The appealing idea
A common belief is that people who read stories become more understanding of others. The reasoning is simple. A novel lets you follow a person’s thoughts, hopes and mistakes for hundreds of pages, often more closely than you ever could with a real acquaintance. By the end, you may feel you understand someone very different from yourself.
That experience is real for many readers. Whether it changes how they behave toward actual people is a harder question, and researchers do not agree on the answer. This article explains the idea, how it might work, and where honest caution is needed.
Two things people call empathy
The word covers more than one ability, and it helps to separate them.
- Cognitive empathy is working out what someone else is thinking or feeling. It is a kind of understanding, sometimes called perspective-taking.
- Emotional empathy is feeling something in response to another person’s feelings, such as sharing a friend’s excitement or sorrow.
Neither is the same as kindness, compassion or helpfulness, and both are usually folded into broader talk of emotional intelligence. A person can understand exactly how someone feels and still act badly, and a person can be very caring without being especially good at guessing feelings. When you read claims that books increase empathy, it is worth asking which of these is meant.
How stories might help
Taking a character’s view
Narration often places the reader inside a character’s head. You learn why they hesitate, what they fear, and how events look from their position. Doing this repeatedly may exercise the habit of imagining others’ feelings. Reading widely, including diverse perspectives from people whose lives differ from yours, may stretch that habit further. Readers sometimes describe this as stepping into stories, and it is the core of the argument for fiction’s social value.
Practice with ambiguity
Real people rarely explain themselves. Stories often leave motives partly hidden, so the reader has to infer them from what a character says, does or avoids saying. That is a kind of practice at reading people, as well as text. It may be one reason why some researchers are interested in literary fiction in particular, where characters are often left unexplained.
Language for feelings
Books give names to emotional experiences and describe them in detail. A reader who has met many descriptions of jealousy, guilt or relief may find it easier to recognize and talk about those states in themselves and in others.
Low-stakes exposure
In life, imagining someone else’s position can be uncomfortable when it involves conflict or disagreement. In a story the stakes are borrowed, so a reader may feel freer to consider a viewpoint they would resist in an argument.
What the evidence looks like
This article reports no study of its own. In general terms, research on reading and empathy includes small experiments in which people read a short text and then complete a task, such as judging emotions from photographs of eyes or answering questions about a social scenario. It also includes surveys that compare how much people read with how they score on empathy questionnaires.
The overall picture is mixed:
- Some studies report small positive links between reading fiction and certain empathy measures.
- Some experiments find short-lived effects that fade quickly.
- Some efforts to repeat earlier findings have produced weaker results or none.
- Surveys cannot show whether reading builds empathy or whether empathic people are simply drawn to stories.
- The measures used are narrow, and a test of reading emotions from photographs is far from real-life kindness.
A reasonable summary is that reading fiction may be linked to modest gains in some kinds of social understanding for some people, but the strength and durability of the effect remain uncertain.
Caveats to keep in mind
Fiction is not the only route
Memoir, reportage, history and essays about people can also invite understanding. Direct conversation, volunteering, travel and friendship with people unlike yourself are likely to matter at least as much, and probably more.
Absorption cuts both ways
A story can deepen understanding, but it can also reinforce stereotypes if the portrayals are shallow or one-sided. A single narrator is also only one person’s account. Reading a variety of voices helps guard against mistaking one portrayal for a whole group.
Feeling is not doing
Being moved by a book does not guarantee that anyone will behave differently afterward. Some readers feel they have done something good simply by feeling something, which is a risk rather than a benefit.
Individual differences are large
Some readers find that fictional lives feel vivid and affecting; others stay detached. Neither is a flaw. People also differ because of temperament, background, and conditions that affect how they read emotions. Readers who are autistic, for example, may relate to stories in their own ways, and it would be wrong to assume that a lower or higher response to fiction reflects a deficit.
Empathy has costs too
Taking on others’ distress without limits can be tiring. For caregivers or people with demanding jobs, empathy fatigue is real, and reading is no remedy for that.
Getting more from reading about people
If you want to make the most of what stories can offer, a few habits may help:
- Read characters you disagree with and ask what they want and why.
- Seek out voices from different places, times and walks of life.
- After a chapter, consider how the same event might look to another character.
- Talk about the book with someone who read it differently.
- Let curiosity about the book lead you toward curiosity about the people around you.
None of this is a technique that guarantees results. It is simply a way to treat reading as an invitation to attend to other minds, and then to carry that attention into ordinary life.
If you or someone you know has difficulty understanding or relating to others in a way that causes distress, a qualified professional can offer support that a book cannot.