Review

Fiction: Simulation of Social

Worlds
Keith Oatley1,*

Fiction is the simulation of selves in interaction. People who read it improve their
Trends
understanding of others. This effect is especially marked with literary fiction,
In long-term associations and shorter-
which also enables people to change themselves. These effects are due partly term experiments, engagement in fic-
to the process of engagement in stories, which includes making inferences and tion, especially literary fiction, has been
found to prompt improvements in
becoming emotionally involved, and partly to the contents of fiction, which empathy and theory-of-mind.
include complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter
in daily life. Fiction can be thought of as a form of consciousness of selves and Improvements of empathy and theory-
of-mind derive both from practice in
others that can be passed from an author to a reader or spectator, and can be processes such as inference and
internalized to augment everyday cognition. transportation that occur during literary
reading, and from the content of fiction,
which typically is about human charac-
Simulation and Social Understanding ters and their interactions in the social
Plato [1] distrusted literary art and wrote of it as a ‘mimesis’, an imitation. He argued that, in daily world.
life, we see only shadows, not unchanging truths, such as those of mathematics. As an imitation
Comprehension of stories shares areas
of the everyday world, art is yet further removed from truth: a shadow of a shadow. Plato's line of
of brain activation with the processing
thinking may be among the reasons why literary art has, until recently, not been of much interest of understandings of other people.
in cognitive science.
Both fiction and everyday conscious-
ness are based on simulations of the
More helpful than ideas of imitation and shadows is the proposal [2] that a piece of art is a
social world; thus, reading a work of
metaphor: a ‘this’ is a ‘that’. In the oldest-known cave painting at Chauvet [3], a set of marks fiction can be thought of as taking in a
made on a cave wall 31 000 years ago (a ‘this’) is a rhinoceros (a ‘that’). Burial mounds from the piece of consciousness.
same period imply that stories were told about someone dead (‘this’) who was alive in memory or
The study of fiction helps us under-
on another plane (‘that’). It is a semantic idea, in which, by mapping from one domain to another,
stand how imagination works to create
we extend our understanding [4]. In evolutionary terms, art is an addition to the mind that is both possible worlds, and how mental mod-
recent and fundamental to our humanity. Science, too, is enabled by this same kind of thinking: a els are formed of others and ourselves.
scientific theory is a kind of metaphor [2].

At the time of Plato and Aristotle, ‘mimesis’ had two meanings [5]. The first was imitation and its
cognates; the second was ‘world-making’ or ‘world-creating’. In Aristotle's Poetics [6], ‘mime-
sis’ was the central concept, probably mainly in the second sense for which the modern term is
‘simulation’: meaning a complex metaphor extended in time [7–11]. Fiction is a set of simulations
of social worlds that we can compare, as it were stereoscopically, with aspects of our everyday
world, to suggest insights we might not achieve by looking with the single eye of ordinary
perception. Recent findings indicate that those who engage in such simulations, readers of
literary art, which is mostly fiction, have better understandings of other people than those who
do not. These findings could not have been made if Plato's misgivings were well founded. 1
Department of Applied Psychology
and Human Development, University
An important step in research on this issue was the finding [12] that, after controlling for factors of of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West,
age, IQ, level of education, and so on, the more people read, the better were their vocabulary, Toronto, ONT M5S 1V6, Canada

general knowledge, and other verbal abilities. The test of reading was the Author Recognition
Test, in which people are given a list of names and check those that they recognize as authors. *Correspondence:
This measure is a close proxy for how much reading people do as measured by diaries, keith.oatley@utoronto.ca (K. Oatley).

618 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
questionnaires, and behavioral means. A meta-analysis of effects of reading, including leisure
reading [13], shows that people who read more at an early age are more successful students.
Moreover, early reading predicts both verbal skills and the amount of reading that people do later
in life [14].

A modified Author Recognition Test includes authors of fiction, such as Alice Munro and Italo
Calvino, and of non-fiction, such as Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag [15]. With this modifi-
cation, people's reading of fiction and nonfiction can be estimated separately and, in this way, it
has been found [16] that the superior verbal abilities attributed to general reading are due largely
to reading fiction rather than explanatory nonfiction.

The first to show a social effect of reading fiction was Hakemulder, who called fiction a ‘moral
laboratory’ [17]. He found decreased acceptance of norms about male–female relations in
Algeria among people who read part of a novel about experiences of an Algerian woman, as
compared with people who read part of a nonfictional essay on the same subject. In a
comparable way, it has been found [18] that reading a piece of fiction about a counter-
stereotypical Muslim woman reduced bias in perceptions of Arab and Caucasian faces. Among
the implications are that fictional characters enable one to imagine what it might be like to be in
other people's situations.

If fiction is the simulation of social worlds then, similar to people who improve their flying skills in a
flight simulator, those who read fiction might improve their social skills [15]. Fiction might be
the mind's flight simulator. The main outcome measure used in this research is the Mind in the
Eyes Test [19], in which participants view 36 photographs of people's eyes and for each
choose among four terms to indicate what the person was thinking and feeling (Figure 1).

The Mind in the Eyes Test is an index of empathy and theory-of-mind that is not based on
narrative; therefore, effects cannot be explained by verbal competencies. Empathy can be
thought of as having an emotion similar to that of another person, which is elicited by seeing or
thinking about the person, and knowing the other is the source of the emotion [20,21]. ‘Theory-
of-mind’ is used by psychologists to mean inference about what another person is thinking. It is
also called ‘mind-reading’ and it overlaps with inference about what the person is feeling [22]. Its
neural bases and relation to empathy are becoming understood [23]. Another measure used in
this research [15] was the Interpersonal Recognition Test [24], in which participants answer
questions about what is going on among people in 15 video clips. Figure 2 shows partial
correlations for effects of reading fiction and nonfiction, controlling for the tendency to read
regardless of genre, as well as for age and education. For social understanding indicated by the
Mind in the Eyes Test, reading fiction gave rise to significantly higher partial correlations than did
reading nonfiction. With the Interpersonal Recognition Test, effects were in the same direction
but smaller.

Figure 1. Item from the Mind in the

Eyes Test. In the test, people view 36
photographs, of which this is one, and
choose among four terms to indicate what
each photographed person was thinking
and feeling. For this example, the four
terms are ‘reflective’ (correct), ‘aghast’,
‘irritated’, or ‘impatient’. The test is by
Baron-Cohen et al. [19].

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8 619

 0.4
∗ Key:
Mind in the eyes test
0.3 Interpersonal percepon task

0.2
^
Paral correlaon

0.1

Nonficon
0
Ficon
–0.1

–0.2

–0.3 ∗
–0.4 ∗ ^ p = .08
∗ p < .01

Figure 2. Associations of Reading Fiction and Nonfiction with Social Abilities. Partial correlations are shown for
amounts of reading of fiction and nonfiction with two measures of social cognition: the Mind in the Eyes Test and the
Interpersonal Perception Task. Data derived from [15].

Using the Mind in the Eyes Test as an outcome, the finding of a significant association of reading
fiction with greater empathy and theory-of-mind has been replicated [25], and found not to
depend on people who were more empathetic preferring to read fiction. The association
remained significant after controlling for personality and other individual differences. Better
scores on the Mind in the Eyes Test have been found for readers of romances and thriller-
detective stories [26], but not science fiction. In romances, the question is whether someone
might be a suitable sexual partner; in thrillers, a central issue is what might be going on in the
mind of the antagonist.

In pre-school children, having stories read to them and watching movies were both associated
with improved theory-of-mind, whereas just watching television had no such association [27].

Although the relation between lifetime reading and theory-of-mind is a correlational one,
direct causal effects have been found in experiments [28]. In one experiment, participants
assigned to read fictional stories scored better on the Mind in the Eyes Test than did those
assigned to read nonfictional essays. The effect was confirmed independently in another
experiment [29] in which, compared with nonfiction, the reading of fiction was found to
improve social understanding but not understanding of the physical world. In other experi-
ments [28], people who were given literary stories to read did better on several visual tests of
empathy than did people given popular stories. Self-reported empathy was also improved by
an assignment to read a literary short story compared with an assignment to read a literary
essay [30].

Improved empathy and theory-of-mind have also been shown in experiments with other media.
Viewing an award-winning television drama, such as West Wing or The Good Wife, improved
scores on the Mind in the Eyes Test, whereas viewing a documentary did not [31]. Comparable

620 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8

results have been found for a video game in which a student comes home from a year abroad to
find her family missing [32]. People who were introduced to the game in a narrative way did better
on the Mind in the Eyes Test than did those who were introduced to it by asking them, when
playing, to ‘register, memorize, and evaluate technical and game play properties of the game’
([32] p. 648).

On their own, studies based on estimates of lifetime reading might be dismissed as merely
correlational. On their own, most experimental studies in this field might be dismissed because
their outcomes occur soon after reading and may be due to priming, that is, making consid-
eration of character temporarily salient. Exceptions have been two longitudinal studies. In one
of these [33], a week after people had read a story, they were more empathetic if they had been
emotionally involved in it, but not if involvement had failed to occur. In another study, narrative
prompted empathy immediately after reading, and also prompted emotion and reflection in the
days after reading [34], but empathetic effects were not found with reading a piece of nonfiction.
The range of studies using different methods, based on long-term, medium-term, and short-
term outcomes, indicates an effect of narrative fiction that is potentially important.

Process and Content in Engagement with Stories

What is the basis for effects of improved empathy and theory-of-mind with engagement in
fiction? Two kinds of account are possible [35], process and content, and they complement
each other.

One kind of process is inference: engagement in fiction may involve understanding characters by
inferences of the sort we make in conversation [36] about what people mean and what kinds of
people they are [37]. In an experiment to test this hypothesis, participants were asked to read
Alice Munro's The Office [38], a first-person short story about a woman who rents an office in
which to write [39]. In one condition, the story starts in Munro's words, which include ‘But here
comes the disclosure which is not easy for me. I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too
presumptuous, phony, or at least unconvincing’. In a comparison version, the story starts with
readers being told directly what the narrator feels: ‘I’m embarrassed telling people that I am a
writer . . .’ ([39], p. 270). People who read the version in Munro's own words had to make
inferences about what kind of person the narrator was and how she felt. They attained a deeper
identification and understanding of the protagonist than did those who were told directly how
she felt. Engagement in fiction can be thought of as practice in inference making of this kind.

A second kind of process is transportation [40]: the extent to which people become emotionally
involved, immersed, or carried away imaginatively in a story. The more transportation that
occurred in reading a story, the greater the story-consistent emotional experience has been
found to be [40,41] (see also [33]). Emotion in fiction is important because, as in life, it can signal
what is significant in the relation between events and our concerns [42]. In an experiment on
empathetic effects [43], the more readers were transported into a fictional story, the greater were
found to be both their empathy and their likelihood of responding on a behavioral measure:
helping someone who had dropped some pencils on the floor. The vividness of imagery during
reading has been found to improve transportation and to increase empathy [44]. To investigate
such imagery, participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine were
asked to imagine a scene when given between three and six spoken phrases, for instance, ‘a
dark blue carpet’ . . . ‘a carved chest of drawers’ . . . ‘an orange striped pencil’ [45]. Three
phrases were enough to activate the hippocampus to its largest extent and for participants to
imagine a scene with maximum vividness. In another study [46], one group of participants
listened to a story and rated the intensity of their emotions while reading. In a second group of
participants, parts of the story that raters had found most emotional produced the largest
changes in heart rate and greatest fMRI-based activations.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8 621

One explanation of the effects of fiction based on content is in terms of literariness, especially in
the exploration of character. Although in their reading, some people like to follow trains of action,
others prefer to explore mental lives of characters [47]. Hakemulder [17] proposed that ‘The
complexity of literary characters helps readers to have more sophisticated ideas about others
emotions and motives than stereotyped characters in popular fiction’ ([17] p. 15) (see also [48]).
To test this idea, a version of the Author Recognition Test has been constructed [49] that
contains authors of literary fiction and of popular fiction. People who read more literary fiction
scored better on the Mind in the Eyes Test than did those who read more popular fiction.
Although the popularity of fiction is easily measured by sales on Amazon, the conceptualization
of literariness is still being constructed. Some steps have been taken. Characters in literary fiction
are more often complex; E.M. Forster [50] called them ‘round’ rather than ‘flat’. Moreover, literary
authors use stylistic means to invite emotional reflection and reappraisal. Such effects have been
called ‘defamiliarization’ [51,52], and studied empirically as ‘foregrounding’ [53,54]. This idea
relates closely to recent neurocognitive findings that language that is especially striking invites
aesthetic effects, vividness (see previous paragraph), and emotions [55] (Box 1). The very
literariness of literary works thus invites a kind of engagement that Barthes [56] has called
‘writerly’. Therefore, writers offer not description (or some other kind of imitation), but sugges-
tion, which Sanskrit theorists called ‘dhvani’ [57], and which they regarded as the heart of literary
writing. Prompted by such suggestion, the reader or audience member takes on a parallel,
writerly, role in the making of meaning [58,59]. This contrasts with a mode of reading that Barthes
[56] calls ‘readerly’, which he says is ‘a kind of idleness’ ([56] p. 4). This latter mode is more often
allowed by popular fiction, in which characters may function only to forward a plot. Although not
all stylistic effects have to do with character, when characters are depicted in a literary way, they
can prompt insight. Marcel Proust [60] put it like this:
A real human being, however deeply we sympathize with him, is perceived mainly by our
senses. This means that he remains opaque to us, and offers a dead weight that our
perceptions cannot lift. If a misfortune should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total
understanding we have of him that we can be moved by this . . . The discovery of writers of
fiction is the idea of replacing those parts that are impenetrable to the mind by an equal
quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say parts that our minds can assimilate ([60] p. 84, my
translation).

Box 1. Brain Bases of Engagement in Fiction

Although brain-based studies of fiction are few in comparison with brain-based studies of music and the visual arts [86], in
a recent trend immediate neurophysiological effects of reading or listening to literature (poetry and prose) are becoming of
interest, such that new methods and new models of literary reading are being developed [87,88]. This area can be called
‘neurocognitive poetics’ [87]. It combines theories of poetics (e.g., [89]), empirical studies of stylistic effects in literature
[53,54], and methods of recording brain activation, such as fMRI.

Among results in this area, there has been substantiation of the idea of fiction as ‘simulation’ [7–10] because areas of the
brain activated by mental processes depicted in a story are those used for the very same mental processes in the day-to-
day life of the reader. Thus, it has been found [90] that for people in an fMRI machine who read a story, when the
protagonist pulled a light cord, a region of the reader's brain concerned with grasping was activated. When the
protagonist ‘went through the front door into the kitchen’, a region of the reader's brain concerned with analyzing visual
scenes was activated (see also [91]).

Brain activations suggest that reading about facts gives rise to action-centered reconstruction of events, whereas
reading fiction gives rise to constructive simulations of what might have happened [92]. The sense of being moved
emotionally by art has been found to be associated with the Default Mode Network [93].

In terms of social effects, a comprehensive review of fMRI research on theory-of-mind and narrative comprehension [94]
was based on 20 samples for theory-of-mind prompted by stories, 43 for theory-of-mind prompted in a nonstory way,
and 23 concerned with comprehension of narratives. There were areas of common activation between brain areas
concerned with theory-of-mind prompted in a nonstory way and those concerned with comprehension of narratives, as
shown in yellow in Figure I.

622 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8

 (A)

(B) (C)

(D) (E)

Figure I. Brain Activations for Narrative Comprehension and Theory-of-Mind as Prompted by Story and
Nonstory Means. Yellow, overlap of narrative comprehension and theory-of-mind as prompted in non-story way; red,
narrative comprehension; green, theory-of-mind as prompted in non-story way; blue, theory-of-mind prompted in a story
way. (A–E) are slices through the brain. Reproduced from [90].

Character-based stories (perhaps especially those of a literary kind) encourage a sense of

shared humanity as a general mode. In a more specific mode, people form relations with fictional
characters. Such relations are called ‘parasocial’, because they are one-way: characters cannot
interact with a reader. Nevertheless, these relations can be intimate and important to the reader
[61]. Both general and specific modes tend to foster the emotional understanding of others.
Such effects have been confirmed in an experiment [62] in which more empathy was found in
people who read a literary version of a story about loss of a child, than in those who read less
literary versions of the same story.

A second kind of explanation is in terms of expertise [63]. A good way to think of fiction is in
terms of its subject matter: principally about what people are up to in their interactions with
each other. It involves what Bruner [64] calls ‘narrative thinking:’ about people's intentions
and the vicissitudes these intentions meet. He distinguishes this from ‘paradigmatic thinking’,

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8 623

about explanations of how physical processes work. When we read fiction, we become more
expert in its subject matter: understanding people and their intentions. By contrast, when we
read explanatory nonfiction we become more expert in its content: for instance, in genetics or
astronomy.

A third explanation based on content is about pluralism. Fiction invites us to engage in many
circumstances, and to experience many emotions in relation to many kinds of people. A few
sentences after those quoted above, Proust [60] writes that within an hour a novelist can set free
‘all kinds of happiness and misfortune, which would take years of our ordinary life to know’ ([60]
p. 84, my translation). As discussed in the second paragraph of this article, about metaphor, with
a work of fiction, an imagined world (a ‘this’) can become an aspect of our day-to-day world (a
‘that’). In addition, as we read, we too can become metaphorical [65]. We can remain ourselves
(‘this’) and also be Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice [66] or J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter (‘that’), in the novels that started with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
[67,68]. We need not lead just one life: by means of fiction, we can lead many lives.

Mental Models and Consciousness

Why is social understanding important? The reason is that we humans are the most social of all
the animals. From the age of about 18 months, humans know that both we and others can act in
the world, and can take part in joint activities [69,70]. In parallel, from comparisons among
primate species over evolutionary time, the social brain hypothesis [71] is that the large capacity
of the human brain is needed for our extensive social world. Thinking is based on mental models
[72]. In thinking about others in the social world, our models derive from matters such as
incidents in people's lives, and from inferences about their emotional states [36]. In such ways,
we incorporate in our models characteristics of up to about 150 people we know. Recursively,
too, we make models of people's models of others and ourselves [73]. The social brain
hypothesis has been confirmed in neuroimaging studies: the size of the social networks of
individuals correlates with the volume of their brain regions concerned with theory-of-mind [74].

Elements that become incorporated into mental models of others have been recognized from
conversations among students in university cafeterias and nonstudents in public places, such as
bars and trains [75]. Some 60% of males’ speaking time and 70% of females’ speaking time
were occupied by issues of social relevance: by relations, by personal experiences, and by future
social activity. Matters such as sport accounted for 8.7% of speaking time, and academic and
work-related topics for 13.5%. Everyday conversation offers input for the mental models of
others that people make in their social groups.

Although they do not disclose the whole of people's mental models and everyday conscious-
ness, topics of conversation provide a useful index of content. A convincing theory is that
consciousness is not so much a mechanism for deciding what to do immediately, but is a kind of
simulation in which we relate our knowledge and memories of other people and ourselves to the
current social situation and to possibilities for future social action [76,77]. Not only does this
accord with the social content of conversation but, in a striking way, it also corresponds to the
process and content of the simulations of fiction.

While some everyday consciousness can remain inside the individual mind and be externalized
in small pieces during conversations, fictional stories can be thought of as larger pieces of
consciousness that can be externalized by authors [78] in forms that can be passed to others
so that these others can internalize them as wholes, and make them their own. Thus, processes
of inference and concern with people in their interactions, in which we engage by reading
or watching fiction, are not only of the same kind as everyday consciousness, but can also
augment it.

624 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8

 Box 2. Artistic Literature and Indirect Communication Outstanding Questions
Artistic fiction enables people to change their personalities by small amounts, in their own way. Kierkegaard [95] called What would happen if people were
this ‘indirect communication’ (see also [96,97]). He writes that, ‘The indirect mode of communication makes commu- assigned to read literary fiction, popular
nication an art in quite a different sense than when it is conceived in the usual manner’. He says that in this mode one fiction, or nonfiction, over 3 months, on
might: ‘say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempting measures of empathy and theory-of-
to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way’ ([95] p. 247). mind that would include measures
such as the Mind in the Eyes Test
A finding of indirect communication occurred among people assigned to read Anton Chekhov's most famous short story and at least one behavioral outcome?
The Lady with the Little Dog or a control text of the same length and reading difficulty, which carried all the information of
the story, and which readers found just as interesting but not as artistic [98]. As compared with those who read the What are the long-term effects of
control text, those who read Chekhov's story changed their personalities by significant amounts, but in different ways: engaging with fiction? Do the effects
their own ways. The changes were mediated by the amount of emotion people experienced as they read (see the last, or do they decay over time?
discussion of transportation in the section on Process and Content in the main text).
How do people form mental models of
In a further study [99], people were randomly assigned to read a literary story or a literary essay. The genre of the text a person, for instance of a new friend in
people read, fiction or nonfiction, did not have much influence, but people who read a text they judged to be artistic daily life and of a new character in
changed their personalities, as compared with those who read a text they judged not to be artistic. Again, people fiction? What are the principal elements
changed their personalities not in one particular direction, but each in his or her own way (see also [100]). in such models, and how do novelists
suggest that such models are built?
In reading a piece of artistic literature, people tend to experience emotions, but not those of literary characters, who are
abstract beings. The emotions are the readers’ own in the simulations they are running. By contrast, when people read What neural processing occurs (Box 1)
or hear a narrative written to persuade, their feelings and conclusions tend to be those specified by the author [101]. when a literary protagonist does an
action that is significant in characteriz-
ing him or her?

Box 3. Personality and Character How are changes in the reader's per-
In psychology, there is personality; in fiction, there is character. The Big Five traits of personality (Extraversion, sonality, which occur in the reading of
Neuroticism, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness [102]) have been applied to characters in Victorian artistic literature (Box 3), related to
novels [103]. The literary characters were more often high in Agreeableness, but otherwise their distribution of traits was understandings of the self that are
similar to that of ordinary people. Agreement among raters indicated that these traits can be validated for literary newly acquired during reading?
characters [104].

One contrast between personality and character concerns stability. After the age of 30, people's self-ratings of their Big
Five traits of personality remain stable over 6 years [105]. In a subsample of this group, the researchers also had their
spouses rate the participants. Their ratings were close to those of their partners, and also remained stable. By contrast, in
fiction, although character is also stable, change can be far more important. In Austen's Pride and Prejudice [66] for
instance, both Elizabeth and Darcy change considerably, and the change is critical for the novel [59]. In reading fiction,
people tend to be alerted, and to regard the event as important, when something happens that does not fit with a
character's previous behavior [106].

A second contrast is between the generic and the particular. Personality is based on generic items, and is typically used
to predict some outcome, for instance academic success [107]. Although dispositions of the kind that occur in tests of
personality traits can contribute to the mental models we make of others [108], for the most part our models tend to
be based on memories of specific incidents and actions. Character in fiction is closer than a personality profile to the kinds
of mental model we make of someone we know.

A third contrast is based on the actor–observer difference [109] as follows. If I walk across a room and stumble on a toy
left on the floor, as the actor I tend to say I nearly tripped because of the toy. It is an inward attribution. If I see a person do
the same thing, as an observer I tend to make an outward judgment, of personality: the person is careless. Observer-
based thinking can slide into judgments of people as being wrong-headed, or as belonging to an alien religion or ethnic
group. Seeing a character more inwardly [65], as an actor in a social world, can enable him or her to be experienced as
more like ourselves.

Concluding Remarks
In cognitive psychological studies, engagement in fiction has been found to improve empathy
and social understanding, and comparable effects have been shown in studies based on brain
imaging (Box 1). Literary fiction has been found especially good for improving understanding
of other minds, and literary texts have also been found to invite changes in readers’ personalities
(Box 2). The concept of personality in psychology compares usefully with that of character in
fiction (Box 3).

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2016, Vol. 20, No. 8 625

Fiction is not well thought of as an imitation of life. For psychological insight and empirical study, it
is better thought of as a kind of simulation that enables exploration of minds and their interactions
in the social world. The social world is complex and, although we humans are good at
understanding others, we are not always that good [79]; literary simulations help us to improve.
Such simulations are invited not by descriptions but by suggestions as to how the imagined
world can be constructed. Always it is an individual matter: no two readings of a book are the
same [80], and many works of literary art aim at ambiguity [59,81,82], which in turn invites
readers to think and feel for themselves. With this approach, results on how fiction can prompt
empathy and the understanding of others have begun to accumulate. It has become clear that
the most striking improvements are in understandings of the social world, rather than of thinking
more generally.

During the past few generations, empathy has increased in many countries. This is one of the
most momentous political changes of the past 5000 years [83]. One of its consequences has
been acknowledgement of the rights of other people, even when these others belong to different
cultures. Some of these changes have depended on people reading fiction. Literariness has
been found to contribute significantly to the fiction-based understanding of others, but this does
not mean that reading needs to be highbrow or difficult. Popular fiction that includes complex
characters can also have beneficial effects. It has been found, for instance, that reading Harry
Potter can enable reduction in prejudice [84]. In a developing trend of research on narrative
[64,85] it has been found that, rather than being just a pass-time, engaging with fiction is
fundamentally helpful in enabling us to understand each other as human beings. This is,
perhaps, as important as anything in engineering or economics.

Although more is needed (see Outstanding Questions), research on engagement in fiction has
already shown the mind at work in processes of inference and emotion, with subject matters that
include understanding people from the inside as well as from the outside, in a manner that is not
always easy to approach in other ways.

Fiction is simulation of a similar kind to that of consciousness; it is a form of consciousness that

can be passed from one mind to another in a way that can augment our day-to-day thinking.
Similar to everyday consciousness, it relates what we know and remember, to people in our
social world, and to possible effects of action in that world.

Acknowledgments
The idea of effects of fiction being due to process and content is due to Raymond Mar, whom I thank warmly for
collaboration in the matters discussed here. I also thank Philip Johnson-Laird, Rebecca Schwarzlose, and two thoughtful
reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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