No support for the claim that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind: A reply to Kidd and Castano’s commentary on Panero et al. (2016).

Abstract

Kidd and Castano (in press) critique our failure to replicate Kidd and Castano (2013) on 3 grounds: failure to exclude people who did not read the texts, failure of random assignment, and failure to exclude people who did not take the Author Recognition Test (ART). This response addresses each of these critiques. Most importantly, we note that even when Kidd and Castano reanalyzed our data in the way that they argue is most appropriate, they still failed to replicate the pattern of results reported in their original study. We thus reaffirm that our replication of Kidd and Castano (2013) found no evidence that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind. Our objective remains not to prove that reading literary fiction does not benefit social cognition, but to call for in-depth research addressing the difficulties in measuring any potential effect and to note the need to temper claims accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record

Imaginary Engagement, Real-World Effects: Fiction, Emotion, and Social Cognition

“…In a response to the Panero and colleagues (2016) nonreplication, Kidd and Castano (2017) argued that a major contributing factor to the failure to replicate might have been the application of different standards regarding participants’ reading times. Notably, although reading time can be used as a manipulation check (see Kidd & Castano, 2013, 2017; Black & Barnes, 2015a), variations in reading time may also reflect individual differences in motivation to read a given text, as well as the use of reading strategies such as skimming (see Panero et al, 2017, for discussion). In other words, reading time may reflect not only whether an individual has read a given text, but also how they read it.…”

How Do Children Socially Learn from Narrative Fiction: Getting the Lesson, Simulating Social Worlds, or Dialogic Inquiry?

“…In contrast, lifetime exposure to expository texts did not correlate or negatively correlate with sociomoral outcomes. Experimental studies further studied the effect of short-time exposure to narrative fiction (e.g., Kidd & Castano, 2019 ; Panero et al, 2017 ). Even though these studies produced less consistent findings, a recent meta-analysis has shown that short-time exposure might improve social-cognitive performance as well (for a meta-analysis, see Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018 ).…”

Does writing promote social cognition? The role of fictionality and social content.

“…One reason that experimental findings on the effects of one-time fiction exposure on social cognition may be inconsistent from experiment to experiment is that these effects may depend in large part on how engaged the audience is with the source text (e.g., Barnes, 2018;Panero et al, 2016Panero et al, , 2017. Although some experiments of this type include transportation-the extent to which readers are "transported" into the story world-in their analyses (Black & Barnes, 2015a), there are many other aspects to engagement with stories (e.g., Bilandzic et al, 2019).…”