The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,361

the opinion poll was an item on attitudes toward murderers, similar to one in the questionnaire that the students had filled out in the lab. At this distance, the effects of perspective-taking made a difference. The students who had tried a couple of weeks before to imagine what James had been feeling showed a noticeable bump in their attitude toward convicted murderers. The delayed influence is what researchers in persuasion call a sleeper effect. When people are exposed to information that changes their attitudes in a way they don’t approve of—in this case, warmer feelings toward murderers—they are aware of the unwanted influence and consciously cancel it out. Later, when their guard is down, their change of heart reveals itself. The upshot of the study is that even when a stranger belongs to a group that people are strongly inclined to dislike, listening to his story while taking his perspective can genuinely expand their sympathy for him and for the group he represents, and not just during the few minutes after hearing the story.

People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts. But what about the portion of their information stream that is set in make-believe worlds—the fictional stories, films, and television dramas in which audiences voluntarily lose themselves? The pleasure in a story comes from taking a character’s vantage point and in comparing the view to that from other vantage points, such as those of the other characters, of the narrator, and of the reader himself or herself. Could fiction be a stealthy way to expand people’s sympathy? In an 1856 essay George Eliot defended this psychological hypothesis:Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy readymade, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers, —more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal lot.62

Today the historian Lynn Hunt, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, among others, have championed the reading of fiction as an empathy expander and a force toward humanitarian progress.63 One might think that literary scholars would line up to join them, eager to show that their subject matter is a force for progress in an era in which students and funding are staying away in droves. But many literary scholars, such as Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel, bristle at the suggestion that reading fiction can be morally uplifting. They see the idea as too middlebrow, too therapeutic, too kitsch, too sentimental, too Oprah. Reading fiction can just as easily cultivate schadenfreude, they point out, from gloating over the misfortunes of unsympathetic characters. It can perpetuate condescending stereotypes of “the other.” And it can siphon sympathetic concern away from the living beings who could benefit from it and toward appealing victims who don’t actually exist. They also note, correctly, that we don’t have a trove of good laboratory data showing that fiction expands sympathy. Mar, Oatley, and their collaborators have shown that readers of fiction have higher scores on tests of empathy and social acumen, but that correlation doesn’t show whether reading fiction makes people more empathic or empathic people are more likely to read fiction.64

It would be surprising if fictional experiences didn’t have similar effects to real ones, because people often blur the two in their memories.65 And a few experiments do suggest that fiction can expand sympathy. One of Batson’s radio-show experiments included an interview with a heroin addict who the students had been told was either a real person or an actor.66 The listeners who were asked to take his point of view became more sympathetic to heroin addicts in general, even when the