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?
The researchers describe it as self-distancing: stepping outside yourself and looking at your situation from somewhere else. The further the distance, the better the kids did. They’re also careful to say that they can’t fully separate that from other explanations, such as Batman being a character known for not giving up, or the effect of the costume itself.
To me, this looks like a great example of resource states (sometimes called ego states): the different parts of ourselves that each bring their own perspective and their own skills. The part of a six-year-old that wants to play with the iPad is not the part that’s Batman, and the cape gives the persistent part permission to take over.
Either way, the cape changes how the wearer behaves.
Batman Effect part 2:
There’s a second Batman effect. This one isn’t about the person wearing the costume. It’s about everyone else.
In a 2025 study, researchers in Milan put a visibly pregnant woman on crowded metro cars and counted how often someone offered her a seat.2 In some of those cars, a man dressed as Batman got on as well. He didn’t say anything, didn’t interact with anyone, and didn’t ask anyone to do anything. He was just there.
Without Batman, someone offered her a seat about 38% of the time. With Batman in the car, that jumped to 67%.
Of the people who gave up their seat with Batman in the car, 44% said afterwards that they hadn’t seen him at all.
“These findings suggest that unexpected events can promote prosociality, even without conscious awareness, with implications for encouraging kindness in public settings.” Pagnini et al., “Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect”2
This wasn’t a randomised experiment, though. It was one transit system in one city, and the authors themselves name generalisability as a limitation. It’s an intriguing result, not a settled one.
So why would a silent man in a cape make strangers kinder?
The authors point to the interruption itself. Most of a commute runs on autopilot, which is a light trance. Something unexpected breaks that pattern and, for a moment, people are paying attention to what’s actually around them, including the pregnant woman standing in front of them.
“Unlike traditional mindfulness interventions that require active engagement, this study highlights how situational disruptions alone may be sufficient to produce similar effects.” Pagnini et al.2
Is it also resource states? It could be, although it’s clearly a very different state from the one that shows up when we’re wearing the costume ourselves. The people on that train didn’t decide to be kinder. Something in the environment brought a more attentive version of them forward.
The first Batman effect says you can change your own behaviour by stepping into a different version of yourself. The second says that when you do, you may be changing everyone else’s as well, whether or not they notice.
So who are you being when you walk into the room?
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White, R. E., Prager, E. O., Schaefer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A. L., & Carlson, S. M. (2017). The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children. Child Development, 88(5), 1563-1571. ↩
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Pagnini, F., Grosso, F., Cavalera, C., Poletti, V., Minazzi, G. A., Missoni, A., Bogani, L., & Bertolotti, M. (2025). Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect. npj Mental Health Research, 4, 57. ↩ ↩2 ↩3