Study: Reading novels makes us better thinkers

New research says reading literary fiction helps people embrace ambiguous ideas and avoid snap judgments

By Tom Jacobs

Topics: Pacific Standard, Fiction, study, Entertainment News

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making.

Fortunately, new research suggests a simple anecdote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction.

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students. After arriving at the lab and providing some personal information, the students read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The fictional stories were by authors including Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, and Paul Bowles; the non-fiction essays were by equally illustrious writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould.

Afterwards, each participant filled out a survey measuring their emotional need for certainty and stability. They expressed their agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I don’t like situations that are uncertain” and “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.”

Those who read a short story had significantly lower scores on that test than those who read an essay. Specifically, they expressed less need for order and more comfort with ambiguity. This effect was particularly pronounced among those who reported being frequent readers of either fiction or non-fiction.

So how does literature induce this ease with the unknown? Djikic and her colleagues, Keith Oatley and Mihnea Moldoveanu, have some ideas.

This is why we have such an idiotic country of no nothings. Nobody reads.

I just AVOID non-readers

2freaky4church1 said:

This is why we have such an idiotic country of no nothings. Nobody reads.

*know

tinaz said:

2freaky4church1 said:

This is why we have such an idiotic country of no nothings. Nobody reads.

*know

I no, right?

2freaky4church1 said:

This is why we have such an idiotic country of no nothings. Nobody reads.

Hell, I saw the movie, I don't need to read the book!

16th of June is Bloomsday,

so time to crack open our copies of Ulysses

Visionnaire said:

tinaz said:

*know

I no, right?

Steven Pinker’s most recent book touched on some similar ideas, specifically that literacy was one of the potential factors that may have been a catalyst for the humanitarian revolution. It was definitely one of the more speculative things he proposes in that book, but it’s a very intriguing notion: that the beginnings of widespread literacy and affordable printed media in the 1800s were primary pacifying forces in expanding the circle of sympathy held for people who are different – from a different village, different country, different gender – and in the beginnings of acknowledgement of animal cruelty. Part of that would be an outcome from just having a more informed, enlightened population, but as the op states, reading fiction allows people to take other vantage points, inhabit the minds of other people and question things that are generally accepted.

[Edited 6/16/13 8:35am]

reading is a fundamental

so is throwing shade.

but in a serious any reading is good for you. regardless of who you read, just read.

cborgman said:

Rococo said:

reading is a fundamental

so is throwing shade.

but in a serious any reading is good for you. regardless of who you read, just read.

Exactly.
That's the main reason why I come here to this site.
To read people's comments and brush up on my reading.

SuperSoulFighter said:

cborgman said:

avid reader, but ashamed to admit i have neither proust nor dostoevsky.

Don't be! Don't read anything because you think you should. That's what I had to do at school. The school tells you what to read because they call it literature. I always hated that. And I always liked to read. I love comic strips and I've also read all of Don Quijote .Still very funny after 400 years!

I love Don Quijote, it was one of the books I read because I had to, for school (and, yes, there are many "lifeless" things they make you read), and I absolutely loved the idea behind it and the spirit. I thought it was brilliant.

There are undoubtedly many good things about reading, but it also depends on the reader and the book, simply. Not every book is written in that brilliant, layered way that makes it different every time you read it, somehow. I don't think reading anything just for the sake of it is good (except for some form of mental excercise) and that it automatically makes a person grow.

So how does literature induce this ease with the unknown? Djikic and her colleagues, Keith Oatley and Mihnea Moldoveanu, have some ideas.

“The thinking a person engages in while reading fiction does not necessarily lead him or her to a decision,” they note. This, they observe, decreases the reader’s need to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Furthermore,” they add, “while reading, the reader can stimulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release—of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own—may produce effects of opening the mind