SynthesisFrontiers in psychology2026
Empathy and perspective-taking in literary fiction: a systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological evidence and theoretical insights.
Synthesis in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Background: It has been argued over the years that fiction reading can be useful in making people know other people, but the empirical history is spotty and frequently contradictory. Investigations vary in their design, measurements and quality and there is still no clear vision of how powerful those effects are and in what circumstances they manifest themselves. Methods: A systematic search was performed in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO, and ERIC of studies published within the past 20 years (2000-2025) that investigated literary or prosocial reading relative to empathy, perspective-taking, theory of mind, or prosocial behaviour. Twenty-one studies were eligible. Of these, 12 contributed enough statistical information to be included in the meta-analysis, yielding 14 independent effect sizes (standardized mean differences and correlations, transformed to Hedges' Results: When all eligible outcomes were pooled, reading literary or prosocial texts was associated with a small but statistically reliable advantage in social-cognitive performance (overall Conclusion: Taken together, the findings suggest that reading literary fiction does not uniformly transform readers' empathy, but is linked to modest, context-sensitive gains, particularly in perspective-taking and theory of mind. These gains are most visible when readers are engaged with demanding narratives and are invited, by the text or by instructions, to actively simulate characters' minds, with affective empathy and prosocial responses emerging more selectively under such conditions.
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