Fiction and Empathy
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I’m continuing to (slowly) read Keith Oatley's "Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction" and I'm struck by his research into fiction and empathy. It's so tricky to interpret research like this when, on the one hand, so much of it resonates with my gut feeling about what fiction is for; yet on the other hand, so much of it draws on the kind of junk science about empathy that dehumanizes autistic people, and the rest leaves nagging questions with me about where autistic people fit into the framework being drawn.
Oatley cites various studies showing that a high rate of fiction reading is correlated with high empathy. His idea is that fiction helps train us for empathy because fiction is about mentally simulating people in social situations.
When we read fiction, we have to understand why the characters are doing what they're doing, what they are feeling and thinking. Much of the pleasure of reading fiction comes from successfully forming this understanding. I don't know about you, but I feel a kind of rush from vicariously feeling a character's feelings in an intense situation. This rush comes, not necessarily from liking or approving of a character’s actions, but simply from understanding them emotionally.
Forming this understanding over and over again is a way of practicing empathy - or at least, that's how Oatley interprets it. He further states that we get better empathy practice when a work of fiction doesn't tell us what a character is thinking or feeling; when it, instead, suggests these things indirectly and makes us work to fill in the gaps. This statement, too, is supported by studies. For example, one study used two different versions of a short work of fiction, where one version was full of statements like "she thought..." or "he felt..." and the other one had all such statements removed. The versions with no statements about what the characters were thinking or feeling elicited more empathy!
Or, at least, they elicited more empathy from neurotypical people.
And they elicited more empathy according to tests like the Mind in the Eyes test - where people look at pictures of people's eyes, disconnected from the rest of their face, and try to guess what they're feeling. This test, as Oatley acknowledges, was specifically developed in order to measure autistic people's supposed failures at empathy.
This is where I put my skeptic's hat on. We know that most autistic people do feel empathy, and that the Mind in the Eyes test is bad at capturing the kind of empathy we feel, mostly because of what I might call format issues (autistic people tend not to look at people's eyes very much, for starters; when we notice how someone is feeling, it’s usually based on other cues).
We also know about the Double Empathy Problem. Autistic people are better at understanding each other's minds than at understanding NT minds. Importantly, this also works in reverse: NTs are better at understanding each other's minds than at understanding ours.
And we know, because it is right there in the textbook I’ve been teaching my cognitive science students from this term, that empathy itself is not just one thing. It's not even just the much-vaunted two things, cognitive and affective empathy - in actual practice, there are several different centers in the brain that we use to vicariously feel or understand several different kinds of experiences that other people have.
I could charitably say that the studies in Oatley's book show the effect that fiction has on a certain type of empathy... for neurotypical readers.
Where does that leave the rest of us?
Including those of us who do, in fact, feel that fiction helps us understand other people; but who have good reasons to suspect that these particular tests don’t capture why that is.
I wonder: do we even have a tool that accurately measures autistic people's empathy? What would it look like?
I wonder: what would happen if we took #ownvoices autistic fiction, and gave it to NTs and autistics, and gave literary fiction by and for NTs to both groups as well, and repeated the study where the "she thought..." and "he felt..." statements are put in or taken out?
Maybe both groups would benefit by reading fiction that makes them need to fill in the blanks about their own group. But maybe both groups would struggle to understand fiction that makes them need to fill in the blanks about the opposing group. In that case maybe they would end up getting frustrated, and failing to practice their empathy because they can't infer what the character's thoughts and feelings might be at all. (This certainly would line up with some of the things I’ve observed anecdotally, both from other autistic readers who get frustrated with literary fiction by NTs, and from autistic writers who find that NTs simply cannot pick up on the implied motives in their writing at all.)
Or maybe both groups would show a different pattern. Autistic and NT communication styles are different, after all, and autistic people often do better when things are spelled out with minimal ambiguity. (I certainly am guilty of writing the kinds of stories where the narrative can go on explaining a character's state of mind for many paragraphs!) Maybe the optimal amount of explanation, allowing autistic readers to best practice their empathy, is larger than the optimal amount for NTs.
I literally don't know, because I don't think anyone has done any research remotely like this.
If autistic people are better served by a different writing style than the one that's best for NTs, I wonder what we would even do about that. I wonder where would be the best places to make space for a writing style like that.
No snappy answers here, in other words. But a lot of food for thought.