The Complex Relation Between Fiction, Morality, Truth, and Ideology

Research on the effects of reading fiction typically treats fiction as a monolithic entity and interprets its effects as evidence that reading improves social cognition and makes people better. This article questions both the practice and the interpretation. Fiction may exercise and reshape social-cognitive processes, but this does not imply greater accuracy, notably because, with few exceptions, social cognition has no external criterion of correctness. Findings linking reading fiction to empathy, moral reasoning, psychological essentialism, or attributional complexity do not by themselves show that fiction makes us better people. Many of these outcomes are selfreported styles and beliefs associated with ideological orientations, and whether people who score higher or lower on them are better people is a separate, normative question. Moreover, fiction is not monolithic: literary and popular fiction differ systematically in formal and representational properties, including ambiguity, predictability, complexity, and reliance on conventional narrative structures, and may encourage, respectively, more schema-disruptive or more schema-reinforcing modes of social cognition. Situating these effects within the psychology of art highlights a broader point: cognitive change, moral value, truth, political orientation, and aesthetic worth are related, but they should not be treated as equivalent.