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Review of General Psychology
Psychology of Narrative Art
Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic
Online First Publication, June 8, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000113
CITATION
Oatley, K., & Djikic, M. (2017, June 8). Psychology of Narrative Art. Review of General Psychology.
Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000113
SPECIAL ISSUE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FICTION
Psychology of Narrative Art
Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic
University of Toronto
Artistic narrative has been recognized in fictional genres such as poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and
films. It occurs also in nonfictional genres such as essays and biographies. We review evidence on the
empirical exploration of effects of narrative, principally fiction, on how it enables people to become more
empathetic, on how foregrounded phrases encourage readers to recognize the significance of events as
if for the first time in ways that tend to elicit emotion, and on how literary works can help people to
change their own personalities. We then suggest 3 principles that characterize narrative art in psycho-
logical terms: a focus on emotion and empathy, a focus on character, and a basis of indirect
communication.
Keywords: fiction, art, emotion, indirect communication, consciousness
Narrative is a mode of thinking about people who have inten-
tions that meet vicissitudes. In making this proposal, Bruner
(1986) contrasted it with paradigmatic thinking, a mode concerned
with explanations of physical processes. It seems likely that nar-
rative derived from conversation (Bortolussi & Dixon, 2003; Oat-
ley, 2004), as people shared anecdotes with each other, perhaps
especially about events of emotional significance (Rimé, 2009).
“Literary art” wrote Nussbaum (1995), citing Aristotle (1970),
“shows us things ‘such as might happen,’ in human life” (p. 5).
This kind of art can affect our “ability to imagine what it is like to
live the life of another person, who might, given changes in
circumstance, be oneself or one of one’s loved ones” (p. 5).
Fiction and Truth
Radford (1975) expressed a reservation. He wrote that it makes
sense to be moved by the suffering of a friend, but
[w]hat seems unintelligible is how we could have a similar reaction to
the fate of Anna Karenina, the plight of Madame Bovary, or the death
of Mercutio. Yet we do. We weep, we pity Anna Karenina, we blink
hard when Mercutio is dying and wish that he had not been so
impetuous. (p. 69)
It seems unintelligible, Radford said, because we know that
fictional characters are not real. So although it may seem natural to
be moved by works of art, it “involves us in inconsistency and so
incoherence” (p. 78). Radford’s argument has become known as
the paradox of fiction.
Radford focused on a difference between fact and fiction. In so
doing he echoed Plato (1955), who devoted Part 10 of The Re-
public to arguing that poetry (which we would now call fiction) is
antithetical to truth and is of “no serious value” (602b). The works
he dismissed included those of Homer, highly regarded in his time.
Making his way along a comparable path, 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). He argued that fiction isn’t the place to look for truths
about the mental lives of human beings. Instead we should look to
scientific psychology and neuroscience. If you must read Middle-
march, he said, you should do so “only when Nature Neuroscience
is ready as an antidote”(p. 15).
Plato, Radford, and Currie have thought of fiction as descrip-
tion. But as Oatley (1992, 1999) proposed, fiction is not descrip-
tion. It is simulation. Stories may have been the very first simu-
lations, invented before computers. For simulations of all kinds,
considerations are different from what they are for descriptions.
We use simulations to understand complexes in which several
factors interact. Widely used are those on which are based weather
forecasts. Prediction of the weather can be made from a single
variable: “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.” A far better pre-
diction of the kind one can see on TV, with tomorrow’s clouds and
precipitation moving across the screen as the hours pass, is based
on a simulation. Here is the reason. We can be good at under-
standing processes one at a time, but when several interact, our
unaided mind is not so good. We can understand, for instance, that
when a mass of cold air meets a mass of warm air, it cools the
warm air so that water dissolved in it condenses to produce
precipitation. But what if we add the season—summer or winter—
whether there are mountains or seas nearby, what the strength of
the winds are, what the atmospheric pressure is, and whatever
other variables bear on the situation? We need a simulation.
Keith Oatley, Department of Applied Psychology & Human Develop-
ment, University of Toronto; Maja Djikic, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Keith
Oatley, Department of Applied Psychology & Human Development, Uni-
versity of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 1V6.
E-mail: keith.oatley@utoronto.ca
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Review of General Psychology © 2017 American Psychological Association
2017, Vol. 0, No. 999, 000 1089-2680/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000113
1
The interactions of human life also take place in complexes. We
can understand a single process, for instance, that if Alison is
angry with Beth, she is likely to say something hurtful. But what
if Beth is Alison’s 3-year-old daughter? Or what if Alison and
Beth are both adults who have just started a sexual relationship,
after Alison has been upset by a recent breakup? Or what if Alison
and Beth are married, and they go out one evening with their friend
Colin, for whom it’s important to Alison to maintain a good
opinion?
The simulations of fiction are ones we can actually enter by
putting aside our concerns and plans and taking on the concerns
and plans of a literary character, such as a protagonist. The process
is one of identification. We enter the character’s circumstance. Or
perhaps a character is a friend of a protagonist, as Mercutio is
Romeo’s friend. In this instance, when watching Romeo and Juliet
(Shakespeare, 2000), if we find ourselves, as Radford said, blink-
ing as Mercutio dies, it’s not that we are feeling for a nonexistent
person. The emotions we experience are our own in a situation of
a kind in which we may never have been but one in which, as we
bring the simulation alive for ourselves, we imagine that we could
be in.
The issue goes deeper. When Plato thought of a truth, his
example was that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle is equal to the sum of squares on the other two sides
(Meno; Plato, 1956). For Radford the truth was that there is no
such person as Mercutio. For Currie a truth was a finding reported
in Nature Neuroscience.
We might imagine Radford or Currie advising us not to take an
umbrella inside a computer while it is running a simulation to
produce a weather forecast.
In any simulation, it is important for individual processes to be
accurate. Artistic writers of fiction and weather forecasters both
work hard to achieve such accuracy. But in a piece of fiction, for
instance about an interaction between Alison and Beth, although
we and the writer might all agree on its typical manifestations,
anger is different for each of us. It is different for someone who is
temperamentally amiable than it is for someone who was physi-
cally abused as a child. It is different for someone newly in love
than for someone in the process of breaking off a long-term sexual
relationship. In fiction, facts of an outward kind are not unimport-
ant, as Prentice, Gerrig, and Bailis (1997) showed, but understand-
ings of an inward and interpersonal kind are generally more
important (Oatley, 1999, 2016).
Effects of Fiction on Empathy and Theory-of-Mind
In a flight simulator, a pilot can improve skills in flying. So if
fiction is the mind’s flight simulator, do improvements occur? Mar
had the idea of asking this question and hypothesized that reading
fiction might improve social skills (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz,
& Peterson, 2006).
Mar et al. (2006) drew on the research of Stanovich and West,
who invented the Author Recognition Test (see, e.g., Stanovich,
West, & Harrison, 1995): a list of names of people who were
authors and nonauthors. The number of authors participants rec-
ognize from this list is a close proxy for the amount of reading they
do as assessed by diary studies, interviews, questionnaires, and
observational methods. We modified the test to include, so that we
could later separate them, people’s recognition of authors of fic-
tion, such as Toni Morrison and Italo Calvino, and of nonfiction,
such as Susan Sontag and Stephen Hawking.
Associations Between Reading Fiction and
Understanding Others
Mar et al.’s (2006) most informative outcome measure was the
Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, &
Plumb, 2001), in which participants look at 36 photographs of
people’s eyes as if seen through the slot of a mailbox. For each one
they choose from four terms to indicate what the person was
thinking or feeling. For one photograph, the terms are reflective,
aghast, irritated, impatient.
The Mind in the Eyes Test is a widely accepted measure of
empathy. Although some researchers have separated affective and
cognitive empathy (e.g., Nummenmaa, Hirvonen, Parkkola, &
Hietanen, 2008), here we consider empathy generally in the way
that Keen (2007) did in Empathy and the Novel, in the sense
suggested by de Vignemont and Singer (2006) that it is the
experience of an emotion, which is similar to that of someone else,
which is elicited by observation or imagination of the other’s
emotion and which involves knowing the other is the source of
one’s own emotion (see also Burke, Kuzmicova, Mangen, &
Schilhab, 2016). Often in fiction, empathy involves identification
with a protagonist or other character (Cohen, 2001; Trabasso &
Chung, 2004).
The Mind in the Eyes Test is also a measure of theory-of-mind:
understanding the minds of others (see, e.g., Astington & Jenkins,
1995), also known as mentalizing, or mind-reading (Meins, Ferny-
hough, Arnott, Leekam, & de Rosnay, 2013).
The Mind in the Eyes Test was important for our studies
because effects could not be explained by verbal skills or transfer
of narrative modalities from texts that people had read. Our main
finding was that scores on this test were higher among those who
read more fiction than among those who read more nonfiction. In
a replication (Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009), we found that the
effect could not be explained by people who were more empathetic
preferring to read fiction. The correlation between reading fiction
and higher scores on the Mind in the Eyes Test remained signif-
icant when all individual differences, including personality, years
of education, and social support, were controlled for. In a subse-
quent study, Fong, Mullin, and Mar (2013) found that readers of
romances and stories that are thrillers or detective stories scored
better on the Mind in the Eyes Test than did those who were
readers of science fiction. The reason is likely to be that in a
romance the protagonist seeks to understand the mind of a poten-
tial lover, and in a thriller or detective story the protagonist tries to
understand the mind of the antagonist.
In a study of preschool children Mar, Tackett, and Moore (2010)
found an association between having stories read to them and the
watching of narrative movies, with five measures of theory-of-
mind. In contrast, there was no association between the children’s
simply watching TV and any measure of theory-of-mind.
Experiments on Effects of Fiction
An early experiment was by Hakemulder (2000), who asked
students to read either a chapter of a novel about an Algerian
woman who found it difficult to adopt a secondary position in
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2OATLEY AND DJIKIC
relation to men in her society or a nonfictional essay on women’s
rights in Algeria. Compared with those who read the essay, those
who read the fictional piece said they would be less likely to accept
current gender roles in Algeria. Hakemulder called fiction “the
moral laboratory.”
In an experiment on a story that he had written to elicit empathy,
Johnson (2012) found, using a behavioral outcome measure, that
those whose empathy increased with the reading were more likely
to help another person pick up some pencils that had been dropped.
Kidd and Castano (2013) found that reading a literary short story
improved scores on the Mind in the Eyes Test and other measures
of empathy more than did reading a nonfictional essay. Black and
Barnes (2015a) replicated this effect by showing that people who
read a piece of fiction about the social world improved their scores
on the Mind in the Eyes Test, whereas people who read about an
aspect of the physical world did not show improvement on an
intuitive physics test.
Kidd and Castano (2013) also found that people who read a
literary story improved their scores on the Mind in the Eyes Test
more than did those who read a popular story. Djikic, Oatley, and
Moldoveanu (2013) found that empathy measured on a self-report
scale was improved in people who read a literary short story
compared with those who read a literary essay. Johnson (2013)
found that American readers who were transported into a literary
story about Arab Muslims that was literary increased empathy for
Muslims.
Other experiments have used other media. Black and Barnes
(2015b) found that people who watched award-winning TV dra-
mas, such as The Good Wife, improved their scores on the Mind in
the Eyes Test, although people who watched documentary TV
programs did not. Bormann and Greitemeyer (2015) found an
effect of playing a video game. In their study one group of
participants was introduced to the game in a narrative way as being
about a student who comes home from a year abroad and discovers
that her family is missing. A second group was asked that when
they played the game to “register, memorize, and evaluate techni-
cal and game play properties” (p. 648). Those who were intro-
duced to the game in a narrative way did better on the Mind in the
Eyes Test than did those who were asked to attend to the game’s
technical details.
Short Term, Medium Term, Long Term
Positive short-term experimental effects of reading a literary
short story, compared with a nonfictional essay, on measures of
empathy and theory-of-mind such as the Mind in the Eyes Test,
were first published by Kidd and Castano (2013). Panero et al.
(2016) and Samur, Tops, and Koole (2017) repeated their exper-
iment and found no such effects. The literary story Kidd and
Castano gave participants was either Anton Chekhov’s “The Cha-
meleon,” Don DeLillo’s “The Runner,” or Lydia Davis’s “Blind
Date.” Each is about what is going on in a person’s mind and is
less than 2,000 words, taking less than 20 min to read. The three
nonfictional essays were, respectively, about potatoes, bamboo,
and birds. In further experiments Kidd and Castano (2013) and
Kidd, Ongis, and Castano (2016) found improvements on empathy
and theory-of-mind with literary compared with popular short
stories. Dijkstra et al. (2015), however, compared reading of a
literary and a popular story but found no effect. Similar failures to
replicate the effect for literary compared with popular stories were
also reported by Panero et al. and by Samur et al. With the Mind
in the Eyes Test or another outcome measure coming immediately
after reading, positive effects could be due to priming, a process
that is beginning to be understood (Schröder & Thagard, 2013),
but that has become controversial because results are not always
replicable (Yong, 2012).
Medium-term effects include those of Black and Barnes (2015b)
with TV series, those of Bormann and Greitemeyer (2015) on a
video game, and the following three studies. One of these was by
Bal and Veltkamp (2013), who used a scale of transportation (see,
e.g., Green & Dill, 2013) to measure involvement. Participants
who became more involved in the story were more empathetic a
week later, whereas those who remained uninvolved did not show
the effect. Koopman (2015) asked participants to read two texts,
about depression and grief, with a week between the sessions. For
one group the texts were expository, for another group they were
life narratives, and for a third group they were literary narratives.
Two kinds of outcomes were measured: empathetic understanding
and the behavioral measure of whether readers made a donation to
a charity that served people who were suffering in the ways that
participants read about. Participants who read the life narrative
subsequently made more donations than did those in the other
conditions. A third study was by Pino and Mazza (2016), who
asked participants to read whole books: one group read a literary
work, one group read expository nonfiction, and one group read
science fiction. The researchers found that those who read the
literary work, an autobiographical memoir, improved their empa-
thy and theory-of-mind.
Long-term effects include those reported by Mar et al. (2006) on
the positive association between the amount of fiction people read
with empathy and theory-of-mind, using the Mind in the Eyes
Test. Similar effects have been replicated in every study that we
know to have used our modification of the Author Recognition
Test, including Kidd and Castano (2013); Panero et al., (2016), and
Samur et al. (2017). A meta-analysis of associations of reading
fiction with empathy and theory-of-mind was published by
Mumper and Gerrig (2017). Their principal finding was a confir-
mation of these long-term effects of fiction, which, although they
are not large, have been found repeatedly. We know of another
meta-analysis that has been performed, but not yet published, on
experimental studies that found a similar small but significant
effect of this kind.
Other Approaches
Coming at the issue from a different direction Mar (2011)
compared published studies of functional magnetic resonance im-
aging (fMRI) brain areas concerned with theory-of-mind measured
in a narrative way (20 samples); with theory-of-mind measured in
a nonnarrative way, as with the Mind in the Eyes Test (43 sam-
ples); and with comprehension of stories (23 samples). All samples
were independent of each other. Mar found that there were sub-
stantial areas of overlap in the brain for these three. That is, some
areas of brain activation concerned with understanding other peo-
ple are the same as areas concerned with comprehending stories.
Kidd and Castano (2016) modified the Author Recognition Test
further than Mar et al. (2006) had done, to compare literary and
nonliterary authors. They found that compared to reading nonlit-
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3
PSYCHOLOGY OF NARRATIVE ART
erary authors, reading literary authors was associated with higher
scores on both the Mind in the Eyes Test and self-reported empa-
thy after controlling for other variables, such as age, gender, and
educational attainment. Though Dijkstra et al. (2015) failed to find
this effect, not enough research has yet been done on this com-
parison.
Defamiliarization, Foregrounding, Literariness
The issue of literariness was addressed by Shklovsky, a leader of
the Russian Formalists (Berlina, 2016; Shklovsky, 1917). He ar-
gued that artistic literature can have an effect that he called
ostranenie, or “defamiliarization,” that is, writing that overcomes
habit and categorization, that enables us to see something as if for
the first time, so that it can become conscious. This idea was
carried forward to the Prague School, where Mukarovský (1932/
1964) extended it in the concept of “foregrounding,” to character-
ize phrases in poetry or prose that stand out and are unusual
compared with everyday usage.
An early empirical investigation of foregrounding was pub-
lished by van Peer (1986). He found that readers were more likely,
when reading poetry, to give more attention to phrases that were
foregrounded than to other phrases. In a study of foregrounding in
prose, Miall and Kuiken (1994) identified phrases that readers of
a short story found striking, so that they spent more time over them
and increased their emotional response to them. Foregrounded
phrases have been found to produce longer lasting activation not
only of the language areas of the brain but of other areas too
(Giora, 2003).
Principal means of foregrounding, which are transformational in
that they enable us to experience the world in a new way, include
metaphor and metonymy, which were distinguished by Jakobson
(1956). Metaphor is a semantic figure: a “this” is a “that.” Meton-
ymy is syntactic: a “this” is juxtaposed with a “that,” or a “this”
which is part of a “that” is mentioned to suggest the whole: a figure
known as synecdoche.
As Lodge (1977) pointed out, metaphor is the principal mode of
poetry and many plays, as with Shakespeare’s (1981) “slings and
arrows” to mean adversity. Sikora, Kuiken, and Miall (2011) asked
people to read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge
(1798/1977) and found that in its metaphors there was an engage-
ment with imagery and transformation of readers’ emotions.
Lodge (1977) argued that metonymy is the typical mode of
novels, short stories, and films. Wells-Jopling and Oatley (2012)
showed how at the beginning of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (1877/
2000) used the metonymic figure of synecdoche to suggest how we
might think of Stepan Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, who has been
having an affair with his children’s governess. Tolstoy wrote that
when Oblonsky’s wife confronts him with this, “his face quite
involuntarily [. . .] smiled all at once his habitual, kind and there-
fore stupid smile” (p. 3). The small part—the smile—suggests the
whole person.
Koopman (2016) assigned participants to read to read an excerpt
from a literary novel about the loss of a child. She used texts with
three levels of foregrounding. One was the excerpt from the
original novel. The second was the excerpt with imagery removed.
The third was the excerpt with all foregrounding removed. Koop-
man found that readers who read the original version scored higher
on empathy than did those who read the version without any
foregrounding.
Literary Art, Indirect Communication, and
Self-Transformation
Djikic, Oatley, Zoetermann, and Peterson (2009b) randomly
assigned 166 people to read either Chekhov’s short story “The
Lady With the Little Dog” or a version phrased in a nonfictional
style, which we had constructed to contain the same information
and to be the same length and reading difficulty. It was judged by
our participants to be just as interesting as Chekhov’s story but not
as artistic. Before and after they did the reading, we gave them a
test of their Big Five personality traits (Extraversion, Emotional
Stability, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientious-
ness) and also asked them about the intensity, on a scale of 0 to 10,
of emotions they were currently feeling. We found that those who
read Chekhov’s story changed their personality by small but sta-
tistically significant amounts. The changes were not all of the same
traits and not all in the same direction. Each person changed in her
or his own way, and the amount of the change was mediated by the
amount of emotion experienced in reading the story.
Djikic, Oatley, and Carland (2012) replicated this study by
randomly allocating people to read either one of eight literary short
stories or one of eight literary essays, selected from anthologies
(the sample was the same as that mentioned earlier in the study by
Djikic et al., 2013.) The essays were adapted to make them, on
average, the same length and reading difficulty as the stories.
Compared with those who read a work (short story or essay) they
judged not to be artistic, those who read a text that they judged to
be artistic changed their personalities by small amounts, each in
her or his own way, as we had found in the study with Chekhov’s
story. In this study, genre—fiction compared with nonfiction—
was not responsible for change, perhaps because as well as choos-
ing literary stories, we had also chosen the essays to be literary, by
writers who included Henri Bergson, John Galsworthy, and
George Bernard Shaw.
Our hypothesis is that the effect is due to what Kierkegaard
(1846/1968) called indirect communication:
The indirect mode of communication makes communication an art in
quite a different sense than when it is conceived in the usual manner
. . . To stop 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 attempting to
persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse
to go precisely his own way. (pp. 246 –247)
Chekhov seemed to have been thinking along the same lines as
did Kierkegaard. Artistic literature, he thought, is not about getting
people to think, or feel, in some way that the author wants. As he
wrote in a letter of 1888 to Suvorin (Hellman, 1955, p. 57), there
are two things one must not mix up:
the solution of the problem and a correct presentation of the problem.
Only the latter is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and
Onegin not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely
just because all their problems are correctly presented. The court is
obliged to submit the case fairly, but let the jury do the deciding, each
according to his own judgment.
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4OATLEY AND DJIKIC
Chekhov said in another letter that he thought that in his writing
his readers would “add the subjective elements that are lacking in
the story” (Yarmolinsky, 1973, p. 395).
Psychological Principles
Other effects than those discussed earlier have been found for
reading narrative, mostly of a fictional kind. These effects include
improved verbal abilities (Mar & Rain, 2015), extension of the life
span (Bavishi, Slade, & Levy, 2016) probably by improved en-
gagement in social relationships (Holt-Lunstadt, Smith, & Layton,
2010), amelioration of an anxiety state (Djikic, Oatley, Zoeterman,
& Peterson, 2009a), and recognition of human rights (Hunt, 2007).
Our current concern is not to review all such effects but to try to
discern from the effects we have discussed some psychological
properties of literary fiction.
The central idea was put by Rosenblatt (1938), in Literature as
Exploration. She proposed that literature depends on “a fruitful
interrelationship between the individual book or poem or play and
the individual [reader]” (pp. 32–33). Along similar lines, Harding
(1962) wrote that the response to a piece of literary fiction is
imaginative and empathetic, seeking insight into other people. The
reader evaluates characters, their actions, and their sufferings. As
an extension of these ideas, we propose three principles— emotion
and empathy, character and identification, and suggestion and
indirect communication—which are discussed in the next three
sections.
Emotion and Empathy
A work of art, properly so called, proposed Collingwood (1938),
is an expression of an emotion in a language of words, music,
paint, and so forth to try to understand it better. This expression is
not preplanned: It is an exploration of something not yet fully
known. If the artist succeeds, then among those to whom the work
is passed on, the emotion has a resonance so that they recognize its
stirrings within themselves and they, too, can take part in the
exploration (see also Oatley, 2003).
As exploration, art is not to be identified with craft. In a craft,
like cooking or carpentry, activity is typically based on a recipe or
plan in which the outcome is known in advance. Breakfast will be
scrambled eggs. This cabinet will have two drawers and a cup-
board.
In contrast, the outcome of a work of art is not known in
advance. Nor is art a form of persuasion, which is an interpersonal
form of craft with the intention that readers take on some emotion,
belief, or disposition specified by the author. Nor, for similar
reasons, wrote Collingwood (1938), is art—properly so called—
amusement or entertainment, which he described as “a device for
the discharge of emotions in such a way as they shall not interfere
with practical life” (p. 78). Craft, persuasion, and entertainment are
all important in life. A piece of art typically involves aspects of
them. But the center of art is different.
Emotion seems to be fundamentally important for stories. In a
study in which he read stories from all round the world, created
before the age of European colonialism, Hogan (2003) found that
three kinds of stories were so common as to be thought of as
human universals. All are based on emotions: the love story, the
story of angry conflict, and the story in which someone suffers in
order to bring benefit to a community.
In an empirical study that bears on authors’ preoccupation with
emotions, Djikic, Oatley, and Peterson (2006) compared inter-
views given by nine famous authors and nine famous physicists.
The authors used significantly more words related to emotions, and
these were predominantly words related to negative emotions such
as anger, anxiety, depression, and sadness, the kinds of states that
might indeed be pressing to authors and be in need of exploration.
Similar results were found when a larger sample of authors was
compared with the physicists.
We have proposed that a work of literary art is a piece of
externalized consciousness (Oatley & Djikic, 2017), which readers
can take in and make their own. In this first principle, therefore, we
suggest that both the writer and reader of a piece of literary art
engage in an emotion-based exploration, which as Miall and
Kuiken (2002) proposed, enables readers, partly by means of
foregrounding, not just to understand their emotions in relation to
themselves and others but to explore, further understand, develop,
and transform them.
Character and Identification
Authors of literary fiction suggest to us mental models
(Johnson-Laird, 1983) of other people and of circumstances in
which they live and interact. We readers, in turn, construct mental
models of characters, incidents, and social worlds.
Why are mental models important? Dunbar (2004) has proposed
that we have large brains because we are the most social of all the
animals, and to house mental models of people we know well, our
brains need to be large. In order to be social we need to understand,
to make models of, those with whom we cooperate, in order to do
things together that we cannot do alone. Similar principles hold for
interactions with competitors. Perhaps the principal reason why
literary stories are of interest is because, sometimes more than in
everyday life, they enable us to enter into the minds of others, and
enable us to engage with, and perhaps get better at, the making of
such models.
Bortolussi and Dixon (2003) proposed that literary art is based
on conversation in which one makes inferences about what the
person with whom one is talking is thinking and meaning, and
about what is implied about the speaker’s personality. In a com-
parable way, in an artistic story, one is invited to make inferences.
In an experiment on this issue, Kotovych, Dixon, Bortolussi, and
Holden (2011) found that people who read a literary short story by
Alice Munro became more able to identify with the narrator of the
story, and understand her more deeply, than did those who read an
altered version of the story in which they were given explicit
descriptions of the personality and emotions of the narrator.
Although the principal results of Kidd and Castano (2013) are
controversial, their work has been important in bringing forward
the empirical investigation of works that are literary, as they affect
empathy and the understanding of others. Kidd and Castano argued
that as such effects occur, they emerge from concentration on
characters in their complexity. It is not that people do not think
about characters in popular fiction; as Barnes (2017) showed (in
this special issue), people often have intense parasocial relation-
ships with popular characters about whom they think a lot. The
important principle is that in literary fiction, compared with stories
in which a protagonist enacts a single role, for instance as hero or
lover, or functions mainly to move a plot forward, people are
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5
PSYCHOLOGY OF NARRATIVE ART
invited to think of what Forster (1927) called round characters,
who have aspects that are not simple and do not necessarily fit
easily together. We hypothesize that art that is literary invites us to
explore and to make inferences as we construct mental models of
complex characters. In this way it can enable us to understand
people more deeply, including their inner contradictions. It invites
us to identify with others of different kinds, to enter unexpected
circumstances, and thereby to live many lives, some of which are
difficult.
Suggestion and Indirect Communication
Theoretical proposals such as those of Rosenblatt (1938) and
results such as those of Kotovych et al. (2011) and of Gerrig and
Wenzel (2015), suggest that reading narrative is active rather than
passive. Barthes (1975) distinguished between writerly reading—
the active and exploratory kind in which the reader becomes the
writer of the story that she or he brings alive from cues on the
page—and readerly reading, which he says is “a kind of idleness”
(p. 4).
Returning to an idea with which we started this essay, we
propose that literary writing is not description. It is suggestion. In
an Eastern theory of poetics, Abhinavagupta proposed that the
heart of poetry is dhvani, or suggestion (Ingalls, Masson, & Pat-
wardhan, 1990). How, as an author, does one make a suggestion?
One thought is of writing that is both minimalist and specific.
Gabriel García Márquez (1981) said in an interview that he had
found that it’s no good writing “There was a butterfly.” One must
write “There was a yellow butterfly.”
An informative study on suggestion was conducted by Summer-
field, Hassabis, and Maguire (2010). They asked people in an
fMRI machine to imagine a scene when between three and six
suggestive phrases were spoken to them, one at a time. Here is an
example: “a dark blue carpet” . . . “a carved chest of drawers” . . .
“an orange striped pencil.” In this way, Summerfield and her
colleagues slowed down the process of imagination of the kind the
writerly reader constructs. Brain activations were recorded, and
they were found principally in areas of the default network, which
Tamir, Bricker, Dodell-Feder, and Mitchell (2016) have shown to
be concerned with simulation of vivid scenes and of people’s
minds. Summerfield et al. found that three phrases were enough to
activate areas in this network to the largest extent and enough for
participants to imagine the scene to its maximum vividness.
Taking this idea further, we suggest that Radford (1975) was
mistaken in thinking that literary fiction such as Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina diverts us from truth. In Feeling Beauty, Starr (2015)
wrote that “the arts mediate our knowledge of the world around us
by directing attention, shaping perceptions, and creating disso-
nance or harmony where none had been before . . . a restructuring
of value” (p. 14).
In this way, she argued, art can point a way toward truth. This
kind of truth is of an inward kind. So rather than description, it is
suggestion and writerly construction that are important, because
effects will be a reader’s own.
The findings of research on changes within the self that can
result from reading artistic literature (discussed earlier and by
Djikic & Oatley, 2014) have suggested a third principle. We
become enabled to change ourselves not when an author has tried
to persuade us or to direct our emotions but by indirect commu-
nication. When this occurs, by means perhaps of a perturbation
within that can occur as we enter into a piece of literary art in a
writerly way, we can begin to transform ourselves.
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Received January 13, 2017
Revision received April 28, 2017
Accepted May 15, 2017 䡲
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8OATLEY AND DJIKIC
