We’re coming up fast on Halloween so let’s talk about the Batman Effect. If you’ve ever put on a costume, you may have noticed that you act a little differently in it. What does the research say?
Batman Effect part 1:
Imagine a six-year-old sitting in front of a laptop, doing the most boring task a team of researchers could design. Right beside the laptop is an iPad with a game on it, and the child has been told they can play it whenever they like. Every minute, a recorded voice asks whether they’re working hard.
Now give that child a Batman cape and change the question to “Is Batman working hard?”
That’s the setup of a 2017 study that gave us the name “the Batman effect”.1 Researchers asked 180 four and six year olds to stick with a dull task for ten minutes while that iPad sat there tempting them. Some kids were asked about themselves (“Am I working hard?”). Some were asked about themselves by name, in the third person. The rest picked a character, were given a prop to match, and were asked about the character instead.
The kids who were Batman (or Rapunzel, or Dora, or Bob the Builder) stayed on task longer than either of the other groups. Some of them even answered the recorded voice out loud with “Batman is working hard”, and if they’d wandered off to the iPad, they went back to work.
So what’s going on?
Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here.
https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/10/26/batman-effect/
