Does Reading Literature Give You More Empathy?
posted by Daniel Solove
The British Psychological Society reports the results of a new study on the effects of reading literature:
The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association. That’s according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about understanding others.
Finding out how much people read is always difficult because it’s socially desirable for people to report that they read a lot. Mar and colleagues avoided this by asking 94 participants to identify the names of fiction and non-fiction authors embedded in a long list of names that also included non-authors. Prior research has shown this test correlates well with how much people actually read. Among the authors listed were Matt Ridley, Naomi Wolf (non-fiction), Toni Morrison and PD James (fiction).
The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association.
The researchers surmised that reading fiction could improve people’s social awareness via at least two routes – by exposing them to concrete social knowledge concerning the way people behave, and by allowing them to practise inferring people’s intentions and monitoring people’s relationships. Non-fiction readers, by contrast, “fail to simulate such experiences, and may accrue a social deficit in social skills as a result of removing themselves from the actual social world”.
However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more empathic people prefer reading novels.
The study is by R.A. Mar, K. Oatley, J. Hirsh, J. dela Paz, & J.B. Peterson, Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds, 40 Journal of Research in Personality 694-712 (2006). It is available here, but for a fee.
Hat tip: Ilya Somin.
October 23, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities
Print This Post
Responses (3)
Frank - October 23, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I think Lisa Zunshine’s book Why We Read Fiction may be of interest here–particularly Part II (Tracking Minds). She also notes that “mind reading is . . . effortless in the sense that we intuitively connect people’s behavior to their mental states . . . although our subsequent description of those mental states could run a broad gamut from perceptively accurate to profoundly mistaken.” (16). Perhaps literature helps us recognize correlations between behavior and mental state…by, for instance, isolating small aspects of a character’s appearance as indicia of their thoughts or feelings.
Of course, Martha Nussbaum made a pretty similar argument long ago in Poetic Justice, but Zunshine tries to back it up with a cognitive science foundation. One interesting question here is: is work like Nussbaum’s mere speculation, without a basis in actual empirical/brain research?
A final cautionary point: of course there’s the classic critique of this stuff (ala Robert Coles) that even the most cultured minds could be barbarians, ala the Nazis listening to Schubert.
Sheldon - October 23, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Interesting. I think that tipped the scales toward taking your Literature and the Law class next semester.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - October 25, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Frank,
To write about thoughts, feelings, and mental states one need hardly await some foundation in or depend upon a prior basis in ‘brain research.’ See, for instance, M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003).
For an interesting proposal that suggests how we might complement ‘external’ democratic deliberation with ‘internal-reflective’ democratic deliberation, see Robert E. Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (2003). Goodin relies in part on literature by way of producing preferences that are more ‘reflective’ insofar as they are
‘more empathic with the plight of others; more considered, and hence both better informed and more stable; and far-reaching in both time and space, taking fuller account of distant periods, distant peoples and different interests.’
As Goodin says, ‘the precise mechanisms by which [we stimulate the imagination are] the subject of much debate in literary theory and art criticism. The fact that some process does seem to be at work seems incontrovertible enough, though, judging simply from our own everyday experience as readers, viewers, and listeners.’ One historical example Goodin cites is the manner in which ‘slave narratives’ served the abolitionist cause.
In my paper on ‘critical thinking’ pedagogy, I discussed the disciplinary advantage English Departments have over their counterparts in Philosophy with regard to an appreciation of the role of emotions in our lives, in particular with regard to how our emotions are central in decision making, judgment and reasoning in general (more Nussbaum territory) [I've done a little editing and left out full references]:
English departments are at a disciplinary advantage here, if only because ‘some novelists and playwrights…display a superb understanding of human emotions’ (Elster) although, as with moral psychology in general, modern moralists like Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère, despite their ‘extreme psychological acuity and powers of formulation’ (Elster),often fall between disciplinary cracks or crevices. Elster hones in on the precise source of this disciplinary advantage vis-à-vis philosophy: ‘Whereas many of the fictional examples used by philosophers to illustrate this or that theory of the emotions fail to convince because they are too obviously made up for that purpose, the words and actions of characters in a novel or play have an independent authority that allows us to use them as examples and counterexamples.’ In Robin Hogarth’s words, ‘the content of a problem and the format in which it is presented can affect both our ability to see the problem and thus the solution reached.’ Or, as Steve Fuller puts it, ‘half of a philosopher’s problem is always that her interlocutor doesn’t already see the problem.’
The emotions are central to the ‘critical spirit’ of critical thinking for it is emotions that, as it were, give it life, critical spirit defined here as ‘that complex of dispositions, attitudes, habits of mind, and character traits characteristic of critical thinkers.’ English instructors, rather than philosophers who teach ethics or analytic moral philosophy, are better situated, pedagogically speaking, to communicate the role of character, of ethical and non-ethical virtues, of the emotions, and of the myriad values that together are individuated in processes of moral and psychological growth and the emergence of character. It is this growth which bears fruit as the critical spirit that animates—is a necessary condition of—critical thinking. In Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997) Colin McGinn thus writes, ‘literature is where moral thinking lives and breathes on every page:’ ‘Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectic between the reader’s own experience and the trials of the character he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling
is done when reading novels (or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attributes especially in contemporary culture.’
In helping to nurture critical spirit, ‘the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech or of abstract theoretical discourse are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy’ (Nussbaum). Trained in political science, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, a pioneer in the field of the psychology of judgment and decision making as well as in the computational modeling of human reasoning, Herbert A. Simon came to a similar conclusion: ‘most human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion—a sort of hot dressing—then if it is presented wholly without affect.’ The corollary obligation should not be taken lightly: ‘If we are to learn our social science from [or imbibe the critical spirit of] novelists, then novelists have to get it right:’
‘Perhaps some of you are familiar with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It is a novel that describes what happens to a particular person at the time of the Russian purge trials of the 1930s. Now suppose you wish to understand the history of the Western world between the two world wars, and the events that led up to our contemporary world. You will then certainly need to understand the purge trials. Are you more likely to gain such an understanding by reading Darkness at Noon, or by reading a history book that deals with the trials, or by searching out the published transcripts of the trial testimony in the library? I would vote for Koestler’s
book as the best route, precisely because of the intense emotions it evokes in most readers.’
The critical thinking Gradgrinds among us could do worse than listen to another Nobel Laureate in economics, Amartya Sen: ‘Fiction is a general method of coming to grips with facts. There is nothing illegitimate in being helped by War and Peace to an understanding of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, or by Grapes of Wrath to digesting aspects of the Depression.’
Critical thinking curricula can also do a better job of awakening our students to the well-known ways in which the emotions distort or subvert information acquisition, belief formation and rational action. Emotions are part and parcel of such debilitating psychological phenomena as weakness of will, wishful thinking, self-deception, and states of denial. With ample reason, Aristotle stressed that ‘mastery of one’s passions is a prerequisite for a virtuous life,’ while Jane Austen drew fictional characters wherein ‘an excess of uncontrolled sensibility leads to a deficiency of good sense.’ Hume’s dictum that reason is or ought to be the slave of the passions, while perhaps open to a more charitable interpretation than is standard, is not one we want to teach our students. More controversially, we might explore how emotions contribute to our being rational or reasonable, how they might serve the critical spirit.
Aristotelian mastery of the passions includes learning how to feel the right emotion(s) in the right circumstance(s). The Aristotelian outlook has some historical affinity with and thus family resemblance to the neo-Stoic theory of emotions formulated by Martha Nussbaum. For Nussbaum, emotional experience involves, among other things, judgments of value and related appraisals or evaluations that reveal our abiding concern with human well-being if not flourishing (eudaimonia): ‘Emotions view the world from the point of my own scheme of goals and projects, the things to which I attach value in a conception of what it is for me to live well.’ Peter Goldie has accordingly written of the ‘intelligibility, appropriateness, and proportionality’ of emotions.
Talk of the possible rationality of emotions should not obscure the frequent involuntary character of our emotional experience: ‘in many standard cases, emotional reactions are triggered almost instantaneously, by cognitive or perceptual cues’(Elster), thus emotions can seem to happen to us, as events passively undergone as opposed to actions of an intentional or voluntary kind. And yet, there is plenty of evidence to be gleaned from philosophy and literature that we can learn to discipline or tame the more troublesome emotions like anger or hatred or lust on behalf of the means and ends of rationality, and toward the living of an ethical life. Given the fact that the emotions can help or hinder the goals of rational living, as well as the idea that ‘it makes sense to hold people responsible both for their characters and for actions that flow from their characters’ (Kupperman)—the notion that we are directly responsible for our character traits (Goldie)—I find Robert Solomon’s Sartrean-like conclusion apropos: ‘It would be nonsense to insist that regarding our emotional lives we are “the captains of our fate,” but nevertheless, we are the oarsmen and that is enough to hold that we are responsible for our emotions’ (Solomon).
Leave a Reply