasons such as these, polygraphs are generally not admissible as evidence in courts.

  Torture interrogation (physically or psychologically abusive questioning) does not yield reliable information29—despite which, people generally believe that it works well30 and that it is, therefore, in some cases justified. It produces behavioral effects, certainly, but in the areas of instilling terror and stifling opposition.31 Elicitation of accurate information was rarely the witch hunter or inquisitor’s goal. “When accuracy is the goal of interrogation, as it is in intelligence collection, the coercive power of torture is likely to result in proffered misinformation, misdirection, and lies—ineffective outcomes by any measure.”32 Based on evidence from experienced interrogators, the FBI (in contrast to the CIA) has objected to torture, regarding it as unreliable and ineffective.33 Successful interrogators establish rapport between interrogator and source, applying powerful persuasion techniques that have been tested and retested for their efficacy based on understanding the subject’s needs, motives, and self-perceptions.34 Non-abusive interrogation methods require greater talent and skill. Why thrust poorly trained soldiers with random social skills into the position of administering torture protocols? Fear evokes urgency. When fight-or-flight kicks in, desperation urges us, “Do something now!” Using torture makes its users feel stronger and their supporters vicariously so. In the wake of horrifying tragedies like the 9/11 attacks, people yearn for any means by which they might restore a sense of order and control. Many yearn simply to make somebody else hurt and so they concoct rational-seeming excuses to inflict retaliatory pain even if it means turning a blind eye to abstract ethical dilemmas or concrete evidence that painless methods should prove more effective. To extract information from allegedly mean, cruel enemies, people want mean, cruel methods to work. Making nice with a monster repulses us. In The Dark Knight, the Joker points out to Batman the pointlessness in banging the clown around in a police interrogation room. Using ineffective truth extraction techniques to satisfy a desire for retributional justice35 gets in the way of effective persuasion. Interrogators rarely find themselves facing the “ticking bomb” scenarios used to rationalize torture, so rarely that most experts have never faced one at all. Moreover, numerous experienced interrogation experts say that were they to face such a dire emergency where someone’s life depended on rapid extraction of information, they’d stick with non-abusive methods proven to work better.36 When a Gotham crime lord called Black Mask tortures a young heroine nearly to death, trying to extract secrets she knows about Batman, he learns little.37 Why doesn’t he issue threats he doesn’t have to carry out? Why doesn’t he try a truth serum, have a flunky dressed like Batman talk to her while she’s delirious from fatigue, or paint the picture that she might improve the heroes’ odds for survival if she’d only share what she knows? Those tricks take finesse. Mainly, Black Mask likes to hurt people. He enjoys wielding brutal power.