ShareThis
Three decades ago, from age 17 to 22, I worked as an actor and director at the Stadttheater and Werktheater in Basel, Switzerland. I have always thought of that stint as an excellent leadership education: you learn public speaking, being authentic in public, improvising with others, adapting under uncertainty, and empathizing with a character.
In one role I played a teenager who killed himself, in another a young man ravaged by a brain tumor, in another an orphan fighting his legal guardian. Standing in the shoes of these characters gave me a deeper sense of what it means to be human.
Is the same true for reading literature? Does it help you see more clearly and read between the lines in complex human systems?
The New School researchers David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano recruited people ranging in age from 18 to 75 for each of five experiments. The subjects were paid $2 or $3 each to read for a few minutes.
Some read excerpts from award-winning literary fiction by Don DeLillo or Wendell Berry. Others were given best sellers like a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Robert Heinlein science fiction.
In one experiment, some participants read nonfiction excerpts, for example from "How the Potato Changed the World" or "Bamboo Steps Up."
“This is why I love science,” Louise Erdrich, whose novel “The Round House” was used in one of the experiments, wrote in an e-mail. The researchers, she said, “found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction.”
“Thank God the research didn’t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,” she added.
After reading—or in some cases after reading nothing—the participants took computerized tests that measure people’s ability to decode emotions or predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario.
In one test, called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” subjects did just that: they studied 36 photographs of pairs of eyes and chose which of four adjectives best described the emotion each showed.
Is the woman with the smoky eyes aghast or doubtful? Is the man whose gaze has slivered to a squint suspicious or indecisive? Is she interested or irritated, flirtatious or hostile? Is he fantasizing or guilty, dominant or horrified?
The researchers—Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, a doctoral candidate—found that people who read literary fiction scored better than those who read popular fiction.
This was true even though, when asked, subjects said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much.
Literary fiction readers also scored better than nonfiction readers — and popular fiction readers made as many mistakes as people who read nothing.
The idea that what we read might influence our social and emotional skills is not new. Previous studies have correlated various types of reading with empathy and sensitivity. More recently, scientists have used emotional intelligence perception tests to study, for example, children with autism.
What is remarkable about the research by Comer Kidd and Castano (published in Science) is the fact that they got their results after just a few minutes of reading fiction.
“It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research, to The New York Times.
“That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”
What do you say? Is Chekhov good for leadership skills like empathy or emotional intelligence? Or is literary fiction irrelevant? And if the former, what fiction do you recommend to be a better leader? I look forward to reading you on my blog: http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.
Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is a Partner & Managing Director at Manres AG in Zurich, Switzerland, and the author of seven books such as The Rabbi and the CEO (SelectBooks, 2008).
No comments:
Post a Comment