Here’s C S Lewis in That Hideous Strength, describing his protagonist (a sociologist)…

“..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”

In one experiment, Oatley and colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults, separating fiction from nonfiction. They also tested the subjects on measures of emotion perception (being able to discern a person’s emotional state from a photo of only the eyes) and social cognition (being able to draw conclusions about the relationships among people based on video clips.) This study showed a “strong” interconnection between fiction reading and social skills, especially between fiction reading and the emotion-perception factor. This correlation, of course, does not by itself demonstrate the direction of causality.

Another study involved assigning 303 adults to read either a short story or an essay from the New Yorker and following up with tests of analytical and social reasoning. Those who read the story tended to do better on the social reasoning test than those who read the nonfiction essay.

Oatley argues that “Good social skills require having a well-developed theory of mind…the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from your own.” He says that children start to acquire this ability at about 4 years old, and that “the ability to gauge emotion from pictures of just the eyes correlates with theory-of-mind skills, as does the capacity for empathy.”

In a further attempt to disentangle cause and effect, subjects were given tests designed to measure 5 personality traits: extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The researchers also assessed the subjects’ social networks and degree of social isolation/loneliness. People scoring high on “openness to experience” turned out to read slightly more fiction. But when this variable was held constant, there was still “a large and significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathetic and theory-of-mind abilities; it looked as if reading fiction improved social skills, not the other way around.”

Dr Oatley has referred to fiction as “the mind’s flight simulator.”

I was blind, but now I see.