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      The effect of exposure to fiction on attributional complexity, egocentric bias and accuracy in social perception

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          Abstract

          We investigated the effects of long-term exposure to literary and popular fiction on attributional complexity, egocentric bias and accuracy. Results of a pre-registered study showed that exposure to literary fiction is positively associated with scores on the attributional complexity scale. Literary fiction is also associated with accuracy in mentalizing, measured via the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, and with accuracy in predicting average social attitudes. The predicted negative association between literary fiction and egocentric bias emerged only when education and gender were controlled for–a covariance analysis that was not pre-registered. Exposure to popular fiction is associated solely with attributional complexity, but negatively. We discuss the significance of these findings in the context of the emerging literature regarding the relationship between fiction and social cognition.

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          Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension.

          The authors describe a constructionist theory that accounts for the knowledge-based inferences that are constructed when readers comprehend narrative text. Readers potentially generate a rich variety of inferences when they construct a referential situation model of what the text is about. The proposed constructionist theory specifies that some, but not all, of this information is constructed under most conditions of comprehension. The distinctive assumptions of the constructionist theory embrace a principle of search (or effort) after meaning. According to this principle, readers attempt to construct a meaning representation that addresses the reader's goals, that is coherent at both local and global levels, and that explains why actions, events, and states are mentioned in the text. This study reviews empirical evidence that addresses this theory and contrasts it with alternative theoretical frameworks.
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            Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind.

            Understanding others' mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.
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              A Terror Management Theory of Social Behavior: The Psychological Functions of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: ResourcesRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                29 May 2020
                2020
                : 15
                : 5
                : e0233378
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy
                [2 ] Institute for Biomedical Research and Innovation, National Research Council, Palermo, Italy
                [3 ] Department of Political Science and International Relations, Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
                [4 ] Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY, United States of America
                [5 ] Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
                Educational Testing Service, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1709-590X
                Article
                PONE-D-19-30601
                10.1371/journal.pone.0233378
                7259578
                32470005
                84da1fd8-cf5b-4400-a7b3-01d04e899dca
                © 2020 Castano et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 12 November 2019
                : 4 May 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 2, Pages: 13
                Funding
                Funded by: National Endowment for the Arts (US)
                Award ID: 16-3800-7004
                Award Recipient :
                EC 16-3800-7004 National Endowments for the Arts https://www.arts.gov/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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                Data are available from the Mendeley repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/4y48dvzwdp.1.

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