Stories and the Promotion of Social Cognition
Abstract
Engaging with fictional stories and the characters within them might help us better understand our real-world peers. Because stories are about characters and their interactions, understanding stories might help us to exercise our social cognitive abilities. Correlational studies with children and adults, experimental research, and neuropsychological investigations have all helped develop our understanding of how stories relate to social cognition. However, there remain a number of limitations to the current evidence, some puzzling results, and several unanswered questions that should inspire future research. This review traces multiple lines of evidence tying stories to social cognition and raises numerous critical questions for the field.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Fiction books have potential to support readers' real-world social and inference skills by describing characters' intentions and interactions.
“Further, fiction books are said to have potential to support readers ' real-world social and inference skills by describing characters ' intentions and interactions (Mar, 2018; Oatley, 2016).”
From Reading and Empathy: Qualitative insights into adolescents' experiences with fiction books (2025) · cites this paper as Mar, 2018
The reading of stories can influence social cognition.
“Third, there is some evidence that the reading of stories can influence social cognition (e.g. Mar, 2018)”
From Does it matter what children read? New evidence using longitudinal census data from Spain (2020) · cites this paper as Mar, 2018
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 47 · Cited by 112
- Authors
- Mar, R. A.
- Affiliations
- York University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Mar, Raymond A.
- ORCID
- Mar, Raymond A.
- Venue
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2018-06-25
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 257-262
- ISSN
- 0963-7214 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8721
- OpenAlex
- W2810785310
- Cited by
- 112
- References
- 47
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 3
- FWCI
- 109.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Current Directions in Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant #435-2012-1420)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Media Influence and Health
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Narrative Theory and Analysis
- Keywords
- fictional stories, social cognition, narrative comprehension, theory of mind, empathy, social understanding, adults
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
