Does a brief exposure to literary fiction improve social ability? Assessing the evidential value of published studies with a p-curve.

Abstract

Humans have long suspected that stories can help us better understand others, and, indeed, lifelong exposure to narrative fiction does predict better social cognition. Several experiments have attempted to investigate the causal direction of this relationship to see if random assignment to a brief narrative directly improves social cognition. Although these experiments have yielded mixed results, a recent meta-analysis did find a small causal effect of narrative fiction on social cognition. What remains unanswered is whether the published findings reflect questionable research practices or trustworthy evidence. In order to rule out the possibility that this body of work has been meaningfully impacted by selective reporting, we conducted a p-curve on the experimental literature on narrative fiction and social cognition. The results of the p-curve indicated that this work does indeed have evidential value but that this conclusion is not very robust. Thus, further experimental work on the causal effect of narrative fiction on social cognitive skills is required before substantial conclusions can be drawn. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).