This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A story that places us inside the mind of a character who is remorseful about causing harm can inspire forgiveness for that fictional bad act, a new study finds. But the literary benefits to a reader's well-being don't stop there, according to the results: For those of us holding a grudge against someone who wronged us, this literary technique has potential to help us find a way to forgive offenders in our own lives, too.
The writing technique is called "internal focalization," when the story narrative gives us access to a character's innermost thoughts—in this case, a man's regret about his careless act. Being transported into the character's mind elicits empathy toward him and forgiveness for his wrongdoing. Study participants who were prompted to reflect on a past transgression tended to extend their forgiveness of a fictional person to that real-life event.
"If you just give people a story without the empathy technique, they're not likely to forgive a character. But if you put the technique in, they not only forgive the character, but are then more likely to forgive other people in their actual life," said senior author Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at The Ohio State University's Project Narrative. With Gallup research finding that over 1 in 5 people worldwide routinely feel angry, Fletcher said, this study suggests stories may be a prescription for better emotional health.
"What's really great about literature is you don't have to be at a crisis point to use it," he said. "It's something that you can just use a little bit to help get you through daily anger, daily depression, daily pessimism, daily anxiety. The right literature, once you learn how to use it, can help pop you out of that, can give you more joy, more optimism, more love, more empathy, all of these positive effects." Fletcher completed the study with Mark Matthews, a recent Ohio State Ph.D. graduate in social psychology.
The research was published Oct. 1 in Frontiers in Psychology. For over 2,000 years, people have believed literature helps create empathy, aiding us in getting over anger and seeing situations from another person's perspective—all of which are beneficial to mental health and social function. Scientists reported that they had demonstrated this influence in a 2013 study, finding that reading passages of literary fiction, compared to nonfiction or popular fiction, enhanced a reader's ability to understand others' beliefs and desires—a concept known as theory of mind.
But efforts to replicate that study—by others and the original researchers themselves—have not panned out. So for this research, Fletcher and Matthews used scientific precision to focus on one writing technique that they predicted would pinpoint one way in which literature influences the human emotion of empathy that leads to forgiveness. "We said, 'What do we know about the history of how artists develop these techniques for creating empathy?' We put the most powerful of those techniques into a story, and then tested whether that story without the technique creates empathy and if the story with the technique creates empathy," Fletcher said.
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