Suspension of disbelief

Based on Wikipedia: Suspension of disbelief

The Deal We Make With Stories

Here's a strange thing about being human: you can sit in a dark theater, watching a man in a rubber suit fight another man in a rubber suit, and feel genuine fear. You can read words on a page about a wizard and weep when he dies. You know none of it is real. And yet something in you decides, just for a little while, to believe anyway.

This is suspension of disbelief—the quiet bargain we strike every time we engage with fiction. We agree to set aside our critical faculties, to ignore the obvious fakery, to pretend that what we're seeing or reading or hearing is actually happening. In return, stories give us catharsis, insight, entertainment, and sometimes even wisdom.

But where did this idea come from? And is "suspending disbelief" even the right way to think about what happens when we lose ourselves in a story?

A Poet Names the Phenomenon

The phrase itself comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English Romantic poet best known for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the fragmentary dream-poem "Kubla Khan." In 1817, he published a work of literary autobiography and philosophy called Biographia Literaria, and buried within its dense pages was a phrase that would echo through centuries of criticism: "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

Coleridge was trying to solve a problem.

By the early nineteenth century, educated Europeans had largely abandoned belief in witches, fairies, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures. The Enlightenment had done its work. Rational people now expected rational explanations for phenomena. So how could poetry that trafficked in the supernatural—the kind Coleridge loved to write—still move modern readers?

His answer was elegant. If a writer could infuse implausible elements with enough "human interest and a semblance of truth," readers would willingly set aside their skepticism. They wouldn't actually believe in the supernatural events. But they would believe in them enough, temporarily, to feel something.

Coleridge was working through this problem with his friend and collaborator William Wordsworth on a book called Lyrical Ballads. The two poets divided their labor in an interesting way. Coleridge would write about supernatural characters and events, but make them feel psychologically real and humanly compelling. Wordsworth would write about ordinary everyday things, but make them feel magical and wondrous. Two paths to the same destination: that state of heightened perception where poetry does its work.

The Ancients Knew This Too

Coleridge wasn't discovering something new so much as naming something old. The Romans had grappled with exactly the same problem two thousand years earlier.

Horace, writing his Ars Poetica around 19 BCE, argued that poetry works like painting. Just as we don't expect a portrait to literally be the person it depicts, we shouldn't expect poems or plays to be literally true. We engage with them on different terms than we engage with reality. This idea—that art operates by its own rules, separate from the rules of the everyday world—turns out to be foundational to how humans experience fiction.

Cicero, the great Roman orator and philosopher, wrote about "adsensionis retentio"—a holding back of assent. When we encounter claims we can neither prove nor disprove, we can choose to neither believe nor disbelieve, but simply to withhold judgment. This is close to what happens with fiction, though not quite the same. We're not really withholding judgment about whether hobbits exist. We're choosing to engage with a story on its own terms.

The classical Greek theater, with its masked actors, its chorus of singers commenting on the action, its stories of gods and heroes, required something similar from its audiences. Everyone in the Theater of Dionysus knew they were watching a performance. The actors wore obvious costumes. The staging was conventional rather than realistic. And yet audiences reportedly experienced genuine emotional catharsis—the purging of pity and fear that Aristotle considered the purpose of tragedy.

The Shift in Meaning

Something interesting happened to Coleridge's concept over the next century and a half.

Originally, suspension of disbelief was the reader's gift to the writer—but only after the writer had earned it by making the implausible feel compelling and true. The burden was on the artist to create conditions where belief became possible. The audience's suspension of disbelief was a reward for craftsmanship, not an obligation.

By the late twentieth century, the phrase had shifted meaning. Now it often implied that audiences had a duty to suspend their disbelief, regardless of whether the work had earned that suspension. "You just have to suspend your disbelief" became a way of excusing sloppy storytelling. Plot hole in the movie? Suspend your disbelief. Unconvincing special effects? Suspend your disbelief. Characters acting in ways no human being would actually act? Just go along with it.

This is almost exactly backwards from what Coleridge meant. He was describing the conditions under which skillful art could make the impossible feel temporarily true. The modern usage turns it into a demand that audiences do the heavy lifting the artists failed to do.

What Actually Happens in Your Brain

The psychologist Norman Holland proposed a neurological explanation for what happens when we engage with fiction. When you're absorbed in a story, your brain shifts into a perceiving mode. The parts of your brain responsible for planning actions and preparing responses quiet down. You're watching, listening, taking in—not preparing to act on what you're experiencing.

This explains why you don't leap out of your seat to help the hero when he's in danger. Your brain knows, at some level, that you're experiencing something that doesn't require action. You're perceiving, not participating. The story is happening to characters in another world, not to you in this one.

But the moment you pull back—the moment you start thinking critically about what you've just seen or read—your brain switches modes. Now you're evaluating, judging, assessing. "Wait, that doesn't make sense." "Why didn't she just call the police?" "How did he survive that fall?" The spell breaks. You're no longer immersed in the story; you're analyzing it from outside.

This is why a single jarring moment can shatter our engagement with a story. We're in that perceiving state, absorbed and uncritical, and then something pulls us out—a boom mic visible at the edge of the frame, a character doing something wildly out of character, a special effect that looks obviously fake. Suddenly we're not in the story anymore. We're in a theater watching actors, or on a couch holding a book.

The Philosopher's Objection

Not everyone thinks "suspension of disbelief" accurately describes what happens when we engage with fiction. The philosopher Kendall Walton raised a pointed objection.

If we truly believed, even temporarily, that the events in a horror movie were real, we would behave very differently than we do. We would call the police when we witnessed an on-screen murder. We would shout warnings to endangered characters. We would flee the theater when the monster appeared. The fact that we do none of these things suggests that we never really believe the fiction is real, even during our most absorbed moments of viewing.

This is a genuine puzzle. We feel fear watching horror movies. We feel grief when beloved characters die. We feel joy at happy endings. These emotions seem real. They produce real physical responses—elevated heart rate, tears, laughter, tension. And yet we clearly don't believe the events causing these emotions are actually happening.

So what's going on?

One possibility is that our emotional systems are more easily fooled than our rational minds. We know intellectually that the monster isn't real, but something more primitive in us responds to the shape, the sound, the movement as if it were. Evolution didn't prepare us to distinguish between real threats and represented ones. A snarling face triggers fear whether it belongs to an actual predator or an image on a screen.

Another possibility is that we're not actually feeling fear, grief, and joy when we engage with fiction, but something closely related—what some philosophers call "quasi-emotions." These feel like real emotions and behave like real emotions in many ways, but they're different because they're not connected to action in the way real emotions are. Real fear makes you run. Quasi-fear makes you grip your armrest and keep watching.

Tolkien's Alternative: Secondary Belief

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and one of the twentieth century's deepest thinkers about fantasy literature, rejected the whole concept of suspension of disbelief. In his essay "On Fairy-Stories," he proposed something different: secondary belief.

The idea is this: a skilled storyteller creates a secondary world with its own internal consistency. Within that world, certain things are true that are not true in our world. There might be magic, or dragons, or faster-than-light travel. The reader's job is not to suspend disbelief in these impossible things, but to believe in them—within the context of the secondary world.

This is different from suspension of disbelief in a subtle but important way. You're not pretending to believe, or choosing not to disbelieve, or suppressing your critical faculties. You're actually believing—but what you're believing is that within this invented world, these things are real. You believe in the internal reality of the fiction, not in its external correspondence to our world.

Tolkien thought suspension of disbelief only became necessary when the secondary world failed. When the storytelling is clumsy, when the internal logic breaks down, when characters behave inconsistently or events happen for no reason—then the secondary world becomes unbelievable even on its own terms. At that point, the reader faces a choice: make a conscious effort to keep believing despite the flaws (suspension of disbelief), or give up on the story entirely.

In Tolkien's view, needing to suspend your disbelief is a sign that something has gone wrong. A well-crafted secondary world should produce belief naturally, without effort or will.

The Actor's Parallel

There's an interesting parallel in the world of acting. Method actors—those who immerse themselves completely in their characters, staying in character between takes, sometimes for months at a time—are essentially practicing a performer's version of suspension of disbelief. They're choosing to believe, at least partially and temporarily, that they are someone else.

The results can be extraordinary. Daniel Day-Lewis, perhaps the most famous method actor of recent decades, reportedly learned Czech and refused to break character for the entire filming of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He learned to track and skin animals for Last of the Mohicans. He spent weeks living in the wilderness eating only what he could catch or gather.

But there are limits to what belief can accomplish. An actor playing a murder victim cannot actually die. An actor playing a superhero cannot actually fly. At some point, the technique requires the very thing method actors often disdain: the kind of technical skill that allows performers to simulate experiences they're not actually having.

This is the actor's version of the question philosophers raise about audience belief. If actors truly believed they were their characters, they would behave in ways that make performance impossible. The character who is supposed to die would refuse to die. The character who is supposed to commit murder would refuse to commit murder. Some gap must always remain between performer and role, just as some gap remains between audience and fiction.

Why Any of This Matters

You might reasonably ask: who cares what we call it? Whether we're "suspending disbelief" or "engaging in secondary belief" or doing something else entirely, the experience is the same. We get lost in stories. We feel things about imaginary people and events. The theoretical explanation doesn't change the experience.

But understanding what we're doing when we engage with fiction matters for a few reasons.

First, it helps us understand why some stories work and others don't. If suspension of disbelief is entirely the audience's responsibility, then any failure to engage with a story is the audience's fault. But if belief needs to be earned by the storyteller—through internal consistency, psychological truth, and craftsmanship—then we have a framework for evaluating what makes some fiction more compelling than other fiction.

Second, it illuminates something strange and wonderful about human cognition. We are perhaps the only species that deliberately and routinely believes things we know to be false, for the pleasure of it. This is a remarkable ability. It allows us to explore possibilities, to imagine alternatives, to feel emotions about situations we've never encountered. Fiction is a kind of flight simulator for life, and our capacity for belief-despite-knowledge is what makes the simulation work.

Third, understanding the mechanics of fictional belief helps us think about other kinds of belief too. We engage in something like suspension of disbelief when we participate in rituals, adopt social roles, or play games. The businessman playing the role of Tough Negotiator, the mourner observing funeral customs, the children playing House—all are engaging with constructed realities that are not literally true but feel real within their proper contexts.

The line between fiction and reality may be less sharp than we usually assume. We are all, in various ways and at various times, believing things we know aren't exactly true, because believing them allows us to participate in activities that matter to us.

The Bargain Renewed

Every time you pick up a novel, settle into a theater seat, or start a new television series, you're entering into an ancient bargain. The storyteller promises to create a world interesting enough to inhabit. You promise to meet them halfway, to set aside your skepticism long enough to feel something about characters you know don't exist and events you know never happened.

Coleridge was right that this is a kind of faith—not religious faith, but something related. An act of imaginative generosity. A willingness to let yourself be moved by what you know isn't real.

And Tolkien was right too: the best stories don't feel like they require faith at all. The secondary world is so complete, so internally consistent, so true to its own logic, that belief comes naturally. You don't suspend disbelief because there's nothing to disbelieve. Within the story's world, everything makes sense.

That's the magic of great storytelling. Not that it tricks you into believing the impossible, but that it creates a space where the impossible becomes, for a little while, the most natural thing in the world.