Does Reading Give Us Access to Other People’s Minds?

Source: The Reading Brain

Jason Tougaw

In her book The Shaking Woman, Siri Hustvedt delights in reading’s power to recast her “internal narrator”:

The closest we can get to . . . entrance into another person’s psyche is through reading. Reading is the mental arena where different thought styles, tough and tender, and the ideas generated by them become more apparent. We have access to a stranger’s internal narrator. Reading, after all, is a way of living inside another person’s words. His or her voice becomes my narrator for the duration. Of course, I retain my own critical faculties, pausing to say to myself, Yes, he’s right about that or No, he’s forgotten this point entirely or That’s a clichéd character, but the more compelling the voice on the page is, the more I lose my own. I am seduced and give myself up to the other person’s words.

Source: Source: AmirReza Fardad

Of course, reading doesn’t simply give us access to “another person’s psyche.” Hustvedt argues it’s as close as we get, without the onus to define how close that might be. She describes the capacity of a writer’s voice to become her narrator, to mix with the stream of her consciousness, to give her access to unfamiliar “thought styles” that may lead to new ideas, new ways of understanding the world—and, ultimately, living with it.

Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene argues that “the human brain never evolved for reading. . . .  The only evolution was cultural—reading itself progressively evolved toward a form adapted to our brain circuits.” Reading is a human invention, made possible by pre-existing brain systems devoted to representing shapes, sound, and speech.  Nonetheless, Dehaene acknowledges that “an exponential number of cultural forms can arise from the multiple combinations of restricted selection of fundamental traits.” In other words, the malleability of the brain’s representational systems enables the continuous evolution of new forms of representation.

The literary wing of the so-called “neurohumanities” has been busy with researchers and theorists investigating what it might mean to “live inside another’s words” and the variations of reading possible within the physiological constraints Dehaene describes. Three books in particular have made a splash: Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007), and Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2009). The titles of these books represent the clarity of their purposes and their shared interests in so-called “mind reading“–how we know what another person thinks and feels, or how literature trains us to guess.

Zunshine draws on theory of mind research in cognitive science to argue that literary texts satisfy, create, and test “cognitive cravings,” focusing mostly on cognitive capacities to imagine other people’s mental experiences—and the centrality of doing so to navigating social relations. She makes a strong argument that writers like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen offer a kind of cognitive exercise, pushing us to practice levels of “cognitiive embedment”–for example, she realized that he thought she was laughing inside, and this worried her.” We practice imagining each other imagining each other’s minds.

Keen emphasizes neuro-cognitive research—especially the fMRI studies of Tania Singer—that link empathy to so-called mirror neurons. Responding to influential research on empathy and mirror systems by Tania Singer, she observes that “Singer and her colleagues conclude that empathy is mediated by the part of the pain network associated with pain’s affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities.” In other words, we can imagine other people’s pain, but we can’t feel it. As a result, Keen’s conclusions are multifarious—and not entirely rosy: It may be easier to empathize with fictional characters that real people; novelists (and writers and artists in general) may be more empathetic than the general population; empathetic responses occur more readily in response to negative emotions; empathy does not necessarily lead to altruism or action; and empathy can lead to an aversive response as well as a sympathetic one.

Vermeule focuses on literary characters, as “tools to think with”: “Literary narratives prove us and make us worry about what it is to interact with fictional people. And we should worry, because interacting with fictional people turns out to be a central cognitive preoccupation, one that exposes many of the aspects of how our minds work.” Vermeule’s “fictional people” include characters like Clarissa Dalloway or Humbert Humbert, but also representations of actual people we don’t know like Barack Obama or Caitlyn Jenner and people we do know, even those we’re intimate with. When we imagine other people’s mental lives, we create a kind of productive fiction. Literature, she argues, makes us attentive to forms of representation that shape the ways we live. If we don’t recognize the role of representation in the shaping of social relations we will mistake our mental reproductions of others for “the real properties” of those people, rather than recognizing the cognitive filters that enable us to relate to them.

Some of this research has gotten a lot of press—for example, Natalie Phillips’s fMRI research on reading Jane Austen, featured on NPR, the Huffington Post, and Salon well before it was published in journals. Phillips conducted her research on a fellowship at Stanford, which touted it with the headline “This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen.” Phillips’s research is a multi-disciplinary collaboration—whose process mirrors its premises with a productive irony Austen might appreciate. She’s interested in the limits of attention, studying Austen’s fiction to make arguments about how it challenges readers to adopt multiple perspectives that test those limits.

Samantha Holmsworth, a neuroimaging expert on the project, describes the challenges: “We were all interested, but working at the edge of our capacity to understand even 10 percent of what each other were saying”—an estimate revised to 30% in an academic article that finally fleshed out the results that had received so much preliminary hype. Phillips presents her research with the enthusiasm of hypothesis that requires further study. In short, close reading (attending to questions about form) and pleasure reading (getting lost in a book) involve related but different forms of representation.

The “neural signatures” involved multiple brain systems, and Phillips envisions future research using a “functional connectivity” approach to measure “synchronous patterns that emerge in parallel across the brain and investigates how these connections change as we engage stimulus over time.” Close reading seems to initiate more widespread activity than pleasure reading, including the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex—areas involved in space and movement.

This is nascent research, and its hypotheses are tentative. That seems appropriate. If Jane Austen abhorred anything, it was too definitive a conclusion. In Austen, mind reading is always misreading.

Disparagement humor makes a punchline out of a marginalized group. Racist or sexist jokes, for instance, aren’t just harmless fun – psychologists find they can foster discrimination.

A joke isn’t just a joke. elycefeliz, CC BY-NC-ND

Source: Psychology behind the unfunny consequences of jokes that denigrate

Thomas E. Ford  Professor of Social Psychology, Western Carolina University

Q: Why did the woman cross the road?

A: Who cares! What the hell is she doing out of the kitchen?

Q: Why hasn’t NASA sent a woman to the moon?

A: It doesn’t need cleaning yet!

These two jokes represent disparagement humor – any attempt to amuse through the denigration of a social group or its representatives. You know it as sexist or racist jokes – basically anything that makes a punchline out of a marginalized group.

Disparagement humor is paradoxical: It simultaneously communicates two conflicting messages. One is an explicit hostile or prejudiced message. But delivered alongside is a second implicit message that “it doesn’t count as hostility or prejudice because I didn’t mean it — it’s just a joke.”

By disguising expressions of prejudice in a cloak of fun and frivolity, disparagement humor, like the jokes above, appears harmless and trivial. However, a large and growing body of psychology research suggests just the opposite – that disparagement humor can foster discrimination against targeted groups.

Jokes that release restraints

Most of the time prejudiced people conceal their true beliefs and attitudes because they fear others’ criticism. They express prejudice only when the norms in a given context clearly communicate approval to do so. They need something in the immediate environment to signal that it is safe to freely express their prejudice.

Disparagement humor appears to do just that by affecting people’s understanding of the social norms – implicit rules of acceptable conduct – in the immediate context. And in a variety of experiments, my colleagues and I have found support for this idea, which we call prejudiced norm theory.

For instance, in studies, men higher in hostile sexism – antagonism against women – reported greater tolerance of gender harassment in the workplace upon exposure to sexist versus neutral (nonsexist) jokes. Men higher in hostile sexism also recommended greater funding cuts to a women’s organization at their university after watching sexist versus neutral comedy skits. Even more disturbing, other researchers found that men higher in hostile sexism expressed greater willingness to rape a woman upon exposure to sexist versus nonsexist humor.

How did sexist humor make the sexist men in these studies feel freer to express their sexist attitudes? Imagine that the social norms about acceptable and unacceptable ways of treating women are represented by a rubber band. Everything on the inside of the rubber band is socially acceptable; everything on the outside is unacceptable.

Sexist humor essentially stretched the rubber band; it expanded the bounds of acceptable behavior to include responses that would otherwise be considered wrong or inappropriate. So, in this context of expanded acceptability, sexist men felt free to express their antagonism without the risk of violating social norms and facing disapproval from others. Sexist humor signaled that it’s safe to express sexist attitudes.

Who’s the target?

In another study, my colleagues and I demonstrated that this prejudice-releasing effect of disparagement humor varies depending on the position in society occupied by the butt of the joke. Social groups are vulnerable to different degrees depending on their overall status.

Some groups occupy a unique social position of what social psychologists call “shifting acceptability.” For these groups, the overall culture is changing from considering prejudice and discrimination against them completely justified to considering them completely unjustified. But even as society as a whole becomes increasingly accepting of them, many individuals still harbor mixed feelings.

For instance, over the past 60 years or so, the United States has seen a dramatic decline in overt and institutional racism. Public opinion polls over the same period have shown whites holding progressively less prejudiced views of minorities, particularly blacks. At the same time, however, many whites still covertly have negative associations with and feelings toward blacks – feelings they largely don’t acknowledge because they conflict with their ideas about themselves being egalitarian.

Disparagement humor fosters discrimination against social groups – like black Americans – that occupy this kind of shifting ground. In our study, we found that off-color jokes promoted discrimination against Muslims and gay men – which we measured in greater recommended budget cuts to a gay student organization, for instance. However, disparagement humor didn’t have the same effect against two “justified prejudice” groups: terrorists and racists. Social norms are such that people didn’t need to wait for jokes to justify expressions of prejudice against these groups.

An important implication of these findings is that disparagement humor can be more or less detrimental based on the social position occupied by the targeted groups. Movies, television programs or comedy clips that humorously disparage groups such as gays, Muslims or women can potentially foster discrimination and social injustice, whereas those that target groups such as racists will have little social consequence.

On the basis of these findings, one might conclude that disparagement humor targeting oppressed or disadvantaged groups is inherently destructive and thus should be censured. However, the real problem might not be with the humor itself but rather with an audience’s dismissive viewpoint that “a joke is just a joke,” even if disparaging. One study found that such a “cavalier humor belief” might indeed be responsible for some of the negative effects of disparagement humor. For prejudiced people, the belief that “a disparaging joke is just a joke” trivializes the mistreatment of historically oppressed social groups – including women, gay people, racial minorities and religious minorities – which further contributes to their prejudiced attitude.

Can you be ‘in on the joke’?

In addition, if one initiates disparagement humor with the positive intention of exposing the absurdity of stereotypes and prejudice, the humor ironically might have the potential to subvert or undermine prejudice.

Chris Rock is one comedian well-known for using subversive disparagement humor to challenge the status quo of racial inequality in the United States. For instance, in his opening monologue for the 2016 Academy Awards, he used humor to call attention to racism in the film industry and hierarchical race relations more generally:

I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards. You realize if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job. So y’all would be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.

The problem is that in order for the humor to realize its goal of subverting prejudice, the audience must understand and appreciate that intention. And there’s no guarantee that they will.

Comedian Dave Chappelle described this interpretation problem in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2006. He discussed a skit in which he played a pixie who appeared in black face.

There was a good-spirited intention behind it. So then when I’m on the set, and we’re finally taping the sketch, somebody on the set [who] was white laughed in such a way – I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me – and it was the first time I had ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with. Not just uncomfortable, but like, should I fire this person?

Chapelle’s intentions with his racially charged comedy were misunderstood. By lampooning the stereotype, he meant to call attention to the ridiculousness of racism. However, it became apparent that not everyone was capable of or motivated to look past Chapelle’s comic stereotypical portrayal to get his subversive intent.

One study found that people higher in prejudice are particularly prone to misinterpret subversive humor. Researchers in the 1970s studied amusement with the television show “All in the Family,” which focused on the bigoted character Archie Bunker. They found that low-prejudiced people perceived “All in the Family” as a satire on bigotry and that Archie Bunker was the target of the humor. They “got” the true subversive intent of the show.

In contrast, high-prejudiced people enjoyed the show for satirizing the targets of Archie’s prejudice. Thus, for high-prejudiced people, the subversive disparagement humor of the show backfired. Rather than calling attention to the absurdity of prejudice, for them the show communicated an implicit prejudiced norm, conveying a tolerance of discrimination.

Psychology research suggests that disparagement humor is far more than “just a joke.” Regardless of its intent, when prejudiced people interpret disparagement humor as “just a joke” intended to make fun of its target and not prejudice itself, it can have serious social consequences as a releaser of prejudice.

A meta-analysis looks at the relationship between reading and social ability.

Source: Does Reading Fiction Really Improve Your Social Ability?

Art Markman Ph.D.

Online viewers mirror the emotions of vlogs posted by YouTubers, a study finds.

Source: Emotional Contagions Can Spread Like Wildfire Via YouTube

Christopher Bergland

Do you subscribe to any YouTube channels? Do you feel especially simpatico with a particular YouTuber? Does the emotional content of a YouTube video blog (vlog) mirror the word-emotion associations used by viewers when writing comments about the video blogger (vlogger) or vlog?

These are the kinds of questions that researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands were interested in when they began investigating what happens when “birds of a feather flock together” on YouTube.

Their report, “Multilevel Emotion Transfer on YouTube: Disentangling the Effects of Emotional Contagion and Homophily on Video Audience,” was published online today in the journal Social Psychological and PersonalityScience. According to the researchers, this is the first study to use a video-focused social media source such as YouTube to explore emotional contagion and homophily. The term “homophily” (McPherson et al., 2001) refers to the tendency we have to bond with people like ourselves.

We all know from firsthand experience that being around someone who is anxious can make you anxious; being around someone giddy can make you giddy; being around someone grouchy makes you grouchy; and so on. Surprisingly, until now, there’s been relatively little research on how these types of interpersonal emotional “contagions” spread online via YouTube.

For their recent investigation into emotional contagions and homophily on YouTube, a trio of researchers from Tilburg University led by Hannes Rosenbusch examined 2,083 YouTube vlogs that were selected from a pool of 110 vloggers (a.k.a. “YouTubers”) who had at least 10,000 subscribers.

Rosenbusch et al. used a word-emotion association lexicon to measure the range of emotions expressed in user comments on each particular vlog. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is a comprehensive list of English words and their associations with eight emotions—anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust—and, more broadly, with negative emotions and positive emotions.

“We find that video- and channel-level emotions independently influence audience emotions, providing evidence for both contagion and homophily effects. Random slope models suggest that contagion strength varies between YouTube channels for some emotions. However, neither dispositional channel-level emotions nor number of subscribers significantly moderate the strength of contagion effects. The present study highlights that contagion and homophily independently shape emotions in online social networks,” the authors said.

The video-level effects of vlogger emotions on spectator emotions (solid lines) are estimated within vlogger channels and under consideration of average vlogger emotions (dashed lines). Almost all video-level slopes (99.3 percent) remain positive while varying in size.

Source: Rosenbusch et al./Social Psychological and Personality Science (2018)