Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind

Kidd and Castano's experiments show that reading literary fiction — as distinct from popular fiction or nonfiction — measurably improves theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The finding was published in Science and sparked a productive replication debate that largely confirmed the core result. For product direction the paper matters because it reframes empathy as a trainable cognitive capacity rather than a personality trait, which changes what you can do about it organisationally. If your product team struggles to model user intent, the prescription is not "hire more empathetic people" but "create conditions that develop the skill." Short, rigorous, and pairs well with Levy's work on empathy education in engineering and Krznaric's broader argument in Empathy and the Art of Living.