Readers of novels may be more compassionate and more prone to embrace spirituality, studies suggest
By Victoria Leo
An interesting series of psychology studies in 2023 points to an unexpected option for our inner-peace toolkit. People who are regular novel readers tend to be more thoughtful, less prone to jumping to conclusions about others, more compassionate about people caught up in real-life dilemmas, and more prone to embrace spirituality and transcendence (rather than rigid doctrinal views). For those of us who love to read, this is very good news. Perhaps I get doubly blessed, because I write novels as well as read them?
Did you assume that people who read novels have acquired all those virtues because they read novels? In the studies, the scientists found a correlation — the novel reading and compassion, for example, occur together, and maybe one causes the other. Then again, maybe the correlation just means that people who like to read are also people who are more likely to ask themselves if they have enough real data to come to a conclusion. Perhaps they should ask a question and check their assumption.
Only one study pointed to causality: They took people who weren’t regular novel readers, tested them, then got a commitment to completing a certain page count and tested them again. A similar list of traits punched higher on the measurements. It looks like novel reading does change how you think.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? Romance novels have, over the course of the last four decades, explored a wider range of possibilities for life choices. Thrillers transcend old gender, age and ethnic tropes, as does military fiction. Mysteries rely on characters who are multilayered and complex. In every genre, Good Guy-Bad Guy plots have given way to heroes with psychic wounds that lead them astray temporarily, combating antagonists who sometimes are defeated by being transformed into friends. Well constructed novels portray complex dilemmas of family life that ignore the easy hero/villain dichotomy.
If you spend hours of your relaxation time being transported inside the mind and heart of someone very different from you, who nonetheless experiences the moral dilemmas that you are challenged by, doesn’t that humanize people who would otherwise be other?
Novels, by forcing us to experience another person’s life from the inside, take our hearts and minds on a journey to a new shore. Instead of thoughts and conversation that rehash the well-worn scripts of our lives, we spend an hour or more being challenged to see the deep emotional depths, the joys and pains that we’ve not experienced in our real life. Maybe novel reading is exercising our brains in ways that we were never aware of. It’s possible that well-crafted movies, TV shows and other ways of experiencing different lives do the same.
Of course, this research on the novel road to inner peace applies only to well-done works. Fortunately, there’s plenty of ‘good stuff’ to be had! There is fiction focused on historical and on contemporary times, imagined pasts and futures. There are future-fiction/mysteries, mysteries focused on food, gadget-heavy modern thrillers as well as physics-drenched stories to delight any kind of interest.
My favorite writing immerses me in complex relationships between people of every known ethnicity, age and gender, with dozens of species, with cultures, desires and mores that make the dilemmas come alive, in worlds that differ as much as one human mind can imagine. Readers get sucked into caring about these imaginary people.
That’s apparently a very effective road to inner peace!
Victoria Leo, a retired therapist, now spends her days engrossed in the challenges and dilemmas of imaginary people. Considering their problems keeps her own in perspective. For sample chapters of “Heroes,” the first book in her eight-book series, email [email protected].
Want to contribute? Send 600- to 700-word articles on all aspects of inner peace to Richard Carey ([email protected]).
