If you were to meet me an hour ago and ask me if reading fiction matters, I would have chuckled to myself with a nonchalant attitude and replied with, "No," but an online article titled "For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov" by Pam Belluck changed my opinion. Now, my opinion was not influenced by their entitlement (we've already been through this), but once the psychological science departments got involved with a little experimentation, the article grabbed my attention.
Due to these new scientific findings, it is now thought to be recommended to read some literary fiction before any type of social interactions. Although the reading time won't necessarily make you any less awkward to be around, it can improve ones understandings of body language and character in the real world. The fact that literary fiction forces its readers to imagine the characters that are described in every novel and base an opinion of those characters through chains of events makes this style of reading ultimately more culturally insightful than other forms of literature.
Hamlet, for example, contains various soliloquies where readers must imagine the mood, the tone, the plot, etc. from a speech that contains very little detail and a ton of indirection. If you were to read a soliloquy from Hamlet then converse with a friend about their problems, studies have shown that you would show much more empathy and mindfulness of body language than you would have if you did not read before engaging in conversation, meaning that a little bit of literary fiction could make you the psychiatrist of the family -- maybe not that far.
I had always told myself that it would take scientific proof for me to want to read more often, and, of course, science had to go there. From the words of novelist Louise Erdrich, "This is why I love science."
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