Freshman Research Forum

When Sofie told us last semester that we were going to be doing a research project that had to be conducted within one hour and had to somehow relate to the body, my first thought was “What on earth am I going to do?”

When I attended Ohayocon in early January, I had my idea.

The title of my research project is A Change of Character: Cosplay, Confidence, and Bodily Perceptions. My hypothesis was as follows:

“I believe there is a psychological connection between what people wear and what they perceive their body to be capable of. I think that the cosplayers will behave more like their characters when in costume, including but not limited to attempting to do things they have not been trained to do when cosplaying someone like an ice skater or a dancer. Another change that I think is likely would be their personality more closely resembling their character’s than it usually does.”

What I found the most interesting about this is how dancers and performers find it much easier to act like their character, with more confidence, when we don costumes.

My methodology to gather data was a brief questionnaire containing the following questions:

How old are you?

What is your age?

What is your gender?

Why do you enjoy cosplay?

Do you think your physical behavior changes while in cosplay? If yes, how so?

Do you think your personality changes while in cosplay? If yes, how so?

How does cosplaying affect your confidence and your willingness to try new things?

Have you ever attempted a character’s specific skill while in cosplay?

Gathering the data was the trickiest part. I e-mailed it as an anonymous Google questionnaire to the anime and the cosplay clubs on the OSU campus, but no one ever replied to me. I then sent it to a few friends who cosplay without telling them what specifically I was researching. I also posted it on my Facebook and Instagram, saying that it was for a school project, asking cosplayers to take it and send it on.

At first I only had two or three responses, which made me anxious. However, the longer I waited the more momentum the questionnaire picked up, and I ended up with 15 responses! A pretty nice sample size—it could have been bigger, but it held enough weight. Recipients typed their own responses to the questions, they did not select from pre-determined responses.

What I found in the responses more or less matched up to what I was expecting. The youngest responder was 11 years old and the oldest was 36 years old. About half of the responses were from females. 27% were from males, 13% gender fluid, and 7% wrote “other.” Gender and age appeared to have no significant impact on the responses I received.

About 79% of the responders said that their behavior changes when they cosplay. 62% said that they are significantly more confident and outgoing while cosplaying. 33% said that they try things they don’t normally try whilst cosplaying. 73% said that they have tried to perform a character’s specific skill!

I was really excited that my predictions had evidence, but while analyzing the data I noticed things I hadn’t anticipated. Somehow, I was so blinded by the “one hour study of the body” part that I missed overall psychological implications. My first inkling of these psychological implications was within the responses themselves.

24% of people said it’s fun to “be someone else,” “present as someone else,” “act like someone else,” etc.

(People also said they enjoy cosplay because of the creativity, the process of creating a costume, and the community.)

It was difficult deciding how to proceed with my actual presentation for the research forum itself. Once I settled on making a poster, I then had to decide how to present my data. I made graphs with the answers to every single question, alongside photo examples of cosplay and the definition of the word “cosplay” (as not all people have heard of it.)

While at the library, the printer jammed halfway through printing my graphs—which figures—but it ended up working out because I wouldn’t have had room for them all anyway, and the two that printed were the crucial ones!

My completed poster!

I was worried about verbally unpacking and summarizing my research at the forum, but it actually went off without a hitch. I came up with a more-or-less standard spiel that probably took under a minute to give. I got some really, really interesting questions and comments that opened my mind up to how many things I could research about this subject.

“So it’s a practice,” Mel Mark said, squinting at the definition of cosplay. “Not meditative, but—well, I guess it could be.”

I realized I never considered cosplay as a practice, more as just a thing—like dressing up on Halloween or a kid making costumes out of your mom’s closet. But clearly it is a practice—some people even sew their own costumes from scratch, cut and style their own wigs, and build their own props. I think I could examine that more and take that into consideration.

Carrie Cox and I had a fascinating conversation about the show Sleep No More in New York City and how it relates. At Sleep No More, the audience wears masks and are forcibly separated from the people they came with. She told me about an interview with the cast she’d seen and the crazy things they discussed people doing in the audience. In response, I brought up something we talked about in my Intro to Psych class this semester. We did a class activity where we anonymously wrote what we’d do if we were invisible for a day and could do anything with no consequences. An alarming amount of people responded with something like “steal a million dollars,” and our teacher told us that as soon as we’re released from the social stigma surrounding our actions, it’s more or less a free-for-all. Carrie and I discussed the implications of that and how even though dancers typically don’t have “a character” to perform in the same sense that, say, an actor would, we still have a disconnect between ourselves and who/what we’re being when we’re onstage—the way cosplayers do.

Amy Schmidt and I had a similar conversation where she recommended I take a course called The Psychology of Creativity, which I genuinely hope I find the credit hours for somewhere. Mitchell Rose pointed out that how you feel about yourself and how confident you are even changes on a day-to-day basis depending on what you’re wearing, even though it’s your own wardrobe—which reminded me of our costuming segment in Production 2601.

We were supposed to choose a character's costume to analyze. Someone brought a Kim Kardashian red carpet look. We raised the question, “What is a costume?” Jackie suggested the definition “something you wear while knowing that people are going to be watching you” (TV, performing onstage, a red carpet look, etc.), but Emily responded that technically our everyday wear is a costume because it’s how we’re trying to present ourselves to the world in general, because we know people will be seeing us like friends, family, teachers, and random people on the street.

A question I received a lot at the research forum is “Will you be continuing this research?”

When I was in the midst of the project, freaking out about getting enough responses and how to present my data and what was I going to say at the forum, I would have said “no, I’m going to be glad to be done with it, I really don’t know what I’m going to find, I wish I’d done something else.”

I had a lot of fun discussing different facets of my project with faculty members and upperclassmen who had unique perspectives to bring to the table. They opened my eyes to how much more there still is to be uncovered and how many different avenues could be considered.

At the forum, when people asked me “Will you be continuing this research?”

My response was, “I think I might.”

Me with my poster at the forum.

#research