Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds

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Abstract

While frequent readers are often stereotyped as socially awkward, this may only be true of non-fiction readers and not readers of fiction. Comprehending characters in a narrative fiction appears to parallel the comprehension of peers in the actual world, while the comprehension of expository non-fiction shares no such parallels. Frequent fiction readers may thus bolster or maintain their social abilities unlike frequent readers of non-fiction. Lifetime exposure to fiction and non-fiction texts was examined along with performance on empathy/social-acumen measures. In general, fiction print-exposure positively predicted measures of social ability, while non-fiction print-exposure was a negative predictor. The tendency to become absorbed in a story also predicted empathy scores. Participant age, experience with English, and intelligence (g) were statistically controlled.

Introduction

[M]an tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation.

— Aristotle, Poetics (trans., 1987)

We are all familiar with the stereotype of the bookworm. An image leaps automatically to mind: that of a nebbish and unfashionable individual, wearing spectacles, whose demeanour is largely characterized by the social awkwardness one might expect from someone who has chosen the company of print over peers. There are, however, good reasons to expect that this stereotype of social impairment may only pertain to non-fiction readers and furthermore, that the very opposite may be true of fiction readers. Non-fiction is typically expository in nature, whereas fiction most often takes the form of narrative. Although these two forms of text are highly similar—both are discourse-level text with local and global coherence—they are not identical in structure or content. This fact is evidenced by the observed differences between these two genres with respect to comprehension and recall (Graesser, Hauft-Smith, Cohen, & Pyles, 1980), and inference generation (Singer, Harkness, & Stewart, 1997). Stories contain depictions of the actual world replete with intentional agents pursuing goals to form a plot, whereas expository texts, in contrast, share no such parallels with the actual world. The processing of narratives, then, shares some similarities with the processing of our real social environment. Thus, frequent readers of narrative fiction, individuals who could be considered ‘bookworms,’ may bolster or maintain social-processing skills whilst reading stories, although they are removed from actual social contact during this activity. Conversely, frequent readers of non-fiction expository texts, individuals colloquially referred to as ‘nerds,’ could be headed toward an embodiment of the socially awkward stereotype by removing themselves from the actual social realm while not simulating experience in a fictional one. There exists both theoretical and empirical support for this hypothesis.

Jerome Bruner (1986) was one of the first psychologists to propose that narrative was a distinctive mode of thought, specifically oriented around human agents, their intentions and their interactions. Richard Gerrig (1993) took this idea further, hypothesizing that real-world and narrative-processing are subserved by the same cognitive mechanisms. Gerrig (1993) also described a phenomenon sometimes referred to as narrative engagement—the manner in which stories draw in and capture their readers. He employed a metaphor of travel, describing how a good work of fiction can “transport” a reader to different times and places. Once transported, that reader experiences thoughts and emotions predicated on the fictional context. Such thoughts and experiences are not merely a form of entertainment, but have lasting real-world consequences. People speak of certain, favorite, books as “life-changing” for example, and it is common for feelings of sadness or elation to persist after closing the pages of a book.

The cognitive basis Gerrig (1993) proposed as common to both fictional and real-world processing may well entail the ability to infer what is in the minds of others. This ability has become known as theory-of-mind or mentalizing (Carruthers & Smith, 1996). While we are not privy to the thoughts and beliefs of others, their behaviour is motivated by these invisible internal states (Frith & Frith, 2001). In consequence, we must predict the actions and reactions of others by, in part, inferring what they are thinking, feeling, and intending. This ability to infer and monitor the mental-states of numerous autonomous agents also seems to underlie our capacity to understand drama and narrative. One need only attend a Shakespearean play to observe that understanding and keeping track of the motivations, intentions, and beliefs of characters is paramount for narrative comprehension. Narratives are fundamentally social in nature in that almost all stories concern relationships between people; understanding stories thus entails an understanding of people, and how their goals, beliefs and emotions interact with their behaviours.

Martha Nussbaum (1995) has taken the argument yet further. She has proposed that literature, most typically the novel, actively develops a form of imaginative thinking and feeling about others and their predicaments that is essential for social life, not just in personal relationships, but also in more public modes such as the administration of justice.

Formal models of discourse-processing in cognitive psychology have begun to take into account this important similarity between social- and story-processing. Although early theories focused on representing the text itself, current models have turned to understanding how the mind represents what the text describes, known as a mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983) or situation model (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Newer formulations based on this idea explicitly dictate that readers monitor many aspects of a mental model, including social aspects such as persons and their motivational states (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). A recent theory by Zwaan (2004) further incorporates the parallels between real-world and text-processing, proposing a framework based on theories of perceptual symbol systems (Barsalou, 1999). This Immersed Experiencer Framework (Zwaan, 2004) hypothesizes that words automatically activate neural events similar to those that occur during the actual experience of their referents. Thus, reading about complex social interactions such as those commonly described in narrative fiction, theoretically engages neural substrates similar to those used to navigate similar situations in the real-world. It should be noted that these ideas are fully congruent with an earlier proposal by Oatley (1999), who suggested that reading stories results in a cognitive and emotional simulation of experience, one that is specifically social in nature.

The experimental work spurred by the theoretical proposals mentioned above have provided substantive support for these ideas. At the sub-discourse-level, Zwaan and his colleagues have demonstrated that language processing appears to involve perceptual simulations that correspond to real world experience (e.g., Zwaan et al., 2004, Zwaan et al., 2002). At the discourse-level, readers often comprehend a story by assuming the perspective of a character (Özyürek and Trabasso, 1997, Rall and Harris, 2000), and mentally represent his or her emotions (Gernsbacher, Goldsmith, & Robertson, 1992). Moreover, these emotional experiences are equivalent in type and magnitude to those evoked by everyday events (László and Cupchik, 1995, Oatley, 1994, Oatley, 1999). The cognitive and emotional forms of perspective-taking described above may underlie real-world mentalizing (Tager-Flusberg, 2001), and appear to mirror in some aspects the two major explanatory theories of this process, simulation-theory and theory-theory (Carruthers & Smith, 1996). Further, readers appear to create models of the characters they read about, and readily update these representations as new information becomes available (Rapp, Gerrig, & Prentice, 2001); a similar process likely occurs during encounters with individuals in the real-world (Read & Miller, 1993). Considering how closely related real-world and narrative-processing appear to be, it should not be surprising that engagement with fictional narratives can result in changes of belief and attitude, much like those produced by unmediated experiences in the real-world (Green and Brock, 2000, Prentice et al., 1997, Strange and Leung, 1999), although there is still some debate regarding the mechanism of this persuasion (Mar, Oatley, & Eng, 2003).

From developmental psychology, there is evidence that acquiring theory-of-mind abilities at around age four may aid the comprehension of stories, particularly those that involve belief (Astington, 1990). Futhermore, it appears that childhood imaginative abilities, similar to those hypothetically employed during adult narrative comprehension, are related to theory-of-mind skills. Seja and Russ (1999) have demonstrated, for example, that fantasy play ability appears importantly related to emotional understanding, over and above individual variation in verbal ability. Taylor and Carlson (1997) revealed, similarly, that children whose fantasy and pretend play abilities were more sophisticated do better on theory-of-mind tasks, independent of their verbal intelligence. Harris (2000), in his book which reviews a great deal of work in this area, argues that imaginative role-play during childhood may play a unique role in empathy, theory-of-mind, and importantly, later enable “children to understand and eventually produce connected discourse about non-current episodes” (p. 194). There is also some preliminary evidence that a causal relation exists between the fostering of narrative skills in children and the improvement of social abilities. Schellenberg (2004) randomly assigned 6 year-olds to 36 weeks of music lessons, drama lessons, or a waiting list. Only children who had received training in drama displayed an increase in adaptive social behaviour (medium effect-size; d = 0.57). Education in a narrative art for these children thus appears to have improved empathic or perspective-taking abilities to the extent that measurable changes in prosocial behaviour occurred.

Support for a parallel between social- and story-processing can also be found in the neuropsychological literature. To begin, Zwaan’s (2004) basic proposal that words evoke neural events similar to those manifested during actual experience of the words’ referent, has received some support. Reading particular action words (e.g., ‘to kick’ or ‘to talk’), for example, results in activations in the motor cortex specific to those areas that represent the relevant part of the body typically used for that action (e.g., the leg or the face; Pulvermüller, Härle, & Hummel, 2001). Imagining an experience also appears to engage neural substrates similar to those involved with actually perceiving that experience; this has been found to be the case with respect to perceiving objects (Kosslyn et al., 1995, O’Craven and Kanwisher, 2000; cf. Mellet et al., 1996), motion (Goebel et al., 1998, Kourtzi and Kanwisher, 2000), sound (Kraemer, Macrae, Green, & Kelley, 2005), and personal action (Gerardin et al., 2000). Perhaps most germane to the current discussion, a review of the neuroimaging and lesion literature found that the areas commonly implicated in narrative comprehension and production include a network of brain regions often associated with theory-of-mind processing (Mar, 2004).

The close relation between navigating social- and story-worlds has a number of implications, not the least interesting of which is the proposal that readers of predominantly narrative fiction may actually improve or maintain their social-inference abilities through reading. The same is unlikely to be true of non-fiction readers. Although in both cases individuals are removing themselves from true social interaction by virtue of the solitary nature of reading, non-fiction presumably does not sponsor the same simulation of the social world as narrative fiction. Frequent readers of non-fiction, then, by sacrificing human interaction and replacing it with no similar substitute, may actually impair their social skills. Individual differences in reading habits and preferences, then, may relate systematically to individual differences in social-processing ability. Exploring this question is made difficult, however, by the fact that many frequent readers of narrative fiction also likely read a great deal of non-fiction. A good portion of readers are simply readers per se, often happy to read whatever happens to be available at the moment regardless of genre. Fiction-reading is thus likely to be very highly correlated with non-fiction-reading. The question we would fundamentally like to ask is whether readers who read relatively more narrative fiction, controlling for the amount of expository non-fiction read, have greater social abilities. Stated in simpler terms, if two people read an equivalent amount of non-fiction, will the individual who reads more narrative fiction be better at social perception and understanding? In order to properly examine this question, partial correlations controlling for the variance shared between fiction and non-fiction reading must be employed.

At minimum, three separate arguments could be made for why a positive relation would exist between the reading of narrative and the possession of social abilities. Perhaps the simplest proposal is that frequent fiction readers expose themselves to concrete social knowledge embedded within stories, which is then applied to real-world interactions. It may also be that frequent readers of narrative hone their social-inference and monitoring skills, and that these improved skills are exercised in the real-world. A third possibility is that individuals who are very empathic, and skilled at making social inferences, simply enjoy reading fiction more and are more likely to engage in this activity. None of these individual hypotheses exclude the other possibilities, and in all likelihood some combination is at play. In any case, pursuing these more refined explanations must follow the basic demonstration that a positive relation exists between the reading of fictional narratives and possessing social abilities or knowledge. The current study was intended to provide such a demonstration.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 94 participants (63 females) from the University of Toronto community ranging in age from 17 to 57 years (M = 22.3, SD = 6.6) participated in the study, for either course credit (46 Introductory Psychology students), or $15 (CDN) in remuneration. The latter were recruited using posters posted around the campus. On average, individuals had been fluent in English for 21.1 years, SD = 7.4, Min = 8.0. Most participants (N = 70) reported English as a first language, and English was generally

Scale reliabilities and scores

Scale reliability statistics along with validation data and norms for the majority of the tests used are available from source articles or the test authors. Cronbach’s α for the MIE is not reported by Baron-Cohen and colleagues, and in this relatively small sample the measure had reasonable internal reliability, α = 0.60. The revised ART had good internal reliability overall (α = 0.96), and for the Fiction (α = 0.93) and Non-fiction subscales (α = 0.90) individually. Split-half reliability for this

Discussion

The results from this study demonstrate that fiction and non-fiction print-exposure appear to exhibit a double-dissociation with regard to various measures of empathy and social ability. In raw correlation, exposure to fiction was more positively (or less negatively) related to the performance-based measures of social ability than exposure to non-fiction. These divergences are unlikely to occur by chance and may be attenuated, considering the high intercorrelation between fiction and

Acknowledgments

This doctoral research was conducted under the supervision of both Jordan Peterson and Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto. Colin DeYoung provided comments on a version of this manuscript and his contribution is greatly appreciated. The authors also thank Keith Stanovich for his help on updating the print-exposure measure. This study was supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to JBP. Requests for reprints should be directed

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