Does reading change the way we think?

In my first few years of teaching English, when people asked why I had chosen this career, I liked to say that I had chosen it because they paid me to talk about love. This was horribly simplified, delightfully whimsical, and ultimately self-indulgent, I can see now, but it is not entirely untrue. The language arts classroom is one of the easiest places students can explore what it means to be human, because the literature we study brings those basic questions of human existence to the center.

Yet the study of literature is often under attack. Education standards press language arts teachers ever further in the direction of informational texts and media literacy. I don’t at all disagree that this other kind of reading needs to be taught. In a world continually shrunk by more communication, in which misinformation so easily spreads and has grave impacts on our societies–of course we need to be teaching how to read media critically. But we lose something at least as essential when we move away from literature.

Last week, a post on social media fired up again my passion for the teaching and reading literature. It was an iteration of articles I had come across in years past, the idea that the reading of literary fiction encourages the development of empathy. The particular study described in the article found correlations between subjects’ familiarity with literary as opposed to popular fiction authors and the subjects’ attributional complexity (our ability to recognize how others see the world differently from us) and egocentric bias (the idea that others see the world just as we do; in other words, that our way of seeing the world is correct). The study concludes that readers of literary fiction have stronger attributional complexity: they are better able to understand and explain differing perspectives of others. Readers of popular fiction, however, show more egocentric bias, as their beliefs about the world are confirmed and reinforced.

Although this particular study was correlational only (leaving open the possibility that these differences in cognition influence the kind of texts the subjects choose to read), they cite other experimental data that shows a clearer causal relationship, that the act of reading literary fiction increases that attributional complexity.

Of course, this is marvelous data for those of us trying to hold onto or win back some of literature’s place in the classroom. As a reader, though, it also makes me think about my own patterns of thought, and where they are good and where they sometimes trip me up. The thing is, sometimes I have wondered if I am too far down this road of attributional complexity for my own good.

This human quality of attributional complexity is important, and it is good in many ways. This ability to empathize, the study notes, is part of dismantling racist and other prejudicial attitudes. On the other hand, they point out, it is also associated with greater existential anxiety and worsening mental health, because attributional complexity disrupts our cultural worldviews (what the authors call an “individuating” process), which work to make the vicissitudes of life feel stable and predictable. By challenging these cultural worldviews, literary fiction can throw us into a question of meaning, unsure what, if anything, is really true. Popular fiction, because it more often confirms existing cultural narratives (thus “binding” us to them), helps us maintain that stability.

In its discussion section, the authors of the study argue that “A thriving human society must therefore allow, and in fact maintain, a continuous tension between these two seemingly incompatible sets of processes—those that are individuating and those that are binding.” Individuating processes (like attributional complexity) allow us to think critically about our world; binding processes (like egocentric bias) help us find our place in a community, to stick together as a group. At the one extreme, our communities disintegrate; on the other, they stifle us. The study argues that there should thus be no hierarchy of literary and popular fiction. Both processes are needed for us to function.

I wonder about these ideas, whether ripping up the worldview is always bad for the community, whether supporting it is good. I think that probably to a large extent it is true, though not entirely: that by plunging through the dark valley of disintegration, we can construct something better and more just, and that holding to the rigid worldview is at the root of the oppressive tyranny of dominant cultural narratives that are so harmful to minority groups. As a reader and writer of literary fiction, I see the disintegration of worldviews around me, the reintegration of others that then are disassembled. I can see that if it never stops, we will lose ourselves. Sometimes it does feel like I live on sand!

These rambling thoughts are one more step along the path to understanding what we’re doing here, with this writing, these different fictions, which reveal truth, maybe. What do you think? Where do you see the power of fiction to impact our thinking? How have stories shaped you?

I’ve finished A Grain of Wheat, and I’m now beginning Albert Camus’s The Outsider (this is apparently the British title; in North America, it is called The Stranger).

Best wishes for the coming week, happy writing, and happy reading,
Jimmy