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I read this article and it both aggravated and encouraged me. Overall, it was a very encouraging article, touting the importance of a liberal arts education. But, several parts aggravated me, namely, the reported views of tech company founders/executives regarding the humanities—specifically, how some of these higher-ups think the humanities to be lesser disciplines than the STEM disciplines and, therefore, not worth a student’s while, such as this quoted view of Vinod Khosla: “If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies.”

While I respect Khosla’s innovativeness and success, I must wholeheartedly disagree with this assertion. It is in the humanities where we are uniquely taught to think for ourselves (at least in certain ways) and to tackle unique problems. No, the humanities don’t teach all types of thinking (e.g., research via the scientific method), but how often do the sciences educate us in asking and answering important existential, ethical, or metaphysical questions? And indeed, because of these unique mindsets that are developed in the humanities, as the author goes on to say, these individuals are able to solve otherwise seemingly intractable problems…even in a STEM discipline like computer programming.

That’s because the humanities and the sciences aren’t competing disciplines, but complementary ones. Each is uniquely important in developing our minds—and, even more, ourselves—and without one or the other, we will be missing out on some of the possibility to fully live out our potential as human beings who think, feel, and experience.

In particular, it is in those areas of feeling and experiencing that the advantage of the humanities is arguably the clearest. Yes, the humanities teach us to think, but the sciences also do that very well (and, in some ways and areas, even better); the difference between the two is in type, not in quality or import. But when it comes to feeling and experiencing, the humanities, in their exploration of the human condition, offer what the sciences simply cannot offer as fully: humanity. Yes, there are ethical dilemmas in the sciences, along with human interest stories and real-world problems; but the times when I am most truly faced with what it is to be a human, it overwhelmingly comes from the humanities, whether philosophy or theology or history or literature. It is the latter on which I will focus.

Thinking about Thinking

There’s something magical about reading a good book. You get transported into a different time and place; your imagination lets loose; you see new worlds and relate to new characters, feeling what they feel and experiencing what they experience. There’s something  equally as profound, even if less magical, about how reading a book engages our brains. Specifically, it engages our Theory of mind (ToM) processes. ToM is the human cognitive (and emotional) ability to reason about and understand others’ minds. By employing ToM, we are able to realize that other people have their own unique beliefs, thoughts, and feelings that are different from our own. This is first-order ToM. We are also able to go further and realize that others also have intentions. This is second-order ToM. In other words, at this stage, we are able to recognize that others have their own ToM, and, as such, that they can recognize that we have our own thoughts and beliefs. Thus, they are able to make use of (and, in some cases, manipulate) our thoughts and beliefs in order to accomplish their goals and intentions.

In theory, you could keep increasing these orders ad infinitum, talking about thinking about what we know about what others know about what we know about what they know about…but that quickly gets complicated, and most research only looks at first- and second-order ToM, so I’ll leave it there. (And everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief, myself included, because that would be a lot to keep track of. Just as it is in one of my favorite FRIENDS episodes, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out”, which has one of my favorite lines from the show: “But they don’t know that we know they know we know.” That’s fourth-order ToM right there—sixth, when you consider that we’re watching them as actors portraying those characters.)

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In typically developing children, first-order ToM develops around four years of age, and second-order ToM around six or seven. Much more could be said about ToM, but I’ll leave it at that for now. If you’re interested in learning more about ToM, including the associated brain areas and potential moral implications, or if you simply want to watch adorable kids take a ToM test, check out this fantastic TED talk.

Literature and ToM

So, how does this relate to literature? Well, essentially, ToM is the process whereby we read others’ minds (a.k.a., “mentalizing”, in the scientific literature), whereby we get in their heads, experiencing what they’re experiencing. This is what we do when we get involved in a good book and relate to the characters. Thus, it’s no surprise that reading literary fiction has been shown to enhance people’s ToM abilities. In a series of recent experiments, Kidd and Castano (2013) consistently showed that reading a selection of literary fiction, but not popular fiction, led to individuals’ subsequently being better able to empathize with others (empathy being the emotional component of ToM), as measured by their ability to identify emotional facial expressions. Similarly, they found that people who likely tend to read more literary fiction also scored higher in identifying these expressions. In two of the experiments, they even found that those who read literary fiction (but, again, not popular fiction) scored higher on a measure of the cognitive component of ToM. Similarly, Bal and Veltkamp (2013) found that individuals who read selections of literary fiction (selections from one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories) saw a positive gain in empathy, but only in those who reported being most transported into the story. This pattern was not observed in those who read news articles, even though those articles were focused on people and personal experiences.

Based on these results, it can be argued that literature enhances empathy and ToM, at least when readers become involved in the story. But not all literature is created equal. What is special about literary fiction that is lacking in popular fiction and emotional news stories? Kidd and Castano address this in their discussion, noting that literary fiction is more “writerly”, whereas popular fiction is more “readerly”. What they mean by this distinction is that popular fiction is very fun, engaging, and easy to read. Good literary fiction, on the other hand, is realistically complex, capturing many of the nuances and enigmas that typify the human psyche and involving social interactions that do not abide by our expected schemas. As such, a reader of such literature must work to make sense of characters and motives by “[taking] an active writerly role to form representations of characters’ subjective states”—that is, they get very transported into and involved in the story (hence why I wanted to reach through the pages and slap the characters when reading Wuthering Heights)—thereby relying on ToM, because that’s what ToM does: it gives us representations of others’ internal, subjective states.

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The Humanities Make Us Better Humans

So one clear advantage of literature is that it helps us refine our abilities to understand and empathize with people. I would say that that alone is good enough reason to preserve and exalt the humanities. But the benefits do not stop there. Johnson (2012) found that individuals who read and were more transported into a story were more likely to subsequently engage in prosocial behavior. Granted, the story was one aimed at teaching compassion, and the prosocial behavior was highly contrived (the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a writing utensil and observed if the participant picked it up), making it challenging to extrapolate the findings to more real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, the potential is there: reading literature just might be making you a better, more helpful, more compassionate citizen. Furthermore, there is longitudinal correlational evidence that higher ToM abilities as a young child may lead to higher executive functioning abilities later (abilities like inhibiting distracting information, attending to what is important, switching between tasks or rules, etc.; McAlister & Peterson, 2013). These higher executive functioning abilities—along with higher ToM abilities when older—were also associated with greater number of siblings at an earlier age, suggesting that having close relationships at an early age might lead to greater ToM and executive functioning later in life. Thus, it seems, the more you deal with people, the better you will be at dealing with and relating to them.

The takeaway from all of this evidence is this: the more experience you have in relating to people, whether they be real people or realistic literary characters, the better able you will be to read and understand people, and, thereby, relate to and connect meaningfully with them. This, then, can enhance the size of your social network and may even make you a more compassionate, helpful friend and citizen. Behold the power of a good book! The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed—and perhaps mightier than the STEM…

Now you might be wondering, What about movies and TV? Can a high-quality, psychologically and socially complex movie or show exert the same effects as a high-quality book? I wondered that, too. So I looked. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any studies that examined movies in the same way others have examined books. But, my thought would be that, yes, they could be able to exert the same benefits, as long as they work like “writerly” literary fiction in that they draw the viewers in to the characters and invite the viewers to decipher for themselves what the characters are thinking and feeling. (Follow up: I feel like NBC’s This is Us does an excellent job of this, as it realistically portrays complicated people in realistic, real-life problems.)

That being said, a few studies have looked at the applications of using movies to teach empathy and interpersonal skills. In one study (Hojat et al., 2013), medical students watched movie clips that depicted doctor-patient relationships. Compared to subjects who viewed a documentary about the history of medical practice, individuals who viewed these movie clips had higher scores on an empathy test. As with the study on prosocial behavior, it seems that literature or movies that depict the desired outcome behavior will augment the exhibition of that behavior in individuals who read the text or watch the movie.

Thus, the overall pattern from these data is this: fiction, whether read or watched, can enhance target behaviors as long as it depicts those behaviors; and, overall, literature, if it is of a high literary quality, preserving the complexity of human nature and inviting the reader to participate in interpreting the characters and situations, can enhance ToM and empathy skills. And I think we can all agree that the world needs a little more empathy. But it could use more ToM, too. Castelli et al. (2014) found that older children, those who have a more developed ToM (specifically, they have second-order ToM), make decisions about what is fair based no longer on what is most beneficial to one party or the other (even though such bias can be justifiable), but rather based on what is the most equitable for both parties. In other words, a more developed ToM leads to a more developed (i.e., fairer) sense of fairness. Consider an example: as little Jane starts to be able to think about what Johnny thinks about her motives and actions, her idea of fairness is going to shift from hyper-fairness/over-niceness (or, conversely, advantageous/opportunistic behavior) to something that is equitable, because she now knows that he is able to know what she’s thinking and will thereby be able to discern if she’s making a decision that she thinks he will think is fair (or not).

Final Remarks

So, even though, in certain ways and at certain times, we spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about what others are thinking about us, when it comes to social decisions and doing what is right and/or fair, the decision will seemingly be most equitable—and, dare I say, favorable and just?—when we do put that time and effort into thinking about what others will be thinking about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It sort of comes down to the Golden Rule—or, even better, to the Platinum Rule (i.e., do unto others as they would do unto themselves), because they will know that you made a choice in acting as you did and that you considered them and their feelings and then chose to act in such a way as to respect those feelings.

In conclusion, maybe, if we all tried to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes—or, in cognitive terms, spend some time in someone else’s mind—the world could be a better place. If you need some practice, read a book. Heck, even if you don’t need practice, read a book. It’ll be good for you. And your mind. And apparently the rest of the world, too.

Yours truly,
D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D.
Renaissance Man and Abundant Life Liver