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How important is reading fiction in socializing school children? Researchers at The New School in New York City have found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling.
Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing. After they finished the excerpts the participants took a test that measured their ability to infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. The researchers found, to their surprise, a significant difference between the literary- and genre-fiction readers.
When study participants read non-fiction or nothing, their results were unimpressive. When they read excerpts of genre fiction, such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother, their test results were dually insignificant. However, when they read literary fiction, such as The Round House by Louise Erdrich, their test results improved markedly—and, by implication, so did their capacity for empathy. The study was published October 4 in Science.
The results are consistent with what literary criticism has to say about the two genres—and indeed, this may be the first empirical evidence linking literary and psychological theories of fiction. Popular fiction tends to portray situations that are otherworldly and follow a formula to take readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and exciting experiences. Although the settings and situations are grand, the characters are internally consistent and predictable, which tends to affirm the reader’s expectations of others. It stands to reason that popular fiction does not expand the capacity to empathize.
Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom. Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.
The results suggest that reading fiction is a valuable socializing influence. The study data couldinform debates over how much fiction should be included in educational curricula and whether reading programs should be implemented in prisons, where reading literary fiction might improve inmates’ social functioning and empathy. Castano also hopes the finding will encourage autistic people to engage in more literary fiction, in the hope it could improve their ability to empathize without the side effects of medication.
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20 Comments
Add CommentI used to teach behavior disordered kids. If we could get them into stories about people and relationships and discuss them with peers, their growth in understanding of self and others seemed significant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, we can use fictional stories to motivate our children.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith imagination into the story, to produce more "empathy" effect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs much as I would like to believe it, the more I think about it, the more skeptical I become. When I read something, I fall into the groove of the work and that way of thinking lingers. Reading history of science before reading fiction pricks up my ears for "sciency" things in the fiction. Taking a multiple choice test, I fall into the "what they are looking for" style of reading and work to silence the voice that insists it could have asked the question so much better. I inhabit an adopted perspective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me that reading "popular" fiction, non-fiction and inhabiting the real world could have been understood as different facets of the same thing: a culturally established distance that makes life "work" more often than it does not. Is empathy something we reserve for those closest to us?
Maybe the authors of the study did address these concerns, but they are not present in the reports I have read. Without them, we have another bit of "Duh!" research ripe for thoughtless educational hijacking.
This doesn't even get into the question of defining "literary", "popular" or "genre" fiction: consider the longstanding battle over the literary value of science fiction or fantasy.
I believe literary fiction does improve a person's ability to get along in the world, but I am not convinced this research - in the form most people will learn of it - proves the point. The reports read as predictable, lacking nuance, formulaic...
and yet the dreams and fictions of others can be used as a foundation upon which to base morals and ethics when no other source presents itself in a way that has value to the individual.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe study's result strikes me as utterly not surprising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can't seem to find the original student you are referring to. Can you provide the citation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe process is called learning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis seems true enough. This holds for 'art films' vs Hollywood as well.
In most Hollywood films, Germans of WWII era are monstrous scum, pure and simple.
But in 'art films' like Das Boot and Downfall, we empathize with how the other side thought and felt.
Also, serious literature will tend undermine not only negative stereotypes but positive ones. For example, take the hoary cliche of the 'magic negro' or the holy holocaust Jew. They are Liberal fantasies that require faith on our part, not unlike the one that made white 'progressives' gush about the Hollywoodized Obama and wee wee in their pants. But a closer inspection via serious literature could explore the hidden and darker aspects of such fgures.
Serious literature can even make people empathize with a pedophile, as in Lolita. Empathy is thus amoral. It undermines both negative and positive stereotypes and is thereby problematic to both left and right.
Portnoy's Complaint revealed some uncomfortable truth about Jewish sexual neurosis.
Will "listening to classical music enrich one's emotional life" be next to be hyped by the media?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's amusing. Liberals attacked the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy in the 60s as 'elitist' and 'reactionary'. They championed popular culture as 'liberating' and 'egalitarian'. Hollywood directors were extolled as 'auteurs'. And the notion that high art could make us into better people was deemed hopelessly naive and self-serving(for the 'white privilege' community that dominated high culture).
So, we ended up colleges teaching stuff like Buffy the Vampire Killer and the philosophy of Matrix.
But now, the same Liberals tell us that high culture IS more valuable than low culture and that art(dominated by those 'dead white males')can improve our hearts and minds.
So, before Liberals make a big fuss about this latest finding, how about some mea culpa?
Very interesting! I remember many times feeling disappointed or even mad when a character did something I was not expecting, as if I actually knew the person just as I wouldn't expect things from some of my friends. It's a good exercise in understanding and sharing the feelings of others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI really take issue with the stance that popular outlets such as Sci Am and the New York Times take on pieces such as this. This study should be taken as a cautionary note on "over-interpreting" the results of this sort of research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors did, indeed, run 5 studies, but they were all over-powered, laboratory studies, designed to detect just about any meaningless difference between groups. In fact, each study found a 1-2 point difference on half a dozen 30-point scales assessing theory of mind. Does this represent a meaningful change in participants' abilities to understand "empathy", even for a few minutes? Doubtful.
Thus, the findings of this study are redundant--if you briefly present literature that discusses empathy then you may briefly prime people to think slightly more about empathy, relative to control groups who were never primed with anything more than action scenes.
In contrast, this study tells us nothing about whether "literary fiction is a valuable socializing influence", a conclusion which could only be drawn from a completely different study. No socialization happened here!
This common fallacy needs to be rooted out. An empirical study which is "consistent with" (that is, does not oppose), but yet which remains entirely unsupportive of a hypothesis does not, in fact, strengthen that hypothesis. It simply fails to remove the plausibility of that hypothesis.
"Genre" fiction? I'm a constant reader of both literary and genre fiction, along with nonfiction in many fields, and I certainly have gained much wisdom, including empathy, from genre sci-fi, fantasy, and even detective stories. Read almost anything by Theodore Sturgeon, Orson Scott Card, Ursula LeGuin and Gene Wolfe, or Terry Pratchett's wise Sam Vimes subseries in his "Discworld" fantasies, Charles Sheffield's novelette "At the Eschaton," the COSMICOMICS anthology of fantasies by Italo Calvino, and several of the police procedural novels of Reginald Hill, especially THE WOOD BEYOND. I could cite numerous others in just about any kind of genre fiction, even comic books, now called illustrated novels. Many novels and stories considered literary, like those of Ambrose Bierce, Albert Camus, Umberto Eco, J.M. Coetzee, Isabel Allende, Sherman Alexie and more, have moments or whole plots so surreal they slip sidewise into fantasy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore, how about nearly all great poetry? I got my Third Graders to read it, taught them about metaphors and similes, then encouraged them to write free verse, novelettes, book reports--ANYTHING. They also wrote and acted in their own plays. Great drama by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Stoppard et al should be part of everyone's upbringing. Some films and even occasional TV programs can bring us into the minds of others and engender awe and love for the strange and different. And I can't think of anything that does it better than natural history by sensitive scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Loren Eiseley. It's WISDOM that children need, a knowledge of the universe's ever-evolving complexity, more than just empathy. For all these reasons I think this was an ill-defined study that needs a lot of rethinking and redoing.
Published Online October 3 2013
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1239918
Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind
David Comer Kidd*,
Emanuele Castano*
+ Author Affiliations
The New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011, USA.
↵*Corresponding author. E-mail: kiddd305@newschool.edu (D.C.K.); castanoe@newschool.edu (E.C.)
Abstract
Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.
Received for publication 1 May 2013.
Accepted for publication 18 September 2013.
To feel empathy with Germans, watch "All Quiet on the Western Front" in the original black and white version. But that is about World War One.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've seen that several times, once in the army where most of the audience were gunners. Their loud reactions were not quite those the film maker intended!
I prefer historical fiction, where what the characters do is more important than what they might be feeling.
Read Scientific American© and True Stories by Pathological Liar©
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article was quite enjoyable and informative until I read the last sentence. Not only did the autism reference feel totally out of left field, it doesn't align with contemporary insights regarding the alleged lack of empathy issue in regards to autism. As more self-advocates are being heard, and in my personal experience among this community, those on the spectrum do not lack empathy. If anything, they might be hyper-empathic. For examples of this, check out the books 'Ido in Autismland' and 'The Reason I Jump.'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe empathy argument could make some sense if you start breaking it into various dimensions, such as emotional empathy v. cognitive empathy. This would be informative to the discussion.
Honestly, I'm surprised to see such content in a publication such as Scientific American.
I think you need to be very careful with these hazy definitions of 'genre fiction' and 'literary fiction'. A lot of literary fiction is pretentious and self important, and a lot of genre fiction can give very subtle and complex portrayals of people. The whole divide is a completely artificial one. This was actually the impetus that led to me starting my publishing company, Fractal Publishing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo where is the required baseline where these groups take the test before reading? I'm also quite skeptical about the literary categories but previous posters covered that better than I could. I do want to second the suggestion to read Terry Pratchett's Sam Vimes novels. Be sure to read "Where's my cow" last. It is an excellent study of proper paternal devotion to children. If you aren't also about passed out from laughter by the end of it then you are either brain dead or a robot.
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