WANT TO BE NICER? READ!

Reading fiction makes you a nicer, more empathetic person. Psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City asked people between the ages of 18 and 75 to read an excerpt of literary fiction or popular fiction or a nonfiction article and then tested their ability to gauge the emotions of people by looking at pictures of their faces. The subjects who read literary works scored much higher on the tests than the other readers. Study author Emanuele Castano says that’s likely because literary fiction takes readers into other lives and forces them to “reconstruct the mind of the character”—an ability that carries over into real social situations.