Does Reading Fiction Really Make You A Better Person?

Jun 13, 2019 by apost team

The quest to becoming a better person can look like different things to different people. Maybe they picture themselves at the gym seven days a week or perhaps calling their mother more often. But maybe to become a better person, it's time to finally pick up that fiction book that's been on the nightstand for months.

If you believe that becoming a better person includes empathy and being aware of other people's struggles, then it seems as though science would support that. It is logical that reading about the inner thoughts of a character or joining them on a journey through their lives would help the reader sympathize and therefore understand others in real-life more, whereas journalism or non-fiction might not be able to follow a person in such a way. A recent Dutch study supports that theory.

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In it, P. Matthijs Bal and his team found that "empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story." They conducted the study by studying the results of two groups of participants: One group that read the newspaper, and one that read the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago's novel "Blindness." The plot follows a man who was unexpectedly turned blind while driving. A week after reading this, the participants filled out a questionnaire asking about empathy, and it found that empathy rose with participants who were engrossed in the story.

However, this study also an interesting question that brings a caveat into the results: Do empathetic people tend to read fiction? Or is it the fiction that encourages empathy?

In professor Keith Oatley's article, "Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds," he purports that fiction "is the simulation of selves in interaction." Perhaps like a pilot uses a flight simulator to mimic the real-life situation of being in an actual cockpit flying a plane, fiction can be the simulation for putting ourselves in emotional situations of others.

"These effects are due partly to the process of engagement in stories," Oatley says in the Trends in Cognitive Sciences journal, "which includes making inferences and becoming emotionally involved, and partly to the contents of fiction, which include complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter in daily life." 

An additional study by Raymond A. Mar and his team (including Oatley) that looked further into non-fiction and fiction readers, aptly entitled "Bookworms versus nerds" might support Oatley's research. Mar's Journal of Research in Personality study found that "Comprehending characters in a narrative fiction appears to parallel the comprehension of peers in the actual world, while the comprehension of expository non-fiction shares no such parallels."

The study goes on to say that fiction readers had a better social ability, after studying lifetime exposure to fiction and once again looking at empathy levels.

Psychologist Diana Tamir from Princeton's Social Neuroscience Lab took an approach to her study that looked at brain scans of people reading fiction. She saw that the areas of the brain that are in involved in “theory of mind,” a social cognitive skill helps people understand the perspectives of others and how they may be different to one's own, were activated.

These scientific studies seem to show that fiction does help you understand others and gain empathy, but is that how being a "better person" is defined?

In another study by Dan R. Johnson, it seems to confirm what these studies, as mentioned earlier, have also confirmed: that reading fiction increases empathy. But this study took it one step further and found that empathy translated directly into action. Participants were observed after reading fiction when an experimenter dropped several pens in front of participants and recorded their reactions.

They found that those transported by the fiction that they read picked up the pens and thus "exhibited higher affective empathy and were more likely to engage in prosocial behavior."

There has clearly been quite a bit of research on the subject, and people are now taking the findings and putting them into real situations. Johanna Shapiro at the University of California Irvine has written about the humanities program implemented for medical students at the Department of Family Medicine. The article said the program was implemented "to enhance aspects of professionalism including empathy, altruism, compassion, and caring toward patients, as well as to hone clinical communication and observational skills."

What do you think about these findings? Are you going to head to the bookstore now? Tell the bookworm in your life that they just might be a better person than most!