…after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence
The New York Times on a new study in Science.
Presumably reading Dan Brown increases the chance that you make rude noises with your hand under your armpit.
The sample sizes are too small to take the result too seriously (which I find continually disappointing in science journals) but they do the experiment multiple times so that is comforting.
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Economists and their large-N obsession. Get over it.
There’s interesting commentary from Language Log here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715
I seem to remember that Stephen Pinker pulls together some more evidence for this in his “The Better Angels of our Nature” and makes the argument that the spread of literacy and empathetic fiction has had a significant impact on levels of violence.