Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight

Fright characterizes Batman’s rogues gallery unlike any other. His enemies dress as if en route to a Halloween masquerade party full of trick-or-treat tricksters, evoking chills and thrills. The Waynes’ uncostumed killer, Joe Chill, reflects the fears that give birth to Batman. People grow resistant to fear, though. Graduated exposure to Batman may

Alfred tells Bruce, before suggesting that Bruce doesn’t fully understand the Joker either. “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Batman scares the mob into turning to the Joker. The Joker wants to scare everybody into turni

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

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 Wo

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

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 th

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 uncond

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 ten

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