Becoming The Mask / Real Life

• During the filming of The Edwardian Country House, the Olliff-Cooper family adopted the lifestyle of the upper class and eventually began to consider themselves as such, despite knowing it was all for a reality television show. The other wiki has a small subsection on the effect.
• C. S. Lewis said that those who are afraid that they can't "love their neighbor" should just act as if they did and the rest would take care of itself. Lewis argued that the whole point of ritual and formalized prayer in religion was that you could 'dress up' as a saint - and thereby become one.
• In World War II, after the Italians turned against the Nazis, the Germans coached an Italian petty thief to pose as an aristocratic Italian general and convince several captured resistance fighters to spill their secrets. He set out instead to be an inspiring figure who'd help the men hold onto their information and their pride. When the Germans executed him for betraying them, he died still maintaining the false identity. This was made into a movie, General Della Rovere, in 1959.
• ATF agent William Queen spent two years undercover as Billy St. John, a member of the Mongols motorcycle gang, and admits he grew to liking the gang he was in and found them kinder than many law-abiding folks he knew. He felt somewhat sorry for turning them in when his job investigating and spying on the gang was over.
• Christopher Reeve became to be considered as noble a man as Superman - first when he went to Chile under the tyranny of Augusto Pinochet to help some arrested actors despite the obvious risk to his life, and after he became a crusader for the disabled after his riding accident.
• Theodore Roosevelt: Born a sickly asthmatic at the pinnacle of privilege, he built up a persona as a rugged man of action. By the time of the Spanish-American War, he was a rugged man of action.
  • The same goes for Robert E. Howard, who got a lot of his ambiance for his rugged action-packed stories from the oil drillers, boxers, sailors and other manly men he emulated.
• Jack Barsky was originally Albrecht Dittrich, an East German spy working for the KGB, and assumed the Jack Barsky persona while undercover in the United States. As time went on he found himself increasingly unable to separate his fake identity from his actual self, and when the Russians ordered him to return home in 1988 he "went native" and stayed with his American family. He later came clean to the FBI and became an American citizen, and now considers Jack Barsky his real identity and Albrecht Dittrich a dead one.
• Enforced Trope in Ancient Rome: Enslaving a Roman citizen was generally illegal, so there were fraudsters that pretended to be slaves and sold themselves to other people, only to run away with the money. The legal punishment for such people was to lose their citizenship and become a slave.
• After World War I, Adolf Hitler was employed as a spy sent to investigate what would later be called the Nazi Party. Hitler liked what he saw and he went from being a spy to the leader.
• The psychological theory of the persona is basically this. A persona is essentially a filtered version of a person's core personality, based on their life experiences, defence mechanisms, culture, social groups, career, and so on. It is developed over a person's entire life, and usually without the person realizing it. When compared to Freudian psychology, the persona can be compared to the idea of the Super-Ego, with the core personality being a combination of the Ego and Id.
• It's not uncommon for people who start engaging with creative works on a purely ironic level or pretending to enjoy it for the purpose of humor or mockery to develop a genuine appreciation for it through a combination of exposure and seeing legitimate merit the more time they are around it and engage with fans who sincerely like it, particularly with music. There's actually a phrase for this: "Fake it till you make it."