Books grow empathy, but only for some readers

When you read a novel, something remarkable happens in your brain. You are not just taking in words on a page; you are running an emotional simulation. As you follow a character through heartbreak, victory, or fear, your brain activates the same neural pathways as if you were living those experiences yourself. In other words, the mind treats fiction as a kind of real-life rehearsal, where emotional reactions are practiced in a safe space.

According to research published in PLOS ONE by Dutch psychologists P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp, reading can actually reshape empathy. Their study found that readers who became emotionally absorbed in stories showed measurable increases in empathy days later.

This is fiction’s quiet superpower. It dismantles prejudice not through argument but through experience. When you spend hours living inside another person’s consciousness, you return to your own life changed, often without realizing it.

But here is the catch: those who read without emotional engagement became less empathetic.

The empathy paradox

Empathy fades when reading becomes passive. To truly connect, readers need to move beyond observing characters and start imagining from within their world. That means slowing down, picturing what the character sees, and staying with their emotions even when they feel uncomfortable. Through this kind of engagement, fiction turns from mere entertainment into a rehearsal for understanding real people.

But emotional engagement alone is not enough. Empathy does not come from reading itself, but from the inner journey it sparks, and that journey is rarely comfortable. The very books that could most expand our empathy are often the hardest ones to connect with. They challenge our assumptions and push us to confront emotions we would rather avoid.

And even then, empathy cannot deepen if we never step outside what feels familiar. Most readers gravitate toward characters who look, think, and live like them, limiting how far that empathy can stretch. Expanding it means choosing stories that cross boundaries: across cultures, genders, and experiences. To do that, we first must understand where our own blind spots lie.

But how do we know what blinds us?

For those unsure where their blind spots lie psychologists at Harvard developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT). It measures subtle, automatic preferences by timing how quickly people associate positive or negative words with faces, genders, or groups. The test is not perfect; results can shift and should be taken several times. Yet it remains a useful mirror, reminding us that bias is not an exception but a condition of being human.

Still, many people see themselves as objective, believing bias is something other people have. But our blind spots often hide in everyday choices, including what we choose to read. And nothing reveals that more clearly than gender.

The hidden empathy gap

Our reading habits often reinforce the very biases we claim to outgrow. Studies show men not only read less fiction but also tend to avoid books written by women.

According to Nielsen Book Data, only 19 percent of readers for the top ten bestselling female authors are men, while readership for top male authors is nearly balanced. Meanwhile, research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering shows that male characters are four times more prevalent in literature than female characters.

It is an empathy problem. When half the population routinely avoids perspectives from the other half, we limit our collective capacity to understand each other. Men’s stories get treated as universal, while women’s stories are seen as niche. The empathy gap widens.

Earlier, Kazinform News Agency reported on how reading fights loneliness.