Short-Term Effects of Fiction on Social-Cognitive Skills: The Roles of Literariness, Language Familiarity, and Narrative Experience

Some theories suggest that literary fiction may enhance social-cognitive abilities (i.e., empathy and mentalizing) to a greater extent than popular fiction. The superiority of literary fiction may depend on readers’ experience of transportation and identification, as well as their familiarity with the language of the story. We conducted an online experiment with 744 adult participants who read a literary or a popular fiction short story matched for topic in either their native or second language. After reading, participants’ evaluation of the story (literary quality, stimulation of reflection, influence on their life and attitudes), narrative engagement, transportation and identification, and their self-reported empathy and mentalizing performance were assessed. The language of the stories had no significant effects on readers’ narrative experience, mentalizing performance or empathy ratings. Contrary to our assumptions, the popular fiction story received higher ratings across variables assessing influence on attitudes and (self-)reflection than the literary fiction story, and no differential effects of literary vs. popular fiction emerged for self-reported empathy or mentalizing performance. Moderator analyses indicated that empathy ratings depended on how strongly the participants felt transported into the story for only the popular but not the literary short story. Additionally, lower cumulative reading exposure was associated with weaker mentalizing performance particularly after reading literary fiction, but not popular fiction. These findings underline the need for a more complex theoretical framework that goes beyond the distinction of literary vs. popular fiction and the need to investigate specific aspects of literariness and their effects on story perception and social-cognitive skills.