Does reading fiction make you a better person?

Aristotle said that reading tragedies makes us feel pity and fear: pity for the tragic hero’s suffering, and fear that we may ourselves meet the same fate one day.

In a new episode of the Polis Project podcast, author Mohammad Hanif sardonically says: “I’m not one of those people who thinks that people who read books or write books are inherently better than those who don’t…you have some very well-read monsters.”

He was specifically referring to the rooms of lawyers and judges, “made up of big, fat books”. However, this view is at odds with those of many who insist that reading, especially works of fiction, can turn you into someone with saintly qualities.

Not only is reading supposed to boost empathy, it’s also said to strengthen emotional intelligence, sensitivity, and compassion. The roots of this can probably be traced back to Aristotle’s thoughts on tragedy. Such works make us feel pity and fear, he famously said. Pity for the tragic hero’s suffering, and fear that we may ourselves meet the same fate one day.

Many studies seem to bear out the notion of fiction increasing empathy. Not just any sort of fiction, however; most researchers focus on literary fiction, for its ability to evoke interiority and let readers get under the skin of the characters, so to speak.

A BBC Future piece by writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond provides several examples. Canadian cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley and his team showed that those who read more fiction scored higher on a scale measuring interpersonal sensitivity. A group at the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab demonstrated that such readers are more skilled in figuring out what other people are thinking and feeling. Similarly, a study in the Netherlands concluded that subjects who were emotionally transported into a story became more empathic.

More recently, Westminster College professor Christine Seifert advised managers in the Harvard Business Review that reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy (that word again), not to mention critical thinking. The habit of reading can thus promote desirable qualities in employees whom organisations want to attract and retain.

Case closed, one might think. Not quite. Criticisms have often been levelled at such studies. For a start, researchers typically select a small number of short excerpts, somehow deemed to be characteristic of literary fiction. The time allotted to read these is also limited, given the conditions of the test. How robust and replicable can the results be?

Author Mark O’Connell is sceptical for other reasons. In particular, he focuses on a much-cited New School research report in Science Magazine on how reading literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, enhances the ability to imagine and understand the mental states of others. To begin with, O’Connell feels it’s reductive, if not absurd, to sit people down, give them a chunk of Chekhov, and measure short-term improvements in their ability to read other people’s facial expressions.

He goes on to wonder whether gauging emotions from pictures of faces in that study actually translates into anything like empathy in the outside world. Though he agrees with Susan Sontag that reading a book is “a way of being fully human”, he also points out that “a life spent reading is, among other things, a life spent alone”.

These reservations apart, there’s the causality versus correlation argument. Those with a fondness for fiction may well have more empathy, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the first brings about the second.

Reading too many novels, literary or otherwise, can also make you profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the world. This could lead to favourable change, or it could bring about consequences that are less than desirable. Ask Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary or Don Quixote.

How, then, does one react to those such as Neil Gaiman, who has written rhapsodically about reading and empathy? “You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well,” he says. “You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.”

This isn’t necessarily wrong, but another way to look at it is that reading literature can point you to portals. Whether you walk through them or not depends on the sort of person you are to begin with. As the Buddhist precept has it, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

It’s not that there aren’t worthwhile reasons to read fiction. Among them are pleasure, perspective, comfort, being transported, and a delight in experiencing how a net of language can capture the world. Let’s not turn it into a giant self-improvement project as well. French author Charles Dantzig goes so far as to exclaim: “I’m so partial to literature that I feel a spontaneous revulsion for books intended to teach me something.” Quite.

In his memoir, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene says that he writes because of  “a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order”. That isn’t a bad reason to read, too.