We are all very good at knowing what other people ought to do. It's even been said that a pleasure that never palls is to point out when other people--friends, people at work, politicians--get it wrong.

There's an equivalent in fiction. Dolf Zillmann (e.g. 2000) has proposed that we are disposed to like fictional characters who behave well and to dislike fictional characters who behave badly. Zillmann says that at the movies, or when reading a novel, we are untiring in our monitoring of characters' intentions and actions. We applaud those whom we think act well, and condemn those who act badly.

There have been several experiments on this effect. For instance René Weber and colleagues (2008) gave more than 500 female students DVDs of five episodes (a week's worth) of a popular television soap opera. (Overall ten sets of five episodes were used in the study, a whole season's worth, each set being watched by about 50 women). Participants were asked to watch, in their own time, the five episodes to which they had been assigned, and after watching all five to rate each of 12 characters in the show, from behaving well to behaving badly. The participants also rated how enjoyable and entertaining they found the week's worth of episodes they had watched. Participants' enjoyment was highest when good outcomes occurred to characters who behaved well and bad outcomes occurred to characters who behaved badly.