No long ago, in a typical university, the department of psychology and the department of literature, on opposite sides of the campus, had nothing to do with each other. At the University of Alberta, Peter Dixon is a professor of psychology and Marisa Bortolussi is a professor of literature, and they have a great deal to do with each other. They are married and, together, they have published some of the most interesting and insightful research on the psychology of literature. This includes Bortolussi and Dixon’s (2003) Psychonarratology: Foundations of the empirical study of literary response. In the current book, The Analogical Reader, they take their studies forward with a focus on perspective taking.
This book is a scholarly account that reviews extensive evidence, interspersed with reflections on several works of fiction by authors who include Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Muriel Spark and J.K. Rowling. Among the topics of empirical research and theory are people’s abilities to read the minds of others, narration, authors’ portrayals of characters, readers’ resonance with books, and challenges to the theory that they are presenting here, all with a focus on the idea of perspective.
Here is what Dixon and Bortolussi say about their theory of perspective-taking on page 204 of The Analogical Reader.
In literary studies, theories of the reader-character interaction include identification, empathy, and transportation … identification is the mapping between the reader and the character, empathy should be understood as emotional perspective taking, and transportation is the elaborative processing that can underlie perspective taking.
Here’s how I put it in Such Stuff as Dreams:
In fiction, the first move is to put aside our own goals and plans, and to insert, instead, the goals, plans and actions of a character (as indicated by the author) into our own planning processor. The second move, with the goals and plans we have taken on, we experience our own fresh emotions in the circumstances of the character’s actions and their effects (p. 116).
An important study by Dixon and Bortolussi’s research group came out in the first year of publication of Scientific Studies of Literature and is referred to in the current book. It’s about how, when we read a work of fiction by an accomplished writer, we are invited to make inferences. In this paper, Kotovych, Dixon, Bortolussi, and Holden (2011) asked one group of participants to read a passage by an author of short stories which contained a paragraph that contained the narrator’s self-doubting and apologetic thoughts on being a writer. The researchers called this version “implicit.” A second group of participants was asked to read a passage that contained a corresponding paragraph, which the researchers called “explicit.” This told the reader directly what this character was feeling: embarrassed, uncomfortable, wondering whether others might feel sympathy and amusement with her. The results of this study showed that the people who read the implicit version gained a deeper and more insightful understanding of the narrator than those who read the explicit version. The authors go on to say, that the very same process occurs when we take part in conversations with people in our day-to-day lives.
The central question of The Analogical Reader is how we might understand people with whom we interact. A substantive answer, not discussed in this book, but relevant to Dixon’s and Bortolussi’s proposals, derives from the work of the research group led by Michael Tomasello (see, e.g., Tomasello, 2019). They found that, unlike our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, in a recent move in evolution, we humans have become largely collaborative. In the first phase of this, we’ve become able to make joint arrangements. In the second, we’ve formed cultures. An instance of this first phase occurs in the following comparison. When a group of chimpanzees travels and finds a source of food, each individual takes what’s available (with the alpha male getting first pick), then goes away and eats alone. In contrast, early humans foraged together, taking with them one of the earliest pieces of human technology—a bag—then took the food back to where their relatives and friends were so that they could eat together. Making this kind of mutual arrangement to have meals together continues today, and dates back perhaps 170,000 years (Wadley et al., 2020), with this time being also within the estimated range of the beginnings of human language.
For us, with our family members, colleagues, friends and enemies, the “we” has become almost always relevant and sometimes more important than “I.” Because of this, it’s necessary for us to understand each other. A thorough review and incisive theoretical proposal on this issue is by Raymond Nickerson (1999), discussed by Dixon and Bortolussi, sometimes in disagreement, sometimes with approval.
Nickerson starts the abstract of his article with this:
To communicate effectively, people must have a reasonably accurate idea about what specific other people know. An obvious starting point for building a model of what another knows is what one oneself knows, or thinks one knows.
Like Dixon and Bortolussi, Nickerson uses the term “perspective” but, unlike them, he also uses the term “model.” For instance, he says that to understand what another person is thinking, considering, and feeling, we make of them a model that includes “beliefs, opinions, suppositions, attitudes and related states of mind” (p. 737). Then, Nickerson suggests, we project onto the other person what we ourselves would be believing, supposing and so on, in the circumstances that person is in, making corrections that derive from our model of her or him: age, gender, culture, and so on, as well what we know about this person from previous interactions with us, and also from gossip when we have discussed her or him with friends. Typically, projecting from what we would be feeling and making corrections according to the model is a good heuristic, but often, perhaps too frequently, we project too much and correct too little.
Dixon and Bortolussi’s equivalent to “model” is “analogue.” An interesting aspect of this is that the movement can take place in both directions. In one direction, when we try to know what another person is thinking and feeling, our understanding of them is a projection of what we ourselves might think and feel in comparable circumstances. In the other direction, if someone does something cruel or betrays us, this event is then entered into our mental model of that person and will have substantial effects on the corrections we make as we subsequently interact with them.
Another version of the analogue effect working in both directions is this. In one direction, several research groups have now shown that, as compared with lifetime reading of non-fiction (typically consisting of explanations), a lifetime reading of fiction enables us not only to have more empathy with other people, but enables a growth in our ability to understand them better or (as psychologists put it) to improve our abilities in theory of mind (see, e.g., Dodell-Feder & Tamir 2018; Oatley, 2016). In the other direction, as we read about a character in a literary short story or novel, we can understand this character better if what is depicted as happening to them prompts memories of comparable events in our own lives.
In the book’s penultimate chapter, the authors publish three new experiments on this last-mentioned effect. These show that, as people read a piece of fiction, when they are reminded of something that has occurred to them, this predicts the extent of perspective-taking that occurs. Here, the reader needs not to be at all like the fictional character. What needs to happen is that an analogy is realized. The person becomes an analogical reader.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.