Cognitive effects of reading fiction

What is it about?

This research project suggests that people who read a lot of fiction have better cognitive skills than people who read little or no fiction. These benefits are small in size across various cognitive skills, but of medium size for verbal and general cognitive abilities, for example, intelligence. Importantly, there is a stronger association between reading fiction and cognitive skills than between reading nonfiction and those skills. However, whether the benefits are caused by reading fiction or by one or more other variables remains to be determined through future research.

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Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Over the last decades, scholars from several disciplines have claimed far-reaching benefits of reading fiction for social cognition in the real world. These claims have been accompanied by a wave of empirical research on this topic and on further cognitive outcomes. In the present project, we meta-analyze extant published and unpublished empirical work examining cognitive effects of fiction reading in order to gain a quantitative research overview.

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