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 to 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 PhD 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. "By being more precise about it, we were able to identify these very specific mechanisms and connections."
The story is about a woman named Mary who, as a child, watched her puppy die after being hit by a car and swore off dog ownership until, at 85, she adopted a puppy to heal her lifelong grief. She hires a repairman, warning him to keep the door shut so the dog can't get out. He leaves the door open and the puppy escapes, to Mary's horror.
Study participants are then offered different information about the repairman's act: Either he disregarded Mary's warning, meaning it was entirely his fault, or he accidentally left the door open because he was distracted by personal issues at home. In the next section, the internal focalization appears: "The repairman thought to himself, I wish I didn't leave the door open," a contrast to the nonliterary condition: "The repairman said to Mary, 'I wish I didn't leave the door open.'"
Over the course of three studies involving a total of 1,563 people, Fletcher and Matthews found that forgiveness of a fictional character can be promoted through the literary technique of internal focalization, and that facilitating literary forgiveness can bring about forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Based on how the study was designed, the fictional forgiveness had to occur first.
What study participants never learned is whether Mary forgave the repairman - Matthews and Fletcher deliberately omitted that detail so as not to model the behavior.
Fostering empathy in readers involved creating conditions in the story that enabled detection of the pathway to forgiveness. Before we can forgive, we have to feel a sense of outrage at the repairman's callous attitude about keeping the dog safe. And it's one thing to opt for forgiveness, which is called decisional forgiveness. It's different when we engage in emotional forgiveness and restore closeness in a relationship, Matthews said.
"Once we know the transgression is someone's fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it. They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having," he said. "As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more."
Both types of forgiveness toward a fictional character and a real-life transgressor were elicited by the literary technique.
The core idea is that exposure to literature changes our perception of the world around us, Matthews said. "That's the hope. That's the goal," he said. "And in our study, we wanted to approximate that."
The effect isn't restricted to the written word, Fletcher said.
"People often report being much more in tune with their emotions when they're watching a movie or reading a novel than they do in regular life, and that's telling you something," he said. "So I think what this piece really points to is a single instance of a much larger phenomenon, which is an emotional health crisis that we're experiencing because we're spending too much time with technology and not enough time with these ancient sources of human wisdom."
This work was supported by Ohio State's Department of English.
