Karen Shackleford is a social psychologist who studies our relationship with fictional characters from film, television, and books.

Her research is about the psychological processes that occur when we engage with fictional worlds and what we take away from those encounters.

Karen has a particular interest in the depiction of race and gender in popular culture fiction. She has also conducted research on social media’s role in our understanding of human social life. She has given expert testimony twice before the US Congress.

Karen is the editor of the journal Psychology of Popular Media and the Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology. She is also the author of How Fantasy Becomes Reality, editor and contributing author for Real Characters, co-author of Mad Men Unzipped, and co-author, with Cynthia Vinney, of Finding Truth in Fiction.