Fiction's Psychocognitive Effects, Part II + Toibín & Eugenides in Conversation

Last month I posted a little musing entitled "Can Fiction Improve Empathy and Provoke Aggression," which focused on some of the more recent findings by psychological researchers, cognitive scientists, and communications scholars on the neurocognitive effects of fictional works of art and entertainment, which, as I was mentioning to a colleague recently, suggest that at least on these and similar accounts, and despite lacking our extensive contemporary knowledge of how the brain functions, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and a few other past thinkers were in fact right, and some of the major 20th century literary theorists and philosophers who wrote about how language works were perhaps off track. The other day I came across a link to another such study, "Misinformation on TV Drama Can Gain Credibility," which reporter Tom Jacobs wrote up on Miller-McCune's newssite. Yet again, it seems, poetic and philosophical wisdom accrued over centuries is more correct than we might think.

Jacob focuses on a study, "The Delay Hypothesis: The Manifestation of Media Effects over Time," by University of Utah communications researcher Jakob Jensen, who looked at the effects of misinformation embedded in a fictional TV show.  Jensen and a research team had 147 students watch an episode of Boston Legal that contained misinformation about EpiPens, which are used to deliver safe doses of epinephrine to people suffering from various kinds of anaphylactic or similar allergic reactions or shocks. In the episode, however, the delivery went awry, a narrative twist that upset EpiPen advocacy groups.  Immediately after the episode, Jensen gave all the students a questionnaire exploring how they related to the characters, how real the show seemed, and how deeply it drew them into its world. He then gave half of the students a questionnaire on the efficacy and safety of EpiPens.

Two weeks later, Jensen and his team mailed all the students a survey on the show, but only asked those who had not previously received the second part of the questionnaire their thoughts on the efficacy of the EpiPens. As it turned out, "individuals queried two weeks after exposure to the television program were more likely to endorse the false belief than those queried immediately after exposure."  This mirrored the results of a 2007 study by University of Cologne researchers Markus Appel and Tobias Richter. As Jensen and his colleagues note, "Two studies have now shown that fiction (written and televised) can produce a delayed message effect," a potentially problematic outcome given that "people are bombarded by mass media every day all over the world, and a sizeable (and growing) body of mass communication research has demonstrated that much of this content is distorted in a multitude of ways."

In essence Jensen was observing a "sleeper effect," in which a piece information in sediments in our minds and we forget it came from an unreliable source, or misinformation sediments and we forget not just the source but that it's misinformation.  Jacobs points out that the "sleeper effect" was first proposed in the 1940s, and confirmed in a 2004 meta-analysis. Yet Plato feared this effect, among others--the "empathy" and the "aggression," as well as other possible modeled and reflective responses--in persuasive, imaginative fictional works, while Aristotle argued that in fact they could have positive, "cathartic" effects.  Many centuries later Nietzsche, among his many other insights, suggested that we engage in such truth-making, sometimes out of lies, half-truths and self-rationalizations, on a societal basis, thus creating truths and sometimes embedding them in various forms of narrative (including religion), however contrary they may be to the material facts around us. One response might be to reject such truths and facts altogether and create one's own, as more than one political operative, party and entire nation has done over the years.

In their 2007 paper, "Persuasive Effects of Fictional Narratives Increase of Over Time," Appel and Richter concluded:

The present study suggests that fictional narratives can have a persistent implicit influence on the way we view the world, and that these effects may last longer than the effects of typical explicit attempts to change beliefs by presenting claims and arguments. Apart from the unintended consequences this instance might have, fictional narratives are a powerful educational tool which on the one hand may be used in a planned and reasonable way to change beliefs and behavior concerning existential topics such as HIV or school education (Singhal et al., 2004). On the other hand, applied fictional persuasion also includes the marketing of political ideas and products in television soap operas without viewers’ awareness (e.g., Lilienthal, 2005) and similar phenomena.

When I discussed this with my graduate fiction class the other night, one student noted that one way to think about this was that fiction and fictional works were essentially propaganda, or could have propagandistic effects. I agreed and thought to myself that many an author, going back many centuries, had intuitively grasped this concept, and instantly thought, in terms of the Anglophone novel, of Samuel Richardson's thoughts about the possible salutary moral effects of works such as Clarissa and Pamela, to give an early example. But, so had many a philosopher, pope and tyrant understood this, which was perhaps one explanation why so many rulers and their censors had taken such extreme steps over the years, from proscribing works of fiction to burning them to proscribing and burning the authors behind them.  I also thought of the long history of important critical work by authors and scholars that raised questions about the effects of various kinds of representations, especially sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, and other discriminatory ones, and the not-infrequent dismissal of such questions based on flawed understandings, particularly of subtle, delayed and influential psychocognitive effects of fiction narratives and the representations embedded in them. To give one example, I was thinking of all of the deleterious representations, stretching throughout the history of Hollywood cinema, from its inauguration up through today, of African Americans, and how even in the face of rational challenges, the "sleeper effect" still plays a role. (This came up a few years ago when I assigned the Joan Crawford vehicle Mildred Pierce in my aesthetics class for the unit on "sentimentality," and we spent a portion of the class talking not about that concept but about the minstrelsy imposed, extraneously to the plot, on Butterfly McQueen's character, which was the sort of eruption that Tisa Bryant explored in her wonderful first book, Unexplained Presence.) One could make similar arguments for other groups. The same is true, I realized, for a good deal of American literature, which also got me thinking in a converse sense about the appeal to respectability among New Negro and early 20th black bourgeois leaders.

So, whether in the absence of intentional, conscious propagandizing, as with a J.W. von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, which precipitated a spate of suicides much as its young protagonist had subected himself to, or when it is overt, as with Ayn Rand, whose dreadful novels' spellbinding effects on so many often quite intelligent, sometimes extraordinarily smart minds, might perhaps now be clearer to the rest of us, the psychocognitive effects of fictional narratives, whatever the media or genre--stories and novels; films and videos; TV shows--still, it seems, tend to be understimated.  Fiction and fictions, then, and as I explored in the discussion this summer, of metaphor, which is to say LANGUAGE in its various imaginative forms, modes and genres, is more important and powerful than we tend to credit it, thus raising some important ethical questions that I don't think writers discuss enough, on an individual basis, with each other, or with readers. (J. M. Coetzee directly poses and dramatizes some of these ethical questions around writing in his strange and powerful novel Elizabeth Costello.) Perhaps I'll pursue some of these questions on here at some point soon.

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This piece reminded me of something I had been wanting to post, a brief conversation in the New York Times at the very beginning of this month, featuring two highly lauded contemporary fiction writers, Colm Toibín and Jeffrey Eugenides. In it they discuss their work and fiction as an art form, focusing especially on their choices of realism as a mode and genre. I wish the piece were longer. I also wish the NY Times would post more such conversations and less of its own reporters' narratives masquerading as news, but that is unlikely to happen, so at least I've gotten that out.

Says Eugenides:

The predicament of the contemporary novelist isn’t that different from the one in which my heroine finds herself in “The Marriage Plot.” You told me earlier that when Madeleine tells Leonard that she loves him, her avowal is open to being “read” or mocked. That is, she knows from structuralist theory that the words “I love you” are a trope and that romantic love is a social construct. And yet that doesn’t keep her from being desperately in love with Leonard. Isn’t this how a lot of novelists feel right now? We know from our Derrida that narrative is exhausted and character a fraud. We know that we might be “mocked” for persisting in writing realist fiction. But we keep on doing it! Because we think there is something about reality, and especially about human consciousness, that can be accurately described and that the novel is the best way to do it.

Ah yes, there is something about reality, and especially about human consciousness, that can be accurately described--but, Mr. Eugenides, as many a predecessor has shown and as the mind scientists above demonstrate, there are quite a few things about human consciousness than can be shaped and molded as well. And the novel is one way to do.

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.

Friday Full Fare (Reed on Precious, 2.0 + Embodied Cognition + Killer Phones + Free Stuff)

I still haven't seen Precious, Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, though I suppose I'll get around to it eventually. Having read the book, I really have no desire to see the movie, though many people whose opinions I value, including a notable Black filmmaker, have told me not only that Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique (at right, Lucy Nicholson - Reuters), like others in the cast, turn in excellent performances, and I believe them, because Mo'Nique could act her way out of a lead safe, but that they thought the film was very good.

My old prof, Ishmael Reed, isn't having it, nor is he having Hollywood's praise for and hyping of this film, nor, for that matter, producers Tyler Perry and Oprah [Winfrey]. Back in November I mentioned (and updated in December) his full-blast critiques of the movie, and he breaks it down, in much more condensed form, in today's New York Times: "Fade to White." A sampling:

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

Yes sirree.

Any surprise that this film is also high on the Oscar buzz list?
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About three weeks ago while discussing orality and literacy I was trying to make a point in class and reached for a name I usually can utter without pausing--UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff--but what came to mind was a completely different scholar and intellectual, George Landow (the hypertext guru, of Brown University) ["I said Landow when I meant Lakoff" almost sounds like a line from a Michael Palmer poem, doesn't it?], so I offered a verbal ellipsis, to be filled in later, to the class, and proceeded to the next point.

Lakoff is probably best known for his important linguistic insights and, perhaps more widely, for the brief moment of public attention he received when the Democrats, who for a host of reasons, are incapable of sustained effective messaging, turned to him after their 2004 electoral disasters to help craft their appeals to voters. New York Times writer Matt Bai even wrote a longish Times Magazine piece about it. Lakoff's ideas on "framing" incurred some caricatures and ridicules--he wants the Democrats to use special words and phrases to gull people was the gist--but his larger ideas, about how people cognize ideas and why frames are so crucial, how metaphors are embodied, and so on, which in fact would have and should be internalized by every liberal commentator, though they still aren't, got lost in the shuffle. (Cf. "Jobs bill" vs. "stimulus package," "Employment spending" vs. "Deficit growth," etc.) Republican messengers--"death tax," "death panels," "welfare queens," etc.--long ago figured this out.

More stuff + the free joint after the jump!