Stories and the Promotion of Social Cognition

By Raymond A. Mar. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2018

99 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Education, Literature and Literary Theory, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90c1619797c2d5cea80bd5a7530791c810263ed0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. G. Moss
2. John Jerrim

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. G. Moss
2. John Jerrim

In Social Psychology

1. G. Moss
2. John Jerrim

Citations in the corpus

• The link between fiction and teenagers’ reading skills: International evidence from the OECD PISA study (2018, background): “Fifth, there is some evidence that stories have a particular role in enhancing social cognition (Mar, 2018) and from this point of view fiction texts may be particularly effective in engaging young readers developing “a clear, complete, and integrated representation of the meaning of a text”…”