What do the arts mean to our lives? To at least some researchers, they’re a way that we learn how the people around us think. Previous studies have concluded that reading fiction is correlated with various measures of empathy — as you learn how characters interact, you can transfer that to the real world. But for David Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research, some types of fiction may be better at this than others. The results of their experiments, published today in Science, suggest that reading “literary” fiction, as opposed to its more mainstream or pulpy counterparts, could especially prime people to understand others’ thoughts and emotions.
via The Verge
