A Closer Look at Fiction and Empathy

In 2011, Dr Keith Oatley published two articles in the online Psychology Today, regarding the role of empathy in reading and processing fiction.

fMRI while viewing suffering,
found at ccc.farmsanctuary.org

Frederique de Vignemont and Tania Singer summarised the concept of empathy as having an emotion that is in some way similar to that of another person; that is elicited by observation or imagination of the other, and that involves knowing that the other is the source of one's own emotion.

That this exists is not a question anymore - functional MRIs, for example, have proven that experiencing an emotion and observing it in someone else activate the same areas in the brain. The picture on the right shows an fMRI of a brain while the person is looking at pictures of other people experiencing pain - the posterior parietal cortex (as well as the occipital lobe), which has been linked to empathy, is immensely active. 

Space: the final frontier. One of the places only fiction can take
us - for now. Found at henrykh.wordpress.com.

Back to Keith Oatley. In his first article, he explains, "Engaging with fiction is an empathetic act. It involves entering a simulated social world, and inserting characters' goals and plans into the processor that we usually use to make and carry out our plans in the world." He also emphasises the fact that even though we put aside our own concerns for a while while reading a good book, we don't 'become' the character we associate with. In fact, we actively imagine the character's situation, and our brain then generates its own emotional response to that situation. This makes the reading even more exciting - the protagonist becomes a gateway for our minds, providing access to new and fantastic situations we would never experience in real life. 

Brain activity in different situations; found at
www.ilabs.washington.edu

Dr Oatley's second article is more specifically focused on empathy related to fiction.
In it, he describes a study conducted this year by Dan Johnson at Washington and Lee University which was based on one of Oatley's ideas from 2008 - the idea that reading fiction and empathising with a fictional protagonist can actually increase our empathy towards 'real' people. 

For the study, Johnson wrote a 15-minute short story designed to elicit a compassionate response from the reader and "model prosocial behaviour". He met with each participant individually and had them read the story. Then they went through several tests and questionnaires to measure their level of absorption into the book and to what degree they empathised with the main character. 
Johnson then did something I personally find very clever: With the unknowing participant watching, he 'accidentally' dropped six pens, and later recorded whether the participants had helped him to pick them up. 
As you probably guessed, the level of empathy towards the character in the short story was directly proportional to how willing the participants were to help with picking up the pens. 

Jonson conducted one more experiment, in which the last test before the pen-dropping measured 'emotional bias' of the participants. They were asked to rate the level of fear on a number of faces they were shown. The more a person had been absorbed into the short story, the more emotion they interpreted into other faces, and the more fear they saw in the faces, the more likely they were to then help Johnson pick up his pens.

There is one thing that might have influenced the results, though: it said the short story Johnson wrote was specifically designed to elicit empathy and "prosocial behaviour", so that may mean that the translation of fictional to real empathy might not always be present, or at least not as noticeable, depending on the type of story. Also, I still don't know how the 'level of absorption' into a book and the amount of empathy felt towards a fictional characters can exactly be mathematically measured.
But other than that, I think this was a brilliant study - especially since the way of measuring empathy, picking up pens, and doing this with only one participant at a time, practically guaranteed that they wouldn't have guessed the aim of the experiment, so no bias there. In addition to that, it was a relatively easy task that anyone could have performed and that didn't involve major ethical dilemmas. 

So in summary, we can say that our brain experiences situations through fictional characters, which creates the feeling of empathy - and this can be translated into empathy and prosocial behaviour in real life, towards real people. 
In even shorter summary, read more books.

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Find the two articles here: Narrative Psychology and Empathy and Fiction.