A very interesting example of expectation bias. Personally I rarely read any fiction that isn't science fiction - maybe the odd historical novel here and there but that's about it. Science fiction is the only truly mind-expanding drug, after all. For the life of me I just don't see the appeal of reading stories in conventional settings, it just seems like a total waste of imagination. Like this incredibly vivid semi-lucid dream I once had which was utterly squandered because the entire thing revolved around me sorting receipts...
Their study, detailed in the paper The Genre Effect, saw the academics work with around 150 participants who were given a text of 1,000 words to read. In each version of the text, a character enters a public eating area and interacts with the people there, after his negative opinion of the community has been made public. In the “literary” version of the text, the character enters a diner after his letter to the editor has been published in the town newspaper. In the science fiction version, he enters a galley in a space station inhabited by aliens and androids as well as humans.
After they read the text, participants were asked how much they agreed with statements such as “I felt like I could put myself in the shoes of the character in the story”, and how much effort they spent trying to work out what characters were feeling.
Gavaler and Johnson write that the texts are identical apart from “setting-creating” words such as “door” and “airlock”: they say this should have meant that readers were equally good at inferring the feelings of characters, an ability known as theory of mind.
This was not the case. “Converting the text’s world to science fiction dramatically reduced perceptions of literary quality, despite the fact participants were reading the same story in terms of plot and character relationships,” they write. “In comparison to narrative realism readers, science fiction readers reported lower transportation, experience taking, and empathy. Science fiction readers also reported exerting greater effort to understand the world of the story, but less effort to understand the minds of the characters. Science fiction readers scored lower in comprehension, generally, and in the subcategories of theory of mind, world, and plot.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/23/science-fiction-triggers-poorer-reading-study-finds
There's also self-selection bias, and self-reporting bias.
ReplyDelete"Gavaler and Johnson write that the texts are identical apart from “setting-creating” words such as “door” and “airlock”: they say this should have meant that readers were equally good at inferring the feelings of characters, an ability known as theory of mind."
ReplyDeleteUmm... this seems like a completely unwarranted chain of reasoning. An airlock is not a door. You don't just "open an airlock" when you walk into a diner. If you have gravity, you are implicitly requiring the reader to assume that somehow antigrav works. If you don't bother to explain it, then the reader has to come up with their own bullshit justification, or just add it to the "suspension of disbelief" debt.
“Converting the text’s world to science fiction dramatically reduced perceptions of literary quality"
Well yes; if you aren't actually engaging in world building, then the paper-mâché setting becomes apparent. You created a fake world, and made no effort to convince your reader that this world should be taken seriously, so why should the reader engage with anything else you wrote?
Chris Greene I also stumbled about that "a door is an airlock"-thing. I don't think the two are replacable in what they do in the readers imagination.
ReplyDeleteEvery reader would normally know the function, look and feel of a door. There are no risks in using a door to a diner, using the word puts focus on what else is happening, because a door is just easily imaginable. Every reader probably sees one if he raises his head from reading.
The airlock, on the other hand, is something the reader needs to imagine. He has probably never seen one in person, let alone used one. An airlock implies an unsafe environment in which it is necessary to seperate one of the most basic things a human needs to survive, air, between two rooms, thus it implies danger. Thus, it forces at least some focus of the reader to the environment. The environment itself is becoming an interesting aspect of the story.
"Thus, it forces at least some focus of the reader to the environment. The environment itself is becoming an interesting aspect of the story."
ReplyDeleteWhich in turn implies that they're loading Chekov guns left and right and never setting any of them off. That right here is degrading the quality of the story.