[LINK] The power of fiction for moral instruction

Anyone have links to the original paper?

The article says the authors are one Kauffmann & Libby, and implies it was published in the last year. So:

Go to Google Scholar, punch in 'kauffman libby', limit to 'Since 2012'; and the correct paper ("Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking") is the first hit with fulltext available on the righthand side as the text link "[PDF] from tiltfactor.org".

I hope this will be helpful for the future.

FWIW, I've been compiling relevant material on this for a while. As it happens, I already had this study.

I always wondered at how Christopher Hitchens (who, when he wasn't being a columnist, was a professor of English literature) went on and on about the power of fiction for revealing moral truths.

Fiction is also very good at making moral falsehoods appear to be moral truths.

The depressing thing is that the fiction that gets read is the fiction that people like to read, which is fiction that does not instruct them but tells them they're wonderful just as they are.

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I agree with this and I will simply copy a relevant comment that I've made before:

A somewhat related thing that I do is to read/watch stories with clever/intelligent/rational (or whatever I want to be) characters such as Death Note/HPMOR (I have a bunch of other examples) which both seems to prime me to think a bit like them (or to enter in a mode where I think that my narrative is similar to theirs) and also gives me role models on which I can fall back to in some situations (like in your Naruto example). This has definitely at least partially worked (might be placebo) as I almost always have more motivation on which I act to study/do productive things after watching/reading such a story.

I wonder what the average relaxation rate is and if there is any residual.

Psychologists have discovered that while reading a book or story, people are prone to subconsciously adopt their behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses to that of fictional characters as if they were their own.

For that matter, I sometimes catch myself adopting the behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of real people as if they were my own, too.

They found that stories written in the first-person can temporarily transform the way readers view the world, themselves and other social groups.

I don't think they have to be written in the first person for that to happen. At least in my case, I don't think there's any noticeable difference between stories written in the first person and stories written in the third-person subjective, and I think that I've also identified with characters from stories in the third-person subjective and third-person omniscient.

Interesting. I've always seen the Disney fairy tales as very helpful primers on parenting (in the what-not-to-do sense). But I don't think I identify with any particular Disney characters.

"I've lived the lives of all the characters in all my books, and all their mighty wisdom thunders in my head."

First:

This gives me a better idea of how people could imprint on well-written fiction. More so than, say, logically-reasoned philosophical tracts.

And then:

This article is, of course, a popularisation.

That's like a meta-comment on the article, isn't it?