The research finding was that people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not. The experiment required hundreds of participants and would have taken a great deal more time to accomplish using physical participants in the laboratory.
