I want to tell you about a study that changed the way I think about fiction. In 2013, psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a paper in Science magazine showing that reading literary fiction temporarily improved performance on tests measuring empathy, specifically the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions. Not self-help books. Not nonfiction about emotional intelligence. Fiction. Made-up stories about made-up people improved real-world emotional perception.

The study was controversial when it was published, and it remains controversial, partly because replication attempts have produced mixed results and partly because the distinction the researchers drew between “literary” and “popular” fiction irritated a lot of people. I have my own problems with the study’s methodology. But the core finding, that engaging with fictional minds can improve our ability to understand real ones, has been supported by enough subsequent research that I think we can take it seriously.

This matters to me personally because I run a publishing house. I spend my professional life trying to get people to read fiction. If fiction actually makes people better at understanding each other, that’s not just a nice side benefit. It’s a reason to consider fiction reading as something more than entertainment. And the science, while still developing, points in an interesting direction.

What We Mean by Empathy

Before getting into the research, it’s worth being precise about what we’re talking about. Empathy isn’t a single thing. Psychologists generally distinguish between at least two types. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person is thinking or feeling. It’s a mental skill, the capacity to model someone else’s interior state. Affective empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling, to share their emotional experience. You can have one without the other. A con artist might have excellent cognitive empathy (they understand your emotions perfectly) and terrible affective empathy (they don’t care about your emotions at all).

Most of the fiction-empathy research focuses on cognitive empathy, specifically a sub-skill called “theory of mind,” which is the ability to attribute mental states to others and understand that those mental states may differ from your own. Theory of mind is what lets you understand that your friend is smiling politely at a joke she doesn’t find funny, or that your colleague is asking a question he already knows the answer to in order to make a point. It’s the ability to read below the surface of human behavior.

This is relevant because fiction, particularly good fiction, is essentially a theory-of-mind exercise. When you read a novel, you’re constantly inferring the mental states of characters based on their actions, dialogue, and the narrator’s descriptions. You’re asking yourself: why did she say that? What is he really thinking? What does this character want, and does it differ from what they claim to want? These are the same questions you ask in real social interactions, but fiction gives you a safe, low-stakes environment to practice them.

The Kidd and Castano Study

The original 2013 study worked like this. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a short piece of literary fiction, a short piece of popular fiction, a piece of nonfiction, or nothing. After reading (or not reading), they took the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, a well-established measure of theory of mind that asks participants to identify emotions from photographs of people’s eyes. The results showed that participants who read literary fiction performed significantly better on the test than the other groups.

The researchers argued that literary fiction was more effective than popular fiction because it tends to feature more psychologically complex characters whose motivations aren’t spelled out explicitly. In genre fiction, they suggested, characters tend to be more clearly defined, with motivations that are stated or easily inferred. Literary fiction forces the reader to do more interpretive work, to puzzle out what characters are thinking and feeling from subtle cues, which exercises the same cognitive muscles used in real-world social perception.

This distinction between literary and popular fiction generated a lot of pushback, and rightly so. The categories are fuzzy. Is Ursula K. Le Guin literary fiction or genre fiction? Is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go literary or science fiction? The researchers used the somewhat crude metric of whether the text had won or been nominated for a literary prize, which is at best a rough proxy for psychological complexity. I think the more useful takeaway is not that literary fiction is empathy-building while genre fiction isn’t, but that psychologically complex fiction, wherever you find it, engages theory of mind more intensely than psychologically simple fiction.

What Subsequent Research Has Shown

The 2013 study generated a wave of follow-up research, and the picture that’s emerged is more nuanced than the original headlines suggested. Some replication attempts found similar effects. Others didn’t. A 2016 meta-analysis by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, looked across multiple studies and found a small but consistent positive relationship between reading fiction and social cognitive abilities. The effect wasn’t huge, but it was there, and it was statistically significant across the body of research.

One important finding from the subsequent research is that the empathy effect seems to be cumulative. A single short story might produce a temporary blip in theory-of-mind performance, but sustained fiction reading over time appears to produce more lasting effects. A study by Raymond Mar and colleagues found that lifetime fiction reading (measured by an author-recognition test) was a significant predictor of empathy and social cognition, even after controlling for personality traits, intelligence, and nonfiction reading. People who read a lot of fiction, over years and decades, tend to be better at reading other people.

This makes intuitive sense. You wouldn’t expect a single session of physical exercise to permanently improve your fitness. But years of regular exercise obviously do. If fiction reading exercises theory of mind, it stands to reason that the benefits accumulate with sustained practice. A lifetime reader of complex fiction has, in effect, spent thousands of hours practicing the skill of understanding other minds.

The Neuroscience Angle

Brain imaging studies have added another layer to this research. When people read fiction, their brains don’t just process language. They simulate the experiences described in the text. If a character in a novel picks up a cup of coffee, the motor regions of the reader’s brain show activation patterns similar to those involved in actually picking up a cup. If a character feels afraid, the reader’s amygdala, the brain region associated with fear processing, shows increased activity.

This phenomenon, sometimes called “neural simulation” or “embodied cognition,” means that reading fiction is not a purely intellectual exercise. It’s a form of vicarious experience. Your brain, at a neurological level, is partially living through the events of the story. When you read about a character’s grief, your brain processes that grief in ways that overlap with how it processes real grief. Not identically, of course, but with enough overlap that the experience can affect your emotional understanding.

Researchers at Emory University published a study in 2013 (coincidentally the same year as the Kidd and Castano paper) showing that reading a novel produced measurable changes in brain connectivity that persisted for days after the reading was finished. Specifically, activity increased in regions associated with language processing and in the central sulcus, a region involved in processing sensation and movement. The researchers described this as the brain’s “shadow activity,” a residual simulation of the physical and sensory experiences described in the novel.

What this suggests is that fiction reading isn’t just training your ability to understand other people’s thoughts. It’s training your ability to share their physical and sensory experiences. This bridges the gap between cognitive and affective empathy: you’re not just figuring out what someone else is feeling, you’re partially feeling it yourself, through the medium of neural simulation.

Why Fiction and Not Nonfiction

A reasonable question is: if the goal is to understand other people, why not just read nonfiction about psychology or human behavior? Why would made-up stories be more effective than factual accounts?

I think the answer lies in the nature of fictional access. In real life and in most nonfiction, you can only observe other people’s behavior and infer their inner states. You can never truly know what someone else is thinking. Fiction breaks this limitation. A novel can take you inside another person’s mind in a way that no real-world interaction can. You can experience a character’s thoughts, fears, contradictions, and self-deceptions from the inside, with a level of access that would be impossible even with your closest friend.

This access is what makes fiction uniquely suited to empathy training. When you read a first-person narration by a character whose worldview is profoundly different from your own, you’re not just learning about that worldview intellectually. You’re inhabiting it. For the duration of the reading, you’re seeing through someone else’s eyes, processing their experiences with their values and their history. That’s a different kind of understanding than what you get from reading an anthropological study of the same community.

Nonfiction can inform. Fiction can transform. Both are valuable, but they work through different mechanisms. A nonfiction book about life in a refugee camp can give you facts, statistics, and reported accounts. A novel set in a refugee camp can give you the interior experience of a specific person living that life, with all its texture, contradiction, and emotional complexity. The facts inform your understanding. The fiction shapes your capacity for understanding.

The Limits of the Research

I want to be honest about the limitations, because overstating the case helps nobody. The fiction-empathy research is suggestive, not definitive. The effects measured in individual studies are often small. Replication has been inconsistent. The causal direction is debated: does reading fiction make you more empathetic, or are empathetic people simply drawn to fiction? (The answer is probably both, which makes isolating the causal effect difficult.)

There are also questions about which aspects of fiction drive the effect. Is it the psychological complexity of the characters? The narrative perspective (first person vs. third person)? The emotional intensity of the subject matter? The length of the text? Different studies have focused on different variables, and there’s no consensus on which specific features of fiction are most responsible for the empathy effect.

And the practical significance of the measured effects is debatable. If reading a short story temporarily improves your performance on a lab test of emotion recognition by a few percentage points, does that translate into being a better partner, parent, colleague, or citizen? Maybe. But the connection between a lab measure and real-world social behavior is not straightforward. The leap from “slightly better at identifying emotions in photographs of eyes” to “more compassionate human being” requires more evidence than we currently have.

That said, the convergence of behavioral studies, neuroscience, and correlational research paints a picture that’s hard to dismiss entirely. Something is happening when people read fiction, something that relates to how they understand and relate to other people. The exact mechanism and the practical magnitude are still being worked out, but the basic finding, that fiction engages and exercises our capacity for social understanding, seems robust.

What This Means for Readers

I don’t think anyone should read fiction primarily to become more empathetic. That’s a terrible reason to read, like eating chocolate primarily for the antioxidants. Read fiction because it’s pleasurable, because it’s interesting, because it takes you somewhere you’ve never been and introduces you to people you’d never meet otherwise. If it also exercises your empathy muscles, consider that a bonus.

But I do think the research gives us a reason to take fiction reading seriously as a social practice, not just a private hobby. A society of fiction readers might be a more understanding society, not because individual readers have been converted by specific books, but because the cumulative practice of imagining other minds makes people slightly more attuned to the minds around them.

This has implications for education, where fiction reading has been declining in favor of informational texts. It has implications for policy, where arts and humanities funding is often justified on economic grounds (the creative economy, cultural tourism) rather than on the harder-to-measure grounds of social cohesion. And it has implications for how we think about leisure time, because an evening spent reading a novel is not just relaxation. It’s a form of social and emotional exercise that may make us marginally better at being human.

What This Means for Writers

If fiction’s empathy effect is driven by psychological complexity, then writers who create multi-dimensional, contradictory, fully realized characters are doing something socially valuable. A character whose motivations are obvious requires no theory of mind to understand. A character whose motivations are opaque, who says one thing and means another, who has desires they won’t admit to themselves, requires the reader to engage in genuine cognitive work. That work is the exercise.

This doesn’t mean every novel needs to be a dense psychological study. A well-drawn character in any genre can engage the reader’s empathic capacities. A science fiction novel with characters who have genuinely alien motivations. A mystery where the detective’s emotional life is as complex as the crime. A romance where the obstacles to connection are internal and psychological rather than external and circumstantial. Any fiction that treats its characters as full human beings, rather than as functions of the plot, is doing this work.

At ScrollWorks, this is something we actively look for in the manuscripts we acquire. I want characters that resist easy understanding. Characters that surprise me. Characters whose actions make me stop and think about why a person might do that. That quality, the demand that the reader engage imaginatively with another mind, is part of what makes fiction valuable. It’s also, I believe, part of what makes it enjoyable. The pleasure of fiction is largely the pleasure of understanding, or trying to understand, someone who isn’t you.

If the science is even partially right, then every time you open a novel, you’re not just entertaining yourself. You’re practicing one of the most important skills a person can have: the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. That practice might not save the world. But a world where more people practiced it would, I suspect, be a meaningfully better one.

If you’re looking for fiction that demands this kind of engaged, empathic reading, I’d point you toward Still Waters and The Last Archive, both of which center on characters whose inner lives resist easy summary. They’re the kind of books this research makes me believe in more than ever.