Why Do We Read Fiction?

Liam Durcan for the Globe and Mail discusses it.

From the story...

One of my favourite paintings is The New Novel, by Winslow Homer [pictured above], showing a woman lying on her side in a field of clover, enthralled by the book she holds. For me, it captures the very essence of reading. The escape. Solitary and personal, the act of reading strikes us as being one of the least interactive things we do, and yet we are coming to understand that reading, and especially reading fiction, is an activity that may hone skills vital to relating to others.

In a recent study conducted by University of Toronto psychologists, subjects who read a short story in The New Yorker had higher scores on social reasoning tests than those who had read an essay from the same magazine. The researchers concluded that there was something in the experience of reading fiction that made the subjects more empathetic (or at least take a test more empathetically). The study provided some proof for what has often been intuitively argued: Fiction is, in some very important ways, good for us.