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The Nuance
Can Reading Fiction Make You a Better Person?
People who read fiction may see the world differently than those who don’t
I’ve always wanted to write a film script. And like a million other would-be Charlie Kaufmans, I once bought a how-to guide to screenwriting. The Screenwriter’s Bible, by David Trottier, turned out to be a surprisingly fun read. It’s filled with insider info on Hollywood and insights on the makings of a great movie.
In the very first chapter, Trottier draws a sharp distinction between films and novels. While films are “a visual medium” that rely on physical action to carry the story along, novels are often oriented around a character’s internal thoughts and experiences. “That’s the strength of the novel form — inner conflict,” he writes.
More than any other form of media (apart from perhaps memoir), novels immerse us in the minds of others. We see the world through the characters’ eyes, but we also think the world through their thoughts. As the literary agent Dorian Karchmar has put it, “[F]or readers to understand and experience points of view that are not their own . . . is sort of the whole freaking point of fiction.”
There’s new evidence that reading fiction may change us, arguably for the better.
Considering the lurch in U.S. educational curricula away from the humanities and toward STEM subjects, it’s worth wondering what our society may be losing in the trade.
A study published this month in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that adults who read a lot of literary fiction as kids possess a more complex worldview than those who didn’t.
“One of the things we repeatedly found is that reading patterns when young predicted things like greater attributional complexity, less essentialism, increased psychological richness, and increased intellectual humility,” says Nick Buttrick, PhD, first author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
