By Ana López Usó,
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once.”– George R. R. Martin.
When we read literature we are able to experience different situations from endless different perspectives. We can travel through time to feel like queens or emperors, we can be part of the most passionate love story or witness the most horrible crimes, live in inconceivable worlds or far away futures. A good book makes readers feel like they are part of the story, being able to celebrate the character’s happiness, suffer through their miseries and learn from their mistakes, regardless of the characters’ class, sex, nation, religion, or race.
For this reason, scholars have been studying for years whether literature has a direct impact on the reader’s ability to understand and share other people’s feelings, that is, the impact of literature on empathy.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has defended the ethical power of literature stating that it triggers a type of imagination that “asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own”. She further argued that literary texts can lead to crucial “self-examination” for ethical decision-making. Furthermore, scientific experiments have been carried out in order to prove the argument defending that literature influences people’s social abilities. At the Princeton Social Neuroscience Laboratory, psychologist Diana Tamir defended that people who often read fiction have better social cognition, being more skilled at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. By means of brain scans, she found that while reading fiction, there is a rise of activity in the parts of the brain involved in simulating the understanding of what other people think. Social psychologist Emanuele Castano along with David Kidd conducted several studies in which they gave different reading assignments to a divided number of participants. The excerpts of literature went from genre (or popular) fiction and literary fiction, to nonfiction or nothing. After the participants had finished, they were requested to do a test that measured their ability to understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. Results found that the conclusions of the readers of non-fiction or nothing were unimpressive, as well as the results of the readers of genre fiction. However, the results of the participants who had read literary fiction, improved markedly.
As seen, there is not only a distinction between readers and non-readers, but also among genres. The most surprising difference was found between genre fiction and literary fiction. Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, tends to portray supernatural situations provoking a roller-coaster of emotions on the reader. However, the characters tend to be consistent and predictable, which would affirm the reader’s pre-established ideas of others. On the other hand, literary fiction portrays more complex characters, focusing on psychology and the nature of human relationships. Characters’ minds are portrayed vaguely forcing the reader to go further in order to understand their intentions and motivations. This way, literary fiction would resemble real life to a greater extent, as humans always lack the complete span of informationwhen it comes to other individuals and their complex lives. However, not only fiction can create this feeling of understanding. Memoirs, biographies and historical non-fiction in general would be also included in the classification, as long as there are powerful stories about people and their complex circumstances.
However, recent research on the topic has opposed to these outcomes. Different studies have failed to replicate the findings of studies that connected literature directly with social skills. Arnold Weinstein, professor of comparative literature at Brown University, has stated that those, both in and outside of the humanities, have conferred moral benefits to literature and art as “a rescue operation” for humanities, whose worth has always been under scrutiny. Other researchers have labelled the tools of research conducted as “poor”, and the results have been questioned, as differences in terminology might produce a “fuzzy point”, by not taking into consideration the distinction between theory of mind and “cognitive empathy” (capacity to imagine rather than share another person’s feelings).
Furthermore, the authenticity of human behaviour in fiction writing has also been questioned as it nullifies the spontaneity characteristic of human experience.
All in all, it is true that by reading we are exercising our ability to walk on someone else’s shoes. By exercising the capacity to imagine and feel someone else’s pain, joy, struggle, doubt, achievement or growth as if it was one’s own -even if it’s a fictional character – might serve as good practice to be able to do so whenever we have to face such situation in real life.
References
- Koopman & Hakemulder. (2015). Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework. Journal of Literary Theory.
- DISCOVER MAGAZINE: How Reading Fiction Increases Empathy and Encourages Understanding. Available here.
- THE ATLANTIC: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. Available here.
