Abstract
There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary criticism of belief in the social and moral benefits of exposure to fiction, and recent empirical work has examined some of these claims. However, little of this research has addressed the textual features responsible for the hypothesized cognitive effects. We present two experiments examining whether readers’ social and moral cognition are influenced by theperspectivefrom which a narrative is told (voice and focalization), and whether potential effects of perspective are mediated by transportation into the story or by identification with the protagonist. Both experiments employed a between-subjects design in which participants read a short story, either in the first-person voice using internal focalization, third-person voice using internal focalization, or third-person voice using external focalization. Social and moral cognition was assessed using a battery of tasks. Experiment 1 (N= 258) failed to detect any effects of perspective or any mediating roles of transportation or identification. Implementing a more rigorous adaptation of the third-person story using external focalization, Experiment 2 (N= 262) largely replicated this pattern. Taken together, the evidence reported here suggests that perspective does not have a significant impact on the extent to which narratives modulate social and moral cognition, either directly or indirectly via transportation and identification.
Highlights
Narrative fictions in various media and genres have long been regarded by humanistic scholars as educative, either through their embodiment of moral principles (Johnson, 1750) or their capacity to make us more sensitive to the needs and outlooks of others (Nussbaum, 1990; Nussbaum, 1995)
In this paper we address this question by examining the role played by a specific textual feature, narrative perspective, on social and moral cognition
The promotion of social cognition seems crucial in view of empirical evidence that understanding others facilitates everyday social interactions (e.g., Watson et al, 1999; Leppänen and Hietanen, 2001; Findlay et al, 2006), and in light of evidence suggesting that deficits in both affective empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are associated with mental health disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (Baron-Cohen, 2000; Hobson, 2007) and schizophrenia (Lee, 2007; Bora et al, 2009)
Summary
Narrative fictions in various media and genres have long been regarded by humanistic scholars as educative, either through their embodiment of moral principles (Johnson, 1750) or their capacity to make us more sensitive to the needs and outlooks of others (Nussbaum, 1990; Nussbaum, 1995). Social cognition is defined as the perception, interpretation and use of social information, and comprises a set of abilities that we draw on daily to manage social relationships in a variety of situations (Fiske and Taylor, 2013). It includes affective empathy (i.e., tuning into other peoples’ feelings or thoughts; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004; Singer and Klimecki, 2014), Theory of Mind (ToM; understanding others’ mental states; Wellman et al, 2001), and emotion recognition (i.e., the perception of others’ emotional states; Brühne, 2005; Frith and Frith, 1999).
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