The Compassionate Instinct

We tend to think of movie watching or book reading as passive activities. That may be true physically, but it’s not true emotionally. When we watch a film or read a novel, we join ourselves to a character’s trajectory through the story world. We see things from their point of view—feel scared when they are threatened, wounded when they are hurt, pleased when they succeed. These feelings are familiar to us as readers or viewers. But our propensity to identify with characters is actually a remarkable demonstration of our ability to empathize with others.

When we examine this process of identification in fiction, we appreciate the importance of empathy—not only in enjoying works of literature, but in helping us form connections with those around us in the real world. The feelings elicited by fiction go beyond the words on a page or the images on a screen. Far from being solitary activities, reading books or watching movies or plays actually can help train us in the art of being human. These effects derive from our cognitive capacity for empathy, and there are indications that they can help shape our relationships with friends, family, and fellow citizens.

THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE ON

In the West, the tradition of understanding literature derives from Aristotle, who, nearly 2,400 years ago, wrote a book called Poetics. The subject matter of his book was not just poetry. More broadly, it was what we now call fiction, which, like poetry, means “something made.” Aristotle said that whereas history lets us know what has happened, poetry (fiction) is more important because it is about what can happen.

The central term in Poetics is mimesis, the relation of the story to the way the world works. This term can be interpreted in two ways. If you read an English translation, you will find the Greek word mimesis translated to mean “copying,” “imitation,” or “representation.” These translations get it half right. While literary art can serve to imitate the world—what Hamlet called holding “the mirror up to nature”—it can also create new worlds. In other words, Aristotle thought that great plays, such as the tragedies of Sophocles, which he discussed in Poetics, created worlds of the imagination. Shakespeare likened this to the way we dream, such as when Prospero, the protagonist in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, says that humans “are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Dream is an apt metaphor because when we dream, without any input from eyes or ears, we create worlds of places, people, and emotions. What a good story does, by means of black marks on the white pages of a novel, or by the actions of a small group of people several yards away on a stage, or by the flickering images on a screen, is to offer the materials—a kind of kit—to start up and run the dream of the story world on your mind. A story is a partnership. The author writes it, and the reader or audience member brings it alive.

The emotions that you experience as you breathe life into a story are related to the characters, but they are not the characters’ emotions. They are yours. How does this happen? How can an artificial world conjure up such real emotions, and what mental capacities do we engage in order to feel those emotions? Brilliant though Aristotle was, his Poetics is curiously silent on this question, as is much of the canon of Western literary theory that followed him.

But other traditions—one of Western psychology, one of Eastern literature—can help shed light on how fiction elicits such empathic responses from us.

MOVING PICTURES

Empathy can be thought of as feeling with someone, or for them. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of brain activity, Tania Singer and her colleagues showed that a basis for empathy can be identified in the brain. Singer and her colleagues administered electric shocks to volunteers and also gave these volunteers signals when a loved one, present in the next room, was being shocked. In some parts of the volunteers’ brains, activation occurred only when they themselves received a shock, but other parts associated with feeling pain were activated both when the volunteers received a shock and when they knew their loved one was getting a shock. Singer and her colleagues describe this dual activation as the emotional aspect of pain. They argue that their results show that the empathic response that we feel for someone we know and like is the same as the emotional aspect we feel ourselves.

That will ring true for anyone who’s ever been caught up in a play, book, or movie—anyone who has wept for the young lovers in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or with the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or with those who have suffered in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.