Failed Replication Shows Literary Fiction Doesn’t Boost Social Cognition

When a 2013 study published in Science concluded that reading literary fiction for as few as 20 minutes could improve someone's social abilities, it made quite the splash. However, when researchers from the University of Pennsylvania , Pace University, Boston College and the University of Oklahoma tried to replicate the findings using the original study materials and methodology, the results didn't hold up. 'Reading a short piece of literary fiction does not seem to boost theory of mind,' said Deena Weisberg , a senior fellow in Penn's psychology department in the School of Arts & Sciences , referring to the notion that describes a person's ability to understand the mental states of others. 'Literary fiction did not do any better than popular fiction, expository non-fiction and not any better than reading nothing at all.' The research team published its results in a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Initially, Weisberg and Pace's Thalia Goldstein wanted to repeat the original study, conducted at the New School for Social Research, to better understand how such a minimal intervention and a specific storytelling type alone could result in this response. 'Why would literary fiction be particularly good at doing this? Why not romance literature, which is primarily about relationships? Or why not something more absorbing?? Weisberg said. 'Literature is harder to absorb.