Can Fiction Improve Empathy and Provoke Aggression?

One of the newer areas of literary scholarly and critical inquiry, at least over the last 10 years, has involved exploring philosophical theories of mind, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience, each distinct, related but not always commensurate fieds, in relation to literature and the arts more broadly. What also has occurred over this same period is that psychologists and brain scientists have increasingly been thinking and conducting research on how the various artistic genres function and what effects they have, in a cognitive and biological sense. (Humanists and scientists in other older fields, such as philosophers going back to Plato, have extensively examined and theorized about the functions and operations of literature and the arts; aesthetics is one of the oldest rooms in the house of Western philosophy, and factors into philosophies across the globe.) I won't dare speak to the literary scholarship involving theories of mind and cognitive neuroscience, but I found two recent articles on psychologists' studies of fiction's effects quite fascinating, not only for what they have to say about the genre's power, but also for what one researcher argues the effects this new understanding about the art form might play, especially on public policy.

Before describing the studies, let me posit that many artists and many who appreciate the arts intuitively grasp how specific artistic genres and forms work.  This is no less true for architects or dancers as it is for poets or fiction writers.  For fiction writers in particular, I would also posit that many recognize in their own experience as writers and readers what's discussed in the studies mentioned below.  As I pointed out in my July review of James Geary's fine survey I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), sometimes what we grasp intuitively is correct, that our understanding of how things, especially language, function is, if not always empirically verified or verifiable, sometimes still right at a deeper level, and yet there remains so much still hidden to us and only slowly being revealed concerning how language works; there is so much that exceeds or eludes many of the popular or dominant theories, including some long held by major scholars and critics.  As Geary's book points out, othering--making oneself an other--is constitutively wired into language; it is built into our understanding of the world through language.  As he argues quite effective, the subject of his book, metaphor, turns out to be more than a mere trope or rhetorical device, but intimately connected to our mental and bodily experience in the world.

But what does this have to do with the articles I'm talking about? According to two studies recently cited in the Guardian, passages in fiction or fictional works in toto appear to "improve" and affect empathetic feeling in their readers. Concerning those fictional passages, Alison Flood relates how a University of Buffalo team, led by Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, "gave 140 undergraduates passages from either [Stephanie] Meyer's Twilight or JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read." In the former text (which I have not read), a character describes what it is like to be a vampire; in the latter, the young wizards are sorted into their respective Hogwarts Academy houses. The researchers then conducted successive computer tests, using personal pronouns and keywords, to measure identification with and as vampires, and then and as wizards. As it turns out, the study, published in Psychological Science, found that the students reading the text involving a description of vampirism were more likely to identify as vampires, while the students reading the text involving the youthful wizards self-identified as wizards. What the researchers also found was something that writers and readers have long known, which is that

"Belonging" to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups. "The current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment," Gabriel and Young write.

Eat your heart out, Facebook and Twitter!

In a second study Flood cites, University of Toronto psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley gave 166 readers either a translation of Anton Chekhov's actual story "The Lady with the Little Dog" (which my undergraduates and I will be reading and discussing in just a few weeks!) or a more linguistically neutral, documentary account of the plot and characters featured in the story. What Oatley found upon measuring readers' personality traits and emotions before and after the story was that those who read Chekhov's "unadulterated" story, a profound and deeply complex essay in imagination and feeling, were found "to have gone through greater changes in personality--empathising with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them," while those reading the documentary account were less likely to have done so. (I also thought of Rainer Maria Rilke's extraordinary poem "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," which lyricizes and dramatizes what this study demonstrates; the experience with the statue marks the speaker not just empathetically, but transforms him, leading to that final, arresting line: "du mußt dein Leben ändern": you must change your life, but also: you must make yourself an other/another ("other" in German is ander).)

To quote Oatley:

"I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world," said Oatley. "The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that's the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters' actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that's too limited.

Or to put it another way: reading fiction allows us to enter those other lifeworlds quite deeply, imaginatively, psychologically and affectively; we become those other people, or identify with them, even if negatively.  We become part of the fictional world, even if temporarily; we change our lives, if only in the moments while in and shortly after leaving a fictional text. (I would argue this occurs in an engagement with other works of art too, as many others have written far more eloquently and persuasively than I ever could.)  A connection occurs--our inner and outer worlds fuse in the experience of reading the text, we draw upon and redraw the fictional world in our heads. And we leave it changed, even if temporarily. (Think of J. W. G. von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and its powerful, often deleterious effects on the youth of Romantic-era Germany; think of the Victorian era concerns about the effects of fiction on young women, both good and bad; think of the Beat era's poetry and fictional narratives, which not only captured the experiences of youthful social and cultural rebellion, but provided pointers for readers. And so on.) To those who've read a bit of philosophy or literary theory of an older sort, doesn't this sound familiar?

But it's not just empathy. In the September 7, 2011 issue of Miller-McCune, Tom Jacobs describes a  Brigham Young University research team study, led by psychologist Sarah Coyne, on the relationship between fictional accounts of two types of aggression and behavioral responses.  Coyne previously conducted studies on violence and popular culture, but had not previously studied fiction, so she focused on it in this one. According to Jacobs's article, the study shows that exposure to an account of violence in literature can effect an aggressive response to provocation.  Jacobs is clear to state that Coyne's study does not claim that "reading a fictional account of an aggressive action increases belligerent behavior," but that reading fiction containing one of two types of aggression, physical, or outright physically assaultive action, and "relational," or actions that upset a person's relationship in a group, resulted in responses marked by the particular type of aggression featured in the work.  In the first study, readers of material featuring physical aggression were more likely to respond with physical aggression when provoked during a video game test; in the second study, readers of texts featuring relational aggression responded with that form of aggression when provoked in a similar virtual game. As Jacobs says:

In both cases, provoked people who were given the opportunity to engage in a specific form of retaliatory violence were more likely to do so if they had just read a fictional account of similar activity.

He again notes that reading fiction does not increase aggressiveness, but that having a scene or mental experience, even fictional, of aggression--not a mere picture or mental image, as Wittgenstein might caution us to be wary of describing it, but something more complicated and nuanced, involving neural mirroring and affect, and embedded and embodied in language--can impact our subsequent behavior.  This also parallels what Geary suggested in terms of how certain words, terms, and figuration of many kinds, can affect and effect responses in us that we do not consciously register.

I mentioned that one aspect of these accounts that interested me was the implication one of the researchers, Keith Oatley, drew from the knowledge his study provided. He argues that his is the first "empirical finding" he knows of--though, as we see, there are apparently others--demonstrating a psychological effect produced by reading fiction.  What philosophers and literary scholars have long argued, he has demonstrated through a scientifically validated experiment, i.e., an empirical method.  Professor Oatley thus thinks we could--and ought--make the case that fiction writing might have instrumental value for readers--students, everyone--and thus "economic" value, in our society.  Oatley's specific argument is that "reading fiction improves understanding of others" in that it can improve interpersonal understanding, and thus might be useful in a range of fields, including business studies, law, and so on. While I agree that reading fiction can have instrumental value, I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it "improves understanding of others," let alone for everyone, because as I see the studies, what's going on is that it might not entail more understanding, but rather something antecedent to that, which is to say, pre-rational emotional connection and empathy, or, as the latter study suggests, negative behavioral responses to provocation.

Either way, what all these studies suggest is what writers and readers know--and what Plato warned about concerning poetry, which is to say, imaginative uses, in particular forms, of language--which that literature, and fiction specifically, are more important to and powerful for and on us than they're often taken to be, even by people interested in studying them.  In that sense, then, Oatley is writing--reading fiction is certainly worthwhile, and studying what it does is worthwhile too. Learning to read it, write it, and understand its effects are also truly worthwhile. (He does not discuss it at all, but we should also be aware of another instrumental possible use of this mode of language, which Geary suggests is possible: propaganda.)  I'll only add that none of these studies look at language at the micro level; none studied syntax, meter, pacing. None studied word choice, connotation, denotation, rhetoric. None studied figuration or tropes in any way. None of the three explore the narratives morphologically.  Instead, they look only at fictional narrative in the holistic or macro level, but suggest that fictional narrative, by itself--and the range in terms of talent, skill and art between the work of Stephanie Meyer and Anton Chekhov, I will dare to say, is great indeed--has powerful effects that should be explored more, and estimated in a different way.  I cannot think of a serious fiction writer or poet I know who doesn't already.

On Metaphor: Book Review: James Geary's *I Is an Other*

Twice today during his press conference on the debt limit talks, President Barack Obama used the word "entitlement" to describe the three major social safety net programs--Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--that the Republicans and even he and some Democrats want to put on the chopping block. Considering the terms you might use to describe these programs, "entitlement," which has become the standard among both parties, journalists, economists, and many others, strikes me as a terrible choice, but it's as common as daylight before between dawn and noon. I mention Obama's invocation of "entitlement" not to debate his or Congress's plans, but as an opening gambit in discussing James Geary's excellent and thorough new generalist study, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). Geary doesn't touch upon the term "entitlement" directly, but his larger argument demonstrates how such words work, and why they resonate for us in certain ways. What he does say is that if you take almost anything anyone says, you can pluck out metaphors almost every 10 to 25 words, or about 6 every minute. In this paragraph alone, I've used a number of them: "put on chopping block," "consider," "strikes me," "common as daylight" (a simile), "debate," "opening gambit," "demonstrate," "resonate," "pluck out," to name a few. We cannot communicate without it.

But first, back to entitlement: It's clear enough to me that the term is a naturalized metaphor, a noun deriving from the much older English verb "entitle," which appears in the 14th century, its origin Anglo-Norman, from entituler or entiteler, from the Latin intitulare, fr. in+titulus (title). "Entitle" originally meant to give a name or title to, as in a deed, right or claim, or for a text, though since the 1960s and the rise of pop psychology, "entitlement" has taken on a negative valence in psychology and the wider cultural discourse. We often speak of "entitled" people as those expecting something they they may or may not deserve. Yet even before pop psychology encoded in the word is the metaphorical idea of individuality and private ownership and authorship. "Entitlement's" metaphorical effects in politics are real. "Cutting entitlements" sounds far less troubling, and has a different cognitive and emotional effect on us, than appeals to "cutting the social safety net." This term is more obviously a metaphor: a "safety net" we can all easily visualize as something helpful—something we want--to catch us if we're on a trampoline or a highwire or any high place and might fall; the "social" involves a group of people, likely a community, which we also seek, at a prelinguistic level.

You might dismiss this as just so much ado about language and competing terms, or, more specifically, linguistic framing, as cognitive linguists like George Lakoff have rightly described it. But what Geary does, in 226 entertaining pages, plus ample end-notes, a fine bibliography, and a thorough index, is to show that in fact, the very use of terms like "entitlement" vs. "social safety net" affects--that is, impacts emotionally and psychologically—us at deep cognitive level, prelinguistically, in part because it plugs into our bodily experiences and understanding of the world. Take that "falling" aspect of the safety net: all humans, across languages, grasp the concept of falling and its dangers. Metaphors of "falling" often tend to be negative, across languages and cultures. The Biblical story of Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden of Eden is also known as a "the Fall," but all kinds of negative processes and their outcomes often include ideas of "falling." Falling ill, falling from grace, falling short, falling under a spell, falling to pieces, and so on, are all metaphorical uses of the term, idioms that English speakers often don't think twice about. Yes here's falling for someone, and falling in love, but also falling out of it.

Geary shows in every chapter that metaphors are more than just figurative uses of language. As he argues, "Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way of with words." (p. 3). Even the word "metaphor" itself is a metaphor, deriving from the Greek term to "carry over" (meta, across + pherein, to carry, related to English's to bear). In linguistic terms, it is a substitution of one term for another ("your eyes are diamonds"), and in psychocognitive terms, it is a powerful system for making meaning, one of the most important for any language and our understanding of the world, by leveraging what we sense and name, to create new names and ideas. Throughout the book and in particular at the beginning of each chapter, Geary points that poets, perhaps more so than many, have profoundly grasped metaphor's implications, as it is intrinsic to the poetry as an art and literary form. French poet Arthur Rimbaud's main principle, Je es un autre, or I is an other, is "metaphor's defining maxim, its secret formula, and its principal equation." (2) Indeed, poet Robert Frost, in a 1930 Amherst College address, "Education in Poetry," urged students to study metaphor to be able to "evaluate the claims made by historians or scientists, newspaper editorialists aor political campaigners," noting that we often don't grasp when we're being "fooled" by metaphor. (35) Geary links Frost's and other poets insights to the larger issue of metaphor's power in structuring our thinking, helping us both to see and ravel patterns, often without our realizing it, for metaphor arises out of our most basic human--we could even say animal—experiences in the world.

Rather than a technical study of metaphor, of which there are many, Geary synthesizes a raft of studies and discussions about how metaphor works and works on us. Chapters explore how every language represents a kind of "fossil poetry" such that the naturalization of metaphors I describe above permits the construction and development of languages, and enables other kinds of innovation and creativity; how it relates to our grasp of the abstractions of numbers and finance (sometimes to deleterious effect, as in the endless analogies to the "family around the kitchen table"); how it operates at various levels in the mind and brain, because there is a growing scientific study of metaphor; how, as I noted above with the political use of "entitlement" and other metaphors can have profound ramifications in advertising and political framing; why certain metaphors are nonfunctional or just laughably bad; and why those old saws and platitudes we heard from parents and relatives guide for us, even when we might consciously reject them as, well, so much empty language.

Geary demonstrates, through deft argumentation and copious citations of studies, that it's our sensory experience in the world that informs our metaphorical, and thus linguistic understanding, world. We cannot help but think of the sun as good and night as bad, at a primal level, or orientate ourselves in space and link this to metaphors of up and down or directionality; we process colors and associate these metaphorically without fully understanding how this operation occurs. Interestingly he does not point out, as Lakoff has, that the central idea underpinning the post-structuralist perspective of language and our systems of signification, that they are fundamentally arbitrary, as Ferdinand de Saussure suggested at the turn of the 20th century, is deeply problematic and cognitively and biologically just wrong. I particularly enjoyed his discussions, which he moves through with clarity and verve ("move" being a metaphor), of psychological and cognitive experiments that involve linguistic and even visual priming, using metaphors, which determine test participants' responses without their having any clue about how the language affected and effected their behavior. To give one example, one experiment exploring corporal metaphor use aimed to explore the priming effects of the "nation = body" metaphor by having participants read an article

ostensibly from a popular science magazine, describing airborne bacteria as ubiquitous and harmful to human health. Another group read a similar article describing airborne bacteria as ubiquitous but harmless to human health.

Both groups then read parallel articles about the history of U.S. domestic issues than immigration. The only difference between the two articles was that one contained "nation = body" metaphors...and the other did not.

Both groups then answered two questionnaires. The first gauged their agreement with statements about immigration and the minimum wage....The second assessed their concerns about contamination....Subjects who read the article describing airborne bacteria as harmful reported being more concerned about contamination. No surprise there.

But the same people also expressed more negative views about immigration when America was metaphorically described as a body. Those who read the more netural description of U.S. domestic issues had more positive views of immigration, even though they read the article describing bacteria as harmful. Both group's views about the minimum wage were about the same because, unlike immigration, the "nation=body" metaphor does not attend that issue. (128-129)

Researchers realized that manipulating someone's attitude about one issue (health) affected that person's attitude about an unrelated issue (immigration) if they were linked metaphorically. This is only one of many examples Geary provides, going so far as to cite legendary figures like neuroscientist V. Ramachandran, famous for his "phantom-limb" studies, but whose basic insights into synesthesia and graphemes offer a way of understanding how metaphor works, linking this idea to Wolfgang Köhler's 1929 discovery of the "bouba-kiki" effect, in which he showed Tenerife islanders two shapes, one hard and spiky, one soft and bloblike, and asked them associate them with two made-up words, "takete" and "baluba"; participants overwhelmingly linked the former to the spiky shape, the latter to the softer blob, and Ramachandran and cognitive psychologist repeated Köhler's experiment with the words "kiki" for "takete" and "bouba" for "baluba," getting the same result, with 98% of research subjects linking "kiki" to the spiky shape and so on.

This brings me back to the relentless use of "entitlement," mindless in the case of many journalists, unintentionally harmful in the case of a brilliant, liberal economist like Paul Krugman because it's the technical term he and his peers have learned to use, and extremely destructive as it leaves the mouths of the President and top Congressional leaders who, like the many sworn enemies of the social safety net, want to "reform" it, "privatize" it, and outright "end" it. What Geary goes a long way to proving is that metaphor is hardly an "abusio," as the old rhetorical term suggested, or a throwaway figure best left to the poets and having no meaning beyond being clever and illustrative, as some anti-rhetoricians might argue, but rather a foundational aspect of our human experience of the world intimately and indissolubly linked to how we think and speak and act. Language matters, metaphors especially, Geary makes clear, more than the vast majority us ever imagine.