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Want to Understand People Better and Improve Your Life? A New Study Says Read These Kinds of Stories
Bill Murphy Jr.
5–6 minutes

Let’s talk about empathy. Maybe we should start with a definition. Here’s a short one, courtesy of the Oxford Dictionary: “the ability to understand and share the feelings, experiences, or thoughts of another person.”

Develop empathy, and you’re more likely to develop emotional intelligence.

In business, you’re more likely to understand customer needs. And you’re more likely to become more persuasive, and maybe better at sales.

Now, a new study out of Ohio State says that there’s a surprising way to train yourself to become more empathetic.

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Mary and the puppy

It’s one that a lot of people get a lot of enjoyment out of, too: reading fiction, especially fiction that employs something called “internal focalization,” which is when a story gives the reader access to the characters’ inner thoughts, and especially when those thoughts are about regret.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, senior author Angus Fletcher, PhD, and social psychologist Mark Matthews, PhD, conducted three studies that involved 1,563 people.

Specifically, they came up with a story about a child named Mary who watched as her puppy was hit by a car, and swore off having another pet until age 85, when she adopted another dog to heal her grief.

Mary has to hire a repairman to do some work at her home, and she warns him to keep the door closed, but he fails to do so, and Mary’s new puppy runs away, to Mary’s horror.

Fletcher and Matthews offered study participants different narrative additions describing the repairman:

First, whether he left the door open because he simply ignored Mary’s warning, or whether he left it open because he was distracted by personal issues.
Second, whether he thought to himself, “I wish I didn’t leave the door open,” or whether he actually said to Mary afterward, “I wish I didn’t leave the door open.”

(You might recognize that if the repairman only thinks to himself that he wishes he hadn’t left the door open, that’s an example of the kind of “internal focalization” this study was testing.)

The distinction is that in one version, we know the repairman regrets what he did because he tells Mary so. In the other, we know because we can read his thoughts, even though Mary can’t.
Fiction makes a difference

In real life, someone can apologize without actually being sorry.

But if we’re reading a story and the author tells us what the character is thinking, we know whether he really means it.

Apparently, that makes a difference.

In the first study, involving 371 people, readers who knew the repairman privately regretted what he’d done were more likely to forgive him than readers who only knew what he’d said out loud.

The researchers then repeated the experiment with another 449 people, but added something else.

Afterward, the study participants were asked to think about a time in their lives when they had been wronged by somebody.

Readers who found they forgave the fictional repairman character for what he’d done to the fictional Mary were more likely to say they forgave the person who had wronged them in their real-life example.

The researchers did a third study, this time with 743 people, and found much the same thing.

They also looked at whether simply reading fiction, as opposed to something like a technical report, might make people more forgiving. That didn’t seem to be the case. It was the specific technique of letting readers see the character’s private remorse that made the difference.

“Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse,” Matthews said, “the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it. They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having. As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more.”
Let’s go beyond forgiveness

Now, this particular study looked specifically at empathy and forgiveness. And we’re talking about people reporting how forgiving they felt, not necessarily going out and actually forgiving somebody.

But I think there’s a broader point here.

Reading fiction is one of the few things you can do that lets you know what another person is thinking without that person ever having expressed those thoughts.

Obviously, we’re talking about fictional people. But if reading about a character’s private regret can make us more willing to forgive someone who wronged us in real life, I wonder what other kinds of reactions and emotions we might become better at understanding as a result.

And considering that reading a good novel is something a lot of us would enjoy doing anyway, that’s a pretty good argument for making more time for it.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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It's just fiction and this is not new information. But yes, everyone should read fiction.