Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (New York, 2016)

December is usually a slow month for posts on this blog. This was not the plan for 2016, as I have a number of quite weighty ones on the way, but I haven’t quite pulled any of them together, and it’s time to spend less time at the desk for a bit. (Also I have to set exam papers and stuff like that.) I’ve been reading an interesting book recently, though, so I will briefly mention that. The Undoing Project is the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two great psychologists who did pioneering work on cognitive biases, exploring and explaining why humans behave irrationally. They became extremely influential in the field of behavioural economics, for which Kahneman (in effect on behalf of them both) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002.
      Michael Lewis is an excellent writer and I read the book keenly. We have some history: in 2004 I read his famous book Moneyball, which was beguiling enough to lure me into supporting the Oakland Athletics baseball team, something that I thoroughly regret at present. Here again he tells a remarkable story, involving Nazi oppression, the early days of the state of Israel, military service, the ups and downs of academic careers, and most of all an intense friendship that proved both fertile and painful (much more the former). Having come across their work on biases in a relatively confined way (a classic essay here, a weighty reputation there) it was good to read about it in a broader context.

* Maria Eugenia Panero, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jessica Black, Thalia R. Goldstein, Jennifer L.
Barnes, Hiram Brownell, and Ellen Winner, ‘Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111 (2016), 46-64.
* Keith Oatley, ‘Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 618-28.

This post follows rather rapidly after the last, because on the day I pressed the ‘publish’ button I found myself reading about the Panero et al. piece listed above. It’s part of Psychology’s replication boom, which I have written about a bit here. The researchers set about trying to repeat the experiments described in a well known 2013 essay by Kidd and Castano. It is one of numerous attempts to show that reading literature makes us better at empathy; I mentioned it, and looked at the issues more generally, here.
      What makes Kidd and Castano’s essay most challenging is that they claim an effect on our mind-reading skills as a result of a short and specific exposure to fiction. Usually the claim is looser — correlation, not causation, or it is based on longer-term exposure to the improving influence of literature. In the piece where I mentioned Kidd and Castano I also cited various pieces by Keith Oatley, who consistently presses the general case. Indeed, there’s a recent essay in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by him (details above), which is interesting as ever. And yet I wasn’t going to feature it in the blog: partly because I have dealt with the empathy thing before, but also because I seem to steer clear of it, perhaps because it just seems a bit too neat for comfort.
      Anyway, the thing about the replication boom is that it’s a failed replication boom. As has happened in a number of notable cases, they did not get the same results. This then casts doubt on the conclusions drawn by Kidd and Castano, and Panero et al. follow through by considering whether there is any causal link between reading fiction and empathy skills. Maybe, they wonder, it’s the other way around: mind-readers seek out representations of minds to read. Now this is just one specific ebb against a broader flow in favour of the argument that, as I noted in my last post, was part of a case being made for literature as a ‘public good’. And I was already wary. But we literary types have to stay vigilant, and careful, even when the science is music to our ears.

Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford, 2016)

I have just got back from St Andrews: photographic proof below. I went for work, but it was very enjoyable work. Also I got to sit on trains for hours (in the dark, so window-staring was out, or at least very dull), and this meant I powered through Rick Rylance’s book. Until recently he was Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Chair of Research Councils UK (translation: he was in charge of the main source of research funding that people like me can turn to, and he led the group that oversees all such bodies, including the much wealthier science ones). So he is a very interesting person to listen to on the subject, since he must have spent a lot of time thinking about how to carve out a space for humanities research funding amid the claims of the cancer-curers and the cosmos-crunchers.

I read the book on an old-school Kindle and so, as is quite often the case, I was surprised when it finished, even though I knew that The Literary Agenda series is made up of ‘short polemical monographs’. I never remember to allow for the bibliography and index, that’s the thing: 86% doesn’t mean 86%. Sometimes that early finish is a very welcome surprise, I have to admit, but this time I could have stood a bit more, because I was interested, and because I would have liked to read a conclusion that brought the book’s key strands together. Rylance outlines historical arguments for the value of literature to society, but the weight of the book’s case for the value of literature rests on two main themes.
      First, he develops ways of assessing the contribution of literature to modern British society in economic terms. By that definition of ‘public good’, literature stands up well: we write, we read, we buy, we sell, we edit, we meet to discuss, we attend events, and so on. Second — and without having read any blurbs I was surprised and pleased to see this — he turns to the argument that literature helps society by improving our skills at ‘theory of mind’ and empathy. Among many other things, there is interesting anecdotal evidence from prisons, and there is Steven Pinker’s argument that human society as a whole is getting better and better and one reason is that the rise of the novel has fostered our skills at understanding one another.

Now on the whole I am thrilled that a cognitive approach to literature, the kind of thing we’re on about here, plays such a prominent role in this book by this scholar. I am trying not to worry about the fact that in the past I’ve felt a bit sceptical about the specifics of the theory, and I really liked an essay that pointed in a slightly different direction. (Actually that argument — here — is perfectly congenial to Rylance’s efforts, it’s just not so straightforward in what it thinks reading fiction does for our ability to understand others.) And I would have liked to see the economic bit and the psychological bit put together somehow, but since I can’t easily see how that would be done, I will just be grateful that two independent reasons for the value of literature to society have been put so trenchantly.