What to Read

Since Raymond Mar and colleagues (Mar et al., 2006) found that reading fiction was associated with better empathy and theory of mind, as measured by Baron-Cohen et al's (2001) Mind in the Eyes test, we have often been asked: ”All right then, what should we read so that we can understand other people better?” We haven’t quite known what to say, although in our Psychologically Significant Fiction, in our Archive, we do start with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, first published two hundred years ago. Now a study by Katrina Fong, Justin Mullin and Raymond Mar (2013) in press in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, has let us know that Pride and Prejudice is exactly the sort of thing to recommend.

Mar et al. (2006) adapted Keith Stanovich's et al.’s (1995) Author Recognition Test. With this test Stanovich et al. were able to measure how much reading people do, and they found that the amount of people’s reading was significantly related to vocabulary and general knowledge, even after controlling for IQ and level of education. Stanovich's idea behind the original test was that readers recognize the names of authors of books they read, and that the number of such names they recognize gives an extremely good proxy for the amount of reading they do. By including names of fiction writers and nonfiction writers Mar et al., adapted the test to identify people who read predominantly fiction and those who read predominately nonfiction. Fong et al. adapted Stanovich et al.’s test one step further by including names of writers of four separate genres: romantic stories, suspense-thriller stories, domestic stories, and science-fiction/fantasy stories. 

In their study, Fong and her colleagues controlled for their readers' traits of personality, gender, age, fluency in English, and the amount of nonfiction that they read. After these variables had been controlled for, that is to say after their effects had been subtracted out, the researchers found that the amount of reading of two of the genres, romance and suspense-thriller stories, significantly predicted people's scores on the Mind in the Eyes test. In addition, there was a positive but not-quite significant relationship between the reading of domestic stories and scores on the Mind in the Eyes test, but a negative relationship between the reading of science-fiction/fantasy and this test.

How do we explain this? It is interesting, I think, that these results suggest that a strong element in romance stories is understanding what kind of person a potential romantic partner might be. Suspense-thriller stories, and domestic fiction also have elements of working out what people are up to. Prototypical science-fiction and fantasy stories, on the other hand, have a different kind of focus. They tend to be about such matters as wondering how life might be different in the future, or how it might be possible to travel faster than the speed of light. It makes sense that people who read stories of this kind are becoming more expert in thinking about and practicing matters that are rather different from interpersonal skills of the kind indicated by the Mind in the Eyes test.

Austen, J. (1813). Pride and prejudice. London: Egerton

Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger's syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241-251.

Fong, K., Mullin, J., & Mar, R. (2013). What you read matters: The role of fiction genres in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Harrison, M. R. (1995). Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span: The role of print exposure. Developmental Psychology, 31, 811-826.

Image: Title page of the 1813 first edition of Pride and Prejudice, public domain.

New Research Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

It is an exciting time to be involved in researching literature and fiction. There has been an explosion of interest in empirical approaches to understanding narrative, marked by growing numbers of published studies, the birth of a new journal, and accompanying media interest. To this list, we can now add the establishment of an important new research institute: the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. The Max Planck Society in Germany was established in 1948, with a mandate to create separate research institutes with a reputation for providing top-notch resources and independence for its scientists. The model has been extremely successful, with at least 17 Nobel laureates having been recognized among their staff. Currently, there are over 80 Max Planck Institutes driving research in a broad range of topics, from the humanities to the hard sciences. This newest institute will focus on scientific approaches to studying music and literature, and will be headed by Prof. Dr. Winfried Menninghaus (language and literature) along with Prof. Dr. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann (music). Located in Franfurt/Main, this institute has enormous support from the state government who will be providing a total of about 45 million euros in support. With an estimated annual budget of 10 million euros per year, this institute is sure to produce some fascinating new research of interest to our OnFiction readers. The institute is currently seeking PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, for those looking to contribute to this new enterprise.

Pilgrimage

Although they have something of a medieval quality, pilgrimages seem to be a continuing part of life. I find myself making them from time to time (to Delft where Vermeer lived, click here, and in Paris to places where Proust lived, click here). A modern pilgrimage of a literary kind struck me especially forcefully. It was by Janet Malcolm (2001) to Russia, to visit places where Anton Chekhov had lived.

Why does one make a pilgrimage? First there is the journey, a time perhaps for mediation, Then there is the arrival. Is it that one wants, by being in a place that an artist has been, to take in some of the atmosphere, to see or hear what that person has seen or heard? Or is the fantasy more intimate? A piece of art, perhaps most especially a novel, a short story, or a play, can be thought of as a piece of consciousness, that one can take in, and make one’s own. By journeying to a place where the artist lived, is one somehow wanting to make that consciousness more real?

Malcolm starts her book on her pilgrimage to Russia with the short story of Chekhov’s which happens to be the one that I admire most in all his work, “The lady with the little dog.” It is about Dmitri Gurov and Anna von Diderits who start an affair at the seaside resort of Yalta.

Malcolm’s first paragraph says that: “After they have slept together for the first time [they} drive out at dawn to a village near Yalta called Oreanda, where they sit on a bench near a church and look down on the sea” (p.3). Then Malcolm quotes this famous passage:

Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist ... The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more (Malcolm, p. 3).

Perhaps visiting this place would provide for Malcolm an unusually clear instance of seeing and hearing what an artist saw and heard ... helped by the very timelessness of the idea suggested by these words. She writes that the scene fell short of her expectations, but because her translator and guide, Nina, had gone to some trouble to find the place, she pretended to be thrilled by it.

When Chekhov wrote, more than 100 years ago, he was struggling with questions of what it is to be a human being, and of what it is to find ourselves with this kind of personality rather than that. He wrote, too, about how we deal with the quirks and unseemly desires that have their way us. In one of his themes, Chekhov, the grandson of a serf, who had been beaten frequently by his father during his childhood, thought how it might be possible to squeeze the slave out of himself, and feel red blood coursing through his veins.

Malcolm found Yalta dull and a bit tawdry and indeed, when he first visited the town inn 1888, Chekhov also found it cheap and shoddy. But because he was suffering from tuberculosis, and the climate there was more benign than that of St Petersburg or Moscow, he built a villa on the outskirts of the town in the late 1890s, It was there that he wrote “The lady with the little dog,” as well as Three sisters and The cherry orchard.

When we read “The lady with the little dog,” we can be ourselves, I think, and at the same time metaphorically we can be Gurov, or Anna. Perhaps, in some curious way, if we make an artistic pilgrimage, it is as if we can be both ourselves and the artist to whom we are trying to become mentally closer?

Chekhov, A. (2000). Stories (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Bantam (originally published 1886-1904).

Malcolm, J. (2001). Reading Chekhov: A critical journey. New York: Random House.

Setting the uncomforTABLE: Food to make a Dinner Party Difficult

It's hard to say how much you've been enjoying my first few months of this year of diagramming food movement dialogues -- but I knew I was doing something right when the new executive chef of my campus's dining services called on me last week to help design a series of Uncomfortable Dinner Parties. I had mentioned in a panel discussion some weeks ago that it seems critical that scholars and activists interested in food narratives help build capacity for engaging in difficult conversations -- and this idea stuck! It's not only complicating social theorists who enjoy the discomfort of a good challenging conversation, it turns out; the director of dining services realizes that practicing staying with a story through what might be an initially rocky start may be the only way, short of censorship and stability management, to get to a happy ending -- or at least a negotiated ending.

So looking forward to the possibility of having fun with uncomforTABLEs, I am starting to sketch out menus that I realize are all variations on a theme of homage to Mrs. Ramsey's dinner scene in To the Lighthouse (the scene with which, auspiciously, Marjorie DeVault starts her masterful work Feeding the Family). Setting the table, it turns out, provides yet another psychogeographical opportunity to think about how the setting of something like a meal might support or challenge its participants to portray themselves and to explore the characters of others. What if you are seated across from an uninvited guest? How far down the list of uncomfortable scenarios sketched out in my initial menu above do you have to read before you reach for advice on comportment from fictional (or other) dinners you have consumed through reading? Even as a food researcher, I often find myself steering dinner conversation away from a series of well-trod paths relating to angry and oversimplified commonplaces about farmers, seeds, and food choices -- but here is a chance to steer it back, hopefully around the cape of hostility, to the waters of even more fraught topics like toxicity, control over food system governance, and the historical traumas that underpin the modern food regime, like stolen land and forced labor. What kind of dinner tables are not adequately represented in food movement conversation? Whose voices do not usually get portrayed, and what about them either makes people bury their face in their soup or sit up and listen?

My fellow artists and STEM professionals in the Public Art St. Paul City Art Collaboratory, where we will pilot a series of food system suppers later this summer, have been crafting challenging and supportive courses to complement the tenor of different kinds of conversation (as well as roles of characters in different positions in the food system that we will ask participants in the suppers to play as the price of admission): comfort foods follow bitter greens with the promise of intriguing desserts and the temptation of challenging apertifs. All are invited.

Quantified Writing

I have recently read about ‘Quantified Self’ movement, a group of enthusiasts for self-improvement through self-measurements whose tag-line is ‘self-knowledge through numbers’.  The movement has produced a remarkable number of self-tracking apps that measure practically everything (sleep, stress, mood, food, goals, energy, relationships, genes, memes, etc.).  If you can think it, there’s a self-tracking app for it.  It even has an app that polls your friends and ‘experts’ about what to do (what decision to make) in a difficult situation.   I will not delve in philosophical and existential implications of this movement (or at least not right now), but will reflect on its meaning for writers.

Many writers track how much they write.  We have all heard of Victor Hugo’s 6,000 words/day, Stephen King’s 2,000 words/day, or Graham Green’s 500 words/day.  Even for those who don’t track their daily outputs, they generally know how much they write, and definitely know if they don’t write anything at all.

Let me do a thought experiment on what using a self-tracking app for writing would look like to me.  Let’s say I’m excited about a new writing project and decide to track my output.  The first couple of days, I’m going strong, looking with pride at numbers of words multiplying into pages.  I keep the output steady, all the while calculating how quickly I’ll be done if my productivity streak continues.  I’m loving my writing app and think of recommending it to my writer friends. A week later, something or other comes up, and I miss a day.  The very next day, I promise myself to double-up the word count for that day, then to keep going.  I don’t quite make it, but it’s good enough.  In another week, I stumble on some part of my writing project.  For three days I don’t write anything.  I keep thinking about the problem, sorting it out in my head, but there’s nothing on the page.  I look pensively at the writing app, thinking all the while how many days I need to double-up to keep the numbers steady, knowing all the while it’s impossible. I start writing again, slower, but since I want to be up to my regular word number, I start inserting paragraphs and pages that I know are no good (“I’ll edit later, I tell myself, “this is just raw words on a page”).  The writing gets worse and worse, and my inspiration flags.  Now I’m writing slowly and badly, and since I know that I’m not up to my regular word count, I keep the writing app off (I’ll turn it back on when I’m ‘full speed’).  I stop writing for a full week or two.  I keep thinking about the numbers of unwritten words, and in a moment of anger or despair delete the writing app from my computer.  Then, afterwards, after some length of time, days or years (not exactly quantified), I complete my writing project.

My conclusion about the imaginary self-tracking writing app – fabulous motivator when writing is going well, and despair-inducing when it’s not.  The opposite of what I need.  But that’s just me.  I’m sure thousands of writers out there believe in numbers just enough (not too much and not too little), to have the numbers motivate them at just the right writing time.

OnFiction's Fifth Anniversary

We are pleased to announce that OnFiction has now been running for five years, and our counter says we have had over a third of a million visits. So thanks very much indeed to all our readers, whether you visit the site occasionally or take our posts by e-mail or other means. We are pleased to provide this site for people who are interested in the psychology of fiction.

The start of the site occurred when a group of people who had known and worked with each other for five six years, and had then met every couple of weeks for two years as a writing group, started to face the fact that one our members was moving from Toronto to Minneapolis. As a writing group we had given ourselves assignments to write 300 words on a topic we chose, and to circulate or read what we had written to each other. So turning ourselves into a blog group enabled us to go on sharing our writings. When I told the group, a couple of weeks ago, that our fifth anniversary was coming up and asked whether we wanted to continue, we all said we would.

An issue that we haven’t discussed in OnFiction is the so-called paradox of fiction. How can it be that we feel emotions for fictional characters? So far as I can see this paradox was formulated by Colin Radford (1975). He asked how it was possible to feel for the fate of Anna Karenina when she does not, and did not, exist. He says to feel emotions in this way is irrational: to be moved by “works of art involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence” (p. 78).

At a recent conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, organized by Helmut Galle on “Fiction in historical and cultural contexts,” at which I made a presentation by Skype, I claimed that it was misleading to see our feelings in fiction as unreal, deceptive, or illogical. To engage in fiction is to enter worlds of the possible—simulations—in which, in an extension of the idea of metaphor, we can be both ourselves and Anna Karenina. The emotions we feel are, indeed, not hers, They are our own emotions, felt empathetically in the circumstances that Anna enters. We have argued that fiction is a simulation of the social world, and when one treats it in this way, it becomes no longer paradoxical that one would experience emotions when reading novels or short stories, or watching plays or films. It would hardly be insightful to argue that simulations of the kind that produce weather forecasts or predictions of climate change are unreal and therefore irrational. The question is whether any particular simulation is a good one, and one might follow the question by a suggestion as to how it might be improved. Fiction is a set of simulations about the hypothetical, but its subject matter is about real understandings of others and ourselves.

One of the metaphors we use is that of a flight simulator. If you were learning to fly a plane you could improve your flying skills in a flight simulator. In this way you can experience a wider variety of situations than you would when flying in a real plane. Gregory Currie, a philosopher who is skeptical about the value of fiction (click here), said in reply to my paper at the Sao Paulo conference that the people who build flight simulators do so by knowing a lot about planes and flying. He said that there is no equivalent set of skills on which writers of fiction draw.

I said there are two replies to this. My first reply is that our results (summarized for instance in Mar, Djikic & Oatley, 2008) show that the more fiction people read the better are their empathy and social understanding. This could not occur if fiction writers knew nothing about social interaction. Curry suggests that writers instruct us readers, but my second reply is that fiction writers don’t instruct us. Writers who are artists offer us situations, and ask us what we feel and what we think. As Chekhov put it in a letter of 27 October 1888 to his mentor and friend Alexei Suvorin, there are two things one must not confuse: “answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author” (Heim & Karlinsky, 1997, p. 116). Chekhov went on to describe the parallel between fiction and what goes on in a law court. The writer’s job, like that of the advocate, is to present the facts of a case in a way that makes sense. But it is the job of reader, just as it is the job of the jury, to draw the conclusions.

Mar, R., Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2008). Effects of reading on knowledge, social abilities, and selfhood. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 127-137). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Radford, C. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelican Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49, 67-80.

Heim, M. H., & Karlinsky, S. (1997). Anton Chekhov's life and thought: Selected letters and commentary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Image: Anton Chekhov, 1898, by Osip Braz, source Wikipedia