Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to
connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new
scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is
literary fiction – pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.
Psychologists David
Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social
Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction
enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's
emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.
In a series of five
experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read,
either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle
Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or
more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa
Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The
Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.
The pair then used a
variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the
participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were
consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for
those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.
"What great
writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the
incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to
understand the minds of others," said Kidd.
Kidd and Castano,
who have published their paper in Science, make a similar distinction
between "writerly" writing and "readerly" writing
to that made by Roland Barthes in his book on literary theory, The
Pleasure of the Text. Mindful of the difficulties of determining what
is literary fiction and what is not, certain of the literary extracts
were chosen from the PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and
the US National book awards finalists.
"Some writing
is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate,
and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see
'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and
thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader.
Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and
you have to find your own way," Kidd said.
Transferring the
experience of reading fiction into real-world situations was a
natural leap, Kidd argued, because "the same psychological
processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships.
Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a
social experience."
Not all
psychologists agreed with Kidd and Castano's use of Theory of Mind
techniques. Philip Davies, a professor of psychological sciences at
Liverpool University, whose work with the Reader Organisation
connects prisoners with literature, said they were "a bit odd".
"Testing
people's ability to read faces is a bit odd. The thing about novels
is that they give you a view of an inner world that's not on show.
Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled … a novel
tells you not to judge," Davies said.
"In Great
Expectations, Pip is embarrassed by Joe, because he's crude and Pip
is on the way up. Reading it, you ask yourself, what is it like to be
Pip and what's it like to be Joe? Would I behave better than Pip in
his situation? It's the spaces which emerge between the two
characters where empathy occurs."
The five experiments
used a combination of four different Theory of Mind tests: reading
the mind in the eyes (RMET), the diagnostic analysis of non-verbal
accuracy test (DANV), the positive affect negative affect scale
(PANAS) and the Yoni test.
However, although
Castano and Kidd proved that literary fiction improves social
empathy, at least by some measures, they were not prepared to nail
their colours to the mast when it came to using the results to
determine whether a piece of writing is worthy of being called
literary.
"These are
aesthetic and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can't and
don't want to make judgments about," said Kidd. "Neither do
we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it's just
that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the
short-term. There are likely benefits of reading popular fiction –
certainly entertainment. We just did not measure them."