Reading Fictional Narratives to Improve Social and Moral Cognition: The Influence of Narrative Perspective, Transportation, and Identification

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary criticism of belief the social moral benefits exposure to fiction, recent empirical work has examined some these claims. However, little this research addressed textual features responsible for hypothesized cognitive effects. We present two experiments examining whether readers’ cognition are influenced by perspective from which narrative told (voice focalization), potential effects mediated transportation into story or identification with protagonist. Both employed between-subjects design participants read short story, either first-person voice using internal focalization, third-person external focalization. Social was assessed battery tasks. Experiment 1 ( N = 258) failed detect any mediating roles identification. Implementing more rigorous adaptation 2 262) largely replicated pattern. Taken together, evidence reported here suggests that does not have significant impact on extent narratives modulate cognition, directly indirectly via