RENEE CRONLEYFiction’s greatest superpower, is that it teaches empathy. Empathy requires us to suspend our egos and see the world through someone else’s eyes. There’s a common misconception that empathy is instinctive, but it’s not—rather the capacity for it is inborn but it’s still a learned behavior. It’s not easily learned either; it takes practice and patience. But it’s important for navigating complex social relationships and responding to situations appropriately. Anyone who’s had to deal with someone high in narcissistic traits knows the devastation that ensues from impaired empathy. Empathy is the highest form of emotional intelligence. Reading fiction is a powerful exercise in empathy, according to Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York. According to Kidd, “What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others.” Consuming non-fiction teaches subject matter, but does not necessarily require the reader to think about it.
There’s a theory in psychology called narrative transportation that proposes when people lose themselves in a story, their attitudes and intentions change to reflect that story. The character may be nothing like the reader. They may be a different age, gender, culture or from a different circumstance in life. Fiction takes the reader inside the mind and perspective of the character into a world that is defined on their terms—forcing the reader to make choices they wouldn’t normally make, challenging preconceived notions and expectations. The real world is a complicated puzzle and people only get to see it in pieces, so it’s hard to visualize how they all fit together in the long term. Fiction puts the big picture into context by taking those important pieces, highlighting them and juxtaposing them against each other in an expedited fashion. Learning lessons that might take a lifetime to learn over the course of the time it takes to read the story. Storytelling is an art, and if it’s done right, can transport the reader into the story and change how they see the world—regardless of whether or not the story is true.
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