Reading Fiction: Abstraction And Simulation Of Social Experience

It is a common mistake to think that those who read fiction are introverted and, colloquially, ‘nerds’. However, I believe that reading fiction has a more profound effect on those who read it, and one of the major effects is that fiction can boost a person’s ability to empathise. Empathy is known as the ability to share and understand the feelings of another person. The belief that reading fiction builds someone’s empathy is closely linked to the idea of Theory of Mind. This is the theory that humans have the capacity to share and recognise that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these will probably differ from one's own beliefs and desires (Kidd & Castano, 2013). The idea that fiction had an effect on a person’s capacity to empathise

However, “authors and psychologists are interested in the same thing, and that is understanding human behaviour” (Mar et al., 2008). There has been some discussion involving the idea of how we become highly engaged in novels and how this can impact our social life and social skills. Mar and Oatley talk about how ‘simulation’ is related to fiction in two distinct ways in their 2008 paper on ‘The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience’. The first way they link simulation and fiction is that through reading these stories people physically experience what the characters in the novel are feeling, therefore this implies that reading fiction does tend to boost empathy. The second link that is made is that “stories model and abstract the human

Now, in a recent study, it has been found that reading for pleasure does put children ahead in the classroom. According to new research from the Institute of Education (IOE) children who read for pleasure made more progress in maths, vocabulary and spelling between the ages of 10 and 16 than those who rarely read at all. Dr Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown analysed the reading behaviour, how often and long they read, of 6,000 young people. They also looked at the children’s test scores in maths, vocabulary and spelling at ages 5, 10 and 16. Dr Sullivan found that reading for pleasure had the strongest effect on children's vocabulary development, and that the impact reading had on their spelling and maths was also still significant. This idea that reading fiction can improve one’s vocabulary has also been researched by other scientists and psychologists. A study carried out by Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich was titled ‘What Reading Does for the Mind’ (2011). One of the most relevant sections of this study was about Positive Cognitive Consequences From Reading Volume and it discussed how exposure to a wide range of vocabulary can improve a person’s brain function, and in turn better a person’s verbal skills and declarative knowledge. This idea is a recurrent theme in Oatley’s 1999 paper, ‘Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Stimulation’,