Exposure to Literary Fiction Is Associated With Lower Psychological Essentialism

Abstract

We investigated the impact of exposure to literary and popular fiction on psychological essentialism. Exposure to fiction was measured by using the Author Recognition Test, which allows us to separate exposure to authors of literary and popular fiction. Psychological essentialism was assessed by the discreteness subscale of the psychological essentialism scale in Study 1, and by the three subscales of the same scale (such as discreteness, informativeness, and biological basis) in Study 2 that was pre-registered. Results showed that exposure to literary fiction negatively predicts the three subscales. The results emerged controlling for political ideology, a variable that is commonly associated with psychological essentialism, and level of education.

On the Complexity of Literary and Popular Fiction

“…The finding that characters of literary fiction are perceived as more complex than those of popular fiction (Kidd & Castano, 2019) supports this conjecture. A similar result also extends to characters of art films, who are perceived as more complex than those of mainstream Hollywood films (Castano, 2021). Notwithstanding the differences between the two types of media, the art film is considered akin to literary fiction, while the Hollywood movie is akin to popular fiction-and in fact, they are often the film version of popular novels.…”

“…Familiarity with popular fiction, if anything, was negatively associated with attributional complexity (Castano et al, 2020). Finally, while familiarity with popular fiction shows a positive association with psychological essentialism (the idea that certain social categories, such as "male" or "white" have an underlying reality that cannot be observed directly), familiarity with literary fiction is negatively associated with it (Castano, Paladino, Cadwell, Cuccio, & Perconti, 2021; see also Buttrick, Westgate, & Oishi, 2022).…”

“…Some studies did not replicate this finding (e.g., Panero et al, 2016), but their methodology has been questioned (Kidd & Castano, 2017b). Furthermore, many replications have been published using either the exact same methodology (e.g., Kidd & Castano, 2019;Kidd, Ongis, & Castano, 2016; van Kuijk, Verkoeijen, Dijkstra, & Zwaan, 2018) or conceptually similar ones (Black & Barnes, 2015;Castano, 2021;Pino & Mazza, 2016;Schwerin & Lenhart, 2022). Reviews of the experimental work of the effects of brief exposure to fiction on ToM have concluded that the effect of reading fiction on ToM is reliable, if small, but they have not focused on the specific distinction between literary and popular fiction (e.g., Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018;Quinlan, Padgett, Khajehnassiri, & Mar, 2022).…”

“…The temporary enhancement is likely the consequence of an activation of the mentalizing process, which is then utilized in subsequent ToM tasks. Such experiments are simply meant to explore the directionality in the relationship between reading fiction and ToM, broadly conceived (for a discussion see Castano, 2021).…”

“…Here we thus propose that these two types of fiction differ not only in the aura they have, but also in the language they use. As it has been discussed elsewhere (see Castano, Martingano, & Perconti, 2020;Castano, Paladino, Cadwell, Cuccio, & Perconti, 2021), this differential impact should not be interpreted as indicating a hierarchy of fiction which is often implied when instead of literary and popular fiction the label highbrow and lowbrow are used.…”