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People in the humanities have long maintained that the classics of fiction are good for you, and are important in the education of citizens. In her recent book, Not for profit, Martha Nussbaum takes up this theme and argues that the humanities are essential to democracy.
Nussbaum regrets the policies in which high-school and university education are being slanted solely towards increasing economic productivity. She says this trend is deleterious, and that such one-sidedness is dangerous. The humanities are essential in democratic societies because they enable us to understand and respect other people, and to become empathetic towards them.
My favorite quotation on this issue is by Marcel Proust who, in 1927, wrote:
Only through literary art can we escape from our selves and know the perspective of another on the world, which is not the same as our own, and which contains views of landscapes that would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon (Le Temps retrouvé, pp. 257-258 my translation).
It has needed psychology to turn this challenging idea into a scientific hypothesis and put it to the test. Members of the research group of which I am part (which includes Raymond Mar and Maja Djikic) have found that people who read more fiction do indeed have better understandings of others. Our research started from my hypothesis that works of fiction are simulations that run on minds, simulations of selves in the social world. Just as people who learn to fly planes can improve their skills by spending time in a flight simulator so, we reasoned, the more time people spent reading fiction the better they would be at understanding others (Oatley, 2008). We have now completed two correlational studies on adults in which we have measured the amount of reading that people do, and then measured their empathy and understanding of others, which developmental psychologists call perspective-taking or theory-of-mind (Mar et al., 2006; Mar et al., 2009). We have ruled out the possibility that these results were due to people who had a certain kind of personality or better social skills preferring to read more fiction. A strong association remains even when we control for readers' individual differences. More recently Mar et al. (2010) conducted a study on preschool children and found that the more stories they had read to them, and the more movies they watched, the better their theory-of-mind, and that watching television had no such beneficial effect. Mar (2007) has also performed an experimental study on adults, which shows superior social reasoning, but not analytical reasoning, after reading a short story as compared with a comparable non-fiction article. More recently (2011, in press) he has performed a quantitative meta-analysis of fMRI results that confirms an overlap between brain networks involved in understanding other minds and those involved in understanding narratives.
Arguments made about the value of reading fiction and seeing worthwhile plays and films are not simply assertions. They can be turned into testable hypotheses. It's important to know that reading fiction is associated with better theory-of-mind and greater empathy for others. Educating a population for economic productivity is important. Equally important for a truly democratic society are ideas of fairness and justice that rely on our being able to think and feel our way into the minds of others.
Mar, R. A. (2007). Simulation-based theories of narrative comprehension: Evidence and implications. PhD thesis, University of Toronto.
Mar, R. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, In press.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications The European Journal of Communication, 34, 407-428.
Mar, R. A., Tackett, J. L., & Moore, C. (2010). Exposure to media and theory-of-mind development in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 25, 69-78.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Oatley, K. (2008). The mind's flight simulator. The Psychologist, 21, 1030-1032.
Proust, M. (1954). Le temps retrouvé. Paris: Gallimard (Original publication 1927).
Image: Landscape on the moon
