Writing and Empathy

I think the basic substance of literature is the exercise of empathy. Some stories stretch our brains more deeply, but all offer the possibility of imagining other lives, other minds, and other points of view.

While I believe we humans create art for art's sake (unlike ants) that doesn't mean art doesn't also enhance our existence in other ways.

We put ourselves into someone else's shoes for the duration of the story. Research has shown "that merely imagining positive contact with members of an out-group can help improve attitudes towards that group."

In an initial experiment, Rhiannon Turner and Richard Crisp had half of 25 students aged between 18 and 23 spend two minutes imagining a positive encounter with an elderly person, whilst the remaining students imagined an outdoor scene. These were the specific instructions for the imagined contact group: "imagine yourself meeting an elderly stranger for the first time. Imagine that during the encounter, you find out some interesting and unexpected things about the person."

Afterwards, the students who'd imagined meeting an elderly person subsequently showed more positive attitudes towards elderly people than did the control group.

Of course, a lot of writing which attempts to do this too clumsily comes across as mere propaganda. And, speaking of propaganda, we know literature and other media can be used to whip up hate and bigotry just as easily as empathy.

Even if stories promote a good cause, the power of stories to model human behavior has always been a two edged sword, both coveted and feared by those who want to push a social agenda. For instance, another study found that watching tv can convince you to donate a kidney.

Participants were asked to watch a selection of episodes from popular TV dramas with storylines that included both positive and negative depictions of organ donation, and then complete surveys that assessed a range of factors related to how strongly the viewer had been influenced by the storylines (and no small potatoes here; more than 5000 people completed the House survey).

The results: viewers who were not organ donors before watching the dramas were more likely to decide to become one if organ donation was portrayed positively and if characters in the show explicitly encouraged it. Viewers who reported emotional involvement with the narrative were significantly more likely to become organ donors. And, finally, viewers clearly acquired knowledge from the content of each drama – whether it was accurate or not.

And that’s the “depending on how you look at it” part of this. The study is really telling us a couple of different things: emotional involvement with narrative affects the way people think, and supplies knowledge that may very well not be true. Most people would probably agree that organ donation is a social good, and if TV dramas encourage it then all the better — but, the troubling part is that the same dynamic driving the good can also serve up the bad with equal effectiveness. Pseudoscience, vaccine alarmism, and quackery of every flavor proliferates just this way.

This also opens a conundrum for writers. Is it important for your story to convey the "right" message, to model "good" behavior -- to combat racist stereotypes, for instance, or teach people to think in a new way? Or is it more important to show the "truth", even if it's ugly or sets a "bad" example? Or do you want to deliberately shock and upset any conventional sense of right or wrong? Even if you do have a message, does trying to push it actually make the reader resist it? Even if you don't have a message, can you really tell any story without conveying a message, whether you want to or not?