A convincing reason to pick up a (fiction) book
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStoc/Getty Images My middle school had a program called AIR in which students were awarded points for every book we read — or, I should say, for every book for which they passed the corresponding trivia quiz. Not that I, or anyone, ever took a quiz for a book they didn’t read. But shorter, easier books were worth fewer points, while harder, longer books were worth more, and more points meant better trade-in prizes.
Whether reading fiction changes one’s brain is a weirdly controversial subject, so the meta-analysis’s authors — led by David Dodell-Feder, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rochester — sought to evaluate previous research in this area.
A number of the previous experiments examined were designed differently — some asked subjects to self-report on their empathy after reading a passage of fiction, while others attempted to measure it with an empathy-related task. Differences like these, and others, might account for differences in earlier studies’ conclusions. Still, Dodell-Feder and his co-authors argue that, in sum, the evidence for fiction’s effect on social cognition is there.
The authors also note that the reason the improvement measured is so small may be due to the short-term nature of the experiments; even the best book probably can’t change your cognition much in an hour. But if you continue to read fiction, the authors argue, these effects will very likely compound over time. It’s no giant novelty pencil, perhaps, but it’s something.
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