Abstract
Having a good conversation in a pub with friends or curling up on the sofa with a book: at first glance, these forms of pastime have little to do with each other. Yet they have something essential in common. Both good conversation and an enjoyable reading experience require us to empathise with the other person and try to understand what they are thinking and feeling. In short, in both cases we have to put ourselves in the shoes of a ‘real’ or fictional other.
The skills we use to empathise with others are called social cognitive skills. They include empathy and ‘reading’ other people's thoughts. This PhD thesis investigates how these skills are related to reading stories. The research findings suggest that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between social cognition and stories. Because we use our social cognitive skills to understand stories, these skills get better and better with regular reading. This, in turn, ensures that we can empathise with characters better and faster when reading. In other words, stories influence our social cognition, and our social cognition influences how we read stories.
