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."
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Woah! Stop, I'm snobbish enough already about my literary reading.
I suppose what "matters" isn't the medium here (the window-dressing of theme and broad subject matter) but the message; what sets good fiction apart from bad is whether its words have any power, whether or not its characters are convincing, whether or not it can elicit an emotional response.
It so happens that much of what earns the title of "literary" fiction does this very well, and much of what is considered "popular" fiction doesn't.
But then again I don't think "literaryness" is a very useful term at all, in the modern, heavily-marketed sense of what it's considered to be.
The results of this experiment seem somewhat obvious to me. If a character has depth, and you're being shown his experiences rather than told of them, you will naturally have a stronger emotional bond with him and hence fellow humans in general. The same most likely rings true with films.
But I suppose it does become incredibly interesting when you attempt to draw a line between what is literary fiction and what is pulp fiction. Are there authors capable of producing both? Dan Brown is textbook pulp fiction and I suppose someone like Hemingway would be textbook literary fiction but it's the grey area that's the most interesting.
Might I suggest that 'JHane Eyre' qualifies on both counts?
Only connect as E.M. Forster said... almost at the end of reading 'The Vicar of Wakefield' by Goldsmith. Yes, it has somehow influenced me in a good sense and the age/period it was written, as I understand, the book was widely read. Notwithstanding dictionary Johnson's 'approval'. It has done me good. I ca't quite say how ! It may for some readers seem too far fetched, too condoning. Shall take it up again as good literature must have 2nd even 3rd readings.
I'm not too surprised. The least engaging people I've ever met were convinced reading anything but non-fiction was pointless.
Sorry if someone's already pointed this out - I don't have time to read all the comments - but maybe people who empathise easily with others are just naturally drawn to literary fiction.
When this was reported in the New York Times five days ago, it was made clear that the people being tested demonstrated unexpected short-term effects on their capacity for empathy, as judged by a variety of standard tests, after reading samples of literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction. The results don't actually say anything about the long-term effects of reading literary or any other kind of fiction.
The objection you make is reasonable: perhaps people with a greater capacity for empathy are naturally attracted to fiction that explores emotions and nuances of character. But it might also be reasonable to suggest that people may reinforce and extend their natural capacity by 'practising' it in their reading.Thanks for that. My original post was not so much an objection, more an observation. Nice to have some points clarified, though.
I'm still trying to discover an acceptable definition for 'literary' fiction.
I generally start with Don Quixote.
I favour simple definitions - though no simpler than they have to be - and I think that 'literary' fiction is any kind of fiction that aims to produce effects on the reader beyond entertainment, indoctrination or temporary distraction. There will always be disagreement about how successfully any particular book meets that criterion: but I don't think that the difference in intention can easily be mistaken by anyone who has read a range of writing.
Does such a genre exist? Although Samuel Johnson wrote "No man but a blockhead wrote, except for money", perhaps it is fiction where the love of money is not the essential motivation for the work? Literary fiction can be found across numerous genres.
It's the 'more than', that I think is news.
Would readers be more understanding and normalised to the behaviour and needs of psychopaths? Could this lead to amending laws that allow psychopaths the right to live out their emotional needs? Or should we be censoring books that normalise criminal activity due to it's potential impact on society.
My God! books are having an impact on they way we think.....burn them all.
Decent article, superb point about the value of writing and fiction but ruined and undermined by bringing the question as to whether or not it makes a book literary into it.
It's difficult enough to encourage people to read without saying one now proven key benefit - helping us understand each other, society and the world around us better and with more empathy - is somehow linked to a book's worthiness.
A good book is a good book for myriad reasons. Personally I appreciate Dickens is a good writer, indeed a writer par excellence, but I just have no patience for him. I like a damn good plot, but Dan Brown is the opposite, damn good (albeit daft) plot, appalling writing.
Few get both measures right, so every book I have ever read has its merits, its value and its ability to engage people with life, each other and the world. I am delighted this value is proven, but appalled it has to be turned into a question of whether or not literary value has any impact.
We explore the world through writing, in the arts, in a way which cannot be done scientifically or rationally. Whether our writing or our art or our reading sucks, the process itself, of seeking, exploring, experimenting and trying to look at the world around us in as many different, fantastic ways as possible is why we are, as a species, so successful. Any ape can reproduce, but only a few apes can turn entire dreamscapes into works of art, fiction and music.
Shame Dickens is so boring then.
Dickens isn't boring but then neither is he the most genuinely empathetic writer. He bestows his considerable capacity for compassion and insight on a favoured few characters and roundly condemns the rest to life as grotesques and caricatures. That's why the great Russians are so great, Chekhov perhaps more than any of them. In Chekhov at his best, no one's humanity is ridiculed or dismissed.
However, I think the catch-all term 'literary fiction' is a bit problematic. There are plenty of literary writers likely to make you less, not more, empathetic - Gogol, Celine, Kafka, Pessoa, Bernhard, etc. The list of misfit, even sociopathic, writers is very long, particularly in the last 100 years. One of 'literature's' primary aims is to critique the human personality and the society from which it springs. The writers above have all made me feel alienated or disturbed or even horrified at those aspects of the human experience they're obsessed with. While that may have benefits for human understanding at the very deepest level, at an ordinary social level it can be a bit of a freak-out.
So it depends what you mean by empathy - the common-or-garden variety advocated by popular culture (the ability to 'understand your pain' or 'be there for someone') - or the more profound kind that understands the hollow places in the human personality that don't mesh well with everyday life.
Which ones?
I found the second half of A Tale of Two Cities as thrilling as an episode of 24.
Tale of Two Cties eh? "I say sir, you look just like me", "Indeed I do sir but I am not a moral man!", "I say sir, I am! But woe, for I am about to be killed", "I say sir, I shall take your place for a poorly constructed reason", "I say, jolly decent of you sir", ".......". The End. There's some other shite in there too of course but it's all pretty forgettable.
And God I hate his twists! Like Oliver's evil twin... That's so fucking naff.
I bet Tea Obreht was gobsmacked to see her name beside that of Dickens in the headline
Do literary readers use that extra empathetic ability for good or evil I wonder?
Good question. Depends partly on what they read or perhaps on what they are drawn to read according to their individual psychological mores. Take the guy who shot John Lennon, Mark Chapman, who was apparently obsessed with Catcher in the Rye. I guess it touched something in him - a sense of alienation, a solipsism, an inability or an unwillingness to empathise with others, for whatever reason, which he may have taken as justification for what he went and did.
On a more absolute level, forgive me for repeating this worn-out example, but many of the Nazi butchers (sorry, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but they're always relevant to any argument about empathy or lack thereof) were highly cultured men who played Schubert and read Goethe when their day's work was done.
We can read all the empathetic literature we like but still fall into the animal tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies. Escaping that subtle prison takes more than reading even a lot of great books to accomplish.
I don't have anything to add, but your contributions to this thread have been very interesting to read, stupormundi!
I don't understand why anybody would spend time trying to decide what is 'Literary Fiction' and what isn't. I understand why someone might only want to read what they consider to be 'literary', but not why they would care what anybody else thinks about it. Perhaps my inability to empathise is because I don't read enough 'Literary Fiction'. I'm caught in a deadly embrace.
It leaves lesser time for video games but.
There are just too many variables and insufficient definitions involved in distinguishing between 'Literary' fiction and other types of storytelling. Certainly any form of story which requires the reader or listener (or video-game player) to consider the inner motivations of characters is likely to provide potential practice for understanding 'real life' human beings. Much literary fiction is character (rather than plot) driven, and readers tend to be engaged enough to attempt to understand personalities they might otherwise not encounter, and regardless of whether they feel empathy or antipathy for the character, their minds are 'broadened' by the experience. Personally I feel that fiction is most valuable when it enables us to experience perspectives we couldn't (or perhaps, wouldn't want to) see otherwise, then enables us to bring back insights from the fictional world we can apply to the 'real' life from which we can't escape. Often we emerge so changed, we imagine we had always felt as we do having read the book, and that our modified perspective and opinion is so obvious we must have known it all before the book crystallised it.
There is something extremely excitint about Russian literature because it is a literature that instinctively takes on all the big problems of the world and has a great sphere of ideas. French and German literature to a lesser extent share this greatness of outlook. By contrast English literature is often very boring because the it is very conservative and small minded. It does not challenge the way the world is but assumes the ideas of the ruling class are the only ideas to be taken seriously. So Dickens is a great bore and very limited and disappointing because he has all that incomparably rich material of the evil of the Victorian society and all he can do is produce some cheap moralising.
Some English writers are amusing for their good prose like Dr Johnson and Boswell but most classic English writing is excecrable - small minded, provincial, a branch of Dutch literature.
I presume you mean people who write in English.
CORRECTED:
There is something extremely exciting about Russian literature because it is a literature that instinctively takes on all the big problems of the world and has a great sphere of ideas. French and German literature to a lesser extent share this greatness of outlook. By contrast English literature is often very boring because it is very conservative and small minded. It does not challenge the way the world is but assumes the ideas of the ruling class are the only ideas to be taken seriously. So Dickens is a great bore and very limited and disappointing because he has all that incomparably rich material of the evil of the Victorian society and all he can do is produce some cheap moralising.
Some English writers are amusing for their good prose like Dr Johnson and Boswell but most classic English writing is execrable - small minded, provincial, a branch of Dutch literature.
I agree about Dickens but there's nothing wrong with looking at a small area of the world. It all depends on how it's done.
I'd want to know more. Did everyone finish the books or were those who failed to complete the task dropped from the study? If people with more empathy are more likely to complete literary fiction then this would affect their results. How statistically relevant were their conclusions? Were the trials double blind? Did the examiners know which group people had been assigned to? This might also skew the results. Finally, were both groups tested before and after completing their novels?
You needed a more critical analysis here. Possibly this should have been in the science section?
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