Does Reading Literature Increase Critical Thinking Ability?

Literary scholars should pay attention to the science.

These are grim times for literature departments. A 2023 New Yorker article called “The End of the English Major” captures the tone. The number of students choosing to major in literature and the other humanities is plunging, and job openings for literature PhDs and funding for literature departments are following suit. Commonly blamed for this decline are worries about employability for literature majors, shortened attention spans due to technology, and tired and unfruitful theoretical approaches.¹

Many literary scholars have tried to turn back the tide by demonstrating the continued educational value of literary studies and recommending changes to the way that literature is taught. John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study has been praised for its contribution to this effort to defend and reform the field. However, while Guillory does have useful insights, his overall case is weak because he neglects to avail himself of the growing body of scientific research on the educational value of studying literature.

As an example of how this neglect undermines Guillory’s credibility, at one point, he declares: “no one can deny the importance of language arts among the modes of cognition”² without citing any empirical findings that establish this importance. His statement is flatly untrue. People can deny the importance of the language arts, and they do it all the time. All literature graduate students know that dentist or uncle who mocks them for wasting their lives on studying mere poems and fictions. As a comparative literature PhD, I have often run into this type and heard similar stories from colleagues. Guillory’s arguments are of little use in convincing such people, who are sometimes university faculty recommending cutbacks in the budgets of literature departments. One would like to be able to answer, “No, you’re wrong! Scientific research has established that studying literature is essential to the development of a critical, broad-minded, and mature intelligence, which you plainly lack!”

Guillory’s lack of attention to scientific research is shared by all the other literary scholars that I know of who have written about the issue, Indeed, it may be that many literature defenders don’t even know how to interpret scientific research. I wrote about a particularly flagrant example of this kind of ignorance here. Occasionally, some defenders of literature will briefly mention some piece of scientific research, but they never do an in-depth survey of this body of work.

The Study of Literature and Critical Thinking

There is now a sizable body of scientific research that establishes the educational value of studying literature. Psychologists have offered substantive evidence that reading and studying literature augments our critical thinking abilities, capacity for empathy, and understanding of the minds off others. This body of research has grown so large that it is impossible to synthesize it all in a single article, so I will focus on literature’s effect on critical thinking abilities (CT).

According to a classic definition by psychologist Peter Faccione:

We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one's personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society.

Critical thinking is a sprawling concept that designates the many cognitive skills that enable us to reasonably and effectively evaluate the propositions, situations, and people that we encounter in life. Many CT theorists, including Faccione, include the disposition to use these skills as an integral part of CT.

Many psychological tests exist to measure both CT skills and CT disposition. Subjects’ scores on one such test, the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment, have been shown to predict real-world outcomes. The higher your score on the test, the less likely you are to do things that we commonly call “stupid,” like buying clothes that you never wear, missing airplane flights, and getting on the wrong train.

How might the study of literature increase CT? Psychologist Nicholas Buttrick and his colleagues believe that exposure to literature encourages us to see the world from the perspective of others.³ The perspective of a literary character might clash with our own and elicit critical reflection on the limitations of our own viewpoint. Buttrick et al. also believe that literary texts make salient the difficulties of interpreting the world. Literary works depict a confusing world, which characters often fail to interpret correctly. Also, the difficulty of dense, ambiguous, and multi-layered literary language may elicit and strengthen our interpretative powers.

In a 2021 paper, information scientist Helena Hollis correlated the scores of 335 participants on an author recognition test with scores on the Critical Thinking Disposition Scale (CTDS). The author recognition test contained names of famous authors like Ernest Hemingway and Danielle Steele and the names of non-fiction writers like Michael Moore and John Searle. Fiction and non-fiction exposure were calculated by the number of authors in each category that the subjects recognized. After education level and non-fiction exposure were controlled for, higher recognition of fiction authors was significantly correlated with higher scores on a critical thinking test.⁴

Furthermore, Hollis found that fiction reading correlated with an evaluativist epistemological orientation after controlling for age and education level. Evaluativism is the disposition to believe that “understanding debatable issues is an ongoing process requiring the evaluation of new evidence.” This epistemological orientation is clearly conducive to CT.

As intriguing as these results are, observational research like Hollis’s does not establish causality. It may be that reading fiction increases CT, but it may be that people already high in CT are drawn to reading fiction. Hollis also does not separate literary texts out from the broader category of fiction, which is a problem with some of the other studies that I review here. I will distinguish between studies on the effect of fiction and studies on the effect of literary fiction or literature. While there are no satisfying definitions of the terms “literature” or “literary fiction,” these typically designate imaginative verbal works of significant aesthetic and intellectual merit. Few educated readers would consider the novels of Danielle Steele to be literature.

Buttrick et al. provide fascinating insights into the effect of exposure to literature in early life on many abilities related to CT. The psychologists conducted surveys of Amazon Turk workers, university students, and nationally representative samples of Americans that correlated fiction reading habits with personality tests to determine how fiction reading influenced the complexity of people’s worldview. Among other traits, the tests measured:

• Attributional complexity, or the preference for complex over simple explanations of human behavior

• Belief in system legitimacy, or confidence that the world treats people justly

• Psychological essentialism, or the belief in the immutability of core human characteristics

• Informativeness of behavior, or confidence that one can know who someone is based on a few basic traits

• Intellectual humility

• Empathy

• Capacity to take someone else’s perspective

• Belief in “simple certain knowledge,” or confidence that science has established the definitive truth about reality⁵

Buttrick et al. asked survey participants about the genres of fiction that they currently read and that they had read when they were growing up. Some of the genres were literary fiction, romance, general nonfiction, and mystery. Across the board, the results showed that:

greater early-life reading of literary fiction predicted a pattern of individual belief indicative of a more complex worldview, one made up of high attributional complexity, psychological richness, and intellectual humility; and low essentialism, belief in system legitimacy, and a sense that all knowledge and ways of knowing are, basically, the same thing.

Buttrick et al. also found that contemporary reading habits, as opposed to early life ones, were not significant predictors of worldview complexity. Intriguingly, greater exposure to romance fiction in early life was associated with lower worldview complexity than average on several measures.

While none of the measures in this study were CT tests, they have obvious relevance to critical thinking skills and dispositions. Indeed, intellectual humility is one of the defining traits of CT. People who believe in a complex world will also believe that detailed and careful evaluation of propositions, situations, and persons, another aspect of CT, is necessary if we are to have any hope of discerning the truth.

Buttrick et al.’s study is more informative than Hollis’s on the question of whether reading literature increases CT, as he breaks out literary fiction as a separate category. Moreover, the study is more informative about causality, as it defines the effect of exposure to fiction genres in early life. CT does not develop until adulthood, so it is unlikely to be the cause of children’s reading literature. It is more likely that reading literature instills CT.

A 2010 PhD dissertation by Brent Strom examined whether exposure to literature increased CT in high school students. He studied two high school classes, one of which read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the other A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Traditional seat-bound instructional techniques were used for the first class, but the second class included stand-up performance of scenes from the play. Both classes were given the California Critical Thinking Skills Test. This test consists of two questionnaires, one of which is given at the beginning of an experiment and the other after it is finished to measure progress in CT. Strom found that both classes experienced a significant improvement in CT ability and that the class taught using stand-up performance of the plays experienced a gain that was significantly higher than that of the control group.⁶

Strom’s work was never published and thus not subjected to the rigors of peer review. However, it is intriguing in that it not only shows that studying literature might increase CT, but also that some methods of literature instruction might be particularly effective in increasing CT. Similar research ought to be performed by academic researchers and published in peer-reviewed journals.

One particularly interesting study by Maja Djikic and colleagues examined the effect of reading literary fiction on our need for cognitive closure, or the “need to reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion.” People high in need for cognitive closure make what we call “snap judgments.” They base their evaluations of situations or people on first impressions without deeper examination of complexities. High need for cognitive closure impedes critical thinking, rationality, and creativity.

Djikic et al. tested whether reading fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, reduced the need for cognitive closure in subjects. They had some subjects read fiction and others read non-fiction essays and then tested them on the Need for Cognitive Closure scale, which measures preference for order, structure, and predictability, as well as decisiveness and closed-mindedness. The fiction stories were by highly regarded authors like Paul Bowles and Wallace Stegner, whose writings fall into the category of literary fiction.

The psychologists found that subjects who read the literary texts scored significantly lower on need for cognitive closure than the ones who read non-fiction. The experimental design of this study, which contrasts an experimental group with a control group, makes it particularly effective at establishing causality.

Other research has established that reading literature has a positive impact on social cognition, particularly empathy and theory of mind abilities, or the capacity to decode another’s mental state and draw inferences about it. Social cognition skills may be a component of critical thinking, as the capacity to take the perspective of another may prompt people to question their own assumptions.⁷ A meta-analysis of lifetime reading habits found that frequent leisure reading of both fiction and non-fiction predicted significantly higher scores on measures of empathy and theory of mind, and that the effects of fiction reading were stronger.⁸ Also, researchers have found that reading literary fiction results in a short-term boost to theory of mind abilities. I explore the topic of literature’s effect on theory of mind at greater length here.

Psychologist Katrina Fong and her colleagues found that fiction reading, but not non-fiction reading, is associated with lower levels of gender stereotyping, as well as lower sexual conservatism and higher gender role egalitarianism. Gender stereotyping was particularly low in readers of “domestic fiction,” as opposed readers of romance, science fiction/fantasy, and suspense/thriller. This research may be of relevance to the thesis because high CT leads to lower stereotyping.

Future directions

Empirical research on the effect of teaching literature on CT presents us with a confused picture. There is reason to hope that including literature in education increases CT in students, but many questions remain. To begin with, it isn’t clear whether CT is enhanced by reading any type of fiction or whether the literary merit of the fiction makes a difference. Also, the research of Buttrick et al. suggests that only early life exposure to literature increases CT. However, the other research surveyed has shown possible benefits for teenagers and adults as well. The precise nature of the educational value is likewise unclear. If studying literature raises CT, what exact skills in that vast category does it augment? Is it reduction in the need for cognitive closure, an increase in empathy, a decrease in stereotyping, or some combination of all these effects? The work of Brent Strom raises the question of whether different approaches to literature instruction have different effects on CT. Another question is the mechanism by which literature produces cognitive changes. Perhaps literature expands our minds by encouraging us to take the perspective of fictional characters, or perhaps by forcing us to interpret confusing motivations, themes, and storylines, or perhaps by challenging our wits with dense, poetic language.

As incomplete as this research is, it does provide some evidence for the educational value of teaching literature. One would expect literary scholars to cite it regularly and to clamor for better and more decisive research on this subject in the effort to preserve funding for their field and attract students. That they don’t is a mystery that I hope to explore in a future article.

1. See John Guillory’s discussion of the problems “topicality” as a paradigm for interpretation in his Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2022), 74-77.

2. Guillory, 353

3. Buttrick, N., Westgate, E. C., & Oishi, S. (2023). Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(9), 1408-1420. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221106059

4. Helena Hollis, "An Investigation into the Relationship between Fiction and Nonfiction Reading Exposure, and Factors of Critical Thinking," Scientific Study of Literature 11, no. 1 (December 2021): 108-141.

5. Nicholas Buttrick, Erin C. Westgate, and Shigehiro Oishi, "Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (2022): 1-13.

6. Brent Strom, “The Strawberry Grows Under the Nettle: How an Integrated Performance-Based Approach to the Teaching of Shakespeare at the Secondary Level Affects Critical Thinking Skills as Measured by the California Critical Thinking Skills Test” (PhD dissertation, Loyola University Chicago, 2010), pp. 131-33.

7. See Hollis for a discussion of the relationship between CT and social cognition.

8. Melanie L. Mumper and Richard J. Gerrig, "Leisure Reading and Social Cognition: A Meta-Analysis," Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11, no. 1 (2017): 109-120.