Why bookworms are better at reading people
I have been a nerd my whole life. I was always “that kid,” the one who read in a corner at recess and talked about Jo March and Ponyboy as though they were real people.
I have a vivid memory of myself at 8 or 9, staying up far past my bedtime to read Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia by flashlight. When I reached the gut-wrenching ending, I began sobbing loudly enough to summon my mother from down the hallway. As soon as she saw the book in my hand, she knew nothing was actually wrong. “I think I comforted you,” my mom told me recently. “I hope I didn’t say, ‘Stop crying. It’s not real.’ ”
When I told this story to Keith Oatley, a perfect stranger, he told me I needn’t feel silly for getting so worked up over the fates of fictional characters. “You were just being a human being,” he said. Oatley would know — he is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto, a novelist and the author of a recent review in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences looking at the psychological effects of fiction. In his review of the past decade of research on the subject, he concludes that engaging with stories about other people can improve empathy and theory of mind — the ability to imagine what might be going on in someone else’s head.
“When we read about other people, we can imagine ourselves into their position and we can imagine (what) it’s like being that person,” Oatley said. “That enables us to better understand people, better co-operate with them.”
In 2006, Oatley helped conduct a study that linked reading fiction to better performance on empathy and social acumen tests. Participants were first tested on their ability to recognize author names — a decent proxy for figuring out how many books they read and what kinds.
“We are all familiar with the stereotype of the bookworm,” he and his co-authors wrote. “An image leaps automatically to mind: that of a nebbish and unfashionable individual, wearing spectacles, whose demeanour is largely characterized by the social awkwardness one might expect from someone who has chosen the company of print over peers.”
But the second half of the study suggested that stereotype is unfair, Oatley said. The participants were then scored on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which is designed to measure empathy, and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, which gauges ability to interpret the mental states of others by asking people to associate pictures of actors’ eyes with an emotion.
Participants who knew the most fiction writers on the author recognition test scored far higher on the measurements of social acumen.
“People who read more fiction were better at empathy and understanding others,” Oatley said.
Any author would tell you as much (then again, they have a vested interest in doing so). But according to Oatley, psychology had long been “very sniffy” about studying fiction.
“People thought it was just made up,” he said. “So who knows what could be happening?”
But the past decade and a half has seen a shift in that trend. In 2000, Jemeljan Hakemulder at Utrecht University published The Moral Laboratory, a book outlining the results of almost two dozen experiments that linked reading to better social skills.
Raymond Mar, a psychologist who co-authored the 2006 study with Oatley, has found that the parts of the brain used for inferring thoughts and feelings of others — a phenomenon called “mentalizing” — light up in an MRI machine when people are processing stories.
Oatley compared reading to being in a flight simulator: “You experience a lot of situations in a short span of time.” Books, he continued, are life simulators. They allow us to see ourselves in someone else.
“Really, all art is metaphor,” said Oatley. “When we read, we become Anna Karenina or Harry Potter . . . We understand them from the inside.”