It is often argued that narratives improve social cognition, either by appealing to social-
cognitive abilities as we engage with the story world and its characters, or by conveying …

Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led
various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' …

Scholars from both the social sciences and the humanities have credited fiction reading with
a range of positive real-world social effects. Research in psychology has suggested that …

This meta-analysis investigates the extent to which people's leisure reading may produce
better social–cognitive abilities. Researchers have hypothesized that experiences of fiction …

Previous research has shown that reading award-winning literary fiction leads to increases
in performance on tests of theory of mind (Kidd & Castano, 2013). Here, we extend this …

Recent studies have shown that reading literary fiction can prompt personality changes that
include improvements in abilities in empathy and theory-of-mind. We review these studies …

Prior experiments indicated that reading literary fiction improves mentalising performance
relative to reading popular fiction, non-fiction, or not reading. However, the experiments had …

Children with a rich home literacy environment generally show better reading
comprehension. For children in the higher grades of primary school, this relation is thought …

Humans have long suspected that stories can help us better understand others, and, indeed,
lifelong exposure to narrative fiction does predict better social cognition. Several …

Readers often describe vivid experiences of voices and characters in a manner that has
been likened to hallucination. Little is known, however, of how common such experiences …