Does reading a single short story of literary fiction improve social-cognitive skills? Testing the priming hypothesis.

Reading stories is a popular leisure activity in Western societies. Several current theories agree that reading might improve social cognition. Priming, in terms of an activation of content stored in long-term memory and facilitation of subsequent cognitive processing, has been proposed as a mechanism that leads to a temporary increase in social-cognitive task performance when reading a single story. In addition, this effect might be more pronounced given a rich prior reading experience. To test these hypotheses, we conducted two experiments in which participants either read a filler text and then a nonfiction text (nonfiction control condition), a narrative text and then a filler text (non-priming control condition), or a filler text and then a narrative text (priming condition). The participants completed a questionnaire on demographics and an author-recognition test. As dependent variables, two social-cognitive tasks on empathy and theory of mind were administered before and after reading the text stimuli (Experiment 1) or only after reading the text stimuli (Experiment 2). We found no significant differences between conditions on self-reported empathy or theory-of-mind performance in both experiments. Moreover, equivalence testing largely confirmed that the outcomes for the experimental and control conditions were statistically equivalent. Rich prior reading experience did not increase effects of narrative exposure. Accordingly, the results challenge the assumption that a brief exposure to narratives improves social-cognitive skills.