Fiction and Empathy: A Tempting Story
A skeptical look at the idea that novels make us better at knowing other minds.
I’ve always loved reading fiction. I remember a trip I took as a child at summer camp when the other kids were fishing off the side of the boat—that was the whole point of the excursion—and I was inside the boat reading. At least one of the counselors was concerned for my mental health, but I was perfectly happy. Now, one of the highlights of my day is reading aloud to my children; right now we’re in the middle of the Lord of the Rings, and it’s loads of fun.
But many people think reading fiction is more than just fun. Rather, reading fiction—or at least, reading great fiction—is supposed to teach us deep truths about the human condition. I want to focus on a particular claim in that ballpark, which is the idea that in reading fiction, we gain an ability to know what it’s like to live lives other than our own. Neil Gaiman puts it nicely:
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.1
In a podcast conversation between Russ Roberts and Julia Galef, the topic turned to how we can rationally make transformative life decisions—whether to have children, for example. Galef said she’d ideally want robust empirical data: longitudinal surveys tracking life satisfaction across different demographics based on what sorts of decisions they made. Roberts was skeptical. He suggested that literature and poetry might offer deeper insight—that fiction is a better tool for understanding what it’s like to make such choices.
One more example. While I was thinking about these questions, I got an email asking me to share an announcement about a new course in the English department with the philosophy majors at my university. The course description included the following passage:
In this course we tour and practice some of the key capabilities literary education seeks to cultivate. These include (among many others!) the ability to imagine the minds and lives of other people.
But does reading fiction in fact give us these epistemic powers? Do regular fiction readers become better at imagining what it’s like to be other people, or knowing what it would be like to lead alternative versions of their own lives? To be clear, I’m not just asking whether fiction expands the bounds of what we can conceive; I’m interested in accuracy. When we try to picture what the world looks like through another person’s eyes, we can do a better or worse job; our imagined version of someone else’s inner life might match their actual inner life well, or poorly. Does reading fiction help us with this matching task?
I’m skeptical. I think it’s a deeply unobvious, empirical question, and I suspect that the widespread tendency to attribute various spillover benefits to reading fiction has more to do with social desirability bias—you don’t want to sound like a philistine, do you?—than with an appreciation of powerful evidence or arguments.
Isn’t this a question for social scientists?
I just said that it’s a difficult empirical question whether reading fiction has the epistemic benefits often claimed for it. So shouldn’t we just see what our best social science says? Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult question for social science. Of course, it’s easy to take surveys where you ask people how much they read, ask them a bunch of other stuff, and then see how well their reading habits predict the other stuff. That’s been done for all sorts of traits.
The big problem for this sort of approach is that habitual readers differ from habitual non-readers in lots of ways. E.g., if people who read a lot also live longer, is that because of the reading itself, or because of something else? E.g., maybe the correlation exists because people who have more free time are less stressed, which leads to longer life, and also means more time to read. If that were so, then reading would have no effect on longevity—both the reading and the longevity would have free time as a common cause. That would be fine if you could measure free time, and see if reading and longevity are still correlated even after controlling for free time. But maybe your data set doesn’t include free time. Or maybe there are lots and lots of other factors that could be playing a role; maybe it’s about wealth, or personality, or who knows what else.2
The standard response to these sorts of problems in social science is randomization. If you want to figure out whether some action affects some outcome, you can’t just observe people who do the action, and people who don’t, and compare outcomes. That approach has the problem above: you might actually be measuring the effect of something else that both causes them to do the action, and affects the outcome. Instead, you’ve got to take a bunch of people, randomly force some of them to do the action, and some of them not to, and then measure outcomes. That way, you know it’s the action that’s making the difference to the outcome, rather than some underlying difference that explains why some people do the action and others don’t.
When the action is something like: “take this drug, available only in the context of the study I’m now running”, that’s reasonably easy. Everybody wants the drug, and for the ones you randomly assign to take it, they’ll happily take it when you give it to them. For the ones you randomly assign not to take the drug, you just refrain from giving it to them. This is why randomized drug trials are possible, and informative.
But what if the action whose effects we want to study is habitual reading over the course of one’s whole life? Imagine trying to take a group of kids, and randomly forcing some of them to read a lot for the rest of their life, and forcing others to read much less, and then measuring them at age 50. Cool idea! Not gonna happen.
What can be done, and has been done, is to put people in a lab and make them read for a short amount of time, and then give them various tests, like inferring people’s emotions from their facial expressions. Initially it looked like people were better at these tests after they read some literary fiction. Later studies failed to replicate the result. But even if the result had held up, I don’t think it would have been very informative. A constant and frustrating feature of psychology is that there’s often a vast gulf between what we’re really interested in, and what we can measure. What’s the relationship between the short term effect of reading a story in the lab, and the long term effect of a lifetime of habitual reading? What’s the relationship between scores on a lab test of inferring emotions from facial expressions, and the real-life task of empathizing with other people? The research can’t really help here.
Why So Skeptical?
That’s why I’m pessimistic about social science telling us all that much about our question. But we can still speculate! From the armchair, should we expect that a lifetime of reading gives people the power of cognitive empathy—the power to know what it’s like to be other people, and what it would be like to live hypothetical alternate versions of their own life?
How would that work? The natural, almost inescapable thought is that it would involve a kind of pattern recognition and extrapolation. If you’ve read a bunch of fiction—or at least, fiction of the right sort—you’ll have encountered a wide variety of characters with complex inner lives, and you’ll have seen how those inner lives were affected by external events, as well as how they manifested in behavior. For instance, even if you’ve never experienced the loss of a sibling—maybe you’re an only child, so it’s doubly hard to imagine—if you’ve read fiction in which characters have, then you have available a kind of lens through which to interpret people you meet in real life who have suffered that misfortune. Read enough fiction, and you’ll have a large enough body of “data”, and patterns you’ve learned from that data, that when it comes to interpreting real people and imagining what their inner mental lives might be like, you’ll be much better at extrapolating from the public, observable facts you know about them to the unobservable facts about their private experiences.
The implicit model I’m offering here is one where the task confronting a would-be empathizer—someone who wants to know what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes—is a kind of learning problem. Given limited data (what you can observe about someone), draw inferences about unobservable hypotheses (what their mental life is like). Especially today, we’re familiar with the idea of general purpose learning algorithms—like large language models—doing an exceptionally good job of drawing reasonably accurate inferences, at least when trained on a large and representative enough set of data. Effectively, I’m suggesting that you can think of the way fiction could work to make you better at imagining what it’s like to be other people as operating on a similar principle. Fiction could act as extra training data for the inference engine in your head.
One thing I like about this picture is that, at least in principle, we could test it. Imagine loading up a version of ChatGPT that’s been trained on all the great literature that’s ever been written (you can decide how to curate the list of the greats). Now, start telling it things about your own life that a casual acquaintance might know, and ask it to guess at facts about your inner mental life—your hopes, fears, anxieties, and so on—that are known only to you. How good a job do you think it will do? I haven’t done the experiment, but here’s my guess at how it would turn out.
My guess is that it would predict that your inner mental life is more interesting, more unusual, more compelling to read about, in a word, more novelistic, than it really is. There are systematic differences between what tends to happen in fiction and what tends to happen in the real world, and our hypothetical instance of ChatGPT will be biased towards interpreting your life as more like the former than the latter. This is easiest to see when we think not about characters’ inner mental lives, but about plot and narrative structure. Consider the principle of “Chekhov’s Gun”: “If you say in the first act that there is a rifle on the wall, in the second or third act it must absolutely go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” While this rule is adhered to in much fiction, the real world isn’t constrained by any such canons of narrative construction. Actual human lives are like bloated manuscripts, full of loose ends, unresolved plots, and extraneous detail that a good editor would delete. Indeed, you could do worse than summarizing the paranoid, conspiracist style of thinking as one that involves interpreting real-world events as if they had the coherence and tidiness typical of fictional narratives. It’s probably hypocritical to cite fiction in making my point, but the pitfalls of interpreting real life through the lens of fiction is a theme in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In that book—mild spoilers ahead—the character Catherine Morland has subsisted on a diet of Gothic novels, and consistently goes wrong in interpreting the people in her own life through that lens; when she gets to Northanger Abbey, she views the family patriarch as a Gothic villain, and looks for signs that he murdered, or is secretly imprisoning, his late wife. In fact, the household is much more boring and unremarkable than she imagines.
The point I’m making, while easiest to accept when we’re thinking about extrapolating from fictional plots to real-world sequences of events, doesn’t really lose much force when we move to the similar task of extrapolating from fictional characters’ inner mental lives to those of real people. Just as fictional plots tend to conform to canons of narrative construction that lead them to systematically differ from reality, the same is true of the relationship between fictional characters’ mental lives, and actual people’s mental lives.
In fiction, characters often exhibit a sort of psychological compression: they’re built around a small set of consistent traits or conflicts that readers can easily recognize and track. Fictional characters tend to have a logic to them that real people often don't. Think about Jay Gatsby—spoilers again. He’s one of the most famous and memorable characters in American fiction: romantic, mysterious, tragic. But part of what makes him compelling is that his entire inner life can be explained through a single obsession—his desire to recapture a perfect past with Daisy Buchanan. Every choice he makes, from the house he buys to the parties he throws, serves that purpose. That’s great character construction. But it’s also deeply unrealistic. Real people aren’t usually built around one driving motive that explains everything. They’re messier. They start projects that don’t go anywhere, and then later forget that they’d been so invested in them. They act out of habit, or boredom, or vague half-formed wants that don’t tie together into a satisfying arc. Gatsby’s psyche is artfully pruned for symbolic and narrative effect. Most people’s minds are more like overgrown gardens.
Basically, I’m suggesting that we should think of the stock of inner lives that we encounter in great fiction as a source of data, yes, but as a systematically biased source of data.
None of this is to deny that fiction can be illuminating in particular cases. If you want to understand how Nora Ephron experienced her divorce, Heartburn would probably help; if you want a feel for post-Civil War life in the American Midwest, Little House on the Prairie is a natural place to start. But those are targeted uses, where the match between fiction and reality is either biographical or tightly constrained. They don’t license the broader claim that reading fiction generally improves our ability to understand people. If anything, they highlight what’s missing in the general case: some independent reason to trust that the fiction tracks the reality.
I don’t mean to defend philistinism. There are many reasons to read fiction that have little to do with its supposed cognitive benefits. We might read for aesthetic pleasure, for the beauty of language, or simply for the joy of getting lost in a story. Sometimes we read to feel things more vividly—to echo or intensify emotions we’re already carrying, much like we might listen to sad music when we’re sad. Fiction can help us name what we’ve felt but couldn’t articulate, or imagine possibilities that hadn’t occurred to us. What’s less clear is whether reading fiction makes us better at understanding other people. That idea is tempting—but perhaps we’re tempted by it for the same reason we enjoy fiction itself: because it’s a compelling story. We should enjoy fiction without needing it to justify itself with grand psychological promises. Sometimes a good story is enough.
From his introduction to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I swear it’s not a dirty rhetorical trick that I’m putting the view I’m going to attack in the mouth of an unsympathetic character like Gaiman.
My thinking here is very much influenced by Emily Oster, who has a really nice, accessible explanation for why inferring causation from observational data is a lot harder than we often think.
Long time reader, first time commenter. I love this argument. I would add that people who select into writing fiction aren't a representative sample of the population. They might be particularly likely to have certain personality traits--to be more like Albert Camus than Ernest Shackleton. The way they describe their characters' inner lives may reflect their own inner lives. That doesn't mean fiction isn't interesting or valuable. But it suggests that fiction might not give us a great sense of the inner lives of the kinds of people who don't write fiction.
Excellent read as always. I agree with the main points of the piece. As an aside, I’ve thought for a while that the fact people feel compelled to defend the “value” of reading in these sorts of ways is precisely the problem; we should value great books (and other works of art) for what they are, and the enjoyment they give us, not some marginal benefit that can be measured in a controlled experiment. (Something similar goes on with defenders of the value of philosophy that cite earning potential etc. Even if the stats are true they don’t capture all or most of the reasons we think philosophy is valuable.)
Anyway I wonder what you think of the following alternative defence of the epistemic or cognitive value of literature. Good books (and I certainly don’t just mean the classics, but I mean to include them) are valuable because they often contain deep insights, sometimes insights it is hard to get elsewhere (who would be a better source of insights into a peculiar section of English society at a particular period in time than Jane Austen?).
Perhaps the people who wrote these books *could* have put those insights in another form: an academic treatise, a work of commercial non-fiction, or whatever. But they didn’t so if you want them you need to read the book. Of course, sometimes you can get much the same ideas and perspectives in lots of places—but what makes really good books good is that they are a bit more original, a bit more idiosyncratic.
I would combine this with another claim, which is that some ideas, visions, perspectives might be better communicated in a work of fiction than in another form, certainly than in a less literary form. I imagine George Eliot could have written a dry academic treatise on social change in 19th century England. But she wrote Middlemarch instead and—no disrespect to whatever academic traits Eliot may have possessed—it was probably better that way.