Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction | Hacker News Reader

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction

npr.org

47 pointsjonchang24 comments

Literary fiction develops empathy and sense of morality. It's sad to see so many people completely neglecting literary fiction as being not useful or less advantageous than technical or other non-fictional literature.

I always regarded technical literature as vitamins for the mind, while fiction (as well as other art) is vitamins for the soul.

Theory of Mind, or Theory-Theory, is far more based in literary fiction than it is based on any experimental evidence of human construction or behavior.

Without reading the paywalled study, I'd assume that reading literary fiction would give you insight into how people who write literary fiction (and those who share their demographic) see themselves, but not into their actual behavior.

In other words, I'd speculate that this holds true when evaluating the interpretations of the anxieties and guilt of upper middle class people who went to small liberal arts colleges in the east, and the people who aspire to associate with them. Otherwise, not so much.

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

> Without reading the paywalled study, I'd assume that reading literary fiction would give you insight into how people who write literary fiction (and those who share their demographic) see themselves, but not into their actual behavior.

The authors make no such assumption. Their understanding of literature draws on Barthes & Bakhtin, which leads them to the dichotomy of readerly and writerly texts. Whenever they talk about these texts, however, they know not to make assumptions about authors at all. The division between author, narrator and character (and, depending on your background, an implied author) have been well established within literatery studies with Genette, Stanzel and Iser.

Reading a book tells you very little about the "actual" author or background, because the process of writing is necessary one of construction and selection. Even an autobiography does not simply tell you the unmitigated, unfiltered, "actual" truth.

Reading fiction, then, tells you very little about people's self-images or (historic) background. What it does, however, is that it makes you aware of the distinct construction involved, as well as the divide between fact and fiction. This, in turn, lets you make certain more educated guesses as to the content and surroundings of peoples' utterances, and perhaps how to understand or interpret them.

You seem to have some bitter classism issues there. Didn't get into Brown?

Here's Jerry Coyne and Stephen Pinker with some skepticism.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/does-read...

An interesting post looking in detail at the methodology and implications of this study on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715

This is a pretty devastating critique. Everyone here should read it before taking this study seriously.

It also explains why over the past few days my Facebook wall has been flooded with people taking emotional recognition tests full of moody actor eyes looking into the distance.

Help: I scroll down past the large image, get comfortable, and read the first paragraph or so... then the page fully loads, and suddenly resets to the top of page.

It's a minor irritation, but it happens very often, and seems so unnecessary and so wrong.

Anyone know how to stop this? (I'm using FF24 on linux, but I suspect it's some onLoad javascript.)

Try browsing with NoScript for a few days?

Your experience may differ, but for me, having to whitelist a site every now and then is far less annoying than constantly putting up with crap like this.

So, photos of actors, who are used to trying to portray emotions in works that closely match high-brow literary fiction, were more easily guessed correctly when someone had been reading such books.

It seems somewhat of a stretch to say, on the basis of that alone, that people were better at reading others emotions.

What also helps, arguably more directly and backed up by more research, are mindfulness and compassion meditation. Mindfulness meditation makes one more observant, while compassion meditation is a way of directly stimulating that part of the brain.

Here is a quick reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett%C4%81#Benefits

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-moralit...

This suffers from lack of priors. The purpose of fiction, is to get those priors. meditation is ultimately narcisistic (ie, self-referential), whereas fiction is highly scalable (you get a bunch of external characters and their internal motivations provided for you). So in this sense, the purpose of fiction is providing something akin to genetic diversity.

You don't really need priors to understand other people, because other people feel exactly the same emotions as you do. The problem is that we are often in a narcissistic frame of mind, where we care more about our own problems and worries, then paying attention to people around us. Both reading and meditation, can help to get you out of that frame of mind. At least that is my understanding.

> You don't really need priors to understand other people, because other people feel exactly the same emotions as you do.

Under very different conditions, with different emotions running alongside them and in very different intensities arising from a wide range of possible causes. Other people do not all feel as I do, any more than they want what I do. The contrary claim is roughly analogous to claiming that all programs are the same because they're all made of 1s and 0s.

Of course… Literary fiction is way better than popcorn culture escapism popular fiction, on a serious perspective. However, I believe, on understanding others, the best books are still those nonfiction books which try to directly analyze and cut the clutter. Literary fictions are subtle and lengthy, tending to be misunderstood, but nonfiction books/articles are the most effective in conveying the knowledge. Also I can't help but feeling this study very loose.

Yes reading nonfiction maximizes knowledge absorption with respect to time and cost. But that is not the objective of literary fiction.

Literary fiction maximizes "emotional sensation". This is a futile attribute in humans who should instead be maximizing their utility.

Here are copies of the paper and supplementary material:

Paper: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8859543/papers/Kidd-2013...

Supplement: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8859543/papers/Kidd-2013...

To "guess" is one thing but to get it correctly is another. Of course popcorn literature won't help you anything on understanding humanity, but I doubt whether literary classics tend to create some misunderstanding and confusion. Still the most effective way to improve your understanding of others is to read direct books which talk about understanding others.

From the sounds of the article (paper is blocked) it appears that what's actually being tested is the ability of people to read the thoughts of fictional or portrayed characters.

> For example, folks who were assigned to read highbrow literary works did better on a test called "Reading the Mind in the Eyes," which required them to look at black-and-white photographs of actors' eyes and decide what emotion the actors were expressing.

A running joke in some acting circles is to sit down with a fellow actor and give them emotions to try and "emote". It becomes a joke because the emotions that are thrown out quickly become hard to even understand let alone interpret into a face. "pensive anticipatory surprise!" "respectful despair!"

The problem with this is that it tests for the ability of an audience to "read" a fictional character, but not necessarily a real one.

For example: this http://images.sciencedaily.com/2009/10/091031002319-large.jp... is an actor making an angry face. How many people here know someone real who's face becomes absolutely calm when they are in the heat of rage?

Authors have no greater insight into people's psychologies than anybody else, but they can construct a character that, when well motivated, has a representational psychology that can drive a story.

However, various factors make this hard in many cases as certain, close to real, believable characters really require the author to, in some sense, "be" that character in order to represent that character's thought processes. This frequently falls down in certain cross-representations. For example, cross-gender representations are frequently very flat: women written by women tend to have full and complex inner worlds while their men tend to be flat archetypes and visa-versa.

Really good authors get praise for writing cross-representational characters well and the best authors simply try and avoid it through clever story construction (unfamiliar cross-characters are turned into flat background players, or they're turned into crazy people where their madness creates an unpredictable inner-drive that covers up for the authors lack of knowledge). What was the last book anybody read, written by a White American privileged male author that explored the inner psychology of a Black inner-city French teen girl?

You'll notice that children are also as terribly written as they are painted in Renaissance paintings.

http://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com/

It's not that the author never lived as a child, but that as children, we don't have the faculty and level of self-awareness to record what it's like to be a child in most cases.

More importantly, emotional display is often very cultural. Can anybody tell me what this emotion is?

http://www.sarugallery.com/files/B1120nor.jpg

or this?

http://www.theoneshots.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/201306...

or this?

http://en.korea.com/fx/files/2011/07/14.jpg

So I'm colored very skeptical about this paper. I think it measures something, but the conclusion about what it's measuring is wrong.

(Not to say that the paper is correct, I haven't read the actual study). Authors don't need to have greater insight into people's psychologies, even if the characters is just a representation of the author's mind, a reader reading many different works would have a glimpse of many minds, and it isn't hard to argue that it would help in reading actual thoughts of real people.

And the distinction of thoughts of fictional characters and real people is a thin one, as you said it yourself, many characters (within a certain genre and level of works) are in fact very realistic - a believable character has to be grounded somewhat from reality. Pick a fictional character in a good literary work, chances are in the real world, someone somewhere would have the same personality.

And the not-so-good children in Renaissance paintings doesn't affect the quality of Mona Lisa at all.

> a believable character has to be grounded somewhat from reality.

Yeah, I think there's basically a few classes of characters that authors tend to use:

- Based on somebody they know (or a synthesis of a few people). These are easiest to give reasonable approximations of normal psychologies to. Or at least a good surface description of their behavior seems to be enough for people to fill in the mind of the character.

- A completely artificial character, but constructed on a profile so as to seem real. A bit like how modern artists start drawing characters from a basic frame to give a realistic movement or position, then fill in the details. This I think is harder in literature since you really have to build a detailed profile of the character as a model so that they provide a consistent and believable behavior. But I think this is also limited by what the author understands about people's psychology and behavior. If the author can't figure what motivates a certain kind of behavior, then they can't really build the psych model of the character and you end up with weird, unmotivated characters without agency. Lots of the more painful Literary Fiction I had to suffer through in school is like this. I think this is also dangerous for readers as it conditions them to expect real people to think and behave like this.

- A flat archetype or stereotype for a character the author needs in the story but doesn't know well enough to write about well. So they become part of the background fabric of the story, providing part of the framework for the better defined characters to work within, but never really coming into their own. Even main characters suffer from this.

> And the not-so-good children in Renaissance paintings doesn't affect the quality of Mona Lisa at all.

It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all.

My point was that literary character doesn't have to be an absolutely accurate depiction of the real people for it to (potentially) have the effect mentioned in the study. If each character is just a representation of the author's perception of other people, it's still something new that the reader couldn't have known otherwise.

>It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all.

It was brought up to say that the quality (or lack thereof) of a subset of all the works has no bearing on the quality of the better works in an area. Of course, you won't gain any new insight on psychology of vampire nor people in love from Twilight. And on incomprehensibleness, well let's say that if people learn that human's emotion might in fact be a giant mess, that we're not particularly (ir)rational nor simple, that would still be some understanding, isn't it? :-)

Sorry, I wasn't disagreeing with you per se, just writing down some thoughts.

> well let's say that if people learn that human's emotion might in fact be a giant mess, that we're not particularly irrational nor simple, that would still be some understanding, isn't it? :-)

Yeah, I think so. But I have to say that I think character's behavior should be relatively consistent and that Irrational incomprehensibility can be a consistent behavior ;)

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