Reading Fiction Improves Empathy!

Reading in general has many benefits. But there is nothing like immersing yourself in a good fiction novel. Many people thus feed their imagination and manage to escape temporarily from their problems, thus creating an escape route that allows them to manage the stresses of everyday life. Furthermore, reading fiction has recently been found to have the ability to foster a fundamental social skill: empathy.

This is confirmed by a study carried out by the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto, Canada, and published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. This study analyzes how fiction can affect a person’s social skills.

Specifically, the researchers focused on finding out how literary fiction influences readers’ empathic response in the real world. According to the researchers, in recent times, scientists have developed a growing interest in how fiction can affect the mind.

Increased empathy in fiction readers

The researchers point out that fiction is a simulation of social worlds. Thus, through reading fiction, people can improve their social skills in the same way that a pilot learns to fly in a flight simulator. “Fiction could be a flight simulator of the mind,” they explain. Thus, empathy, as a social skill, could be enhanced through fiction.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers asked a group of adults to complete a series of tests to measure an index of empathy and “theory of mind.” An indicator that was not based on the narrative, thereby seeking that the effects could not be explained by the verbal skills acquired by reading itself.

In this test, subjects were asked to view 36 images of different people’s eyes and select from four states that best explained, for them, what those people felt or thought. These states were thoughtful, horrified, irritated, or impatient.

Compared to subjects who read only nonfiction books, those who read fiction scored significantly higher on their ability to empathize. The researchers note that this finding held true later, when considering individual differences in personality and other characteristics.

Fiction allows us to explore the lives of others

Previous studies have indicated that increased empathy can not only occur with literary fiction, but fiction in general can enhance this social skill. In this sense, the researchers point to a study that identified the improvement of empathy among participants who watched fictional television series. However, viewing television documentaries did not produce the same effect.

According to the researchers, the evidence to date suggests that any type of fiction that involves the reader or viewer in characters can lead to improvements in empathy and other social skills.

The reason fiction helps develop empathy is that it allows us to explore the lives of others, their emotions, their motivations, and their ideas. Fiction allows us to make inferences, get emotionally involved, and understand the emotional complexity of characters.

In a recent study, a group of volunteers were asked to imagine certain phrases while neuroscientists looked at what was going on in their brains. What they found was that when the participants said those phrases, their hippocampus, a region associated with learning and memory, was activated as if they were evoking the real world. Other studies have found that fiction can even generate empathy for a race or culture that is different from your own.