Ask a Psychologist: Why We Can’t Help but Love Pop Culture Jerks
From Roman Roy to Loki, audiences regularly become enamored of jerks across movies and television. Just what makes these characters so endearing—and what does that say about ourselves?
My first memorable experience with a pop culture jerk was with Vegeta of the seminal anime series Dragon Ball Z. The prince of a near-extinct race of warriors known as Saiyans whose home planet was destroyed, Vegeta became one of the anime’s earliest antagonists: an annoyingly prideful foil for the wholesome hero Goku. (Goku also happens to be a Saiyan but was raised on Earth after crash-landing on our planet as an infant.) After Goku defeats him, Vegeta spends much of Dragon Ball Z obsessing over how to surpass his Saiyan peer: a journey that vacillates between moments of despicable villainy and tear-jerking heroism.
There’s nothing quite like a character you love to hate. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jerks Week at The Ringer. Vote for your favorite ones in the Best Pop Culture Jerks Bracket, and check back throughout the week for a selection of stories on one of the most underrated archetypes.
Despite having such an abrasive personality, Vegeta is often regarded as one of the most popular characters in the Dragon Ball universe—something that won’t come as a surprise to longtime fans of the series. (For the record, he is my second-favorite character after Piccolo, which is still high praise.) But Vegeta is hardly the only pop culture jerk who elicits this kind of reaction from viewers: Whether it’s Succession’s Roman Roy, Mad Men’s Pete Campbell, or Scrubs’ Perry Cox, we can’t seem to get enough of characters who wear their prickliness like a badge of honor. In some cases, such as The Karate Kid’s Johnny Lawrence, a pop culture jerk is so beloved that they even get an opportunity to be the (anti)hero of their own story.
To better understand why people—very much including me—become enamored of pop culture jerks, I called Dr. Jill M. Swirsky, an assistant professor of psychology at Holy Family University and the editor of a psychology-focused pop culture blog for the International Honor Society in Psychology. Below, we discuss what makes jerks so captivating, how our relationships to these characters have evolved since the rise of social media platforms, and the ways in which pop culture can be used to study human behavior.
Just to give you a better idea of what separates a jerk from an outright villain, here’s some of the characters included in our bracket: George Costanza from Seinfeld, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series, Roman Roy from Succession, and Bugs Bunny. It’s a pretty loose definition.
Tell me Loki is on there from Marvel.
That’s a great shout. We should have Loki. If he somehow isn’t there, I’ll make sure we sneak him into the bracket.
Right? He was the first one I thought of when you started explaining the concept. I was like, “Oh yeah, because he’s a jerk, but you root for him.”
Exactly, and that actually leads to my first question: Do you have a favorite pop culture jerk? Is it Loki?
I don’t know that I do. I find Draco’s character really compelling. He’s just a really relatable guy. My background is actually in studying bullying, and so one of the big things we know about bullying is that you are rarely just a bully or just a victim. It’s oftentimes both. You are a bully because you are victimized, and Draco epitomizes that.
His dad is a major jerk to him. We see all sorts of childhood trauma. We see authoritarian parenting, and we see Draco respond to that by lashing out. I’m a developmental psychologist by training as well, so it really brings up these questions of nature and nurture. Is his jerkiness born, or is it made? I find him really compelling for those reasons.
I know this is a broad overview of pop culture jerks; Draco and George Costanza couldn’t be more different and exist in totally different genres. From a psychological perspective, what do you think some of these characters have in common?
They’re relatable. The hero is unattainable. Nobody can be Harry Potter, and nobody wants to be the villain, but the jerk is relatable. They’re human; we see ourselves in them. I think that’s what speaks to people about them. Like Loki, he’s a jerk: a textbook definition of a jerk. But you sort of get it, right? He finds out that he was adopted. He finds out that his parentage isn’t what he thought it was. That’s a huge upset in someone’s life. We understand that, we relate to that, we see ourselves in that.
Snape is another really good example. On the surface, they look like they’re one thing, but they have so much complexity underneath—often more than the villains or the heroes, who are usually just black or white. These characters are gray, and that’s humanity, right? Humanity’s not black and white.
Sometimes people can develop a parasocial relationship with a fictional character. When that happens, when should we draw the line? When does that behavior gear toward something more unhealthy?
This is more anecdotal than professional because that’s not my area of expertise, but I would say it’s when you start to lose touch with reality, when you start to live more in the fantasy world than in the real world. I recognize that in itself is a vague answer because we could keep asking, “Well, why? Where is that line?” With anything mental health related, it’s when it starts to impair your life or impact your life in negative ways.
In some ways, that escapism is positive. It’s adaptive. That’s what’s so appealing about pop culture. I’m thinking particularly of the Harry Potter franchise before J.K. Rowling went rogue. The Harry Potter fandom was this place of safety for people—people who were different. People identify with the Harry Potter world for all sorts of reasons. It was a really healthy, adaptive form of escape. That certainly can flip when we start to lose touch with reality. I don’t know where that line is. I think that’s different for each person.
Another example I thought of: Have you watched Succession?
I did, and Roman was one of my favorites.
It’s sometimes hard to know how people really feel just by sentiments shared on social media, but there’s a lot of sympathy for that character—and people root for him—despite awful behavior that included trying to elect a fascist as president. Obviously, Roman does draw a lot of empathy from the viewer because of the familial trauma he experienced.
That’s sort of a larger question about how much can trauma become an excuse for behavior? That’s probably not a popular question, especially among psychologists, because most often what you hear is that we should make space for people with trauma. And yes, certainly, we should, but at some point it’s not an excuse for behavior. I think Roman’s a really, really good example of that. Loki too, to an extent. He destroys New York. But how much can trauma excuse it? That comes, really, down to education and people understanding what trauma is.
We’re now becoming more open to sharing our stories. Like 50 years ago, the idea of seeing a counselor or discussing trauma or discussing mental health was unheard of. Now we’re doing it a lot more and we’re exploring those stories and we’re making that space and we’re having that patience and that understanding for people’s backgrounds.
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How do you think people’s relationship with pop culture characters has evolved since the prevalence of social media platforms?
It’s interesting because I study social media and I study pop culture, but I typically study them separately. So I actually really like this question because it puts my worlds together. It’s easier to connect with like-minded people now. Celebrities, pop culture icons also live their lives under microscopes now in ways that they didn’t 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. It just gives us more opportunities for connection. It gives us more space for criticism. It gives us more space for upward and downward social comparison.
I totally agree. This is more just from my own observations, but I do feel like when it comes to people’s relationship with fictional characters and how they express their fandom online, the pop culture jerks tend to also have more of that following.
Well, it’s more fun. You know that the hero’s going to win, you know that the villain’s going to lose. That’s predetermined, right? That’s the standard trope in all narratives, with the possible exception of something like Game of Thrones, where anyone’s fair game. But the jerk, you don’t know, it’s unpredictable. You don’t know how they’re going to end up. They might flip and become good.
When you first reached out to me, my husband and I were discussing this concept and we went back and forth on Darth Vader. Does he fall into a jerk, or does he fall into a villain? We could keep arguing about that, but in general, you don’t know how the jerk is going to turn out. Draco Malfoy does end up being good. Snape does end up being good. But for most of the series, that really could have gone either way. It kept us on the edge of our seats. We knew Harry was the good guy. We knew Voldemort was the bad guy. Nothing exciting there, but the jerk keeps you guessing.
Is there a particular TV show, movie, or fictional character that piques your interest as a psychologist?
Marvel does a really good job of making their villains understandable. It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s in the same ballpark. Thanos, for example, you can understand what he’s saying, right? I mean, obviously, killing half of the population is horrible, but some of what he says makes sense, about how we’re overcrowded and thinning the herd would make the existing people’s lives better. You listen to him say it, and you’re like, “Yeah, that kind of makes sense.” And then you’re like, “No, no, no, wait, that’s awful. I shouldn’t think about that.”
There’s another Marvel character, Wilson Fisk. I remember thinking that he was just such a compelling character because he was clearly the bad guy. But you saw why he was bad, and he was very complex. So while those characters don’t necessarily fit into the jerk category because those are both pretty textbook villains, the idea of that deeper level of understanding is what’s really compelling when you start to see behind the curtain as to why they act the way they do.
Disney’s really leaning into this right now with all of these villain backstories like Maleficent, and while it’s not Disney, the whole concept of Wicked is getting a better understanding of why the Wicked Witch acted the way she did and how she became wicked. We’re doing more of that in today’s media than we’ve done in the past, where things used to be really one-dimensional. And now more and more we’re getting those layers, and you’re starting to understand more.
How does pop culture help us to understand psychology and human behavior?
This is something that I’ve gotten really into recently. I actually work with a group right now, we call ourselves the Thematic Instruction Consortium because we don’t use the word “consortium” nearly enough. Largely, my colleagues are interested in Sesame Street—I’m the black sheep in that I’m a bit more broad in terms of pop culture interests, but there’s so much in pop culture that’s psychology. Psychology is everywhere. It’s everything we do, think, say, feel. It’s in all of our relationships and things like that. There’s a lot of space in pop culture to bring that into the classroom. So that’s what I’ve been working on recently, is how we can use these pop culture stories that everyone is familiar with and everyone connects with and use them as teaching tools.
We’ve been having a bit of success with that. Recently, my colleagues have taught Sesame Street in child development classes, so using Sesame Street characters to help students understand how children grow and develop. I’m teaching a psychology of musical theater course in the fall, so we’re going to look at different Broadway musicals and the different psychological constructs that show up in those musicals. West Side Story is full of social psychology and gangs and group dynamics and cumulative risk and all sorts of things. There is so much space for us to use pop culture as teaching tools. I don’t know why we’re not doing more of that.
Lastly, the winner of the pop culture jerks bracket will be determined by our readers and anyone who stumbles upon the polls online. Any guesses as to who might be crowned the greatest pop culture jerk?
I think it will be Draco for a couple reasons. One is that the Harry Potter fandom is so universal. Something like Seinfeld or Bugs Bunny, it’s too generational. Harry Potter is just so well known. I also think from all of the things I talked about earlier and how compelling of a character Draco is, I would put my money on him—unless you have Loki, in which case I would be split 50/50 between the two of them.
The other one that I need to make a huge plug for, I don’t know how set your bracket is, but Jaime Lannister.
Oh, that’s another great call.
Textbook example, right? You got to get him and Loki in there.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
