is not one ability: you can understand what another person thinks, and you can feel with them, and those are two different things. To find out what literature does, researchers randomly assigned hundreds of people to read literary fiction, science fiction or non-fiction, and measured both sides separately. What changed?
The understanding moved and the feeling did not. The researchers randomly assigned to read literary fiction, science fiction or non-fiction, and tested them before and after. The literary fiction group improved on tests of of others. On tests of no clear change appeared. So “books make us empathic” is too simple: it depends which book you read and which side of empathy you test.
Earlier work claimed that reading literary fiction can improve the ability to understand people. The researchers here wanted to test whether the change also touches the emotional side of empathy, and not only the understanding of thoughts.
They divided 214 participants between three kinds of reading and ran tests before and after. A comparison like that matters, because people who choose to read novels may differ to begin with from people who choose non-fiction.
After the reading, an improvement was recorded in the literary fiction group on tests of understanding the mental states of others. On measures of emotional sharing no clear effect appeared. The result does not say novels stir no feeling, only that the experiment did not measure a general improvement of that kind.
These are laboratory tests after a limited period of reading. Even if an improvement on a test is real, it still has to be checked whether it lasts and whether it changes conversations, relationships or helping others in the world outside the experiment.
wat. Literary fiction may help you understand what others think, without necessarily changing the intensity of emotional identification.
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When reading is promised to improve relationships between people, it matters to distinguish understanding another person from feeling what they feel.
How do we know?
The researchers compared three reading groups in a randomized experiment and tested separate measures of understanding a mental state and of emotional sharing, before the reading and after it.
What is still unknown
The experiment tested a short-term change in healthy participants; it is no proof that reading novels over years changes social behavior in daily life.
Learn something?
Where to next
Can a few minutes with a text change how well you read another person?literature
Why would reading novels make somebody better with people?literature
Does a spoiler really make a story more enjoyable?literature