From Quill & Quire, here’s a snippet of a fascinating article:
“People always talk about books changing us. Could we actually measure that?” he says.
As a grad student at U of T, Raymond Mar, now an assistant professor of psychology at York University and associate editor of Scientific Study of Literature, worked with Oatley on doing just that. Mar sums up the central assumption Oatley developed to frame their research: “When people are reading literary fiction, they’re creating in their mind a simulation of experience. It’s a simulation that’s cognitive as well as emotional, and has all these different components.”
From there, Mar says, it wasn’t much of a stretch to wonder: if we’re engaging in these various social interactions through fiction, might it be the case that those who read a lot of fiction are developing better social skills than those who don’t?
To test this hypothesis, Oatley and his colleagues developed experiments to measure empathy, and examine what Oatley calls the “big five personality traits” – extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. In one such experiment, the researchers randomly assigned readers one of two versions of Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Lady With the Little Dog”– a translation of the original and another comprising only basic plot points. Beforehand, researchers measured the readers’ personality traits and their emotions at the time of the experiment.
“We found the people who read the [whole] story changed a bit in their personality,” Oatley says. “What we found interesting was that they all changed in somewhat different ways.”
