Literature and Empathy: Educational Value of Literature from the Psychological Perspective

Abstract

This study aims to introduce the latest findings in psychology about the power of empathy through reading literature and to discuss the educational value of literature related to empathy. Empathy, the cognitive, emotional, and communicative ability to respond to others’ feelings, is the basis of our daily social interactions. Empathy enables us to analyze, judge, and reason the behaviors of others. It is believed that human beings are born with basic empathy skills and gradually develop them as they grow up. Empathy can be approached in two concepts: attitude of life, or communicative skills. Recently, as empathy as an attitude of life has been more focused, literature has been used in empathic education, which is based on the hypothesis that understanding literary characters would be similar to understanding people in real life. In other words, reading literature is not other than training empathic attitude of life. This interest has led to four psychological researches involving literature and empathy: 1) the social values presented by the novel have the potential to reduce social prejudice in real life, 2) people who read a lot of novels are more likely to have empathic skills and social acumen than non-fiction reader, 3) the more literary fictions you read (not popular fictions), the better your empathy and other social skills will be promoted, 4) multi-perspective novels have the great potential to facilitate the reading of others’ minds. These psychological researches on literature and empathy generally suggest that literary works, especially narratives, can have a positive social impact on readers by improving their ability to read others’ minds. These researches are surely believed to provide scientific evidence for the social, educational value of literature, and it is also expected that literary works will be more actively used in empathic education.