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For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

By PAM BELLUCK


Say you are getting ready for a blind date or a job interview. What should you do? Besides shower and shave, of course, it turns out you should read — but not just anything. Something by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory better than a potboiler by Danielle Steel.

That is the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.

“This is why I love science,” Louise Erdrich, whose novel “The Round House” was used in one of the experiments, wrote in an e-mail. The researchers, she said, “found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction.”

“Thank God the research didn’t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,” she added.

The researchers, social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, recruited their subjects through that über-purveyor of reading material, Amazon.com. To find a broader pool of participants than the usual college students, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs.

People ranging in age from 18 to 75 were recruited for each of five experiments. They were paid $2 or $3 each to read for a few minutes. Some were given excerpts from award-winning literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Wendell Berry). Others were given best sellers like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale.

In one experiment, some participants were given nonfiction excerpts, but we’re not talking “All the President’s Men.” To maximize the contrast, the researchers — looking for nonfiction that was well-written, but not literary or about people — turned to Smithsonian Magazine. “How the Potato Changed the World” was one selection. “Bamboo Steps Up” was another.

After reading — or in some cases reading nothing — the participants took computerized tests that measure people’s ability to decode emotions or predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. In one test, called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” subjects did just that: they studied 36 photographs of pairs of eyes and chose which of four adjectives best described the emotion each showed.

Is the woman with the smoky eyes aghast or doubtful? Is the man whose gaze has slivered to a squint suspicious or indecisive? Is she interested or irritated, flirtatious or hostile? Is he fantasizing or guilty, dominant or horrified? Or annoyed that his tech stock dropped half a percent on the Nasdaq in a round of late trading after news from the Middle East? (Just kidding — that last one isn’t on the test.)

The idea that what we read might influence our social and emotional skills is not new. Previous studies have correlated various types of reading with empathy and sensitivity. More recently, in a field called “theory of mind,” scientists have used emotional intelligence perception tests to study, for example, children with autism.

But psychologists and other experts said the new study was powerful because it suggested a direct effect — quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got on the tests — from reading literature for only a few minutes.

“It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”

Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University’s Darwin College, said he would have expected that reading generally would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading, is remarkable,” he said.

Experts said the results implied that people could be primed for social skills like empathy, just as watching a clip from a sad movie can make one feel more emotional.

“This really nails down the causal direction,” said Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study. “These people have done not one experiment but five, and they have found the same effects.”

The researchers — Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, a doctoral candidate — found that people who read literary fiction scored better than those who read popular fiction. This was true even though, when asked, subjects said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much. Literary fiction readers also scored better than nonfiction readers — and popular fiction readers made as many mistakes as people who read nothing.

There is much the study does not address: How long could such effects last? Would three months of reading Charles Dickens and Jane Austen produce larger or smaller effects, or have no impact? Are the differences in scores all attributable to the type of material read? Would the results hold if the same person read all of the types? And would it matter if the literary fiction was particularly difficult? (Nobody was asked to read James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.)

The study’s authors and other academic psychologists said such findings should be considered by educators designing curriculums, particularly the Common Core standards adopted by most states, which assign students more nonfiction.

“Frankly, I agree with the study,” said Albert Wendland, who directs a master’s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”

He added: “Maybe popular fiction is a way of dealing more with one’s own self, maybe, with one’s own wants, desires, needs.”
In popular fiction, said Mr. Kidd, one of the researchers, “really the author is in control, and the reader has a more passive role.”

In literary fiction, like Dostoyevsky, “there is no single, overarching authorial voice,” he said. “Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”

Dr. Castano added that, in many cases, “popular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot.”

“Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described,” he said.

Ms. Erdrich, the author, said the study made her feel “personally cheered.”

“Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It’s nice to be told what we write is of social value,” she said. “However, I would still write even if novels were useless.”

Interesting. I wonder if literary fiction has a positive impact, could other genres have a negative impact? Who knows, it's just a silly thought, and seeing as I don't read much literary fiction, I might not want to know the answer anyway!

My knowledge of this study is based only on the article above. But just from that information, I'd say it sounds like a classic example of junk science: "research" deliberately set up to prove a predetermined outcome in the service of whatever axe the "researcher" has to grind. In this case, the axe is the cultural elite's prejudice that whatever they please to call "literary" fiction is oh-so cool and personally enriching, while "popular" fiction is sleazy swill fit only for the human swine they think most of us are.

It's fairly intuitive that reading fiction featuring a lot of interpersonal interaction where the author follows the classic principle of "show, don't tell," so you infer people's moods and reactions from clues that aren't spoken, would sharpen your ability to do the same in real life. The problem with the "study" is its built-in assumption that all "literary" fiction does this, and no "popular" fiction does. I'm not familiar with Flynn or Pilcher, but it's definitely true that you wouldn't glean any insight into revealing nuances of human emotional expression from Heinlein's short stories; that's not his focus. But it's also not the focus of a great many "literary" fiction or metafiction writers whose claim to fame is their glorification of meaninglessness and rejection of traditional dialogue and narrative. "Literary" writers like Chekhov and Munro mentioned above (and I think the same is true of Berry, though I haven't been exposed enough to DeLillio to tell in his case) provide readers with that kind of instruction precisely because their fictional technique is actually much closer to that of some "popular" writers than it is to that of their fellow "literary" authors. Munro, in fact, is "literary" only because she writes mainstream short stories, and there's no longer a popular periodical market for them; there's nothing about 'How I Met My Husband," for instance, that wouldn't have been thoroughly enjoyed by average Saturday Evening Post readers in my childhood. And most of the 19th-century authors like Chekhov who are in the canon today were read and liked in their own time by ordinary readers, not just by academicians and the status-conscious wealthy snobocracy; Dickens and Austen are good cases in point. (And don't even mention the fan base of writers like Shakespeare, or worse, Chaucer!). That tends to make nonsense of the artificial distinction between good "Literary Fiction" vs. BAAAAD (shudder!) "popular fiction."

The converse is true as well; there are certainly any number of writers who consciously write for ordinary readers, and who at the same time pay serious attention to human interactions using the descriptive technique of "show, don't tell." (Diana Gabaldon and Krisi Keley come readily to mind.) It might be interesting to see what a similar study, using selections from one of these latter writers vs. one of the more incomprehensible "stream-of-consciousness" passages from any of the critical elite's latest nine-day wonders, would turn up. (Or better yet, a study that actually compared apples to apples, instead of apples to oranges. But since when do modern researchers design studies to actually learn anything? :-( )

Interesting article. (It may help explain the behaviour of someone I know.) Thanks for sharing.

~from Sherry Turkle is an optimist on reading

"In her newest book, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle explores how mobile devices and social media have changed human communication. Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

BOOKS: What are you reading?

TURKLE: I’m reading “Brooklyn” by Colm Tóibín. I love his evocation of it. I’m from the Flatbush area, which he describes. I would read anything about Brooklyn, even a cookbook. I’m also rereading Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” because I think I didn’t get it the first time. I love it. She is such an interesting and complex writer.

BOOKS: What other books really capture Brooklyn?

TURKLE: “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron, a masterpiece. It takes place literally on the street where my aunt lived and where I went to nursery school. People in Chicago probably feel that way about Saul Bellow’s books. I spent a year in graduate school at the University of Chicago and ripped through Bellow’s books. I did what was called then the Committee on Social Thought program. You chose 12 books and studied them for a year. The thinking is if you read great books, the world of sociology, history, and anthropology would open to you.

BOOKS: Which books had the biggest effect on you?

TURKLE: Jean Piaget’s “The Child’s Conception of the World,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind.” Getting into those books got me into this notion that we love the objects we think with, and we think with the objects we love. That became my life’s work.

BOOKS: Any other pivotal book?

TURKLE: I think the most influential book for me was “The Lonely Crowd” by David Riesman. I read that in high school. I said to myself I want to be the sort of person who could write a book like that. So I decided to study sociology and psychology. In fact, he became my mentor.

BOOKS: What kind of books do you read for pleasure?

TURKLE: I like sweep-of-history novels like Irene Nemirovsky’s “Suite Française” or Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow.” I have a daughter who recently graduated from college. For a while I loved following her taste. We got into an all-things-Tudor all-the-time thing. We read books that I can’t even remember the names of about Henry’s wives. They did lead me to Hilary Mantel’s books and the TV and Broadway shows based on them.

BOOKS: What else do you like to read?

TURKLE: I love memoir. The reader in my family was my aunt, and I read what was on her bookshelves. She had Lillian Hellman’s “Pentimento.” I devoured that. Apparently it’s not what actually happened to Lillian Hellman. Now I teach a course on memoir. My favorites are Oliver Sacks’s “Uncle Tungsten,” probably one of the best books about a life in science, and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I pair that with Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” which works really well.

BOOKS: What did you read when you were a child.

TURKLE: I read Nancy Drew over and over. A friend and I found 19 original Nancy Drew mysteries in the incinerator room in our apartment building. We divvied them up. We had no books in our house. These were the only books I owned. I read them when I was eight. They were about faraway places, deducing things. It made me want to be a psychologist. It made me want to travel. I still sometimes think as myself as Nancy Drew.

BOOKS: In the age of cellphone mania, what do you think the future of reading is?

TURKLE: I’m optimistic. I think that people are realizing that we have overstepped. If you don’t read you lose the capacity for sustained concentration. We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books. I think people know we are on the cusp of losing something really important.

AMY SUTHERLAND

I was really struck by that last comment. In my 15+ years online, and my last 5 or 6 years getting online with a cellphone, my reading habits have drastically changed.

In recent months, I've had to make a concerted effort to spend time reading -- a pasttime I've always enjoyed. Yet, in these past few years, I've read very little compared to what I once did. I also found I was having trouble concentrating on an entire article, whether online or a magazine. Plus, I'd really missed the downtime and entertainment value of reading: and that includes fiction as well as nonfiction.

I find her statement intriguing: "We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books."