"Cheaters"? Men Enjoy It if It's Fiction

Now, come on, face it. You roll your eyes when you hear about "Cheaters" or all kind of heart tugging shows, but you won't miss one episode. Emotional melodramas dig deep into your emotional reactions, no matter if assigned as "chick-flicks," "tearjerkers," or "human interest stories."

A new research published in the Journal of Consumer Research focused on differences between sexes, on how they react to this type of entertainment coming with the life story of men and women fighting with bravery their life challenges. The results revealed that women preferred (or tended to believe) stories appearing to be real, while men were more interested in stories specifically presented as being fictionalized.

"Providing explicit information that the story is make-believe may have enabled low empathizers (males in this case) to relax emotion norms and become more involved in the story, in turn resulting in more favorable evaluations of the entertainment. The more empathetic a person is, the more s/he will be involved and immersed into the story and transported into the world of the narrative," wrote the authors, Jennifer J. Argo (University of Alberta), Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Darren W. Dahl (both University of British Columbia).

It appeared that men were less likely to follow sex stereotypes, like "men should not cry," when they regarded the show as not being real, thus they were rather temporarily neglecting stereotypes, fact that permitted them relax and enjoy the story.

"At a practical level our research findings speak to an increasingly popular trend in the entertainment industry wherein publishers and producers indicate at the outset of the story or program its level of fictionality (i.e., whether it is based on actual facts). Signaling the nature of the fictionality of a story or program may be one possible way of targeting specific segments in audiences," signaled the authors.