Inner business

Old-school businesspeople and trial lawyers have the advantage of Sherlock Holmes, I've long believed. They can weigh and measure a person very accurately just by observing him. Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional 19th-century detective, had a similar ability. In a moment he could tell the profession and position of the person he was looking at, and incidental facts such as where he lived, whether he was married and what he had had for lunch, by noticing the smallest details.

But would Holmes have made a good negotiator? Do you think Holmes could tell, by looking at a person, the best way to bring him or her around to his point of view? Would he meet an interlocutor half way? He had logic but did he also have instinct? (Note: not imagination, which is subject to logic.)

More impressive than any instance of Holmes's logic are the anecdotes with which the career story of any successful businessperson or lawyer is scattered. The best anecdotes involve victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, usually by a shrewd, seat-of-the-pants estimation of the person who is in the way or who has to be won over. This is experience and instinct, not just logic. There is a dose of empathy, too - you have to understand what the other side needs, as well as what he has.

These thoughts occur because of a recent report published in the prestigious American journal Science, and parsed and much commented upon in the New York Times and elsewhere in the publishing world. The report is titled "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind", and it is by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the well-known New School for Social Research in New York.

In a series of five experiments, the scientists showed that what their subjects read before they sat down to do simple computerised tests directly and measurably impacted their "ability to decode emotions or predict a person's expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario", according to the Times. The tests included, for example, looking at photographs of pairs of eyes and trying to identify the emotional state of the person in each photograph.

The subjects, who ranged in age from 18 to 75, were given one of three kinds of reading matter: literary fiction (by authors including Don DeLillo and Alice Munro), popular fiction (Robert Heinlein, Rosamunde Pilcher), and serious nonfiction (the Smithsonian Magazine). Some subjects were given no reading matter at all.

The test results were unambiguous: the subjects who read literary fiction had by far the best success rate. The report's authors write that reading literary fiction "leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence".

They suggest, and various commentators have also argued on the basis of these results, that reading literary fiction forces the reader to imagine his or her way into more than one character on the page, each with a different perspective on "reality". Being able to do this at all - to be aware of more than one's own mental state of being - is considered one of the few special abilities of our species, and it is called "theory of mind". This is what makes it possible for us to read a novel where there is a narrator and a protagonist; at once we inhabit three states of mind.

It's not surprising that reading improves theory of mind. That relationship is not new to researchers looking at how the brain works. What is surprising is that Comer Kidd and Castano gave their subjects no more than three to five minutes' worth of reading of each type. That such a small dose of reading can make a measurable difference to theory of mind is unprecedented.

Naturally the jokes followed: read Chekhov before a date, at last literary fiction finds a use, and so on. It's also a little annoying that such a firm distinction between high and low fiction and nonfiction should be made today. But these are scientists at work, not literature professors.

You can use this information as you wish. Read Chekhov before a job interview. To me it suggests that good businesspeople and lawyers have a strong theory of mind. And Sherlock Holmes? Pfft, mere popular fiction.