How Complex Novels Might Train the Way You Read Other People

Theory of mind — the ability to attribute mental states to others, to understand that people have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from your own — is one of the cognitive capacities that most distinguishes human social life. Developmental psychologists can track its emergence in children around age four. Clinical researchers study its impairment in certain psychiatric and neurological conditions. And a growing body of research has asked whether it can be trained in adults, and whether literary fiction is one of the tools that might do it. The theoretical argument for why literary fiction specifically might exercise theory-of-mind capacities is not arbitrary. Literary fiction, as a genre characterized by psychological complexity and interiority, tends to present characters whose inner lives are rendered with specificity and ambiguity. Unlike the relatively flat characterization of much genre fiction, where characters' motivations are clear and their states are signaled explicitly, literary characters often think and behave in ways that require the reader to do significant inferential work. The text provides evidence; the reader constructs an interpretation. This is structurally similar to what we do in real social situations, where other minds are never fully transparent.

The Simulation Hypothesis

Researchers including Raymond Mar at York University and Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto have developed what is sometimes called the simulation hypothesis of narrative fiction: that reading stories functions as a kind of social simulation, allowing readers to practice navigating social situations and understanding social minds in a low-stakes context. The brain regions activated during reading about a character experiencing emotion overlap substantially with regions activated during actual emotional experience, and reading about a character's intentional actions activates motor regions associated with planning and movement. A study from Mar's group found that lifetime exposure to fiction — measured by a test of author recognition — was a stronger predictor of social cognition scores than general reading exposure, after controlling for several confounds. People who had read more fiction throughout their lives showed better performance on tests of empathy and theory of mind. The correlational nature of the finding leaves the causality question open, but the pattern is consistent with the simulation hypothesis.

What Literary Specifically Adds

The distinction between literary and genre fiction in this research is sometimes treated as if it were obvious, but it is worth being precise about. What makes fiction literary in the relevant sense is not prestige or critical acclaim but psychological complexity — characters whose actions arise from ambiguous mixtures of motive, who are capable of self-deception, who change in ways that are neither predictable nor arbitrary. A well-crafted genre novel can do some of this work. A poorly executed literary novel may do it badly. The category is a heuristic for a textual property, not a guarantee. The aspect of literary fiction that seems most relevant to theory-of-mind training is what narratologists call free indirect discourse — the technique of presenting a character's thoughts in the third person without fully attributing them, blending the narrator's voice with the character's interior experience. Henry James is the canonical example; so is contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk or Rachel Kushner. Reading text that slides between perspectives, that requires the reader to track whose thoughts are whose, exercises exactly the kind of perspective-tracking that social cognition demands. There is a mild irony in the fact that the argument for literary fiction's cognitive benefits has itself become a kind of cultural flattery — reassuring to people who already read literary fiction, easily deployed as self-congratulation. The stronger version of the claim is more specific: engagement with psychologically complex characters, in any medium, may exercise theory-of-mind capacities. Literature is particularly well-positioned to do this, but it is not magic, and skimming an acclaimed novel while mentally elsewhere is not a cognitive workout.