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INTRODUCTION
Imagining Possible Worlds
Keith Oatley
University of Toronto
Robin Dunbar and Felix Budelmann
University of Oxford
The reading of fiction has been found to confer benefits, including increased empathy and understanding
of others. Among ongoing research questions are those of how people engage in imagined worlds while
keeping in touch with the currently perceived world, as well as how far stories were important in human
evolution and how the brain is involved understanding them.
Keywords: fiction, narrative, imagination, mental models, theory-of-mind
Fictional storytelling, in oral recitals and theatrical perfor-
mances as well as in written literature, has a long history. In the
West Aristotle (330 BCE/1970) and in the East Bharata Muni (200
BCE/1986) joined psychology with literary analyses in their pro-
posals for its understanding.
For general psychology, exploration of fiction bridges across the
cognitive psychology of imagination and abstraction, the social
psychology of understanding other minds, and the evolutionary
psychology of how social life arose and how it is maintained in
humans. For the humanities, there is increased interest in cognitive
approaches, and in understanding what goes on in the minds of
people as they engage with fiction.
In the last few decades a new phase has begun with research
both in psychology and in the humanities. In 1986, Jerome Bruner,
a cognitive psychologist, published Actual Minds, Possible
Worlds, in which he proposed that narrative thinking is the way in
which we humans understand ourselves and each other, our inten-
tions, and the vicissitudes these intentions meet. In the same year
psychologist Willie van Peer published an investigation of effects
of literary style on people as they read. In 2003, Patrick Hogan,a
literary theorist, published The Mind and its Stories in which he
surveyed stories from all round the world from before the era of
European colonialism, and found love stories, stories of conflict,
and stories of sacrifice for a community, were so common as to be
almost human universals. In this special issue we suggest that the
psychology of fiction is continuing to be built as a joint endeavor
of psychology and the humanities. The contributions presented
here span both areas.
In reading or watching a piece of fiction, we engage ourselves
in an imagined world, but without losing all attachment to our real
surroundings. How is it that the human mind can manage to live in
two worlds simultaneously, without confusing them? This is a
phenomenon we do not yet fully understand. But we do know that,
as members of a species who make plans for the future, we
imagine possible versions of the world that are based on mental
models (Johnson-Laird, 1983). Such models can be about circum-
stances that are not perceived directly. So, while sitting in an
armchair alone, a reader of novel may understand a social inter-
action.
The title of this special issue is “The Psychology of Fiction” but
fiction is a complex concept. Biopics, mockumenteraries and part-
scripted reality TV programs show how uncertain the boundary
can be between reality and fiction. Moreover, the effects studied in
this issue do not all depend on fictionality. For the most part it is
the narrative depiction of people’s intentions, interactions, and
lives, which is at the center. So fiction, here, is to be broadly
understood, and conceived not an antithesis to fact, but in terms of
mode and content: narrative accounts of people and their interac-
tions in the social world. Within this remit are theater, novels, short
stories, films, and TV series, but also, too, narratives of the kind
that occur in biography, memoir, and narrative history.
The Cognitive World of Fiction
In recent research on effects of reading, a distinction has been
made between fiction and explanatory nonfiction so that, for
instance, the substantial benefits that have been found for reading,
in improvements of vocabulary and verbal reasoning abilities, are
due largely to the reading of fiction (Mar & Rain, 2015). Then, in
another development, in terms of understanding others, which in
psychology is often referred to as theory-of-mind, or mentalizing,
Hakemulder (2000) found that people who read a fictional narra-
tive of an Algerian woman were more likely to understand her
point of view as a woman in that society than those who read a
nonfictional account of gender relationships in Algeria. Mar, Oat-
ley, Hirsh, dela Paz, and Peterson (2006) reported that people who
Keith Oatley, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Develop-
ment, University of Toronto; Robin Dunbar, Magdalen College, University
of Oxford; Felix Budelmann, Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Keith
Oatley, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development,
University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S1V6,
Canada. E-mail: keith.oatley@utoronto.ca
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This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Review of General Psychology
© 2018 American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 22, No. 2, 121–124
1089-2680/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000149
121
read fiction, as compared with nonfiction, did better on a non-
narrative test of empathy and theory-of-mind. In meta-analyses it
has found that these effects are small but replicable (Mumper &
Gerrig, 2017;Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018). Theoretical implica-
tions have been discussed by Oatley (2016) and De Mulder,
Hakemulder, and van der Berghe (2017).
How it is that from fictional worlds, we can understand so much
about states of mind, emotions, and intentions, of the people who
inhabit it? Some pointers may be provided by research on chil-
dren’s play. It used to be assumed that children cannot tell the
difference between the imaginary and the real so that, as we grow
up play recedes, and we come to focus on the real. Harris (2000),
however, has shown that this idea is misleading. Young children
are well able to differentiate between events in an imagined world,
such as pouring imaginary tea into toy tea-cups, and the real world
in which nothing actually gets wet. But play does not dwindle and
die. Like other human functions, it develops: it transforms into
adult modes such as games, sports, and indeed fiction. The trans-
formation starts early. As Mar, Tackett, and Moore (2010) showed,
preschool children to whom stories were read, and who watched
fictional movies, subsequently had better theory-of-mind abilities
than those who simply watched whatever happened to be on TV.
Barnes and Bloom (2014) found that children of ages between four
and eight already preferred stories that are about other minds.
Leslie (1987) noted that theory-of-mind enabled young children
to engage in fictional play: in effect, they engaged in imagined
worlds and imagined minds. Think of hide-and-seek. When you
are hiding, you enjoy the game by imagining the one who is
seeking.
Although we know a certain amount about mentalizing and its
natural history, one thing that has eluded us since the concept was
introduced is exactly what, in cognitive terms, this phenomenon
actually is; the question is explored in this Special Issue. At
another level, a salient property of fictional narratives is their
ability to move us emotionally. The ability of actors to enable us
to empathize with characters’ predicaments should not surprise us:
responding to facial and verbal cues is how we infer others’ mental
and emotional states in our everyday world. What is more surpris-
ing is the fact that these effects can be elicited off the page by just
a few carefully chosen words. The capacity of words to move us
clearly merits a great deal more experimental attention.
To what extent do individual differences in mentalizing ca-
pacity and emotionality affect our ability to immerse ourselves
in, and enjoy, fictional worlds? Carney, Wlodarski, and Dunbar
(2014) have shown experimentally that individuals with poorer
mentalizing abilities prefer less complex stories. There are also
important questions relating to the extent to which different
storytellers can move us. The storyteller’s linguistic skills must,
of course, play a role; but from a psychological perspective a
more interesting question may be whether their own mentaliz-
ing competences and emotional responsiveness influence their
ability to conceive and tell stories that move us. An author has
to work with a reader or audience-member’s mind, and pushing
people beyond what they can process will result in bafflement
and failure to engage. Conversely, failing to challenge people
may result in a less enthusiastic response. In effect, the author-
storyteller has to know people’s competences and be able to
work with them.
The Role of Stories in Human Evolution
We know that symbolic culture played an important role from
some 100,000 years ago. Early modern humans and Neanderthals
drilled holes in sea-shells and colored them with ochre, in order to
wear them as necklaces (Bar-Yosef Mayer et al., 2009;Hoffmann
et al., 2018). As Mithen (1996) explains, what began at that time
was metaphor, in which something was something that it was not.
A shell was not a shell; it was a bead of a necklace. Following
these early indications, evidence of burials has been found
(Coolidge & Wynn, 2016). Burials imply funerals, in which people
would imagine a world beyond the grave. At such events stories
about those who had died would been told. So a person who was
dead was a person who was alive on another plane, or in memory.
Boyd (2009),inOn the Origin of Stories, and Gottschall (2012),
in The Storytelling Animal, are among a growing number of
literary scholars who explore how the ability to create stories has
been important in human evolution. Dunbar (2014) has argued that
this ability played a central role in allowing ancestral and modern
humans to bond large communities, and that this must have in-
volved a long prehistory during which the psychological compe-
tences required were built up and scaffolded.
Tomasello (2014,2016) has argued that cooperation is funda-
mental to being human. We arrange and enact joint plans, in which
a goal in a possible world, shared with one or a few other people,
becomes more important than individual goals. And we take part
in cultures, which involve shared understandings of spoken lan-
guage, and of moralities such as the idea of justice as fairness in
society. In order to cooperate with other individuals or to take part
in society, we need to make mental models of others, to know who
they are, to know how they are likely to behave in shared endeav-
ors and in response to potential conflicts. As Dunbar (2004) has
emphasized, it is likely that the reason we need our large brains is
to house not only mental models of those whom we know, but also
the models of others’ models of other people and ourselves. Stories
told as anecdotes and gossip (Dunbar, 1996), whether orally or in
writing, have an effect of enabling human beings to make better
mental models of others, both for joint plans and for being mem-
bers of a cooperating cultural community (Dunbar, 2018). In
novels, for instance, we are able to identify with protagonists, and
so understand them from the inside.
Neural Bases of the Audience Experience
In 2011, Zeki announced that functional MRI (fMRI) is bringing
in a revolution, comparable in scope to that begun by Galileo in his
recognition that the earth revolves round the sun. The new revo-
lution, said Zeki, is the beginning of understanding how the brain
constructs experience. In a review of literature, Mar (2011) iden-
tified brain regions that are activated (i) when people understand
others in tasks presented in narrative form, (ii) when people
understand others in tasks presented in non-narrative form, and
(iii) when people comprehend stories. Although some regions of
activation were distinct for each kind of task, a core mentalizing
network was identified, within which there were substantial areas
of overlap for all three tasks. In other words, comprehension of
stories involves the understanding of other minds.
Part of the mentalizing network (the medial prefrontal cortex), is
also part of the so-called default mode network, which includes, as
well, the posterior cingulate cortex and the angular gyrus. The
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122 OATLEY, DUNBAR, AND BUDELMANN
default mode network is deactivated when one performs certain
tasks in the outside world, but is activated during spontaneous
self-reflection and when thinking about other people. Andrews-
Hanna (2012) proposes that “engaging in spontaneous thought can
allow individuals to construct and simulate alternative scenarios,
mentally organize their plans, and prepare for what may lie ahead”
(p. 260). In an example of interdisciplinary coordination, Vessel
and Rubin who are neuroscientists, worked with Starr, a theorist of
literature and other arts, to find that the process of engaging with
art that moves one, activates the default mode network; it reaches
within (Vessel, Starr, & Rubin, 2013).
There is some evidence that mentalizing is more cognitively
demanding than processing factual information. Two studies of
2012, one using memory for friends’ traits as a social working
memory task (Meyer et al., 2012), the other using eye gaze in an
implicit false belief task (Schneider, Lam, Bayliss, & Dux, 2012),
provide evidence for an effect of cognitive load when processing
social information. More directly, Lewis, Birch, Hall, and Dunbar
(2017) showed that processing propositions about the world of
intentions (mentalizing) recruits more brain neurons and is cogni-
tively more demanding (as indexed by reaction time [RT]) than
processing factual propositions of similar complexity about the
same story. These studies speak to the fact that humans’ large
brains may have their origins in the need to handle the demands of
virtual mental worlds.
Such studies suggest avenues for further neuroscientific work on
the processing of fiction. As yet, we still know relatively little
about the neural bases of engagement with fictional worlds (for
examples of work to date, see Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, & Zacks,
2009;Phillips, 2015). It is largely unclear, for example, whether
we use different neural circuits to handle engagment in physical
and fictional worlds. Further experimental work in this area will be
welcome.
Toward This Special Issue’s Contributions...
Our aim in putting this Special Issue together has been to
explore some processes of human minds that, until recently in
psychology have not received much attention. We warmly thank
our contributors and also Gerianne Alexander and Svetlana Efremova
for their help and encouragement.
Aside from raising questions of why we spend so much time in
fictional worlds, and what effects this had in evolution and today,
this topic raises psychological questions as to how we navigate two
mental worlds simultaneously without confusing them. Our behav-
ior in this respect contrasts with mental disorders in which indi-
viduals do confuse inner states with the immediate world.
Stories may be thought of as externalized pieces of conscious-
ness that can be passed from one mind to others (Oatley & Djikic,
2017). Human consciousness remains an enigma. Investigations of
the imagined worlds of stories may enable us to come closer to
understanding it.
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124 OATLEY, DUNBAR, AND BUDELMANN
