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The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication
to Changes of the Self
Maja Djikic and Keith Oatley
University of Toronto
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 and propose a
psychological conception of artistic literature as having 3 aspects that contribute to such changes. These
are that literary fiction is simulation of selves with others in the social world; that taking part in this type
of simulation can produce fluctuations that are precursors to personality changes; and that the changes
occur in readers’ own ways, being based not on persuasion but on indirect communication.
Keywords: art, fiction, empathy, personality, self-change
The indirect mode of communication makes communication an art in
quite a different sense than when it is conceived in the usual manner.
...Tostop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him,
is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing,
without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempt-
ing to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an
impulse to go precisely his own way.
—Søren Kierkegaard (1846/1968, p. 246–247)
Fiction is an art form, but of what does it consist? During the last
15 years, psychologists have made progress on understanding the
art in fiction. One important property has come to the fore:
literature can facilitate self-change. This is impressive, given the
stability of the personality system (Costa & McCrae, 1994;Mc-
Crae & Costa, 1990,1996) and difficulties people encounter in
attempting to change it (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994).
Although there have been anecdotal reports of self-changing in
encounters with literary works (Sabine & Sabine, 1983), aspects of
self that have recently attracted attention in empirical research are
empathy and the ability to understand others. A striking feature of
self-change through literature is that the effects are not direct, as
occurs with persuasion, where an author intends the reader or
listener to think, feel, or be disposed to act, in a way he or she
desires. The art in fiction is a social influence, but one that helps
people to understand and feel, and even change their selfhood, in
their own ways. The influence is what Kierkegaard (1846/1968)
called “indirect communication” (pp. 246–247).
In this paper we begin by reviewing recent empirical findings
which indicate that reading literary prose helped improve empathy
and the ability to understand others, and thus to change personal-
ity. We then propose three psychological aspects of artistic liter-
ature that made this change possible: that such literature mainly
takes the form of simulation rather than description, that it can
produce fluctuations in personality systems, and that its influence
is indirect and exploratory.
Reading Fiction Improves Empathy and the Ability to
Understand Others
Traditionally, teachers of literature have argued that reading
novels by writers such as Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and
Leo Tolstoy, or short stories by writers such as Anton Chekhov
and Alice Munro, invites us to understand others better. The
literary scholar Keen (2007), for instance, argued that increas-
ing empathy by means of literature made for improvements in
the self and society. Some philosophers, however, have been
skeptical. Radford (1975), for instance, argued that the idea of
feeling moved by fictional characters is incoherent, and Currie
(2011) wrote, “when we engage with great literature we do not
come away with more knowledge, clarified emotions, or deeper
human sympathies” (p. 15). The question, then, is what is the
evidence?
Hakemulder (2000) proposed that fictional narrative can be a
“moral laboratory.” He asked people to read pieces of fiction, and
found that these could help people to imagine themselves into the
shoes of others, and this could affect beliefs about what it must be
like to be someone else (see also Hakemulder, 2008). Mar, Oatley,
Hirsh, dela Paz, and Peterson (2006) found (in a study that used
measures of a different kind than those of Hakemulder) that the
more fiction people read the better were their empathy and their
ability to understand others. To measure the amount of fiction and
nonfiction people read, Mar et al. (2006) adapted the Author
Recognition Test developed by Stanovich, West, and Harrison
(1995) in which people are given a list of names, and they were to
This article was published Online First October 20, 2014.
Maja Djikic, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto,
Canada; Keith Oatley, Department of Human Development and Applied
Psychology, University of Toronto.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Maja
Djikic, Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, Rotman School of
Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada, M5S 3E6. E-mail: maja.djikic@rotman.utoronto.ca
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Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts © 2014 American Psychological Association
2014, Vol. 8, No. 4, 498–505 1931-3896/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037999
498
check those that they recognize as authors. People who read a lot
are likely to know, for instance, that Toni Morrison and J. R. R.
Tolkien are authors, whereas Lauren Adamson and Eric Amsel are
not. Stanovich et al. found that the number of correctly recognized
names of authors on this test gave a close proxy to the amount
people read as measured, for instance, by daily activity diaries.
They also found that the better their scores on author recognition,
the better was their vocabulary and their general knowledge, even
when age, IQ, and level of education were controlled for. Rain and
Mar (2014) presented fresh evidence of the predictive validity of
author recognition checklists.
Mar et al. (2006) had the idea of modifying the original Author
Recognition Test so that it consisted of names of writers of fiction,
names of writers of nonfiction, and names of people who were not
writers. With colleagues (Mar et al., 2006) he gave this modified
test to participants along with two outcome measures of social
understanding. One outcome measure was Baron–Cohen Wheel-
wright, Hill, Raste, and Plumb’s (2001) Mind-in-the-Eyes test, a
36-item task to measure empathy and theory-of-mind (the ability
to attribute mental states to oneself and others, and to understand
that others can have intentions and desires that are different from
one’s own; Premack & Woodruff, 1978). In the Mind-in-the-Eyes
test, participants look at photographs of the eyes of people seen as
if through a letter box so that the rest of the face is not visible. Each
person whose eyes are seen in the test has been photographed
while making a readable facial expression. Participants have to
choose one of four adjectives to indicate what they think the
person was feeling and thinking, for instance: “joking,” “flus-
tered,” “desire,” or “convinced.” The second outcome measure
was an Interpersonal Perception Task ⫺15 (Costanzo & Archer,
1989), in which participants watch 15 video clips of naturally
occurring social interaction, and for each clip answer a question
about what was going on. Mar et al., 2006 found that the more
fiction people read (as measured by their ability to recognize
names of fiction writers), the better were their scores on the
Mind-in-the Eyes test. Results on the Interpersonal Perception Test
were smaller but in the same direction. By contrast, people who
were predominant readers of nonfiction (as measured by their
ability to recognize names of authors of nonfiction) scored lower
on these tests.
In a replication, Mar, Oatley, and Peterson (2009) found that
higher scores on the Mind-in-the-Eyes test associated with reading
fiction occurred even when a set of controls had been applied. The
effect was not, for instance, explained by preference to read fiction
among people who had better empathy and theory-of-mind, or by
any other trait of personality. Mar et al. (2009)found, too, that the
myth that avid fiction readers are socially isolated is untrue; their
social networks were found to be better than those of people who
read less fiction. Fong, Mullin, and Mar (2013) demonstrated that
the genre of fiction most closely associated with improved empa-
thy and theory-of-mind as measured by the Mind-in-the-Eyes test
was romance. Family stories and adventure stories also showed
positive associations, but science fiction did not. In preschool
children, Mar, Tackett, and Moore (2010) found that the more
stories they had read to them, and the more movies they watched,
the better they were at five tests of theory-of-mind. By contrast,
hours of watching TV did not correlate with any measures of
theory-of-mind.
Two criticisms of this set of studies were that they were corre-
lational and that they did not measure effects of increased empa-
thy. Johnson (2012) solved these problems. In an experiment, he
found not only increased empathy for the protagonist among those
who were mentally transported into a story they read, but also an
increase in participants’ altruistic behavior: Those whose empathy
increased were more likely to help a stranger who had dropped
some pens on the floor. A reservation about Johnson’s (2012)
study is that it did not use literary fiction, but a story written
specially for this experiment. This problem was solved however by
Johnson (2013) when he found that transportation into literary
fiction decreased prejudice against Arab Muslims. Moreover,
Johnson, Cushman, Borden, and McCune (2013) found, in an
experiment, that instructions to generate imagery while reading
fiction increased empathy and prosocial behavior, and Johnson
(2014) found that reading narrative fiction decreased bias of peo-
ple as they thought about Arab faces seen in photographs.
In terms of conventional measures of personality change with
more direct focus on literary reading, Djikic, Oatley, and
Moldoveanu (2013b) demonstrated in an experiment that people
who were low on the Big Five personality trait of Openness to
Experience (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) increased their em-
pathy as measured on the perspective taking scale of Davis’s
(1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index when they read one of eight
fictional short stories, as compared with those who read one of
eight nonfictional essays. Both the stories and the essays were
chosen from literary anthologies.
Further experiments also have been conducted to focus on
literary reading. Kidd and Castano (2013) randomly assigned
participants to read one of three literary short stories (one of which
was Anton Chekhov’s Chameleon) (1884/1979) or one of three
nonfictional essays (one of which was Charles Mann’s (2011)
“How the Potato Changed the World”). As compared with people
who read one of the essays, those who read a fictional piece
significantly improved their scores on the Mind-in-the-Eyes test.
In their second experiment Kidd and Castano (2013) used a
different measure of theory-of-mind, and compared a piece of
literary fiction, a piece of fiction that was popular (as gauged by
Amazon), and no reading at all. Reading literary fiction produced
better theory-of-mind than reading popular fiction, but the effect
was only marginally significant. In three further experiments, the
researchers compared different pieces of literary and popular fic-
tion and found in each case that, as compared with those who read
the popular fiction, those who read the literary fiction were sig-
nificantly better on the Mind-in-the-Eyes test.
Missing, currently, from studies of this type are experiments on
longer term effects. For instance, people may be randomly as-
signed to read for, say, 10 hr a week over a period of several
months, either fiction or explanatory nonfiction of their choice.
Another limitation is that most work of this type has so far focused
on fiction as compared with nonfiction. Influences of forms such
as biography and narrative history have yet to be examined.
Another problem with current research on this issue is that it has
focused predominantly on reading prose. In a study on poetry used
functional MRI (fMRI), Zeman, Milton, Smith, and Rylance
(2013) found that as well as activating brain areas concerned with
reading, pieces that were more stylistically concentrated (such as
the poetry of Keats, 1959) activated areas that are usually activated
by music, those concerned with introspection, and also those
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499
ART IN FICTION
concerned with memory. Poetry (and, by extension what we might
call the “poetry of prose”), then, is not restricted to narrative
effects. As to theater, Goldstein (2009) discussed how actors are
able to improve theory-of-mind, and Goldstein and Winner (2012)
found that children in elementary school and adolescents in high
school improved their empathy and theory-of-mind with training
in acting as compared with training in other arts. As to work on
film, we mentioned Mar et al.’s (2010) finding that preschool
children who watched more films had better theory-of-mind. There
is also a body of work on psychological effects of film in engaging
adult spectators (see for instance, Green et al., 2008;Oatley, 2013;
Oliver & Bartsch, 2010;Schramm & Wirth, 2010), although this
work has not yet examined changes of empathy or other aspects of
personality.
Despite these limitations, recent research has pointed to the
conclusion that fiction, and particularly artistic fiction, is an agent
of self-change. In the following section, we suggest three aspects
of literary fiction that can facilitate change in facets of personality.
Three Aspects of Art in Literature
Literary Fiction as Simulation of Other Selves and
Other Minds
Oatley (1992,1999) proposed that rather than conceptualizing
fiction as flawed empirical description of the world, we should
think of it as simulation. It is a simulation with subject matter of
the type that Bruner (1986) suggested, of human (or human-like)
agents, their intentions, and the vicissitudes these intentions meet.
It is a type of simulation that runs not on computers but on minds.
Stories told orally were probably the very first simulations, with
subject matter based on the closest interests of our ultrasocial
species. These simulations are of what we and others are up to with
each other, and of how to understand such matters. If you learn to
fly a plane you might do well to spend time in a flight simulator.
The studies discussed earlier, of fictional reading’s association
with better empathy and abilities of theory-of-mind, were
prompted by wondering if fiction might be the mind’s flight
simulator.
In terms of effects on the brain, Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, and
Zacks (2009) studied people who read a short story while they
were in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. When they read of a
character doing the action of grasping something, the part of their
brain concerned with grasping with a hand was activated. When
the character moved to a new scene, the part of the reader’s brain
concerned with analyzing visual scenes was activated. Speer et al.
discussed their findings in terms of readers running a simulation of
events they read about.
A principal reason for the superiority of fiction over nonfiction
for promoting understanding of others is, as Zunshine (2006)
argued, that theory-of-mind is the typical subject of fiction. The
main difference between psychological effects of fiction and non-
fiction is a matter of expertise (Oatley, 2011,2012). People who
read a lot of fiction get better at its subject matter: understanding
other minds and what people are up to with each other in the social
world. By contrast, people who read about geometry or genetics
become more expert at understanding how diagrams can concep-
tualize space or how DNA is important in how plants and animals
develop. In acquiring social expertise, readers of fiction change
somewhat in themselves. As the experimental studies by Johnson
(2013);Djikic, Oatley, and Moldoveanu (2013b); and Kidd and
Castano (2013) found, reading fiction that is literary made people
more empathetic, that is to say better able to experience something
of the emotional states of others in an inward way. It is likely that
this process diminishes the actor-observer bias (Jones & Nisbett,
1971), in which people tend to see themselves as acting in relation
to events while they tend to see others as acting out fixed person-
ality traits.
A serious problem in studies of reading literature is how to
choose control groups. In many experiments on psychological
effects of literary narrative as compared with expository prose,
there is a large confound. It is that narrative prose is generally
easier to read than expository prose. A measure that can be used
to avoid the most troublesome influences of this confound is the
Flesch–Kincaid measure of reading difficulty (Kincaid, Fish-
burne, Rogers, & Chissom, 1975), which is based on the aver-
age length of words and the average length of sentences in a
text. Although the Flesch–Kincaid score does not measure more
sophisticated aspects of the text (such as literary features, style,
etc.), it does adequately measure how easy the text is to read.
Using this measure, Mar, Oatley, and Eng (2003) built on the
studies of Larsen and Seilman (1988) and Seilman and Larsen
(1989) who found that reading narrative prose elicited more
actor-based memories than did reading expository prose. The
passages studied by Mar and colleagues (2003) were arranged
to have exactly the same semantic content, the same level of
reading difficulty on the Flesch–Kincaid measure, and the same
length. Participants were randomly assigned to read the narrative or
expository text. As they read, they were asked to mark the
margin whenever a memory occurred. After reading they wrote
summaries of these memories. As compared with those who
read the expository piece, those who read the narrative had
memories that were more vivid and more likely to involve the
reader as an actor or observer in a detailed scene. Narrative text,
in other words, involves readers more deeply and personally in
what they are reading. It invites what Green, Chatham, and
Sestir (2012) called “transportation” into the narrative world.
Fluctuations of Personality Prompted by Literature
How is it possible that literature can promote change in a system
as stable as personality? We hypothesize that the art of literature
(its style, figurative expressions, and invitations to involve the
reader) can temporarily destabilize the personality system. Djikic,
Oatley, Zoeterman, and Peterson (2009) conducted an experiment
on the short story of Chekhov (1899/1917):The Lady With the
Little Dog. People were assigned to read either this story or a
control text. Chekhov’s story is about two people who start an
affair at the seaside resort of Yalta. The control text, written by
Zoeterman and Djikic, was a nonfiction-style courtroom report of
a divorce case based directly on the short story. It contained the
same information, and had some of the same conversations. Even
more important, participants found it just as interesting as Chek-
hov’s story, though not so artistic. In effect, the literary quality of
the text (that relies on rhythm, stylistic factors, literary features)
was diminished, while all the narrative components of the text
were maintained. As with Mar et al.’s (2003) study, the control text
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500 DJIKIC AND OATLEY
was arranged with the same reading difficulty and length as
Chekhov’s story.
In the experiment, people were randomly assigned to read
Chekhov’s story or the control piece. Before they started reading
Djikic et al. (2009) measured their personality traits by means of
the Big Five personality inventory, and asked them, also, to indi-
cate on 0 to 10 scale the intensity of a list 10 emotions they may
have been feeling at the time, with 0 being least intense, and 10
most intense. After reading we again administered the personality
inventory, and again measured the intensity of participants’ emo-
tions. We found that those who read Chekhov’s story, but not those
who read the control text, experienced fluctuations, or changes, in
their personality. A participant would, for example, report an
increase in openness and a decrease in conscientiousness, while
another participant would have a completely different pattern of
changes.
The main point was that individuals who read Chekhov’s story
temporarily changed (fluctuated in their personality) more on
average than those who read the less artistic version. Furthermore,
for the readers of Chekhov’s story, the changes were all in differ-
ent directions. In other words, in contrast to effects of persuasion,
changes of individuals in their personality were idiosyncratic.
Everyone had a different type of change. The changes were me-
diated by the intensity of emotions that readers experienced while
reading, and these emotions too, were idiosyncratic of different
types and directions. They indicated what people felt, individually,
about the story.
Popular literature often moves our emotions, but at the end of an
emotional roller coaster of the type provided by the typical horror
story or thriller, we remain much as we were before we opened the
book. Emotion is important to personality change, but not emotion
as programmed by writers who have decided in advance that they
want their readers to be anxious (in a thriller), or horrified (in a
horror story), and suchlike. We think that the intensity of the
different emotions people felt as they read Chekhov’s story indi-
cated the strength and importance they attached to the story’s
characters and events, that is to say by how touched they were by
the story. The readers’ emotions were not prespecified. They were
the readers’ own.
Personality is a stable system. Research has shown that a change
in any stable system (biological, physiological, or psychological)
needs to be preceded by a fluctuation that is strong enough to move
the system to a different level (Bak & Chen, 1991;Schiepek,
Fricke, & Kaimer, 1992). The fluctuation necessary for change in
personality occurs both for negative changes, such as trauma (van
der Kolk, 1987/2003), and positive ones, such as growth in psy-
chotherapeutic settings (Bonanno, 2004;Linley & Joseph, 2004).
Furthermore, this type of fluctuation, or variability in personality,
is known to happen during developmentally active life periods
(Fleeson & Jolley, 2006). Djikic et al.’s (2009) study indicated
that, in regard to Chekhov’s literary story, it was not the narrative
content that caused this fluctuation, but the artistic qualities.
Fluctuation prompted by literary style is temporary. This means
that for many individuals exposed to literature (and other arts), the
personality system temporarily may open and then revert to its
former configuration. The implication is that an experience of this
type can be merely of passing interest. By contrast, those who
resonate more strongly with a work of art, as indicated by strong
emotions of their own while reading, may be helped by the
instability induced in the system to change into a different config-
uration of personality (see Sabine & Sabine, 1983). Art can there-
fore be a facilitator, though not a dictator, of self-change.
The study by Djikic et al. (2009) was replicated by Djikic,
Oatley, and Carland (2012). Based on the data collection in which
people were randomly assigned to read one of eight literary short
stories or one of eight literary nonfiction essays (in the study by
Djikic, Oatley & Moldoveanu, 2013a, mentioned above), they
found that people who read a text they judged to be artistic
experienced greater fluctuation of personality than did those who
read a text they judged not to be artistic. The genre (fiction vs.
nonfiction) did not matter as much as the artistic quality, in
producing these fluctuations or short-term changes in personality.
These results answer a question that arises in relation to studies
such as those of Kidd and Castano (2013): How is it possible that
a single exposure to a piece of literature can change something as
stable as the personality trait of empathy? The results imply a
process in which the artistic component of literature temporarily
unfreezes one’s personality system, as its narrative components
allow the person to incorporate others’ experience in their own
personality system and restabilize it.
Miall and Kuiken (2002) found that literariness of a narrative is
closely related to its ability to prompt emotions that are the
readers’ own. The induction of personality instability is helped by
this emotional instability (Djikic et al., 2009). As well as referring
semantically to people, actions, and objects, as narrative must do,
artistic narrative draws on tropes such as metaphor and metonymy.
It arranges words in syntactical orders that may not be of the most
common kind; it has its own rhythms, alliterations, and asso-
nances. It achieves what researchers on literature have called
“foregrounding” (Miall & Kuiken, 1994;van Peer, 1986) that is to
say it brings phrases to attention and makes them more likely to be
emotionally moving.
One difficulty with artistic, that is, literary narratives, is that we
often focus so much on the effects of narratives, that we underes-
timate effects of artistic style. As Mithen (1996) argued, art is a
relatively late arrival in human mentality. It is perhaps about
50,000 years old. It is signaled in the archaeological record not just
by cave paintings but by burial sites that imply the existence of
funerals at which stories would be told about the dead person.
Mithen proposed that the central component is metaphor, in which
a something can be a something else. Marks on a cave wall can
also be a bison. At a funeral someone dead is also alive on another
plane. As Dissanayake (1992) argued, the effect of art is to make
something special.
Art in general, including literary effects of foregrounding, has
effects that Flaubert referred to when he constructed what seems to
be the first theory (perhaps still the best theory, see Oatley &
Djikic, 2008) of how to write prose fiction. This type of writing,
said Flaubert,
would be as rhythmical as verse, as precise as the language of science,
and with the undulations, the humming of a cello, the plumes of fire,
a style that would enter your mind like a rapier thrust, and on which
finally your thoughts would slide as if over a smooth surface. (as cited
in Williams, 2004, p. 167)
The effect of art in fictional narratives is shared with art in other
domains: with instrumental music, with visual arts, or with dance.
Fluctuations in personality comparable to those that occurred in
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501
ART IN FICTION
reading artistic literature have been found when people listened to
music (Djikic, 2011) and looked at pieces of visual art (Djikic,
Oatley, & Peterson, 2012). These results support the hypothesis
that literature shares with other arts an effect of introducing a
perturbation to personality, which can sometimes be a precursor to
a more permanent personality change.
Artistic Literature as Indirect Communication
There is a large field of research on persuasion, in which social
psychologists have shown how by words and images people can
cause others to have beliefs, emotions, and dispositions of partic-
ular kinds. Green and Brock (2005) found that narrative can
increase persuasiveness of a message. Scientific writing, political
communication, advertising, and propaganda, all seek to persuade.
But, as we propose here, art does not try to persuade people to
believe or act in any particular way. Rather, writers offer cues, and
invite readers to draw their own inferences.
Kidd and Castano (2013) argued that literary fiction is more
open-ended than popular fiction. People are invited to think more.
A good explanation for the effect had been offered by Kotovych,
Dixon, Bortolussi, and Holden (2011). They reported three exper-
iments, two of which were on Alice Munro’s The Office, a literary
first-person short-story about a woman who rents an office in
which to write. In Munro’s stories one has to make inferences. For
example, near the beginning of The Office, one reads: “But here
comes the disclosure which is not easy for me. I am a writer. That
does not sound right. Too presumptuous, phony, or at least uncon-
vincing.” (as cited in Kotovych et al., 2011, p.270) The woman
narrator talks to the reader, who has to infer what she feels. In
Kotovych et al.’s first experiment some participants were given
Munro’s story to read, and others were given a version that instead
of the lines quoted above says, “I’m embarrassed telling people
that I am a writer.” Readers of the original Munro story attained a
deeper understanding, and a closer identification with the narrator
than those who were told explicitly how she felt. In their 2003
book, Psychonarratology, Bortolussi and Dixon (2003) proposed
that literary fiction is like conversation in which we make infer-
ences about other people. It is not that literary fiction makes us
work harder than we may want. Its secret is that, as compared with
some types of popular fiction that are explicit in what the reader is
expected to think and feel; it comes closer to conversation, an
activity we enjoy and spend an enormous amount of time in. The
inferences of conversation are everyday means by which we come
to know the minds of others.
The manner in which artistic literature differs from nonartistic
narratives such as explanatory essays or some popular fiction is
that it does not give us ready-made answers to our questions.
Collingwood (1938) proposed that art that is properly so-called
does not aim to produce a specified effect. He explained that there
are many crafts that have this attribute. If a carpenter makes a
chair, he or she has a plan to produce an object with attributes that
are specified in advance. By contrast, said, Collingwood, art is not
based on any such plan. Instead, in a language such as words,
painting, or music, it is an expression of an emotion that is not yet
fully understood. The outcome is unknown. Although the concen-
tration on expression of emotions is too restrictive, Collingwood’s
hypothesis did usefully separate art from craft. It has also been a
useful starting point for psychological studies. For instance Djikic,
Oatley, and Peterson (2006) found that in interviews aimed to elicit
autobiographical information, writers were far more preoccupied
with their emotions than physicists were with theirs. The writing,
then, becomes for the author an exploration of how the emotional
self interacts with self and the world. A comparable effect occurs
for readers.
Putting the Aspects Together
The three aspects of literary art that we have discussed above do
not provide a complete characterization of the art in fiction.
Among other important aspects are: art’s relation to the world as
indicated by the concept of mimesis as discussed by Aristotle
(trans. 1970), art’s ability, as Longinus (trans. 1965) put it, to be
sublime, art’s ability to build bridges between the seen and the
unseen (Kemp, 2006), and the idea that art is, as Hyde (1983) put
it, not part of a commercial transaction but a gift that can set up a
certain type of relationship with the person who engages in it.
The three aspects of art we propose here fit together psycho-
logically and, as we have shown earlier, beginnings have been
taken in exploring them empirically. In this closing section we
integrate these aspects in relation to Chekhov’s story, The Lady
With the Little Dog. Not only is Chekhov generally considered the
greatest artist of the short story, but this story is regarded by many
as his best. Empirically, as Djikic et al. (2009) demonstrated, not
only did the participants of their experiment regard this story as
artistic, but empirically it was found that reading it produced
change in how they perceived their own personalities, the change
that was unique to each participant.
In relation to the first aspect—that of simulation—we suggest
that we engage in the story, first of all, by identification with the
main character, Gurov. As we start up the simulation, we set aside
our own goals and concerns, somewhat as a person does who is
starting a session of meditation, and we take on the concerns and
intentions of Gurov. In this way, as Trabasso and Chung (2004)
demonstrated, we empathize with the protagonist. At the same
time, as Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora (2004) stated, reading a story of
this kind implicates the self, connecting us to memories and
deepening our self-understanding.
The relation of this to the second aspect is that because as
readers we have taken on the concerns of the protagonist, it is we
ourselves—not any fictional character—who experience the emo-
tions of the story. In artistic works not only can we experience our
own emotions, but we can reflect on them. Emotions are critical
psychological mediators between outer and inner, and they give us
a sense of urgency and importance (Oatley & Johnson-Laird,
2014). It is not just that works of art have, as Mithen (1996)
explained, qualities of metaphor in which one thing can be some-
thing else, but as Oatley (in press) proposed, we can become
metaphorical. By identification we can become a literary character.
In Chekhov’s story we can remain ourselves, and become Gurov or
Anna. We thereby put ourselves in the position of experiencing
perturbations in our usually fixed schemas of personality. The
process is one that Kaufman and Libby (2012) called “experience
taking” in which, as they demonstrated in six studies, aspects of
our emotions, our beliefs, our behavior, and our self can change.
The third aspect of artistic literature is that the writer’s commu-
nication to the reader is indirect. In The Lady With the Little Dog,
we may feel, with Gurov, that life has a husk and a kernel, so that
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502 DJIKIC AND OATLEY
although some parts of our life are public, other parts are hidden.
Or we may feel sympathy for Anna, who finds herself in a
marriage that convention seems to have provided for her, but
which no longer engages her. Or we may find ourselves disap-
proving of Gurov and Anna, who are both married but are now
having an affair. Or, with Malcolm (2002) who based her book on
a pilgrimage she made to Russia to walk in Chekhov’s footsteps,
we may feel that the deep essentials that Chekhov suggested in this
story are of the privacy of inwardness and, at the same time, of
leaves of autumn, of growing old.
Chekhov put the issue of the indirectness of his stories like this.
In a letter of October 27, 1888 to Suvorin, he wrote that there are
two things one must not confuse, “answering the questions and
formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an au-
thor” (as cited in Heim & Karlinsky, 1997, p. 117). A few lines
later he suggested that artistic writing compares with presentation
in a court of law. “It is the duty of the court to formulate the
questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to
answer them according to his own preference” (as cited in Heim &
Karlinsky, 1997, p. 117).
In his elegy to Yeats, Auden (1977) wrote, “poetry makes
nothing happen” (p. 242). He was right; art is not like a toaster that
makes bread turn into toast. But recent evidence has shown that
artistic literature can allow things to happen in the minds and
personalities of readers. Psychologically, this is a nondirective
social influence: indirect communication.
Art involves the nondirective property of inviting those who
engage with it to experience their own emotions and thoughts.
Literature can help us navigate our self-development by transcend-
ing our current self while at the same time making available to us
a multitude of potential future selves.
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Received January 21, 2014
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Accepted July 30, 2014 䡲
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