Empathy Is a Muscle. Your Book Club Needs a Better Workout.
Five story traits that actually train your brain for compassion.
So, you want to grow your empathy.
You’ve read the articles. You’ve maybe even read my articles. Haha, just kidding. Now you know that reading fiction is an empathy workout. It can rewire your brain for better social perception, sharper emotional sensitivity, and even real-world moral action. Good for you. That’s step one.
But here’s the tough question. What should you actually be reading?
Because I think I’ve been clear. Not all stories are created equal. Some stories stretch your heart. Some stories stretch the truth. And some stories are the literary equivalent of a treadmill that sits in the garage performing tirelessly as a cat perch. That’s definitely not what mine is used for, but I have heard it’s common.
If we want to treat fiction as empathy training, then we need to think like trainers. You wouldn’t walk into a gym and randomly start flailing at machines, hoping one of them turns you into your choice of Hemsworth. You’d pick the right equipment for the muscles you want to build.
Same goes for stories.
So, let’s set up a training regime with the proper machines to focus on that empathy muscle.
1. Depth Over Distraction
The first thing to understand is that complexity builds empathy. When a story presents characters who are psychologically rich, morally ambiguous, or culturally unfamiliar, it forces us to engage more deeply. We don’t just watch, we work. Empathy grows with that work.
Psychologist Raymond Mar and colleagues have spent years tracking the relationship between fiction and social cognition. Their studies consistently show that readers of literary fiction (not just any fiction, we’ll get to that) perform better on tasks measuring Theory of Mind. That’s the ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, and emotions to others.
So, why literary fiction?
Because it tends to avoid clichés, formulae, and tidy resolutions. The characters aren’t superheroes. They don’t always say what they mean. They contradict themselves. Just like your boss. Or your neighbour. Or you. Probably not you, though.
In 2013, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a study in Science that confirmed this. Participants who read short passages of literary fiction showed a measurable bump in Theory of Mind performance after just minutes of reading. Genre fiction and nonfiction? Not so much.
2. Stretch the Familiar
Reading about someone just like you doesn’t stretch your empathy. It validates and reinforces your worldview. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not training.
The stories that count make you squirm. They make you pause and make you question whether you’ve been missing something.
A study found that participants who read a fictional story about a Muslim woman facing prejudice experienced a greater increase in positive attitudes toward Muslims than those who read a factual news article about the same topic. Similar information. Different format. One moved people. The other just informed them.
When you read good fiction, you’re inside the experience. You’re not being told what to think. You’re feeling what the character feels. You’re noticing the moment of her fear, not just reading a statistic about discrimination.
This works best when the character is different from you. The more “other” they are, the more your brain has to imagine. That’s empathy doing push-ups.
So if you’re trying to grow, seek out stories that take you far from your own identity. Read across race. Across gender. Across geography, religion, and history. No-one in history has had more access to more varied stories and storytellers. Take advantage of it.
3. Genre Isn’t the Enemy
Genre fiction isn’t useless. It’s just easy for authors to follow well-trod paths of conventions, tropes, or expectations. That’s what genre readers are expecting. You expect a red herring in a mystery and an bow-wielding elf in fantasy. You don’t generally expect them in your sci-fi. And if your smutty ice hockey book with a cartoon cover features a cowboy’s revenge plot, you’re going to be disappointed.
Sci-fi, fantasy, romance, thrillers can all be empathy-building if done right. The key isn’t what shelf the book is on. It’s how the story is told.
A character-driven, morally messy sci-fi novel (Ursula LeGuin’s wheelhouse) can do more for your perspective-taking than a dozen cookie-cutter dramas starring Nathan Fillion. It’s not about dragons or spaceships. It’s about depth.
The very hallmarks that make genre fiction popular (formula, predictability, emotional shortcuts) are why they don’t make great tools for our empathy gym. They’re the empathy equivalent of junk food. I love Tim Tams, but I don’t assume they’re a cornerstone of my fitness plan.
So please feel free to read genre. But choose the kind that challenges you, not the kind that tucks you in and tells you everything’s fine while giving you a sugar rush.
4. The Role of Ambiguity and Reflection
A good empathy workout doesn’t end at the last page.
The best fiction doesn’t always hand you the answer. It doesn’t point out a neon sign blinking the moral. It doesn’t yell “This is the lesson!” while stabbing its own narrative in the chest with a metaphor. Good stories trust you to find your own way through.
Unfortunately, a lot of today’s storytelling doesn’t.
In a recent piece for The New Yorker, film critic Vinson Cunningham explored what he calls “The New Literalism”. He sees a rising trend in movies where every idea is shouted, every symbol underlined, and every emotional beat hammered home.
This is storytelling that doesn’t trust you. It assumes we’re too distracted or too dumb to understand anything unless it’s wrapped in bright packaging and repeated three times. It says the quiet part out loud, then replays it with a voiceover and a hashtag. And listen, we are getting more distracted and dumb, so maybe the storytellers are just meeting us where we are. But that’s lazy.
Literalism doesn’t stretch us. It spares us the work of interpretation. It fills in the gaps we were supposed to bridge. In doing so, it robs us of the space to imagine.
Good fiction doesn’t do that. It resists spoon-feeding. It demands participation. When Toni Morrison leaves a moment unresolved or Kazuo Ishiguro buries emotion beneath quiet restraint (again), you have to lean in. You don’t get to be passive. You have to wonder/guess/feel your way toward the character’s truth. In doing that work, your perspective shifts. That’s empathy training in action.
Literalism is an open-book multiple-choice test. Great fiction is an essay prompt with a three-hour time period. My kid just finished two weeks of exams at school, so excuse my analogy.
In a world full of flattening algorithms, where art is increasingly reduced to “content,” and content is reduced to “concept,” this kind of mental workout is almost punk in its radical nature.
5. So What Should You Read?
I won’t give you a definitive list. Many of my readers would be happy to do that for you. But I will give you some criteria.
Look for stories that meet at least three of these five criteria:
1. Moral complexity – Does the story resist simple good/bad divides?
2. Perspective shift – Are you asked to inhabit a character unlike yourself?
3. Emotional authenticity – Do characters respond in believable, human ways?
4. Narrative ambiguity – Are you left with questions, not just answers?
5. Character over plot – Do the people matter more than the twists?
Found one? Congratulations, the workout can begin.
Fiction is not magic. It’s not a hack. Reading this kind of fiction takes time, commitment, and effort. It’s not a substitute for showing up in the world and actually caring about people.
But it is practice.
And just like physical training, results depend on the quality of your reps. Reading the kinds of stories that challenge, stretch, and dislocate your emotional comfort prepares you to be the kind of person who notices. Who pauses. And ultimately, someone who acts.
Heroism starts with noticing someone else’s need. And you can’t see it clearly if you’ve never imagined a world outside your own.
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TL;DR?
Don’t just read more. Read better.
One well-crafted, mind-opening, emotionally uncomfortable novel might just do more for your empathy than a hundred quick hits of feel-good fiction.
The world doesn’t need more aesthetic book haul shots for Booktok.
It needs more people who live the way the best stories taught them how.
And yes, I included a “too long; didn’t read” section in an article about the importance of reading deeply. I like to subvert expectations. Like Rian Johnson. But not like him, if you know what I mean.
~ Matt
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