You Are What You Read

How fiction forms and changes your mind, and not always for the better

This essay / list of resources is meant to be a companion to my Youtube video.

When you were a child there’s a good chance someone sat you on their knee and told you a story. Maybe this was your parents, maybe it was a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a grandfather or grandmother, or even a babysitter. The story you were told had a not-so-subtle lesson couched within. Maybe it was a tale about an ogre who eats children who lie, maybe it was fable about little girls who get gobbled up by wolves when they talk to strangers, or maybe it was a story about a brother and sister who worked together to kill a witch who wanted to eat them. Whatever the story, we all heard them growing up. Storytelling is part of the human condition, but its function is not only entertainment, it’s not even primarily entertainment. Storytelling has always been first and foremost formation.

Since time immemorial human beings have understood instinctively that we are more likely to remember the lessons we learn in stories. We also know — though we don’t know how, exactly — that we’re more likely to remember the stories that move us or that make us laugh. A good storyteller does both, sometimes at the same time. For the religious readers out there, you know well that preachers and priests do their best work when they put their Sunday lessons in stories. And parents who want to teach their children complex moral lessons know to do so by telling it to them in a story. No one has to tell us to do these things. We do it automatically.

Storytelling only becomes more sophisticated as the centuries march on. We don’t just tell stories around the hearth anymore, now we also write them down with beautiful prose and rich illustrations. We don’t just write them down, we also perform them on stages with costumes and music! We don’t just perform them on stage, now we can record them and watch the performances in our living rooms, and it all looks so real! Yet, every time a child sits on his mother’s lap, she will instinctively find herself telling him a story. When we get together with our friends, we all rifle through our week in search of a story to relate. Storytelling is arguably the most important and universal feature of humanity.

So much time has passed from those days when all we had were our spoken tales shared around the campfire that we’ve begun to forget the original purpose of storytelling. We’ve begun to forget that stories and, to use the modern parlance, media are formation. Every story we take in, in whatever medium, is forming us. Some formation is good, some is neutral, some is downright horrific.

There are two major ways that fiction — books, movies, video games, television, etc — impact, alter, form, and manipulate your mind:

• First, fiction presents to you an image of reality which you will then use to construct your perception of the real world.

• Second, fiction can subtly change you over time. This includes changing your opinions, your behavior, your tastes, your beliefs, and sometimes even your personality

And yes, even though a lot of what we picture when we hear the word “formation” is generally about children, adults are just as susceptible to alteration and formation as children. Not to speak of the fact that our modern society is becoming increasingly immature… We are all susceptible to the formation that is promised in stories. This is actually a perfectly neutral state of affairs. If a book has no possibility of changing us in some way then what’s the point of reading it? Not all change is bad, just as not all formation is good. In the video I examined at length the various ways fictional media can change and form us, both for the better and for the worse.

Let’s get this out of the way first:

Do Video Games Cause Violence?

(No, obviously, but here are some resources in case you aren’t convinced)

• In 2015 the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violent Media presented its findings that violent video games could be linked to aggression but (they later clarified) not to violent crime. This in-depth examination of that task force’s findings published in 2020 has uncovered a number of factors that call the 2015 data into question. This is a hugely unbiased analysis which refuses to present absolute conclusions but which also refuses to accept conclusions which had been reached through invalid or questionable means. For anyone who genuinely believes that video games cause violence, this is a good place to start, as it demonstrates just how shaky the foundations of that belief really are.

• A point: around the same time violent video games (and movies) fell under scrutiny the “mass media” was becoming more salaciously violent than ever before in American history. Even news reels about the WWII were less violent than a simple sixty-second segment about some guy killing his coworker and then himself in Small Town Nowhere. More than that, the average person’s daily viewing of this salaciously violent media was also hitting new highs. Most people turned on the TV as soon as they woke up, most offices had TVs in the break rooms. Most kids turned on the TV as soon as they got home from school. Most families watched TV through dinner and then after dinner and then until bed, and then sometimes while in bed until they fell asleep. And “if it bleeds, it leads” so anything violent was played on repeat on all the news channels.
  My point is that around this time people were taking in a shocking amount of real life violence. THIS more than any number of violent video games and violent movies was contributing volumes to the desensitization of people, but especially of children and youths.

• This 2007 article on the topic asks simple questions about the validity of the link between video games and real life aggression while also touching on a connected issue: why do all these histrionic video game condemners who insist that video games must have negative effects refuse to also look at the data regarding their positive effects?

  “[I]s it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?”

• This 2019 study from England conducted on just over a thousand British adolescents found no conclusive link between the playing of violent video games and increases in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study very helpfully explains the main basis for older studies’ assumption that this was the case, that is, results derived from the general aggression model or GAM. Using this in the way in which it was used was inherently flawed to start with. And the authors explain why before presenting the results of their own own study.

• Another meta-analysis from 2020 which again found countless issues with previous analyses and also found no conclusive evidence that there was any link between video games and aggression.

  “Overall, longitudinal studies do not appear to support substantive long-term links between aggressive game content and youth aggression. Correlations between aggressive game content and youth aggression appear better explained by methodological weaknesses and researcher expectancy effects than true effects in the real world.”

Alright, enough about that.

I. Fiction and Reality

“I know the difference between fiction and reality.”

Of course you do. All reasonable adults and most reasonable children know the difference between fiction and reality. And that knowledge does change how certain media impacts our minds — such as with violent images — but beyond that, it just isn’t that simple. You can know that something is fiction, hell, it can be a cartoon and it will still have an impact of some kind on your mind. Here’s how:

I.a. Real Versus Fake (How the Perceived Realism of Fictional Violence Alters the Effects It Has on the Viewer’s Mind)

Closely related to the video game topic is this one. A big reason video game violence doesn’t increase aggression in its players is because the players do not perceive that violence to be real. It really is (more or less) that simple.

The biggest issue with a lot research on the question of violent media leading to violence in real life is that the researchers use merely “violent media” on their test subjects, very often failing to differentiate between fictional violent media and real violent media. I will absolutely concede that real life violent images and news can lead to desensitization, decreases in empathy, and even some degree of heightened aggression, almost as a trauma response to helplessly watching something horrific actually happen.

More important than that, I would say, is the salacious and glamorizing sheen that the media puts on real life violence. For instance, numerous serial killers and even school shooters have expressed that a major contributing factor to their decision to carry out violent acts was that they wanted to be famous or be on TV. I have very little patience or tolerance for any academic study on this topic that fails to acknowledge a clear distinction between real life violence and fictional violence.

The oft-overlooked reality is that there is a mental distinction that our brains make between real life violence and fictional violence. This has to do with “real” violence being metabolized by our mind as an example of actual reality. Overlooking this distinction causes us, as a society, to assume that general “violence” is the culprit, while overlooking the much larger and much more dangerous issue: the news media’s glorification of real-world violent behavior.

In addition, later (more reliable) studies on the topic took into consideration the subjects’ pre-existing personality traits. People who self-reported as more aggressive in general would be more likely to have aggressive reactions to violent media. At least one of the studies I’ve listed below pointed out that little boys are generally more aggressive (not more violent, but more prone to aggressive solutions to problems) than girls, which was reflected in the study’s results.

(By the way, a lot of data out there debunking the links between video games and fictional violence and real life violence often comes with the name Christopher J. Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is a psychologist who is a professor and co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. He has also been a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M. This guy is out there on the front lines trying to undo decades of damage caused by this absurd fallacy. Here’s a link to his academic page on his personal website where he has a lot of interesting stuff archived.)

• This meta-analysis from the 2009 Journal of Pediatrics, which analyzed dozens of peer-reviewed studies, found major issues with the ways in which those studies were conducted which resulted in wildly misleading data:

  “Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of media violence effects provided little support for the hypothesis that media violence is associated with higher aggression. The corrected overall effect size for all studies was r = .08.”

• This important 1974 study — sometimes called a landmark study — describes the result of a fascinating experiment done on elementary school children that measured aggressive behavior in relation to the realism of the violent media they had watched.

  “The aggressive cartoons, however, failed to disinhibit aggressive behavior in either the boys or the girls. These results lend support to previous research reported by Hapkiewicz & Roden¹ and Siegel² who used interpersonal aggression as a criterion measure, and by Osborne and Endsley³ who found the emotional impact of cartoon violence (measured by galvanic skin response) to be much less than that which resulted from viewing violence among human characters.”

  • note: the above link leads to a free PDF of this study which, unfortunately, does not include the charts and graphs. This link might provide you access to the final printed version through an institution if such things are available to you.

• This study from 2013 details a similar experiment carried out on adults. Over two hundred college students were shown violent fictional tv shows and then they were shown deliberately similar violent clips of a real event. The clips they were shown were explicitly marked as fictional or real. After, they were assessed via questionnaire regarding their anxiety, empathy, and aggression state. (Alternative link.)

  “…our results indicate that people responded with more empathy when they knew they were seeing scenes of actual violence with real people being harmed compared with when they were watching fictional scenes. This is an important point, as it provides demonstration that human brains process information differently depending upon whether it is understood to be real or fictional.”

I.b. Is This Real Life? Or Is It Just Fantasy? (How people tend to use fiction to build their perception of the real world)

Okay, so the question of real versus fake is pretty easy to solve for most of us adults, but what about when we know something is fictional and yet we still use aspects of it to build up our baseline for reality?

• This is the 1992 article which I spoke about in the video which examined at length the ways in which the average human acquires data about reality. Specifically this one speaks about the plethora of “mediated” sources for reality to which we subject ourselves every day. Though its emphasis is more on the way virtual reality will, in the future, prove a challenge to our perception of the reality of reality (this article, remember, is thirty-four years old) this nevertheless provides a tremendous amount of eye-opening information about this thing we call Real Life.

  “First, judgments about the reality of mass media events, characters, including fictional characters, are natural, ongoing, probabalistic [sic] (not dichotomous), and relatively sophisticated. In addition, mediated events and people are most easily accepted as real when places and people appearing in stories are similar to or are the same as familiar places, contexts, and people. Also, when an event, if true, has immediate (rather than delayed) implications, the audience will act on a ‘worst-case’ scenario rather than on a careful analysis of all of the facts. Finally, fictional media presentations are most likely to be mistaken for reality when the audience feels stress, strain, or worry about the future.”

  • For anyone curious, the 2012 book by Dylan Trigg The Memory of Place, A Phenomenology of the Uncanny⁴ is a fascinating foray into the philosophy of how our perception of reality can be altered by various factors, including emotion. My personal copy of this book is one of the most heavily-annotated books on my shelves.

    “Above all, what is ‘weird’ is less a matter of content, and more a position we as human subjects adopt in relation to that content…”

• As I said in the video, “cultivation” is what researchers call it when a person’s mind — opinions, beliefs, behavior, etc — is altered by fiction. This 2009 study examined the possibility that perceived realism would have an effect on the linking of “television exposure and social judgments.”

  “Television influences one’s judgments about the real world. More than 30 years of research into television’s ability to cultivate⁵ ⁶ or construct⁷ viewers’ social reality has demonstrated a moderate but reliable link between television exposure and some social judgments⁸ ⁹ . Although the existence of this relationship is evident, the processes responsible for the relationship are little understood¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹².”

• This is the interesting article by Sue Cartwright which does an excellent job of contrasting the story of the Tongan castaways to the widespread influence of Lord of the Flies on our ideas about real humanity.

  Cartwright pointed out that the concept of Lord of the Flies has now become a model for a rash of reality programming in which real people “are plied with alcohol” and are externally motivated to behave in cruel, cheating, manipulative ways in order to get ahead. For a time this led to imitation and even influenced young people to believe that this behavior was both normal and expected.

  “This epic tale demonstrates just how much manipulation is required to bring out the worst in people and the effect this has on our collective consciousness.

  Lionel Trilling, an influential critic of the book said the novel marked a mutation in culture¹³ and despite this fact, in 1983, the author received a Nobel Prize in Literature for his parables of the human condition. In fact, he was so revered in literary circles he was knighted in 1988 and in 2008, The Times newspaper ranked him third on its list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” [emphasis in original]

  • Information about the incredible true story of the Tongan boys.

• For a laff, here’s the story about the woman who thought she could go to South Korea and scoop up a nice Kdrama boyfriend, only to be disappointed by the existence of reality.

I.c The Science of Propaganda (Some Studies About Effective Ways Media Can Be Used To Change Minds)

This is a massive topic and not quite the subject we’re discussing today. But if we remember that most or all fiction media is attempting to convince you of something (persuade you) and that persuasion — no matter the form, political, marketing, or social — is harnessing certain neurological and psychological factors, this becomes more relevant. Persuasion is used by storytellers all the time. It’s a neutral thing. Writers want to convince you to care about their characters, or persuade you to turn the page or get emotionally invested in the story. More insidious actors might use these principles within storytelling to change your mind about certain moral, social, or political issues without you even realizing that it’s happening.

• This 2017 study about “persuasive communication” experimented to see how much more effectively a person’s mind could be changed if the manipulator had access to that person’s psychological data

  “However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

  Needless to say, the experiment showed a marked increase in persuasive campaigns’ success when the target’s psychological data had been used.

• This fascinating study from 2016 found that, since many persuasive campaigns rely on emotion — especially positive emotion — to change the mind, physically resisting reactions to those campaigns actually reduces the influence it has on you. The researchers referred to this as “embodied resistance”.

  “Controlling the expression of emotions elicited by an ad (for example refusing to smile) might be a fruitful way to resist the ad’s persuasive potential.”

• This eleven-year-old study in the Journal of Advertising talks about optimal use of repetition. The study’s authors acknowledge that repetition is a key to success but the study’s aim is to determine the most effective way to use that repetition as well as how long the effects of repetition last.

• If you really want to get into the weeds, this study shows how repetition doesn’t just increase a person’s recognition of your brand over other brands, it also decreases their recognition of other, non-repeated brands.

  (Do you see what I mean when I say they’ve spared no expense?)

• This paper, using magic as an example, talks about attentional capture and the neurological limits on the human mind that allow for guided focus by a manipulating, outside source.

  “Psychologist and magicians often think of attention as a ‘spotlight’ that enhances the items or parts of a scene we are focusing on. The attentional spotlight is not an accurate metaphor from a neuroscientific perspective, however: rather than making our object of interest more salient, our attentional system actively suppresses (via inhibitory neurons) how salient everything else is. That is, rather that illuminating whatever draws our interest, our attention gives us tunnel vision: it obscures all the rest¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹²⁰²¹²²²³²⁴ . Suppressed crucial information passes us by without ever entering our awareness.”

• This is the 1996 study referenced in the video that talks about how long the Illusory Truth Effect can last after the repetitions have ceased.

• This chapter from The Principles of Social Psychology talks about other methods that can be used to manipulate people with marketing and media, including emotion and perceived trustability.

• There are a lot of studies and analyses out there examining the different neurological and psychological factors that are at play when advertising is attempting to change our minds. The important thing to remember is that these methods are just as effective within fiction.

II. Fiction as Formation

It has long been understood that we ought to take care with the media we consume as it is forming us. Only recently have attempts been made to “debunk” this idea, an idea which has held true for literally centuries, if not millennia. Let’s look at some of the science behind the ways in which our media consumption changes and forms us.

II.a A Note on Desensitization

I mentioned at the beginning that the human mind doesn’t react to fictional violence and real life violence in the same way, and therefore doesn’t become desensitized to real life violence because of exposure to fictional violence. A lot of this overlaps with the question of increased aggression due to (or not due to) watching fictional violence, so please see that section if you want more resources on this topic.

• That said, this study, which I have previously linked, is one of the clearest examples of this point. Young college-aged people were exposed to graphic fictional violence and then they were shown clips of real life violence. It was found that they were not desensitized to the real life violence, that it still disturbed them. Crucially, it was also found that their empathy was not diminished.

II.b Let’s Talk About Porn (The Ways In Which Pornography Damages Your Mind and Your Character)

I can’t believe I have to do this. But for anyone who somehow wasn’t convinced that porn is bad, here’s some proof.

Put in context, fictional violence might not lead to increases in aggression or even violence in audiences, but here we have studies showing that real and simulated or even animated pornography result in increases in violent and aggressive behavior.

For those who already knew, there’s still some interesting information here, including the different ways that women react to pornography (compared to men).

• This article from 2014 cites studies done on men who had lost interest in real life sexual partners after prolonged pornography consumption. The authors explain this in terms of neuroplasticity. That is, our tastes and preferences can change over time with outside influence such as internet usage.

  “The sexual excitement of viewing pornography releases a chemical neurotransmitter named dopamine that activates the brain’s pleasure centres. Since ‘neurons that fire together wire together’, the repeated viewing of pornography effectively wires the pornographic images into the pleasure centres of the brain with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. In other words, habitual viewers of pornography develop new brain maps based on the photos and videos they see. And since the brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle, they long to keep those new maps activated. Consequently, pornography has an addictive power. Like all addicts, the men who [Dr. Norman] Doidge treated developed a tolerance to the photos and videos they observed and sought out progressively higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction.”

• This article from the 2013 edition of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology takes a medical approach to the question of pornography consumption as an addiction. Dr. Hilton’s approach has to do with “an increased understanding of the function of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward systems”, which is a key factor in any discussion of addiction.

• This article from the Journal of Neuroscience continues the medical side of neuroplasticity, addiction, and the altering of the brain’s tastes and preferences. A lot of this was highly medical and specialized and a bit over my head, but it’s still fascinating to read about how the brain’s ability to change can also make the brain vulnerable to wildly unhealthy habits.

• This peer-reviewed study examined the brains of people with compulsive sexual behavior and compared them to people with healthy brains particularly when viewing sexually explicit materials and non-sexual materials.

  One of the many fascinating things found in this study was that in those with compulsive sexual behavior when viewing explicit material, fMRI scans showed activity consistent with desire but not activity consistent with liking. That is, the reward system in their brain had rewired to desire what they saw despite the fact that they might not have even liked it. Which is consistent with what one sees in drug addicts. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was any medical basis in referring to — and treating — compulsive sexual behavior as an addiction.

• This fascinating experimental study conducted in 2018 attempted to determine if there was a connection between men viewing pornography and their negative behavior towards women. Most interesting was the inclusion of an “erotica” category in the study. The authors found that men who viewed degrading pornography had marked increase in negative attitudes towards women, including objectification and sexism. However, even erotica showed an increase in these areas. It was not as dramatic as the effects of degrading pornography, of course, but it is fascinating to learn that even loving, gentle, consensual erotica had a negative effect on the minds of the men viewing it. And this was only over the course of the study’s duration. One wonders what the effects would be after a year, or five years, or ten…

• In a rare study on the minds of women who consume pornography found that, contrary to expectations, women who consumed pornography did not respond by developing “empowering” sexual behavior, but rather they became more submissive. I won’t detail the nature of this submissive sexual behavior, but suffice to say it is violent, humiliating, and degrading. The younger the woman was when she started to consume pornography, the greater the effect.
  As I have said before, men and women respond to explicit sexual media in different ways. Men become more violent and more aggressive. Women can respond in that way, but typically they do not. They become more submissive and more willing to tolerate or even seek out intensely degrading, violent, even physically dangerous behavior, like choking.

• This Korean survey on over six hundred Korean college-aged heterosexual men determined that those who consume pornography are likely to try to act out porn scenes in real life, a point I think it’s worth underscoring given that many who defend pornography use the common line “we know the difference between fiction and reality” and yet, once again, it would seem that it just isn’t that simple.

• Another study showing that the more pornography a man consumes, the more likely he is to attempt to reenact it during sex and to use its imagery during sex to stay aroused.

• The question of pornography consumption intensifying over time — that is, the viewers’ tastes becoming more extreme as usage continues — is a difficult and complex one scientifically speaking. One can look at anecdotal evidence from people whose usage has become oppressive, people who find themselves drawn to more and more disturbing content, and you can use your own common sense to understand how this could easily happen. But collecting all the scientific data here would triple the length of this list. So I’m providing this link. This article will be frowned upon by many because it was put together by the folks over at fightthenewdrug.org, which is an anti-pornography organization and is therefore inherently biased.
  However, the linked article has over thirty citations from unbiased resources all across the scientific and academic world. It’s also not a piece of alarmist propaganda speaking in nothing but superlatives. It’s an honest, direct, clear treatment of the overall issue insofar as it is understand by respected, certified experts who have no affiliation with anti or pro-pornography organizations. If you’re genuinely interested in a nuanced discussion of the topic, this is a great place to start. I’ve personally looked through several of the studies cited and they provide valuable insight into the way the mind works in general, not just when pornography is being consumed.

  • The article mentions — as many people will tell you — that not everyone experiences this escalation. But to those who think that means that pornography could be safe: you should note that there’s no way to predict whether or not you’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t experience escalating tastes. Considering how deep the pit goes, why would anyone risk that? I read the accounts of several men and women whose tastes eventually made it to CSAM. As I said, there’s a reason it’s called “degenerate”.

• Here is a link to that disturbing video of Minnesota Representative Finke making a case for allowing children access to pornography as it is “sex education”.

  • The “Paxton case” mentioned at the beginning is this case.

  • This is an interesting note defending age-verification laws as not a valid threat to freedom of speech

  • Another point I’d like to make is that even if children are, ostensibly, viewing pornography — or sexually explicit “education material” — for educational purposes, it is still objectively harming them. Please see the rest of this pornography section if, for some reason, that’s not something you entirely believe. When it comes time to teach a person about sex, there are perfectly adequate ways to do so without employing literal pornography.

• Related: This survey put together by the Department of Justice details, among other things, that one of the important strategies which pedophiles employ is exposing children to pornography. This desensitizes the children to the idea of sex and having sex, while easing them into increasingly extreme sexuality in general, and makes them open to producing sexual materials of themselves and giving it to adults.
  Many pedophiles use these methods to get children to make child pornography of themselves which the adults can then sell, a lower-risk method of producing CSAM.

II.c. Becoming What You Consume

There has been a lot of research done on both cultivation (mentioned above: the way fiction can change our minds and opinions and even our perception of reality), and also on formation from fiction. This, in particular, is often called “identification” and refers to audiences’ tendency to latch onto their favorite characters and begin to assimilate their traits and habits into their own personalities. Why this happens has been studied and theorized at length.

• This research paper from 2005 examines young adults’ (ages 18-28) identification to see what specific motivations and traits male and female young adults tended to look for in their favorite characters. The introduction provides highly useful information about the concept of “identification”.

  “All of the definitions [of identification] involve a bond or connection between an individual and another person (or entity), such that the individual adopts traits, attitudes, or behaviors of the other person, or incorporates the other’s characteristics into his or her sense of self.”²⁵²⁶²⁷

  Taking it further, the paper goes on to explain the phenomenon of “wishing identification” which extends beyond the time during which the media is consumed. That is, many people identify with or admire a character while watching the media or reading the book, this is one process. A secondary process occurs when the audience begins to wish to become more like the person:

  “Bandura²⁸²⁹ contended that the modeling process goes far beyond simple imitation of behavior, to include the changing of attitudes, values, aspirations, and other characteristics to match those of a model.”

• This interesting study examined closely the possibility of a link between the introduction of specific telenovelas in Brazil and a corresponding drop in fertility rates in otherwise fertile women.

  “We find that, after controlling for time varying controls and for time-invariant area characteristics, the presence of the Globo [producers of the telenovelas in question] signal leads to significantly lower fertility. […] Our empirical analysis on children naming patterns and on novela content suggests that these results may be interpreted not only in terms of exposure to television, but also of exposure to the particular reality portrayed in Brazilian novelas.” [emphasis added]

• This book published in 2017 talks at length about how fiction media can be used to change social norms among a given populace. This book doesn’t focus only on negative social change but also positive, such as de-normalizing child marriage. It is meant to provide a kind of blueprint for identifying and then altering social norms.

  “The media are popular tools for changing target behaviors. The range of technologies may include broadcast media such as radio, film and television, newspapers or pamphlets, billboards, internet, and even public events. Common interventions include information campaigns, edutainment (ranging

  from soap operas to video games), and other more modest form of collective entertainment, such as village theater.” (page 147)

  If you read the book you’ll find that a lot of the science I have talked about in this essay/list of resources is being actively employed with fiction media to deliberately adjust social norms.

  If it is generally understood by those going about changing “target behaviors” that fiction has this ability, then perhaps the targets whose behavior is being changed should also accept this reality.

II.d. Reading Will Make You Smarter

Yet another bit of common sense, but which is fortunately backed up by a lot of science. There are distinct and traceable links between reading level and vocabulary size; there are distinct and traceable links between vocabulary size and cognitive abilities. Therefore, there is a link between reading challenging books and becoming smarter:

• This 1993 article by Keith E. Stanovich was among the first to tackle with scientific rigor the question “Does Reading Make You Smarter?” And his answer was an emphatic “Yes.” This 48-page paper also details the controversy surrounding this idea which has come to be called the Great Divide, which is defined as the understanding that there is a cognitive divide between the literate and the illiterate that goes beyond mere ability to read. Many in different academic fields viewed it as self-evident that literacy and the act of reading improved various areas of intelligence and cognition. But, he explained, in the 80s there arose a movement bent on debunking this idea as a mere myth. Stanovich takes the time to explain how the myth idea is nonsensical. This might be one of the most important and thorough papers on the topic, if just an introduction.

• This meta-analysis of hundreds of studies determined that there was a “small and significant” link between reading fiction specifically and social cognition. This link was determined to be causal, that is, reading fiction was found to directly improve social cognition.

  “The notion that fiction reading and social cognition engage similar processes is further supported by neuroimaging work demonstrating an overlap in the networks recruited during story reading and theory of mind³⁰, and

  increased engagement of the brain’s default mode network while simulating literary passages with social content³¹. Second, fiction may provide concrete content about human psychology and social interaction, and about distant countries, cultures, and peoples that readers may never have access to otherwise³². In this sense, fiction may help to build up a reader’s social knowledge.

• This study (which was a set of five experiments) found that there was an increase in the readers’ theory of mind when they read literary fiction, as opposed to reading popular fiction, nonfiction, or nothing at all.

  The idea of “literary fiction” itself and even a definition of the genre is difficult to pin down. It has been said that literary fiction can be identified by its more active quality, that is, the reader has to do more active work to understand descriptions and even the events of the plot. The authors of this study provide a loose but somewhat helpful definition:

  “The category of literary fiction has been contested on the grounds that it is merely a marker of social class, but features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most best-selling thrillers or romances. Miall and Kuiken³³ ³⁴³⁵

  emphasize that through the systematic use of phonological, grammatical, and semantic stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers. The capacity of literary fiction to unsettle readers’ expectations and challenge their thinking is also reflected in Roland Barthes’s³⁶ distinction between writerly and readerly texts. Although readerly texts—such as most popular genre fiction—are intended to entertain their mostly passive readers, writerly—or literary—texts engage their readers creatively as writers.”

  “Theory of mind” has been described elsewhere as:

  “…the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires.”³⁷

  I don’t know about all of you, but I have personally noticed a marked decline recently in the average person’s ability to understand that other people might hold different beliefs and desires from their own. For myself personally this is most often evidenced in the frequent accusation of “grifter!” by which the accuser presents the idea that they cannot conceive of another person holding a different view from their own and so this person (me) must be faking it for money.

• This study from 2015 looked at the physical brain development of readers versus non-readers or less skilled readers using MRI machines. The results suggested that the children who were proficient readers had a different “development trajectory in brain reading regions”. The analysis found physical brain development to be affected by reading.

• This 2025 study found a direct link between participants’ reading ability and their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Interestingly, the study included internet content and found that resources like social media did have as much of a positive effect in this area as books and websites which published news stories and cultural imformation (e.g. longer articles).

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Conclusion

The simple reality is that our ability to distinguish between fiction and reality isn’t that simple. How fiction alters our minds and changes our personalities, perceptions, opinions, even our beliefs is extremely complex. But at the end of the day, there is no avoiding the fact that fiction absolutely changes us.

I said throughout the video and I’ll say it again now, one of the major ways we can avoid being completely at the mercy of the storytellers who entertain (and sometimes manipulate) us — and the reason people in the past tended to be more stable in this regard — is by increasing our daily contact with reality. Yet again, this effect will be mitigated and our minds in general will be healthier without social media guiding our perceptions of reality.

Moreover, binge-watching media and binge-reading books is all well and good once in a while, but in our isolated society doing so habitually prevents your mind from being corrected by either contact with reality or by contact with other people who can challenge what you’ve come to believe from the media you’ve consumed in isolation. This total lack of a social element in modern media consumption is unprecedented in history. It is only by touching reality with our own two hands that we can begin to understand whether what we’ve read — or watched — has any basis in reality.

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