Study links books, gauging of others

It says classics enhance theory of mind

Fifty Shades of Grey is a fun read for many, but it’s not going to help probe the minds of others the way War and Peace would. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that, compared with mainstream fiction, high-brow literary works do more to improve the ability to understand the thoughts, emotions and motivations of those around us.

The lead author of the study, David Kidd, gravitated to social psychology by way of Russian literature. Now a Ph.D. student at the New School in New York City, he is versed in arguments from literary theorists that divide fiction into two categories. When we read a thrilling-but-predictable best-seller, “the text sort of grabs us and takes us on a roller-coaster ride,” he said, “and we all sort of experience the same thing.” Literature, on the other hand,gives the reader a lot more responsibility. Its imaginary worlds are full of characters with confusing or unexplained motivations. There are no reliable instructions about whom to trust or how to feel.

Kidd and his adviser, social psychologist Emanuele Castano, suspected that the skills used to navigate these ambiguous fictional worlds serve people well in real life. In particular, the duo surmised that they enhance the so-called theory of mind. That’s the ability to intuit someone else’s mental state - to know, for example, that when someone raises his hand toward you, they’re trying to offer a high five rather than a slap to the head. It’s closely related to empathy, the ability to recognize and share the feelings of others.

Increasing evidence supports the relationship between reading fiction and theory of mind. But much of that evidence is based on correlations: Self-reported avid readers or those familiar with fiction also tend to perform better on certain tests of empathy, for example.

To measure the immediate cognitive effects of two types of fiction, Castano and Kidd designed five related experiments. In each, they asked subjects to read 10-15 pages of either literary or popular writing. Literary excerpts included short stories by Anton Chekhov and Don DeLillo, as well as recent winners of the PEN/O.Henry Prize and the National Book Award. For more “mainstream” selections, they looked to top-sellers such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and to anthologies of genre fiction, including a sci-fi story by Robert Heinlein.

Participants took tests designed to measure theory of mind. In one test, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2-Adult Faces, they looked at a face for 2 seconds and decided whether the person appeared happy, angry, afraid or sad. In the more nuanced Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, they saw only a small slice of a face and picked from four complex emotions such as “contemplative” and “skeptical.”

On average, both groups did slightly better than control subjects who read either a nonfiction article or nothing. That fits with previous research showing a positive relationship between fiction and theory of mind. But among the fiction readers, those who read “literary” works scored significantly higher on the theory of mind tests than those who read popular selections, Kidd and Castano report online in Science.

The absolute differences in scores were hardly dramatic: On average, the literary group outperformed the popular group by about two questions (out of 36) on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, and missed one fewer question (out of 18) on the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2-Adult Faces exam.

But psychologist Raymond Mar of York University in Toronto said that even very small effects could be meaningful, provided they translate into real-world consequences - reducing the likelihood that social misunderstandings could create grudges or leave someone in tears.

Still, the “literariness” argument needs hammering out. Castano believes these results show that fiction’s power doesn’t hinge on exposing readers to foreign viewpoints or offering a persuasive, empathetic message.

“For us, it’s not about the content,” he said. “It was about the process.” But Mar said there are probably many ways to improve theory of mind, and “different things might work for different people.” Some may find that stories with a moral of acceptance and empathy increase their theory of mind skills, for example, while others might benefit more from the practice of filling in the emotional gaps in an ambiguous story.

Cognitive neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma in Italy, who is exploring how the brain responds to works of art, finds the new link between real and fictional worlds exciting but is skeptical of the distinction between literary and mainstream fiction.

“This is a very slippery ground,” he said, because historical tastes often move the boundary between “high” and “low” art. For example, he says, Honore de Balzac’s The Human Comedy was released in serial form as a work of “popular” fiction, but has since attained the status of a classic.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/06/2013

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