How Reading Fiction Can Improve Your Social Skills

“Perhaps it's due to the way movies and television programs portray bookworms, but people who like to read are often portrayed as socially awkward. Interestingly enough, a new study shows that reading fiction can actually improve your social skills.”

Original: Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes [pdf]

Abstract: Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind (Mar et al., 2006). We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support.

It sounds really interesting btw, nice articles you posted!

Can you help me to understand a bit and paraphrase this passage?

Thus, it appears increasingly necessary to ensure (1) that
hypothetical variables are not merely variants of known personality
traits, regardless of their name and (2) to demonstrate that identified
relationships between such variables cannot be attributed to well-established measures of personality.

They are describing issues relevant to their aim to “rule out the role of personality” by underscoring problems intrinsic to current personality models.

Thanks, I got it.

"There is growing evidence that reading narratives, even those explicitly
labeled as fiction, is far from a meaningless leisure activity that ends
when one closes the cover of a book."

I wonder if the same could be said about games. Because I've been avoiding all kinds of virtual games because of this sole reason- I get the feeling that the meaningfulness of a computer game ends as soon as I come out of it, and then comes addiction.

Maybe it's the dialogue? Although dialogue in fiction can be 'cheesy' or useless for normal conversation.

As for games, they are kinda essentially visual books? Maybe not the multi-player part, but certainly campaigns or quests?

Anyways good read, although I did not read the whole lot.

There's plenty of work on the value of videogames and games for cognition, emotion, abilities, and suchlike.

Example from a previous post: http://www.livescience.com/6521-video-ga...gests.html

Found this on that site also: http://www.livescience.com/1382-study-pl...sight.html

There's also understanding flow/desirable difficulty through games.

Ian Bogost has written interesting stuff on games and blogs frequently, but here's a book link: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/def...52&ttype=2

Also, Edward Castronova on virtual worlds and currency, and Clive Thompson (most know him from Wired, I imagine) on a variety of topics. He quoted a sociologist named Bart Simon on relevant topics to this thread.

Then there's more general stuff regarding virtual and augmented reality, which often develops from gaming concepts and technologies (such as HL2's facial muscles being used to help autistic folks).

Tangent from Castronova: I recently read this: http://www.labspaces.net/110654/Virtual_..._teenagers

Just found this when testing out what a Google search for ‘benefits videogames’ would turn up: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...90884.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/deat...deo-gaming

http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/08/st...aying.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...02114.html

It's a rather popular subject, because of the whole ‘is technology making us smarter or dumber’ thing.

When I was a teenager I spent more time watching anime than socialising or watching Western media. I think this screwed me up and made me incapable of socialising naturally in English, lol

This is a more accessible piece by one of the authors: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-...s-others-0

hehe reminds me of Dickens' Hard Times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation..._causation

fakewookie Wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation..._causation

Did you even read the study, or the linked article(s)? Because if you had, you'd have seen this quite obvious factor repeatedly mentioned and in fact, this is the aim of the original paper (and later papers): working out this process of establishing independence of variables and correlations and establishing causal relations.