Research Bulletin: Do Stories Satisfy Core Human Motives?

Stories, and transmission of information through stories, is one of the most universal aspects of human communication. But what role does it play in our lives and how does it relate to our core motivations? In this brief theoretical article, Costabile, Shedlosky-Shoemaker, and Austin (2018) set out to demonstrate how stories promote social and psychological wellbeing by satisfying core motivations. As a starting point, the authors adopt Susan Fiske’s (2010) five core social motivations: belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust. These are essential social needs that each person desires in order to feel complete. Costabile and her colleagues argue that stories, both autobiographical stories and entertainment narratives, satisfy all five core motivations. The article is broken up into sections for each of the core motives, and in each section empirical evidence is presented to support the relationship between stories and the core motive in question.  

In conclusion, the authors propose that this article helps bring together research on narrative with more traditional social psychological research. Moreover, they believe that narrative approaches can be of use in other areas of social psychological research, such as intergroup relationships and overcoming resistance to persuasion. 

References

Costabile, K. A., Shedlosky-Shoemaker, R., & Austin, A. B. (2018). Universal stories: How narratives satisfy core motives. Self and Identity, 17(4), 418-431.

Fiske, S. T. (2010). Social beings: Core motives in Social Psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley.

Post by Connor LaForge.

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).

Personality Traits and Literature

Buried in a twelve-volume Handbook of Psychology is a chapter that addresses contemporary trait psychology and its relation to fiction (and the humanities in general). The Five-Factor Model (FFM) is the most widely accepted description of individual differences in personality traits, with five broad factors (the “Big Five”)—Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness—plus more specific traits, or facets, that represent different aspects of each factor. The chapter provides a broad introduction to the FFM and to research findings about its heritability, longitudinal stability, universality, and cross-observer validity; it also describes Five-Factor Theory, an interpretation of these findings in the form of a general theory of personality.

However, the distinctive focus of the chapter is a consideration of two questions: How can literary fiction be used by psychologists, and how might an understanding of trait psychology help in the interpretation, and perhaps the creation, of imaginative works?

The principal interface of fiction and traits is found in character. Psychological interpretations of literary figures have, of course, been proposed for decades. McCrae, Gaines, and Wellington provide an empirically-based method for assessing the personality of characters, using a validated personality inventory (the NEO-PI-3) to characterize Moliere’s Alceste (“The Misanthrope”) and Voltaire’s Candide. Profile agreement statistics are used to quantify overall agreement of judges (substantial, in these cases) and to point to occasional instances of disagreement that warrant and stimulate further discussion.

The chapter contains a table of characters who illustrate positive and negative poles of each factor—for example, Alexei Karamazov is high in Agreeableness; Antigone is high in Conscientiousness. Additions to this list, especially with more contemporary characters (perhaps from film or television) would make it more useful to teachers who want to bring the abstract concepts of traits alive to today’s students.

McCrae, R. R., Gaines, J. F., & Wellington, M. A. (2013). The Five-Factor Model in fact and fiction. In H. A. Tennen & J. M. Suls (Eds.), Handbook of psychology, Vol. 5: Personality and social psychology (2nd ed., pp. 65-91). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

(Guest post by Dr. Robert R. McCrae.)
For a copy of this chapter, please contact Dr. McCrae: RRMcCrae@gmail.com

Visual Methods for Exploring Challenging Narratives

I have had the chance over the past month to visit a number of collaborators who work with various interactive visual methods to get people to engage each others' stories. Visiting around also gives one a chance to check out the institutional arrangements people use to support their work -- and to think through some of the relationships between the methods people were using for interactive collaboration on specific knowledge-building processes and the methods they use to organize their work relationships more generally. 

I am tempted to dive into immense detail, describing such wonderful projects that are happening as part of the scholarship and practice represented at the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, the Canadian Association of Food Studies (especially its collaborative project on working collaboratively!), the Syracuse Thinklab, the Works Progress Whole City project here at home, and the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at UBC (all of whose websites represent different and interesting efforts to represent varying stories about the ways things work with some coherence). However, since I will resume delving into my ever more epistemological maps of food system knowledge terrains with my remaining posts for this year, I reflect here on some key thoughts about the function of visual supports people are building for challenging conversation, opening the question to this community about how this work might relate to work on narrative and emotion.

I chose today's opening image (over a scrawling 37-part diagram of different contentious characters or roles in the food system that I'm drawing) because I have been so struck in a very intense few month of immersion in other people's collaborative knowledge-sharing projects at the role of comfort, narratives, and challenges, and this opening image -- from a wonderful post by Yasmin Nair on Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World -- was one of the most to-the-point when I went searching for an image on those three themes. (I will say that I was tempted by this intro to a fantastic missive on Korean feminism, sexuality, and popular culture -- and that I should also acknowledge that outside these two cultural studies approaches, everything else that came up was about peace studies or illegible). It's true that what most of the collaborators I worked with were talking about was sustainability and food systems, not immigration per se (although immigration certainly figures heavily in considerations of the way our current food system works), the fact that it is considered revolutionary to talk about having a capitalism problem sums up perfectly one of the central issues I witness most of my peers facing. The main problems they work to address are considered too upsetting or challenging to discuss.

Consequently, I have been most impressed by the successes that some have had bringing emotion more directly into their narratives, to attempt to build comfort to support engaging challenges. For example, Thinklab co-directors Kathleen Brandt and Brian Lonsway carried with them a number of artifacts, often contrasting pictures on flashcards, noting the difference between conversations focused on "getting the food just right" and "not having enough to eat." Such an artifact at once pointed back to a specific set of narratives and dialogues between differing narratives, invoked a range of similar experiences of the potentially challenging confrontation involved in such dialogue, and suggested a truce both topical and emotional: a way to get past that sticking point in a conversation and to keep going with it. When I expressed my ebullience with the way that this achieved a persistent desire of mine to incorporate people's stories ABOUT stories into progressively more participatory versions of the story, people related a name: RESTORYING, which they thought everyone should know. Narrative inquiry colleagues, dear readers, forum theatre participants, how do you think about this challenge of building in enough comfort for people to be willing to engage in an exploratory story -- without losing the challenge that makes it worthwhile?

Caring for literary characters

In her new book, Why do we care about literary characters? (2010), Blakey Vermeule argues that novels, and particularly eighteenth century British novels, exemplify the kind of explicit concern with intricate levels of mindreading with which readers care about engaging themselves. Characters read each others’ minds in the interest of self-preservation, flourishing, and status enhancement, and experiencing such fictions allows the reader to learn what she needs to survive and flourish in her own Machiavellian world. Vermeule’s book echoes Zunshine’s thesis in Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel (2006): we read fiction because it stimulates our need for mindreading at several different levels of recursion (e.g., “Emma knew that Ricardo expected Angela to hope that Roger would call her.”) and because partaking of gossip just makes us feel good. Indeed, both Zunshine (p. 4) and Vermeule (p. 99) use the word “craving” to describe the reader’s stance toward social scenarios that require complex mindreading. An important difference though, is that Vermeule purports to speak of “caring” about characters, while Zunshine defends her avoidance of the topic of such engagement in fiction by noting on the next-to-last page of her book that, “[Theory of mind] is always much more than whatever cluster of cognitive adaptations we have isolated to make the discussion of it manageable“ (p. 163). That’s as much ground as Zunshine grants to her reader’s complaint that we can’t mindread without emotions. The reader accepts her hedge because she has presented a solid argument for what does interest her, and she leaves the emotion side of the theory of mind coin to others to explore.

Vermeule, though, claims to address “care,” which she defines as “to be anxious and to exert mental energy” and “expending charity, even passion” (12). She claims an evolutionary psychological parentage for the concept. She notes, in brief, “Why do we care about fictional characters? The very short answer is gossip: we need to know what other people are like, not in the aggregate, but in the particular” (xii). She believes that a genuinely literary moment centrally features a character engaging in Machiavellian reasoning, which “engages some of the things we care about most” (81), and claims that the most celebrated literary characters are Machiavellian (52), that “the most important social information is whether somebody is inclined to cooperate in social exchange or to cheat” (146), and that the “highest power” one has in a social exchange is to get that assessment right (187). What we care about is making sure we come out ahead of others in personally relevant domains, and we care most about literary characters who do just that.

Survival strategies are important, so we care about them. But there is another way to look at caring, one that the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt treats with clarity and power in his essay “The importance of what we care about” (1998). (Vermeule mentions this titular phrase in her book [p. 73] and attributes it to Frankfurt, but she does not engage his ideas, nor cite his work in the bibliography.) Frankfurt says, “A person who cares about something… identifies himself with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced” (1998, p. 83, Frankfurt’s emphasis). And further, “…if there is something that a person does care about, then it follows that it is important to him. This is not because caring somehow involves an infallible judgment concerning the importance of its object. Rather, it is because caring about something makes that thing important to the person who cares about it” (1998, p. 92). It seems, though, that Vermeule’s reader feels care because she makes an “infallible” evolutionarily-driven judgment that leads her to assess exposure to Machiavellian characters and their actions as important to her own social understanding.

So, why do we care for fictional characters? Frankfurt does not comment on this question, but we might be able to construct a Frankfurtian response. First, he does not deny the important role of evolution in human caring. In his meditation on love, an extreme form of caring, he notes, “What we love is shaped by the universal exigencies of human life,” but then he adds, “together with those other needs and interests that derive more particularly from the features of individual character and experience” (Frankfurt, 2004, p. 47). The character the reader cares for or loves fits who the reader is, today, in the moment of reading, not only as a human who wants to survive and flourish, but as a cultural being with a particular cultural, personal and interpersonal history, which her care for particular characters may help her to understand better. Frankfurt does deny that we can care for an individual only as a token of, even a fine exemplar of, a class: “The significance to the lover of what he loves is not that his beloved is an instance or exemplar. Its importance to him is not generic; it is ineluctably particular” (2004, p. 44). Thus, perhaps we don’t care for literary characters because we get loads and loads of social information from them – isn’t our effort better spent in getting social information relevant to the living, breathing cast of characters in our own lives?—nor because they are exemplars of Machiavellian pursuits which could somehow edify us. Frankfurt’s account of care can thus accommodate those readers who care about individual embodiments of a whole range of characters: the weak ones, the misguided ones, the self-delusional ones, the ones who would very much like to be Machiavellian, but eventually discover that, alas, they are not -- the ones, in short, who make us vulnerable to emotional losses because they suffer while we are identifying with them.

He claims that it is “volitional necessity” that moves us to care and to love. He says that “[caring about something] serves to connect us actively to our lives in ways which are creative of ourselves and which expose us to distinctive possibilities for necessity and for freedom” (1998, p. 93) and ends his essay on care in this way: “The person does not care about the object because its worthiness commands that he do so. On the other hand, the worthiness of the activity of caring commands that he choose an object which he will be able to care about” (1998, p. 94). Maybe the history of human engagement with fiction is less the history of a creature craving mindreading in order to more efficiently usurp the goods of its conspecifics, and more the history of a creature who is exceptionally good at caring, and much in need of more and more things to care about, or to love, than the world could ever make available in the creature’s lifetime.

Frankfurt, H. G. (1998). The Importance of what we care about. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, H. G. (2004). The Reasons of love. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Vermeule, B. (2010). Why do we care about literary characters? Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

Research Bulletin: Neuroaesthetics

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In discussing the psychology of fiction, one inevitably wanders into the realm of aesthetics. Books, as art, are appreciated by their readers and understanding this appreciation can be an enlightening undertaking. Recently, a volume has been published surveying the exciting new area of neuroaesthetics, or neuroscience approaches to understanding aesthetics. Edited by Dr. Oshin Vartanian and Dr. Martin Skov, and published by Baywood, this collection provides a fascinating and broad survey of the field, from many of its experts. The chapter perhaps most of interest to our readers, on the neuroaesthetics of literary reading, was written by David Miall, a contributor to this site.

My own thoughts on this book appear on the back cover (let me assure readers that I do not receive any royalties from sales, so there is no conflict of interest!), but I will repeat them here:

"Skov and Vartanian have assembled an impressive volume on the rapidly burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. The contributions cover a broad range of topics—from visual art to music, patient studies to neuroimaging approaches—while providing an exhaustive and deeply considered treatment of each. Being a relatively young field, neuroaesthetic research consists of a manageable body of knowledge surrounded by a vast and compelling array of questions. This book provides readers with a detailed map of the available research findings and sketches out the promising unknown territories in a way that is certain to fascinate and excite."

You can read the first chapter of this interesting volume here, and read Dr. Skov’s musing on the topic and the book here. Copies can be purchased here.

Books on the Psychology of Fiction

We hope our list of books on, or relevant to, the psychology of fiction has been useful. To reach this list with its micro-reviews, please click here. I update it from time to time, and it has passed the mark of a hundred titles of monographs. In addition there are a couple of dozen edited books, without reviews, that contain collections of contributed chapters. This list is far from complete, so if you would like to suggest a book, please do so by adding the title and a micro-review as a comment to this post. We will review nominations. If a book you suggest belongs here, we will insert it in our list, with your micro-review and an acknowledgement to you. We are happy to receive a nomination of a book you have written yourself, but in such a case we would like to read it and write the micro-review. We would also be pleased to hear of, and correct, mistakes you discover.

Our list of books and micro-reviews is in chronological order to give the sense of how work on the psychology of fiction has developed over time, and to show how influences can have occurred. In this post, today, I give an alphabetically ordered list of just the authors, dates, titles, and publishers. This will enable you to see who is here and who has been missed but should be included. It will also enable you to use the search function of the blog, at the top-left-corner of this page, to find authors and titles.

As I prepared this alphabetical list, the following came to mind. Aristotle's Poetics has been the most influential book on fiction in the West, although it is not the oldest. (The first substantial discussion of art, including fiction, occurs in Plato's The republic). Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, written in Istanbul during World War II after Auerbach lost his job under Nazi rule in Germany, remains the most distinguished of the modern era. The most wide ranging book in our list is perhaps The mind and its stories, by Patrick Colm Hogan who, in order to write it, read stories from all round the world. The most salutary to Western-centric thinking are the thousand-year-old books on Indian poetics by Anandavardana and Abhinavagupta (in Ingalls et al., 1990). The most surprisingly original is a tie, I think, between Frederic Bartlett's Remembering, and Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the book. Academically the most bold, perhaps, is Martha Nussbaum's The fragility of goodness, in which she proposes that instead of spending lifetimes reading philosophy, philosophers would have done better to read fictional literature. The book that gets a prize for being both highly influential and illogical is Practical criticism, by I.A. Richards who described his psychological experiment of finding how a group of people understood 13 poems, and then, instead of thinking how interesting were the differences in people's readings, became the founder of a movement to tell people how to make the correct interpretations. The wrongest in the set is, I think, Kendall Walton's (1990) book with its proposal that the emotions we experience in fiction are not real emotions, but are merely make-believe. The wittiest, perhaps, is Pierre Bayard's How to talk about books you haven't read. But the book that is most likely to have you chuckling aloud is Alan Bennett's The uncommon reader, about how, as a result of falling in love with reading novels, Queen Elizabeth II starts to neglect her duties as head of state.

Monographs
M. H. Abrams (1953). The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anandavardana & Abhinavagupta (circa 1000) in D. H. H. Ingalls, J. M. Masson & M. V. Patwardhan (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Karen Armstrong (2005). A short history of myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, reissued by Vintage Canada.

Aristotle (circa 330 BCE) Poetics (G. E. Else, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (This edition, 1970).

Erich Auerbach (1953). Mimesis: The representation of reality in Western literature (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1963). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. (trans. C. Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press ( Current edition 1984).

Mieke Bal (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Frederic Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roland Barthes (1974). S/Z: An essay. (trans. R. Miller). New York: Hill & Wang.

Pierre Bayard (2007). How to talk about books you haven't read (J. Mehlman, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury.

Alan Bennett (2007). The uncommon reader. London: Faber.

Wayne Booth (1988). The company we keep: An ethics of fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

David Bordwell (1985). Narration in the fiction film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Marisa Bortolussi & Peter Dixon (2003). Psychonarratology: foundations for the empirical study of literary response. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brian Boyd (2009). On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jerome Bruner (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nöel Carroll (1990). The philosophy of horror or Paradoxes of the heart. New York: Routledge.

R. G. Collingwood (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mary Thomas Crane (2001). Shakespeare's brain: Reading with cognitive theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Margaret Anne Doody (1997). The true story of the novel. London: HarperCollins.

Ellen Dissanayake (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where art come from and why. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Robin Dunbar (2004). The human story: A new history of mankind's evolution. London: Faber.

Judy Dunn (2004). Children's friendships: The beginnings of intimacy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Denis Dutton (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution. New York: Bloomsbury.

Catherine Emmott (1997). Narrative comprehension: A discourse perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

E. M. Forster (1927). Aspects of the novel. London: Arnold.

Richard Gerrig (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Raymond Gibbs (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Alvin Goldman (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frank Hakemulder (2000). The moral laboratory: Experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-concept. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Stephen Halliwell (2002). The aesthetics of mimesis: Ancient texts and modern problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Paul Harris (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jerry Hobbs (1990). Literature and cognition. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Patrick Colm Hogan (2003). Cognitive science, literature, and the arts: A guide for humanists. New York: Routledge.

Patrick Colm Hogan (2003). The mind and its stories: Narrative universals and human emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Norman Holland (1968). The dynamics of literary response. New York: Columbia University Press.

Daniel Hutto (2008). Folk psychological narratives: The sociocultural basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lewis Hyde (1983). The gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property. New York: Vintage.

Wolfgang Iser (1974). The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Roman Jakobson & Morris Halle (1956). Fundamentals of language. 'S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Samuel Johnson (1779-1781). Lives of the poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Current edition, 2006).

Suzanne Keen (2007). Empathy and the novel. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ronald Kellogg (1994). The psychology of writing. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frank Kermode (1966). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elly Konijn (2000). Acting emotions: shaping emotions on stage. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Milan Kundera (1988). The art of the novel. New York: HarperCollins.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Peter Lamarque (2009). The philosophy of literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Jonah Lehrer (2008). Proust was a neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

János László (1999). Cognition and representation in literature: The psychology of literary narratives. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

David Lodge (1977). The modes of modern writing: Metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

David Lodge (2002). Consciousness and the novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Longinus (circa 50 BCE). On the sublime. In Classical literary criticism (Ed & trans. T. S. Dorsch). (pp. 99-158). Harmondsworth: Penguin (This edition, 1965)

Percy Lubbock (1926). The craft of fiction. London: Cape.

Colin Martindale (1975). Romantic progression: The psychology of literary history. Washington, DC: Hemisphere.

Keith May (1977). Out of the maelstrom: Psychology and the novel in the Twentieth Century. London: Elek.

Scott McCloud (1993). Understanding comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

David Miall (2006). Literary reading: Empirical and theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.

Steven Mithen (1996). The prehistory of the mind: The cognitive origins of art and science. London: Thames & Hudson.

John Mullan (2006). How novels work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Victor Nell (1988). Lost in a book: The psychology of reading for pleasure. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Martha Nussbaum (1986). The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martha Nussbaum (1995). Poetic justice: The literary imagination and public life. Boston: Beacon.

Keith Oatley (1992). Best laid schemes: The psychology of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frank O'Connor (1963). The lonely voice: A study of the short story. New York: World Publishing Co (reprinted 2004, Melville House).

Michael Ondaatje (2002). The conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

Keith Opdahl (2002). Emotion as meaning: The literary case for how we imagine. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Alan Palmer (2004). Fictional minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Willie van Peer (1986). Sylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.

Willie van Peer, Frank Hakemulder & Sonia Zyngier (2007). Muses and measures: Empirical research methods for the humanities. Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Jordan Peterson (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. London: Routledge.

Plato. (375 BCE). The republic. (Translated by D. Lee). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin (current edition 1955).

Matthew Potolsky (2006). Mimesis. New York: Routledge.

I. A. Richards (1929). Practical criticism: A study of literary judgment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Paul Ricoeur (1985). Time and narrative (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Louise Rosenblatt (1938). Literature as exploration. New York: Noble & Noble.

Mark Sadoski & Allan Paivio (2001). Imagery and text: A dual coding theory of reading and writing. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Elaine Scarry (1999). Dreaming by the book. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Roger Schank & Robert Abelson (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Thomas Scheff (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Leonard Shlain (1998). The alphabet versus the goddess: The conflict between word and image. New York: Viking Penguin.

Elaine Showalter. (2003). Teaching Literature. Oxford: Blackwell.

Murray Smith (1995). Engaging characters: Fiction, emotion, and the cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bruno Snell (1953). The discovery of the mind in Greek philosophy and literature. New York: Dover (modern edition 1982).

Konstantin Stanislavski (1936). An actor prepares. New York: Theater Arts.

Sol Stein (1995). Stein on writing. New York: St Martins.

Brian Stock (2007). Ethics through literature: Ascetic and aesthetic reading in Western culture. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.

Peter Stockwell (2002). Cognitive poetics: An introduction. New York: Routledge.

Ed Tan (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film: Film as an emotion machine. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Leo Tolstoy (1898). What is art? In A. Maude (Ed.), Tolstoy on art (pp. 117-357). Oxford: Oxford University Press (This edition, 1925).

Jean Trounstine & Robert Waxler (2005). Finding a voice: The practice of changing lives through literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Reuven Tsur (1992). Towards a theory of cognitive poetics. Amsterdam: North Holland.

Mark Turner (1996). The literary mind: The origins of thought and language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scott Turner (1994). The creative process: A computer model of storytelling and creativity. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kendall Walton (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ian Watt (1957). The rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus.

Peter Widdowson (1999). Literature. New York: Routledge.

Maryanne Wolf (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York: HarperCollins.

James Wood (2008). How fiction works. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Virginia Woolf (1929). A room of one's own. London: Hogarth Press.

William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798). Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman & Rees.

Lisa Zunshine (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

Rolf Zwaan (1993). Aspects of literary comprehension: A cognitive approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins.


Edited collections on, or relevant to, the psychology of fiction
Jennings Bryant & Peter Vorderer (Eds.). (2006). Psychology of entertainment. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Nöel Carroll & Jinhee Choi (Eds.). (2006). Philosophy of film and motion pictures: An anthology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gerald Cupchik & János László (Eds.). (1992). Emerging visions of the aesthetic process: Psychology, semiology and philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gary Fireman, Ted McVay & Owen Flanagan (Eds.). (2003). Narrative and consciousness: Literature, psychology, and the brain. New York: Oxford University Press.

Joanna Gavins & Gerard Steen (Eds.) (2003). Cognitive poetics in practice. New York: Routledge.

Susan Goldman, Arthur Graesser & Paul van den Broek (Eds.). (1999). Narrative comprehension, causality, and coherence: Essays in honor of Tom Trabasso. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Jonathan Gottschall & David Sloan Wilson (Eds.). (2005). The literary animal. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange & Timothy Brock (Eds.). (2002). Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

David Herman (Ed.) (2003). Narrative theory and the cognitive sciences. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

David Herman (Ed.). (2007). The Cambridge companion to narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mette Hjort & Sue Laver (Eds.). (1997). Emotion and the arts. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scott Kaufman & James Kaufman (Eds.). (2009). The psychology of creative writing. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Roger Kreuz & Mary Sue MacNealy (Eds.). (1996). Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Colin Martindale (Ed.). (1988). Psychological approaches to the study of literary narratives. Hamburg: Buske.

Colin Martindale, Paul Locher & Vladimir Petrov (Eds.). (2007). Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches in aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. Amityville, NY: Baywood.

Bruce McConachie & Elizabeth Hart (Eds.). (2006). Performance and cognition: Theater studies and the cognitive turn. New York: Routledge.

David Olson & Nancy Torrance (Eds.). (2009). The Cambridge handbook of literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Herre van Oostendorp & Susan Goldman (Eds.). (1999). The construction of mental representations during reading. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Andrew Ortony (Ed.). (1979). Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A second edition, of 1993, contains additional contributions.)

Willie van Peer & Seymour Chatman (Eds.). (2001). New perspectives on narrative perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Willie van Peer (Ed.). (2008). The quality of literature: Linguistic studies in literary evaluation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Alan Richardson & Ellen Spolsky (Eds.). (2004). The work of fiction: Cognition, culture, and complexity. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Dick Schram & Gerard Steen (Eds.). (2001). The psychology and sociology of literature: In honor of Erlund Ibsch. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Elena Semino & Jonathan Culpeper (Eds.). (2002). Cognitive stylistics: Language and cognition in text analysis. Linguistic approaches to literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Jane Tomkins (Ed.). (1980). Reader-response criticism: From formalism to post-structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek & Irene Sywenky (Eds.). (1997). The systemic and empirical approach to literature and culture as theory and application. Siegen: LUMIS Publications.

Dolf Zillmann & Peter Vorderer (Eds.). (2000). Media entertainment: The psychology of its appeal. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sonia Zyngier, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova & Jan Auracher (Eds.). (2008). Directions in empirical studies in literature: In honor of Willie van Peer. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Instinctive Art

On 14 January 2009, Denis Dutton gave a talk at Google headquarters, to discuss his recent book The art instinct. You can view Dutton's talk by clicking here, and you can read a micro-review of his book in our archive of Books on the Psychology of Fiction, by clicking here. Dutton asks: where do the intuitions of art come from? They are adaptations, he says. This makes it possible to understand art across the range of human cultures.

Here is a list of some of the characteristics of art, of a kind that emerge if one looks across cultures in this way. Works of art:
• provide people with direct pleasure, they are ends in themselves
• require the exercise of skills and virtuosity
• tend to be made in styles
• are characterized by creativity and novelty
• have a special focus, and often involve expense
• involve expressive individuality, each has someone behind it
• are surrounded by critical commentary
• involve intellectual challenge, they use a lot of the brain
• tend to be characterized by emotional saturation
• provide imaginative experience and make-believe worlds.

With a list like this, says Dutton, you can see unity across cultures. You can then also see the list in terms of an ensemble of adaptations. We are descended from beings who had these adaptations. Three important indications are that art gives pleasure, it is found in all cultures, and it develops spontaneously. In the Pleistocene, human personality was formed: our likes and dislikes. Our ancestors avoided snakes and high places. They enjoyed sex, puzzles, and stories. Stories allow for forecasting, but at low cost. They enable us to learn lessons, for instance about hunting but without the danger of the hunt. They encourage us to explore points of view of others. We are the descendants of the survivors in evolution, and the survivors were those who had these inclinations. Those in the past who did have these dislikes and likes were not our ancestors, because they did not survive.

You can think also, says Dutton, in terms of sexual selection. Story-tellers are virtuosi, who squander resources and brainpower. They offer displays that are like the peacock's tail, which is a signal of fitness. Peahens choose the peacocks with the most impressive tails. So alongside natural selection, is sexual selection. Many of the values seen in art are seen in courtship, for instance the wasteful display of useless things like flowers for someone taken out to an expensive meal. Works of art are often made of expensive materials. They have usually taken time and skill to create. These features implies status. Women prefer men who have resources, skills, and status.

What about women artists? Maybe that's for the next book.

Denis Dutton (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution. New York: Bloomsbury.

Research Bulletin: The Canon and Interpretation

The Western Canon is the set of works of great literary art that have contributed to Western culture. The idea is that an educated person should have read a fair number of them.

The Canon gained impetus, I think, with the proposal that not only are there great works of poetry and prose literature but that for each one there is a correct interpretation. A principal in making this proposal was I. A. Richards (1929; for a micro-review, see our Books on the Psychology of Fiction, by clicking here). Richards did the psychological experiment of giving undergraduates in his English classes "at Cambridge and elsewhere" 13 poems (from the Canon, e.g. by John Donne, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, et al.) without attribution, and asking them to "comment freely in writing about them." He was shocked to find an "astonishing variety of human responses:" most people made wrong interpretations. Education in English literature, for several decades under the influence of Richards and the New Critics, then became teaching people not only what to read but how to read. The watchword was "close reading." Then, of course, came post-modernism, with its scepticism about the Canon and interpretation.

This month, in the journal Poetics, Marc Verboord and Kees van Rees have taken an empirical approach, and asked about influences on what gets taught in literature classes in high-schools in Holland. They analyzed the content of textbooks on literature, and teachers' choices among these textbooks. What they found was that, over the last decades of the 20th Century, the way in which literary authors and their works were presented in textbooks increasingly came to be based on students’ reading preferences rather than a Canon specified by literary experts. Over this period, too, teachers seem to have chosen textbooks that were most responsive to students' preferences.

If this trend is a general one, does it represent a diminution in the value of literary expertise, or the kind of democratization called for by some post-modern critics?

What we (members of this research group) would hope is that among future influences on appreciation of literature would be findings of the psychological effects of reading fiction, for instance on understanding others and ourselves. We might hope, too, for a growing sense of what aspects of literature have such effects (see our micro-reviews of Psychologically Significant Fiction, by clicking here).

I. A. Richards (1929). Practical criticism: A study of literary judgement. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Marc Verboord & Kees van Rees (2009). Literary education curriculum and institutional contexts: Textbook content and teachers’ textbook usage in Dutch literary education, 1968–2000. Poetics, 37, 74-97.

Karen Armstrong on Myth

The Greek word mythos means story, so it is close to the idea of fiction. Myth is a kind of societal distillate of human struggles with life. It stands in contrast with logos, meaning rationality.

In A short history of myth (see micro-review in our Books on the Psychology of Fiction, by clicking here) Armstrong argues that myth always reflects the precariousness of human existence, and has followed the great movements of prehistory and history. The earliest myths, she argues, derive from hunter-gatherer societies in which men would go out and face danger to hunt wild animals, which they would bring back as food to the society in which they lived. Their myths are those of the hero. The agrarian revolution, in which people started to farm, was accompanied by new myths: of how the world was created. The coming of cities produced further myths in which, for the first time, struggles arose between gods and humans: the Mesopotamian and Biblical story of the Flood is an example. Then, argues Armstrong, we entered what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age in which new myths were created of human interdependence, with the principle that was first enunciated by Confucius: "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you." Although the mythical systems of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, were enormously influential, from this time forward, mythos was starting to fade, to be displaced by logos, the ordering of society according to rational systems, and increasingly dependent on technologies not just of food production (agriculture) and housing (cities), but of transport, communication, and warfare. In the West, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment onwards, the fading of mythos and the rise of logos became almost complete.

Armstrong's own life has a somewhat mythological structure. Her autobiography is The spiral staircase: My climb out of darkness, and in it she describes how at the age of 17 she became a novitiate Roman Catholic nun in a teaching order that followed the rules of the Jesuits. Having passed through the stages to become a nun, she was sent by her order to Oxford to do a degree in English. Seven years after she joined the order she left it while she was still an undergraduate, realizing that she had never been able to pray. Later she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Tennyson. She was devastated by having her thesis rejected by an external examiner who was known from the beginning to be hostile to both her thesis topic and the methods she employed. She felt the failure as a reiteration of her failure as a nun. From adolescence onwards she suffered losses of consciousness and of memory that she and others assumed were hysterical or panic attacks. Only in her 30s were they diagnosed as symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Although she now had a diagnosis and drugs to control her seizures, her periods of illness worsened and, because of them, she was fired from the school in which she taught. These are among the darknesses out of which she climbed.

Armstrong has become a writer recognized throughout the world for her books on religion in which, almost uniquely, she enables the reader to enter into the deeper ideas of the world's religions but without the guff. She says that religion is not about believing things. "It’s about doing things that change you ... an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way you will be transformed ... myths of the hero [such as those of Buddha or Jesus] are not meant to give us historical information ... Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way as to bring out our own heroic potential” (2004, p. 270). Religion, at its root, says Armstrong, is about achieving compassion for others, entering mentally into their situation.

All myth, says Armstrong, is about a plane of being which is different from the quotidian world, but which interpenetrates it and gives it meaning. To understand it, one must enter this parallel plane. If one stands outside it, it seems incomprehensible, even absurd. A short history of myth includes a discussion of fiction, which Armstrong sees as having properties similar to those of myth. One can enter a fictional world by identification. Here is what Armstrong says:

... the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from that of their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional world is not "real" and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling (p. 147).

Karen Armstrong (2004). The spiral staircase: My climb out of darkness. New York: Knopf.

Karen Armstrong (2005). A short history of myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, reissued by Vintage Canada.

The Solitary Vice

Mikita Brottman, who holds a doctorate in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, has recently written a book entitled The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. Although the subtitle of this book is purportedly intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek (and perhaps, deliberately controversial for the purposes of marketing), Brottman is of the opinion that reading has become dangerously fetishized by modern culture which tends to over-value literature, and that reading literature might in fact be detrimental for some people. More specifically, she puts forth a hypothesis that is in direct contrast with much of what has been expressed on this site: Brottman believes that reading literature may be personally damaging with respect to one’s capacity for social interaction and social integration. You can listen to an interview in which she describes her book and her perspective below, conducted by Jesse Thorn as part of his radio show The Sound of Young America. While I will withhold extensive comment until readers have had a chance to familiarize themselves with her ideas, it goes without saying that we here at OnFiction disagree with her thesis. You can also read another interview with Dr. Brottman here, and read a review of her book in the LA Times here.

The Sound of Young America interviews Mikita Brottman

The Inner Library

We continue to add book titles accompanied by micro-reviews to our list of books on the psychology of fiction, which you can access by clicking here. Recent additions include Margaret Anne Doody (1997). The true story of the novel. London: HarperCollins, and Alvin Goldman (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press.

The latest addition to our list is Pierre Bayard's brilliant book on how you don't need to read books in their entirety (full title and micro-review below, and in our list). Bayard points out that even books we have read are retained in our memory only as fragments in what he aptly calls our inner library, which is entirely idiosyncratic. In our library, items seldom coincide exactly with items in the inner libraries of other people. So it is the fragments, and their inter-relationships, that are the matters to concentrate on. I was delighted to find that Bayard used, as examples, the fine scene in Graham Greene's The third man, (reissued 2005, London: Vintage) in which Holly Martins, author of pulp Westerns mistaken for a highbrow writer called Martins, has to give a talk at a literary gathering held in post-War Vienna, on the future of the novel (a topic he has never thought about), as well as a wonderful paper by the anthropologist Laura Bohannan (1966, Shakespeare in the bush. Natural History, Aug / Sept, 1-6, which I did not know existed in anyone's inner library but my own) in which she tries to explain to a group of the Tiv in Africa the story of Hamlet. The Tiv are interested in stories, and the group is very pleased when Bohannan offers to recount a story from her culture, but although they remain appreciative of her efforts, at every juncture they tell her she has it wrong: dead people do not reappear, the young Hamlet should not worry about affairs of state which should be left to elders, it is not wrong, but imperative, for a woman recently bereaved to marry again as quickly as possible, and so on. Bayard follows these episodes with scenes from David Lodge's Changing places, in which is introduced the game of Humiliation: in a group of literary people, you have to admit to not having read a famous book. Steppenwolf, anybody? Oliver Twist? Hamlet? Bayard's book gets even better as it goes along, and becomes a literary version of Bartlett's (1932, see our list of books by clicking here) theory of memory and understanding as based on personal and cultural schemas that are partial, ever active, and ever changing. Towards the end of the book (pp. 182-183) Bayard says: "Who can deny ... that talking about books you haven't read constitutes an authentic creative activity, making the same demands as other forms of art. Just think of all the skills it calls into play—listening to the potentialities of a work, analyzing its ever-changing context, paying attention to others and their reactions."

Reference and micro-review
Pierre Bayard (2007). How to talk about books you haven't read (J. Mehlman, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury.

Professor of French literature and psychoanalyst, Pierre Bayard, explains how to talk and think about books without reading them. In doing so he proposes a theory of reading and imagination: a rather good theory, about how we can come to know what various books say amid the otherwise all-too-formidable infinity of published material. He introduces an elegant notation for the books he discusses: SB to mean "book I have skimmed," HB to mean "book I have heard of," and FB, to mean "book I have forgotten." He offers as persons to admire the librarian in Robert Musil's Man without qualities (SB) who doesn't want to read any of the books in his library, but only to know how they relate to each other, and Paul Valéry (SB and HB) who advocated that we should avoid reading books because we too easily get lost in their details, or even have them overwhelm us. Bayard goes on to point out that what we remember of books, including those we have written ourselves (FB), in our inner library, is a collection of fragments, much like those from books we have skimmed or heard about. Bayard's book is so witty and engaging that I am sorry to say I read the whole of it, but at least I wrote this micro-review before I was half-way through.

New Books on our List

Since we started the list of Books on the Psychology of Fiction (click here to see it), I have been adding five or six books a month. Initally we had 61 books with micro-reviews. Now we are up to 80, plus 25 edited collections of articles for which we have given full citations but no reviews. David Miall's site, which you can reach by clicking here, has a very full bibliography of articles and books on readers' responses to literature.

The two latest additions to our list of books-with-micro-reviews are slim volumes. One is Alan Bennett's (2007) delightful fantasy The uncommon reader, about how Queen Elizabeth II comes, at a late stage in her life, to fall so much in love with reading that this pursuit usurps (if that is the right verb) all her other interests and commitments. The other is How fiction works, by James Wood (2008) an influential critic who has written for The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, etc. His book has been reviewed at length by Rohan Maitzen, whose site you can reach by clicking here.

If you know of, or have written, books to add to our list, please let us know by adding a comment.

Martha Nussbaum and the Judicious Spectator

Philosophy has typically been thought of as rather different from literature. The separation started at least as far back as Plato, who wanted to eject the poets from his Republic. Indeed the idea that philosophy could learn from literature seems as strange as the idea that psychology might do so.

It is striking, then, that one of America's most distinguished philosophers, Martha Nussbaum, has built her career, in part, from her analyses of works of fiction. The first book by which she became widely known was The fragility of goodness (1986) in which she argued that for Plato the route to goodness was a life of contemplation, insulated from the shocks of the external world. By contrast, she argues, real life is full of accidents, which make goodness more fragile. So where do we find analyses of life as affected by accidents? In literary fiction. Nussbaum points us towards Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and says: "Greek tragedy shows good people being ruined because of things that just happen to them, things they do not control ... Tragedy also, however, shows something more deeply disturbing: it shows good people doing bad things, things otherwise repugnant to their ethical character and commitments, because of circumstances whose origin does not lie within them" (p. 25).

Plato’s descendants are the natural sciences, in which we strive towards ideal truths that transcend individual human cognition. No informed person would wish to argue against inferences drawn validly from empirical science, including science done in the domain of psychology. But complementary to such inferences, as Nussbaum argues, are understandings from literary fiction, whose truths are relative to the reader, and point to vulnerability rather than Platonic self-sufficiency as the centre of our humanity.

In 1995, Nussbaum published Poetic justice: The literary imagination and public life. She starts the book with Adam Smith’s idea of the “judicious spectator” who can mentally enter the plight of another person. She argues that this ability, of identifying with others by means of empathy or compassion, is developed by the reading of fiction. It is this kind of development for which Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz & Peterson (2006) have offered empirical evidence (see our academic papers, accessible by clicking here). Without being able to imagine one's self into the minds of others, in their often fragile circumstances, as one does in fiction, such issues as justice and fairness in public life would be impossible. You can access a review of Poetic justice by clicking here.

Books on the Psychology of Fiction at the Cinema and the Theatre

Since we introduced our list of books and micro-reviews on the psychology of fiction, we have added several more. In addition Bill Benzon has contributed a review of a book on the cognitive structure of comic-book fiction by Scott McCloud (1993), and Peter Sattler a review of a book on mental imagery in fiction by Elaine Scarry (1999).

It occurred to me that although our interests include the cinema and the theatre, our original list was without books on films, and there was only one on theatre, namely Aristotle's (330 BCE) Poetics. We have now remedied this defect to some extent by adding four books on the psychology of cinema: the influential book on the psychology of fiction films by Peter Bordwell (1985), and books by Murray Smith (1995), Ed Tan (1996), and Michael Ondaatje (2002). We have also added two on the psychology of theatrical acting by Konstantin Stanislavski (1936) and Elly Konijn (2000).

Although a number of people have kindly said that our list of books is helpful, I am aware that there are many gaps. Also, I am not a very fast reader. So, please suggest books and offer micro-reviews that we can add to the list, which can be accessed by clicking here.

The Role of Empathy in Fiction

The role that empathy plays in the comprehension and experience of fiction has been debated at least since Adam Smith’s The theory of moral sentiments was published in 1759. These ideas continue to have currency in such recent books as Suzanne Keen’s (2007) Empathy and the novel and Lisa Zunshine’s (2006) Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. You can find references, and micro-reviews for both these books in our list of books on the psychology of fiction.

We regard identification with a character as the literary application of empathy, and we think that it is one of the most important of the psychological processes that are at work during our engagement with fiction. In 2005-2006, Keith Oatley wrote an article for Greater Good Magazine, on this subject. It is available in our new archive of magazine articles. Also, Raymond Mar has conducted empirical research on this topic, with relevant papers available in our archives or his own website.

Books on the Psychology of Fiction

There has been a surprising number of books that are either directly on the subject of the psychology of fiction, or that contribute to it. We have made a list of 61 of them, starting with Aristotle's Poetics, which explicitly explores both the literary qualities and the psychology of what Aristotle called poetry, which we might call fiction. Poetry and fiction are derived, respectively, from Greek and Latin words for something made. Most of the examples with which Poetics is illustrated are not from lyric poetry, but from Homer's epics and from plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and others.

Our list is mainly of books by one or two authors. With the reference to each one, we include a micro-review of 50 to 100 words or so. After these books, we also list edited collections of articles or chapters, but because contributions in edited books tend to be various in quality and content, we do not review these collections.

Our list is far from complete, so please make suggestions in the form of comments to this post. Nominations and micro-reviews that fit the subject of the psychology of fiction will be added to the list, with an acknowledgment to you.

You can access our list by clicking here.