Well, now it's actually come around to being morally improving - hand me that novel!
How far we have come from the days when novel reading was A VICE up there with drinking tea and Ye Heinous Sinne of Onan.
It’s official! According to science, reading fiction makes you nicer. Dodell-Feder and Tamir noted that the nature of the link between fiction and social awareness is still not fully clear; they recommended that future research investigate fiction’s impact on real-world and day-to-day social functioning. But in the meantime, keep reading that literary fiction and nailing that small talk. Let’s create that feedback loop.
We wish to know what, exactly, is meant here by 'literary fiction' and whether they had control groups a) reading a much wider variety of fiction b) specific genres, because we feel that would be A Lot More Science-y, no?
Maybe, it is just the fact that they are able to escape into the simple pleasure of narrative from time to time in the course of their day...
But a huge honking hole in this research, I feel, is, how much reading were these people doing?
Personally, we sometimes feel that any benefits in social eptness are somewhat militated against by people asking 'what are you reading?'/'is that a good book'/generally trying to have a conversation while one is immersed in a book.
The idea of reading 'just a few pages': A 2013 study showed that reading a few pages of literary fiction improved participants’ immediate ability to discern people’s emotions from pictures of their eyes and faces, and those participants sometimes performed better on a Theory of Mind test where participants used visual and verbal cues to determine what someone was thinking or wanting.
Yeah, yeah: it starts with 'just a few pages', and 'it does you good': and the next thing you know you're staying up to 3 a.m. to finish the book.
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