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Read Better Books To Be a Better Person

Posted by timothy on from the great-books-like-the-novelization-of-grand-theft-auto-5 dept.

00_NOP writes "Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to empathize with others [paper abstract]. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive."

1 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Nonsense. by ornil · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a deeply flawed study. Basically, it's cherry-picking with a vengeance. There's a good discussion at Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715