Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (2013)

theguardian.com

40 pointsbrudgers6 comments

"In the second experiment, the authors selected three Princeton students from among a few dozen student-government leaders, and compared them to three selected representatives of the University of Oregon football team, and three (in their opinion characteristic) young people who did not attend college at all. Experiment 3 tested six new students, three from Yale and three from the University of Arizona, again selected to represent the authors' opinion of what such students should be like. Experiment 4 re-used four of the students from Experiment 3, but substituted two new choices from the same pools. And Experiment 5 re-used five of the six students from Experiment 4, substituting for one participant who seemed on reflection not to be quite of the Right Kind."

...and so on. The usual stuff.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715

Pretty interesting, but it feels like the vague category 'literary fiction' is being used to make the results seem more surprising than they really are. You could also say, "fiction which requires readers to model the internal mental states of characters improves empathy"—and the results seem pretty straightforward: modeling mental states of others improves ability to model mental states of others.

I mean, it is pretty interesting that it works with fictional characters—but still: nothing I read in the article lead me to believe this is due to some elusive quality of the intentionally undefined category 'literary.' If anything, these results give a little more info. on how we actually do define 'literary': that a typical requirement for a work to be called 'literary' is that it pushes readers to model mental states of characters.

To me the best fiction has great characters, and what makes them great is the author's ability to demonstrate the subtleties of those characters' personalities. So it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some things I read make me more empathetic.

Is there a difference with cinematographic fiction?

"Literary fiction" might sound redundant, but in fact it's jargon used by critics, usually to describe a certain range of writing styles in which all of the implied drama takes place in the characters' inner emotional states rather than anything explicitly described in the narration or dialogue. It's usually contrasted with "genre" fiction, I guess because they wanted a broader term than "pulp."

"Literary fiction" is frequently simply a means of elevating the prestige of certain writing, by indicating that it is by/for literary elites.

In this case, the authors contrasted "literary fiction" with nonfiction, "popular fiction" and nothing. The literary fiction samples were drawn from a PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and the US National book awards finalists. The examples of popular fiction consisted of a Danielle Steele novel, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn, and know knows what, although one of the authors mentioned "...genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers."

Not much more in the abstract. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract

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