17

Imagination, Stories, Empathy

Two boys play together under a table; as described by Judy Dunn, such play draws on elaborate imagination, and develops intimacy.

As Judy Dunn has shown, children’s play involves the making of model worlds. Among extensions of play are games, which are models of kinds of interaction which, as Erving Goffman has shown, give insight into the roles and modes of interaction of day-to-day life. Games and play are works of the imagination, which Paul Harris and his colleagues have shown also to be involved in abstract thinking. Fiction is another extension of childhood play into later life. It enables identification with literary characters, and engaging with circumstances of possible worlds. Engaging with fiction is associated with better empathy and understanding of others.

Children’s Play

To imagine is to create a model world, a place and time to inhabit mentally. Or it’s to think oneself into the world of another mind. In children’s play we can see the making of such worlds. We see, too, the taking up of roles: the coming-to-be a firefighter, or a doctor, or a shopkeeper.

Here is a depiction by Judy Dunn of two four-year-old boys, friends in a nursery school for about a year, in a room that contains a table and some dress-up clothes. You can see two boys of this kind underneath a table in the picture at the head of this chapter.

First they are pirates sailing on a search for treasure, then their ship is wrecked, and they are attacked by sharks; they reach the safety of an island, and build a house (under the table). What to eat and how to cook it are problems that are ingeniously solved. Their elaborate adventure, their quickly solved disputes (are they being attacked by sharks or by crocodiles?), their extended conversations about what happens next—all are captured by our video camera in the corner of the room.1

Dunn calls this the beginning of intimacy. In the roles the children are taking, they not only enact their own model-being of pirate, but they understand the other’s role, the moves he makes, the things he says. They take on an elaborate shared intentionality. The reciprocity of children’s play can be seen in hide-and-seek. To enjoy the game, when you are in the role of the person who is hiding, you have to imagine yourself into the role of the seeker. Play seems to be one of the ways in which, in childhood, we discover how to model others, to understand and coordinate with them.

Not content with writing one of the best books of history on the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga followed it up with a book on play: Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture. Huizinga suggests it isn’t that our species is particularly wise (sapiens). Rather, as a species we play or interact together imaginatively and cooperatively to create something that was not there before.

Fun in Games

It is sometimes thought that we play when we are children and stop when we grow up. But play doesn’t stop. It becomes transformed. Among its transformations are games and sports.

Rather than being unstructured, as was the play of the boys who were being pirates, games and sports specify roles, specify how to engage in these roles, let us know what actions are available, what rules are to be obeyed. They are enactive models of modes of life, for instance of competition and skill. The sociologist Erving Goffman sketched the outline of a theory on this. In each game, he says, there is:

a matrix of possible events and a cast of roles through whose enactment the events occur constitute together a field for fateful dramatic action, a plane of being, an engine of meaning, a world in itself.2

With a few exceptions such as Sudoku, games and sports are social events, cooperative encounters, even when their mode is competitive. And, says Goffman:

there seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.³

Many games and sports reflect social structures, so chess is based on medieval warfare, Monopoly is based on real estate speculation, Snakes and Ladders is based on downs and ups in our journey through life. The metaphor works in the other direction: forms of work can be spoken of as games or sports, the banking game, the writing game, and a person may say, “It came out of left field.” In addition to such instances, Goffman explains how games enable us to reflect on the way in which, for each kind of interaction in life, we pass through a kind of semi-permeable membrane, into the interior of a certain way of life (“a world in itself”) to participate, to accept the rules, to enact a role. In a restaurant, one doesn’t order anything one can’t pay for, and one doesn’t take one’s shirt off as one would in the changing room of a swimming pool. As one enters one’s workplace one passes through another membrane. Within the workplace are rules of etiquette, modes of interaction, uses of time, which are different from within the membrane of home. And more than that: in real life as in games, as Goffman emphasizes, it makes all the difference how engaged we are in each role we adopt. If we are disengaged, or even not fully engaged, all is not well. And, as he also points out, in both real life and games, jokers and psychotics know how to cause disruption by breaking the rules.

Fun at the Movies

Play has also become transformed into plays, into novels, into films, into television series.

The film that is said to have been the most successful of all time in France is Bienvenu aux Ch’tis (in English, Welcome to the Sticks). It is about a post office manager, Philippe, who lives in Provence. His wife is grumpy and dissatisfied, and wants him to get himself moved to the Côte d’Azur. To obtain such a favorable transfer he would need to be disabled, but when he buys a wheel-chair in order to present himself in this way he is found out and sent to a post office in Bergues near the English Channel which, for those who live in the south of France, is like being exiled to the North Pole. There, he finds that though the weather is not so good, his post office staff are friendly. They do, however, speak with a strange accent. Even the English subtitles are witty.

The humor of the early scenes in Bergues derives in part from interchanges in which the local dialect, Ch’ti, is at first almost incomprehensible to Philippe.4 In Ch’ti, s-sounds are pronounced “sh,” and “a” is pronounced “o.” On Philippe’s first day, the post office workers take him to lunch at the French Fry Shack on the town square, where he joins the others in having fricadelle (a local delicacy) and fries. He finds the fricadelle surprisingly good, and asks what’s in it. “Can’t ask whatsh in it,” says a post office counter clerk. The ingredients are secret. “Like Americansh and Coco-Colo.”

The staff of his post office make Philippe feel welcome, but on the phone to his wife, he tells her that it’s even worse than they had imagined. As a result she stops being grumpy and becomes understanding, so that when he goes back to Provence every other weekend, his marriage is better than it has ever been, just as his job has become better than it has ever been.

Henri Bergson asked why people laugh, and said that among the reasons is that it’s completely human; we don’t laugh at landscapes or lampposts. We do laugh at people when, although they are human, they behave in a not-quite-human way, in a machine-like way. And generally we only laugh when we are with others: laughter needs a social echo. It may well have been an aspect of an evolutionary process of building group solidarity.

One reason Welcome to the Sticks is so good, so laugh-out-loud funny, is that rather than being about laughing at people who slip on banana peels or do other such silly things, it is about laughing with people. Philippe and his staff laugh together, and we in the audience laugh with them.

Imagination and Reasoning

With the spread of education, the question arose as to whether learning to read and write would improve people’s ability to think. Does it, for instance, enable them to think in more abstract ways, as Jean Piaget would say, to reason logically? And might such changes affect whole societies?

Eric Havelock put the difference between oral and written information like this:

Oral information is likely to be unfriendly to such a statement as, “The angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.” If however you said, “The triangle stood firm in battle, astride and posed on its equal legs, fighting resolutely to protect its two right angles against the attack of the enemy,” you would be casting Euclid backwards into Homeric dress, you would be giving him preliterate form.5

What does learning to read and write do for our thinking? It was partly to answer this question that in 1931 and 1932 Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan to study the effects of literacy programs that the USSR had begun. Among his tests was whether people who had attended such programs could reason from syllogisms, as conceived by Aristotle in Prior Analytics. In a syllogism, a person is given a proposition in the form of a general statement, then a particular statement that relates to it, and asked to make an inference. Here’s an example:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Inference: Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Here is a transcript from a person whom Luria interviewed: Abdurakhm, aged thirty-seven, who had not attended a literacy program.

INTERVIEWER: In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are the bears there?6

ABDURAKHM: I don’t know; I’ve seen a black bear, I’ve never seen any others …

INTERVIEWER: But what do my words imply? (The syllogism is repeated.)

ABDURAKHM: If a man was sixty or eighty and had seen a white bear … he could be believed, but I’ve never seen one, and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything.

Abdurakhm seems on the edge of irritation with these silly questions, but at this point a young man who had attended literacy classes joined in. “From your words,” he says, “it means that bears there are white.” Luria reported that in a sample of fifteen people who had attended a literacy program, all of them could solve syllogisms of this kind, whereas from fifteen who had not attended a literacy program only four could solve syllogisms of this kind.⁷

A next step was taken by Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, who went to Liberia to see whether Luria’s findings would be found there. One group of their participants was illiterate; the people in it had never been to school. In a second group, people were literate; they had been to school and could read and write English. In a third group, people had not been to school, and could not read or write English but they could write in a local indigenous script that was used for personal correspondence and commerce. Would the ability to read and write, which members of this third group had, enable these people to reason with syllogisms? Scribner and Cole found that it wasn’t being able to read and write that made the difference. People who could read and write their indigenous script were not able to solve syllogisms. Only those who had been to school could do so.

Children’s Imagination and Implications for Thinking

Paul Harris reasoned that the literacy programs that people had started to take in Uzbekistan were very elementary, and that for Luria’s finding perhaps something much more basic was involved than becoming literate. Perhaps, in these programs, and in schools in Liberia, he thought, people had been introduced to the idea that, by thinking, they could imagine possible worlds. They could do this, perhaps, because they had been able to think imaginatively in play when they were children.

With Maria Dias and Antonio Roazzi, Harris thought they would see how this idea might work with illiterate people in Recife, in Brazil. They tested twenty-four people who had attended literacy classes two or three times a week for two years, and twenty-four who were unschooled and illiterate. They constructed a set of syllogisms with premises that would be unfamiliar to their participants, such as “All leucocytes are white,” and a set with premises that would be familiar: “All blood is red.” Then half the participants were tested in the way that Luria had tested his informants. To these people the researchers said, “I am going to read you some little stories about things that will sound funny. But let’s pretend that everything in the stories is true. Okay, now I’m going to tell you the first story.”8 The other half of the participants were invited to use their imagination. The researchers asked them to imagine being on another planet. To these people they said: “I am going to read you some little stories about things that will sound funny. But let’s pretend that I am telling you all about another planet. Everything in that planet is different. Okay, now I’m going to tell you the first story about that planet.”

With the first group of participants, Dias and her colleagues found that people responded in much the same way as Luria’s respondents had. They tended not to be able to solve the syllogisms. Instead they drew only on their own experience. In contrast, those who were asked to imagine being on another planet—both those who had received some literacy instruction and those who had not—were able to do significantly better on syllogisms with both unfamiliar and familiar content.

The coming of language, perhaps 200,000 years ago, changed the mind from its previous ape-like state, into a hybrid. At this time in human evolution our ancestors would have been able to make individual mental associations, such as those of conditioned avoidance of the kind discovered by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner. At the same time, they would have taken part in shared plans with individuals, offspring, sexual partners, friends. They would also have taken on characteristics of their own local group culture. But now, in addition, they would have started to use a processor that worked in a new way, and could understand and generate language.

Andy Clark has proposed that a property of this new processor is that thoughts can themselves become objects of thought. As Philip Johnson-Laird has shown, this new processor is computationally more powerful than that of mental associations. It depends, too, on a new kind of memory that can work with language. This is short-term memory, of the kind discussed by George Miller in his paper on the magical number seven, plus or minus two.

So, some 200,000 years ago, the human mind became a hybrid with two kinds of processors that Keith Stanovich calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the older processor: associative and intuitive. Its memory is long-term and capacious, based mainly on direct experience. Then there is the newer processor, System 2, computationally more powerful, able to generate and understand language, able to direct and organize itself, but with a memory that is short-term and limited in capacity. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes about how thinking fast draws on System 1, while thinking slow draws on System 2 and enables us to go step-by-step through a problem to become more accurate.9

More recently, a further mental development has occurred: the coming of imagination. It’s this that explains how one can not only use thoughts to work on thoughts, but to think about things beyond the immediate and beyond the realm of remembered experience. This includes play, and being able to reason in abstract terms. It’s what Dias, Roazzi, and Harris found with their participants in Brazil, who were asked to imagine what it might be like on another planet.

Imagination seems to have required a suite of six abilities to operate in the brain, some of long standing, others more recently acquired.10 All of them emerge, in modern children, in the first four years of life. They are as follows.

•  Imitation. Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore have reported that babies’ abilities to imitate others’ facial actions start when they are just a few weeks old. Imitation develops into abilities to learn how to do things if one is shown how.

•  Empathy and altruism. The idea of empathy, defined as the ability to feel what someone else is feeling, goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was separated from the idea of sympathy. It is reviewed by Marty Hoffman and by Nancy Eisenberg. Empathy emerges in babies between twelve and eighteen months of age. It seems to grow from emotional engagement, and it can give rise to motivation to help others altruistically.

•  Knowledge of one’s abilities to act in the world. Michael Tomasello and Hannes Rakoczy say that an important faculty that differentiates us from apes is that by about the age of eighteen months human children know that both they and others are able to act in the world.

•  Symbolic play and role-based play. Alan Leslie has discussed how a two-year-old may take a banana and use it as a telephone to talk to her friend. Hide-and-seek is an early kind of role-based play.

•  Understanding models. Judy DeLoache found that three-year-olds, though not younger children, could find a toy hidden in a room if they had been shown a miniature toy being hidden in a dollhouse model of this room. Children also become able to understand pictures as representations.

•  Theory-of-mind, perspective-taking. Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner discovered that four-year-olds were able to know what someone else knows even when this is not the same as what they themselves believe.

It doesn’t seem as if these abilities depend on each other. For instance, being able to take part in roles during play does not predict the development of theory-of-mind. It does, however, seem that these abilities matter for our modern human minds. They matter for our joint plans and for our development and maintenance of cultural worlds. They matter for our ability to imagine what it is like to live in circumstances other than our own: being in a minority ethnic group, beset by starvation, or made a victim of war. They are also essential for being able to think in abstractions, as well as understanding possible futures such as consequences of climate change, of rates of income inequality, and of international conflict.

Art Appears in the Human Record

More than 100,000 years ago a new human mode began, the mode of art. It’s not directly practical, like the technology of stone tools, the earliest of which are more than three million years old. But in some ways this mode is comparable because it involves externalization, the sharing of mind. This earliest-discovered form of art was of shells, drilled to make beads, which seem to have been used for necklaces.11 Whereas tools are used in the outer world, necklaces had other purposes. Did they perhaps work in the same kind of way as clothes, which may already have started by that time? Did they help people to fashion their identities, to transform themselves partly in the social world but also within?

Later, other kinds of art began to appear. Dating from 40,000 years ago, burial mounds have been found.12 The earliest cave paintings were discovered at Chauvet. They date back 31,000 years.¹³

Personal ornaments and art mean that a mental connection is being made between the mind of the artist and the mind of another person who engages with it. Steven Mithen calls this metaphor: a “this” is a “that.” Burial mounds imply that a “this” (a person who is dead) is a “that” (this person who is alive on another plane, or in our memories). A set of marks on a rock (a “this”) in the earliest cave painting is a rhinoceros (a “that”), and a mental connection to them is offered to another person who sees it.

Early written stories include the Epic of Gilgamesh,¹⁴ Homer’s Iliad, and stories of the Bible.¹⁵ Although later it was written down, the Iliad is thought to have been composed, first, by someone who recited it orally, to groups of people who would gather and listen.¹⁶ The same kind of storytelling still occurs in some parts of the world. We can think of all such narrative stories, oral and written, as fiction.

The idea of fact as compared to fiction is not very helpful for psychological understanding. Of course, we know what is meant. In a court of law, or in a newspaper, or in science, we want to know the facts. A better word for fiction might be imaginative stories which, with the wider development of literacy, became imaginative literature.

We can say that generally (in plays, novels, movies) fictional stories take a narrative form, and their subject matter is about human beings interacting with each other. Stories based on happenings and anecdote must have arisen from conversation, our human means of cultivating and maintaining our relationships with each other. In fiction, imagined worlds of the kind that children share with friends in interactive play are transformed into imagined worlds that authors share with readers, and that readers share with each other in reading groups.

The adult love of fiction can be seen as entering model worlds to encounter characters (model people) in whom we become interested, and whom we recognize in terms of traits and quirks that enable us to better understand the people we meet in day-to-day life.17

History of the Mind in Fiction

There are not many subject areas in which there is a book that everyone in the field thinks is indispensable. For Western literary fiction, there is one: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach. He wrote it between 1936 and 1946 when he lived in Istanbul. The book has twenty chapters. The first includes discussion of an incident from Homer when Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War and is recognized by his former nurse, from a scar on his thigh, and the biblical story of Abraham being told to sacrifice his son Isaac. Then, in historical sequence, come chapters based on courtly romance, on Dante’s Inferno, on Montaigne, on Proust, and on Virginia Woolf. With each one, there is a passage from a book and, as we start to read it, we find ourselves inside a society with its own meanings, and inside a mind of that time. It’s a history of Western literature and it is also a history of the Western mind.

How do storytellers enable us to make a scene vivid? Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that it’s no good writing, “There were butterflies,” in a story. “I discovered,” he said, “that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it.”¹⁸

Jennifer Summerfield, Demis Hassabis, and Eleanor Maguire conducted an fMRI study that takes us closer to this issue. They studied what neuroscientists call the core network. It is involved in remembering events in our lives, making plans, imagining future possibilities. Summerfield and her colleagues say they managed to slow down the constructive process of imagination by presenting spoken phrases to their participants one at a time, in an fMRI machine. Among phrases they used were: “a dark blue carpet” … “a carved chest of drawers” … “an orange striped pencil.” Participants were asked, as they heard each phrase, to imagine what it indicated, and when they heard each new phrase, to add it to the scene. They were also to report on how vivid the resulting scene was. As this was going on, the researchers looked to see which brain areas were activated.

Three brain areas of the core network were associated with imagination: the hippocampus (plus some other areas), the intraparietal sulcus (plus another area), and the lateral prefrontal cortex. When the first phrase was presented, the hippocampus and associated areas were activated; with the second phrase, activity of these areas increased; with the third phrase activity in these areas increased again, but phrases presented beyond the first three did not produce additional activation. In what they said of their experience of doing the task, participants confirmed that three elements were sufficient to construct a scene to its maximum vividness.

Here is an example from the work of Anton Chekhov, widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers of short stories. His story “Gusev” is about a private soldier who has been in the East for five years, who has been discharged and is now on his way home. At the start of the story neither the readers not Gusev know that he is dying. On his journey he imagines his homeland.

He pictures an enormous pond covered with snow … On one side of the pond, a porcelain factory, the color of brick, with a tall smokestack and clouds of black smoke: on the other side a village … Out of a yard, the fifth from the end, drives a sleigh with his brother Alexei in it (ellipsis points in the original).19

Chekhov offers us some suggestive phrases: a snow-covered pond, a factory with a tall smokestack, the village with a sleigh, with no more words than necessary, enough for the reader to imagine the scene. In the same year that he wrote “Gusev,” in a letter to his mentor and friend Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov wrote that in his short stories he counted “on the assumption that [his readers] will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.”20

When we look at the world and perceive it in terms of people and objects laid out in three-dimensional space, the brain uses cues from the retina to guide its constructions, to make mental models of how the world must be. Writers of fiction do much the same, but their cues are phrases on a page, or words heard on a stage. As Shakespeare put it at the beginning of Henry V:

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,

Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth:

For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.²¹

Human Rights

Although we now think of human rights as universal and fundamental to society, it was not always so. In her book, The Invention of Human Rights, Lynn Hunt shows that the invention of rights began in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1759, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith wrote of sympathy for others as essential, and that indeed it is the glue that holds society together. Then, as Hunt explains, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the American Declaration of Independence (of 1776) states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.²²

A photo of this Declaration is presented in figure 23. Hunt notes slyly that Jefferson did not explain these rights; to do so would have meant they weren’t self-evident. A decade later, in the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, influenced by Jefferson, the first article states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Hunt talks of invention, and how difficult it was; not everything was accomplished at once. Although in these early statements, “men” means “persons,” it does not pass notice that Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 would write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In 1948, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published, in which the first article is: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”²³ In all these declarations Hunt argues that there are “three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in all human beings), equal (the same for everyone), and universal (applicable everywhere).’²⁴

Figure 23. United States Declaration of Independence. Source: Original Declaration of Independence as printed on July 4, 1776, top of page 1. This is the original printing sent to the states and the army. It differs from the “engrossed” copy that was made later. U.S. Library of Congress. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US-original-Declaration-1776.jpg.

To make a person a possession, by slavery or other means, is not to be tolerated. In many countries women and people who belong to ethnic minorities are equal before the law. Democracies enable everyone to vote. But we still have far to go. In the twenty-first century, in the name of war, politically based actions that kill civilians and destine millions to become refugees have been carried out for reasons in which human rights of all the people (naturally, and equally, and universally) have counted for little.

A principal means by which recognition of human rights began to occur was empathy. Hunt concludes that the growth of empathy, with its outcome of the recognition of human rights, is more important than any other social-political change in the last 5,000 years. This growth began some 300 years ago.

Hunt writes that empathy depends on “a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own.”25 She goes on to argue that among the processes by which this took place was fiction. “Reading novels,” Hunt says, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative.”²⁶ She describes Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) as encouraging empathy, by inviting the reader to identify with a servant woman. Hunt quotes from Pamela and includes this passage.

He kissed me two or three times, as if he would have eaten me.—At last I burst from him, and was getting out of the Summer-house; but he held me back, and shut the Door.

I would have given my Life for a Farthing. And he said, I’ll do you no Harm, Pamela; don’t be afraid of me. I said I won’t stay! You won’t, Hussy! Said he. Do you know who you speak to? I lost all Fear, and all Respect, and said Yes, I do Sir, too well!—Well may I forget that I am your Servant, when you forget what belongs to a Master.

I sobb’d and cry’d most sadly. What a foolish Hussy you are! said he: Have I done you any Harm?—Yes, Sir, said I, the greatest Harm in the World: You have taught me to forget myself, and what belongs to me.²⁷

It was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the technologies of reading and writing began to spread more widely in European and North American society, that novels began to flourish. Pamela was successful, and it enabled readers to enter the lives and minds of people different from themselves, and to feel empathetically toward them. So, writes Hunt, “Human rights grew out of the seedbed sowed by these feelings. Human rights could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion.”28

Literature was important in ending slavery in the West. A significant book was the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, who was taken from Africa and shipped to the New World as a slave. He traveled widely, acquired a good education, bought his freedom, and settled in England. In fine literary prose, his autobiography is a moving story of how slaves were treated. His book became popular, and a powerful encouragement in Britain for the abolition of the slave trade. In the United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited with comparable effects in the abolition of slavery.

George Eliot wrote: “We are all born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.”²⁹ So, despite our propensities for cooperation, we need to cultivate our understandings of others, of how they also are selves, and of how they are affected by our behavior.

Marcel Proust put it like this:

Only through art can we escape from our selves and know the perspective of another on the world, which is not the same as our own, and which contains views of landscapes that would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.³⁰

In 2006, Raymond Mar and others in our research group published a study in which we found that the more fiction people read, the better were their empathy and their understanding of others. Reading non-fiction didn’t have this effect. We replicated the study with another group of participants and found that the effect was not due to people who were more empathetic preferring to read fiction rather than non-fiction. Nor was it due to any other individual differences; it seemed as if fiction itself had the effect. Subsequently, effects of this kind have been found experimentally. Short-term effects, of reading short stories followed by immediate testing, have been published, though some have become controversial and may be due to priming, a process in which exposure to something makes a certain kind of response more likely. But there have also been medium-term effects, which have been based on people reading whole books. Together with the longer term associations of the kind that Mar and colleagues have found, and with statistical analyses of groups of studies (meta-analyses) that have been performed, this kind of result is now fairly firmly established.31

Effects of this kind imply that fiction, particularly fiction about intentions of others, as in love stories and detective stories, and as in literary fiction, tends to focus on character and its complexities.³² Fiction of these kinds, and some kinds of narrative non-fiction such as biography, can invite us mentally to create for ourselves the world of the story, and to think ourselves into the minds of its characters. In this way, it is a form of what Søren Kierkegaard called “indirect communication.”³³ This kind of communication doesn’t attempt to instruct, or persuade, let alone (as in propaganda) to coerce, but instead enables people to think for themselves, and also to think into the minds of others. Roland Barthes put it like this. To read in a way that involves creating and constructing the world of the story and its characters is to do very much what the writer does; it’s writerly reading. To read passively, to do merely a readerly reading, he says, is to be “plunged into a kind of idleness.”³⁴

In Ethics through Literature, Brian Stock writes: “All Western reading, it would appear, has an ethical component, and the value placed on this component does not change much over time.”35 In 2015, a conversation was published in the New York Review of Books between U.S. president Barack Obama and novelist Marilynne Robinson. Obama is quoted as saying:

The most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.³⁶

Reflection, and learning, about morality, and what Tomasello calls group intentionality, in other words, can be prompted through reading fiction.

Reading fiction, going to movies, watching television series, and playing video games have been thought to be mere pastimes: entertainment. Effects of fiction on empathy have been found not just for reading, but with the better kinds of television series and video games, and thus point to something deeper.³⁷ Through engagement in certain kinds of fiction, we become better able to understand others by means of our imagination.