Psychology Today

However intimate our friendships, however much we value them, circumstance will have restricted our choice of people we can know. Books are friends we can choose without restriction.

I was asked recently by a journalist to comment on Tyler Cowen's TED talk on why we should be suspicious of stories.

Much of what we know about reading fiction predicts that it will move people towards empathy. But what happens when this idea is tested in psychological studies?

Empathy has become a subject of much interest. It's of interest in fiction as we feel for characters in stories, in politics as we wonder what to feel for people in different social groups, and in history as we wonder about the emotions of people living in societies of the past.

We are all very good at knowing what other people ought to do. It's even been said that a pleasure that never palls is to point out when other people--friends, people at work, politicians--get it wrong.

The idea that art may imitate life is at least as old as Aristotle's Poetics, the book that-in the West at least-is the most widely recommended text on how to write fiction. It's even recommended by screenwriters to screenwriters.

If we think in the way that Lev Vygotsky (1962) proposed, mind isn't a container in which memories, thoughts, plans, and impressions can be inserted or from which they can be retrieved. It IS these memories, thoughts, plans, and impressions.

There are many kinds of social influence. A parent may coax, an employer may demand, a politician may exhort, an advertiser may suggest. In forms of this kind one person knows what another should think or do. But what about social influence in which people are not trying to persuade or control?

People read fiction to travel to fictional worlds, where one's responsibilities are few and one's experiences are many. But fiction also enables us to change our personality. Maja Djikic and I, together with Sara Zoeterman and Jordan Peterson (2009), showed that when people read one of the world's great short stories, changes occurred in their personality.

One hears a lot of grumbling that although housemaids are thought once to have snatched half an hour below stairs to read the latest novel by Jane Austen, now people only Google and Twitter. "It's because of technology," say the grumblers. But writing-and-reading is the most important technology yet invented. Every technology has two parts. One is external. In writing and reading it's the marks on paper or some other medium. The other is internal. In writing and reading it's the skills to make and use the external marks. Each successful technology is taken up into society and creates a new niche, supported by new practices. The technology of writing and reading enables the externalization of thoughts, and it has led to the book, which has created a niche that is still thrives.

Many people who've seen James Cameron's film Avatar say, "The special effects are good, but the movie is mindless." The special effects certainly are good, but the film isn't mindless. It's all about minds. The hero, Jake Sully, first enters by identification the mind of the military commander of a human mission to Pandora in the Alpha Centauri solar system, then second that of the anthropologist, Grace, who is trying to understand the Na'vi inhabitants of Pandora, in order to win them over. Third, by a piece of DNA magic, he enters the body of a Na'vi person and takes on a Na'vi mind, falls in love with a Na'vi princess, and becomes able to communicate with her mentally by a means that for humans is impossible.