Literary Fiction & Empathy

The article stated that after reading literary fiction "people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking". I do agree that reading about characters with more complex issues in their lives and more serious conflicts can inspire more empathy in people. You have to consider the hardships they are going through and then you naturally compare/contrast it to your life and it helps to get you thinking about what others are going through, especially the things you may not necessarily deal with on a daily basis. As Albert Wendland stated, in literary fiction readers also have to be more active. You can't just take a backseat and automatically understand like you can in popular fiction. Each person involved has a different version of the truth leaving it up to the reader to make inferences much like in real life.