Reading in a Foreign Language and Empathy

What Happens When You Lose Yourself in a Story?

Think about a novel that changed the way you understood someone. Maybe it was a character whose life was nothing like yours: different background, different struggles, different values. But by the end of the book, you felt like you'd lived inside their head. You understood them not because someone explained their perspective, but because you experienced it through the story.

That experience has a name in psychology: narrative transportation, which Melanie Green and Timothy Brock defined as being absorbed into a story. Brain imaging also shows some of what happens while you read one.

When you read fiction, you don't just process words on a page. Your brain appears to simulate the events described in the text. In a 2009 fMRI study, Nicole Speer, Jeffrey Zacks and colleagues found that as people read a story, different brain regions tracked different aspects of it, such as a character's location or goals, and some of those regions overlap with the ones used when people perform, imagine or watch similar activities in the world.

The psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley argue that this simulation is what lets fiction help you understand other people: a novel gives you a model of the social world to practice in. Whether that carries over to understanding real people is a harder question, and the research on it is below.

Now, what happens when you do this in a language that isn't your own? Something more interesting than you might expect.

Does Reading Fiction Make You More Empathetic?

The evidence suggests a small effect. People who read a lot of fiction tend to score a little higher on tests of empathy and of understanding others, and in lab experiments reading fiction has had a small effect. The best-known result, though, has not held up well.

In 2013, David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a widely discussed study in the journal Science suggesting that reading literary fiction improves Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to understand that other people have beliefs, desires, and perspectives different from your own.

Their study was elegantly simple. Participants read either literary fiction, popular fiction, non-fiction, or nothing. Then they took tests measuring their ability to read other people's emotions and intentions. The literary fiction group outperformed the others.

What happened next is a good example of science working the way it's supposed to. In 2016, Maria Eugenia Panero and colleagues ran a replication with three independent research groups and 792 participants. It found no significant advantage for literary fiction over the other conditions. Kidd and Castano then ran three preregistered experiments of their own, published in 2018, and got a mixed result: two failures to replicate and one success. A 2017 meta-analysis by Micah Mumper and Richard Gerrig found that people's fiction reading habits were linked to empathy and theory of mind more strongly than their nonfiction reading, though the effects were small. And a 2018 meta-analysis of 14 studies by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir found that, compared with reading nonfiction or nothing, reading fiction led to a small improvement on tests of social understanding. So the idea that fiction reading relates to empathy in some form hasn't been thrown out. But the specific, tidy claim from the original 2013 study, that literary fiction gives your Theory of Mind a one-session boost that popular fiction doesn't, has not held up well under scrutiny.

The theory behind why literary fiction specifically might matter is still worth understanding, even with the original finding on shakier ground. Literary fiction is supposed to do something that genre fiction and non-fiction generally don't: force you to work to understand characters. In a thriller, the detective's motivations are usually clear. In literary fiction, a character might do something confusing, contradictory, or unexplained, and you have to figure out why. That cognitive work, actively inferring mental states, is the kind of thing that ought to build Theory of Mind, at least in principle.

The steadier evidence comes from a different angle: not "one session of literary fiction versus popular fiction," but "lifetime reading habits versus social cognition." A 2009 study by Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley and Jordan Peterson found that how much fiction someone has read predicted their performance on an empathy task, even after accounting for the personality trait openness to experience, the tendency to get absorbed in stories, and gender. That's a correlational finding, not proof that fiction reading causes the difference, but it's a more durable pattern than the single-session lab result.

The proposed mechanism isn't mysterious: fiction as a flight simulator for social life. It gives you practice understanding perspectives, motivations, and emotional states in a safe, low-stakes environment. If that idea is right, the practice carries over to people you meet. Mar and Oatley made this argument in 2008:

Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.

Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley (2008)

Does Reading in a Foreign Language Build Empathy?

I don't know of a study that has tested that directly, but there are reasons to think it adds something. When you read fiction in a foreign language, you're not just practicing empathy through narrative transportation. You're adding an entirely separate layer of perspective-taking.

Reading in another language asks you to follow how that language divides up experience, from the words it has for feelings to the way it marks politeness. Whether differences like these change how people think is debated, and the color study below is one example of why.

When you read a novel in its original language, you're accessing not just the story but the way the author's culture thinks about the story. A translation can smooth some of that over.

Can a Language Give You Words for New Feelings?

Some languages have a single word for a feeling that English needs a phrase for. Portuguese has saudade, the feeling of missing something or someone. German has Schadenfreude, enjoyment of someone else's misfortune, and Weltschmerz, world-weariness. Japanese has mono no aware, a wistful awareness that things do not last. Languages divide up colors differently too. Russian has separate basic words for lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy), and Winawer and colleagues (2007) found that Russian speakers were faster to tell two blues apart when they fell on different sides of that boundary. A 2020 study by Jasna Martinovic and colleagues used the same tasks and did not find that speed advantage for the two blues.

When you learn these words through reading, not from a vocabulary list but from a scene where a character feels saudade or a narrator describes mono no aware, you don't just learn a word. You learn an emotional concept that your native language didn't give you a word for, and your emotional vocabulary expands. It seems reasonable that having a word for a feeling makes it easier to notice, in yourself and in others, though I don't know of a study that has tested this with language learners.

That's one way reading can widen your understanding of people: you gain names for feelings and perspectives that were easy to miss, not because you couldn't feel them, but because you had no word for them.

Reading in a foreign language puts you in front of these hard-to-translate words in the scenes where they're used. You encounter concepts your native language doesn't name, and over time, those concepts can become part of how you understand the world.

Are Bilinguals Better at Taking Someone Else's Perspective?

Research on bilingualism and social cognition has produced some interesting findings. Fan and colleagues (2015) gave four- to six-year-olds a task where they had to take a speaker's perspective to work out what the speaker meant, and monolingual children got it wrong far more often than bilingual children, or than children who were only exposed to another language at home or around them. Rubio-Fernández and Glucksberg (2012) found that bilingual adults were less affected by their own perspective when reasoning about what someone else believed. These are individual studies, and bilingual advantages in general are a debated area of research, so treat this as a promising lead rather than a settled fact.

Why might knowing two languages help with perspective-taking? The two studies point in different directions:

Social experience. In the Fan study, the children who were only exposed to another language did as well as the bilingual children, even though they scored lower on a test of executive function. The authors suggest the advantage is social in origin: growing up around several languages may teach children to pay attention to what a speaker means.

Executive control. Rubio-Fernández and Glucksberg found that how well adults did on the belief task was related to how well they did on an executive control task. They suggest that bilinguals' early sensitivity to the social side of language, and better executive control, may explain the advantage. The executive control part is the more disputed one: in three studies by Kenneth Paap and Zachary Greenberg, bilinguals and monolinguals performed the same on 15 measures of executive processing.

Neither explanation is settled. The Fan study hints that you may not need to be fully bilingual for some of this: exposure alone made a difference for those children. It's reasonable to think that reading in another language, even imperfectly, involves some of the same work, though I don't know of a study that has tested that. Every sentence asks you to understand it the way a native speaker would, rather than translating it back into your own framework.

Do Stories Feel Different in a Second Language?

Neuroimaging research has found some differences in how the brain responds to narrative in a first language versus a second language.

In your native language, recognizing words and following sentences is fast and largely automatic, so more of your attention is free for the story itself: imagining the scene, feeling the emotions, modeling the characters' minds.

In a second language, recognizing the words takes more effort. In one eye-tracking study, university students took about 20% longer per sentence when they read a novel in their second language than in their first.

In a 2015 fMRI study, Chun-Ting Hsu, Arthur Jacobs and Markus Conrad had German speakers with adequate English read emotional passages from the Harry Potter books in German and in English. Happy passages produced stronger responses than neutral ones in the amygdala, a region involved in emotion, only when read in German, and the brain's responses to different kinds of emotional content were easier to tell apart in the first language. The authors concluded that reading in your native language gives a stronger and more differentiated emotional experience.

What that means for empathy is an open question, and the rest of this section is my interpretation, not a research finding. If the automatic emotional pull of a story is weaker in a second language, you may have to work more deliberately to understand what the characters are going through. That deliberate effort to understand someone is close to what perspective-taking is. I don't know of a study showing that it makes you more empathetic, but the extra effort of reading in another language is not only an obstacle to the story; it also asks you to pay closer attention to the people in it.

Cultural Empathy: The Assumptions a Culture Shares

Every novel is, at some level, a document of its culture. The assumptions characters make, the conflicts that drive the plot, the values that go unspoken because everyone in the story shares them: these reveal the cultural water that the characters swim in.

When you read a novel in translation, you get the story. When you read it in the original language, you get the culture embedded in the language itself.

Consider politeness. Japanese has a whole system of honorific language, keigo, and in a Japanese novel you see characters change how politely they speak depending on who they're talking to. Reading this in Japanese, and learning what each change says about the relationship, can teach you something about those social dynamics that a summary in a cultural guide can't.

Or take Portuguese, where the diminutive ending -inho can show affection as well as smallness: cachorrinho is a doggy, and terrinha is a fond word for your homeland. A novel in Portuguese shows you how people talk about and to each other in a way a translation can smooth over.

When you read these stories with the support of contextual translation, understanding not just what a word means but which meaning applies in this specific sentence, you notice these cultural patterns sentence by sentence, and they help you understand how another culture thinks and feels.

To me, this cultural empathy, the ability to understand not just individual people but entire frameworks of meaning, is one of the most valuable things reading in a foreign language can give you. It gets you closer to understanding, from the inside, what it feels like to live in another culture. This is especially true of fiction set in historical or political contexts central to a culture but distant from your own experience: a novel about the Spanish Civil War in Spanish, a Korean novel set during the Japanese occupation, a German novel grappling with postwar guilt. Reading these in their original language asks you to understand not just a character, but a collective experience in the language of the people who lived it.

Building Empathy Through Your Reading Practice

If you want to maximize the empathy-building potential of reading in a foreign language, here are some practical approaches:

Choose Complex Characters (Sometimes)

You don't need to read literary fiction exclusively. Plot-driven novels, genre fiction, and even non-fiction all have value, and the research doesn't clearly show literary fiction has some unique edge over other reading. But when you want a book that pushes you to work at understanding a character, look for novels with complex characters, ambiguous motivations, and situations that resist easy moral judgment. That kind of active inference is the mechanism the theory points to, whatever genre it comes wrapped in.

Read Perspectives Unlike Your Own

Seek out authors whose backgrounds differ from yours. If you're learning Spanish, don't just read Spanish authors. Read Colombian, Argentine, Mexican, and Chilean writers. Each brings a different perspective, a different cultural context, and different assumptions about the world.

Sit With Discomfort

When a character's behavior or a cultural norm in the text makes you uncomfortable or confused, resist the urge to judge it immediately. Instead, try to understand it from within. Ask yourself: what would I need to believe about the world for this behavior to make sense? That question is the essence of empathy.

Discuss What You Read

Talking about books with other people adds something reading alone doesn't, especially with native speakers of your target language. They can illuminate cultural contexts you might miss and offer perspectives on characters that wouldn't occur to you. If you don't have native-speaker friends, online book communities in your target language are a good alternative.

Re-Read in Both Languages

An interesting exercise: read a novel in your target language, then re-read key passages in an English translation (or vice versa). Notice what changes. Notice what the translation captures and what it loses. This comparative reading sharpens your awareness of how language shapes perspective, which is itself an empathy-building exercise.

Why Does It Matter?

We live in a world that desperately needs empathy. The ability to understand perspectives different from your own, to imagine what it's like to be someone else, to feel what someone from another culture feels: these aren't luxuries. They're necessities.

The evidence links fiction reading to slightly better social understanding: people who read more fiction score a little higher, and in experiments the effect of reading fiction is small. Reading in another language adds extra perspective-taking and cultural exposure on top of that. I don't know of a study that has tested whether that makes the benefit larger, but I think there are good reasons to expect it. And reading has an advantage over other ways of practicing empathy: it's enjoyable, so it's easy to keep doing.

When people talk about the benefits of language learning, they often mention better executive function, and that one is debated too. But the empathy benefit may be the one that matters most in daily life. A person who can understand how another culture thinks and feels, who has expanded their emotional vocabulary beyond the borders of their native language, who has practiced perspective-taking through hundreds of fictional lives lived in another tongue, that person has more ways to understand the people around them.

You don't read in a foreign language just to learn vocabulary. You read to learn people. And with every page, with every character whose life you inhabit through the medium of another language, you practice the most human skill of all: understanding someone who isn't you.

So pick up that novel. Step into another language, another mind, another way of seeing. The words will teach you the language. The stories will teach you everything else.

Sources

All checked on October 31, 2026.

• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721: doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
• Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., Swallow, K. M., & Zacks, J. M. (2009). Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science, 20(8), 989–999: doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02397.x
• Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192: doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
• Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380: doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918
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• Dodell-Feder, D., & Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: A meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713–1727: doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395
• Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications, 34(4), 407–428: doi.org/10.1515/COMM.2009.025
• Winawer, J., et al. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. PNAS, 104(19), 7780–7785: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
• Martinović, J., Paramei, G. V., & MacInnes, W. J. (2020). Russian blues reveal the limits of language influencing colour discrimination. Cognition, 201, 104281: doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104281
• Fan, S. P., Liberman, Z., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2015). The exposure advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication. Psychological Science, 26(7), 1090–1097: doi.org/10.1177/0956797615574699
• Rubio-Fernández, P., & Glucksberg, S. (2012). Reasoning about other people's beliefs: Bilinguals have an advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(1), 211–217: doi.org/10.1037/a0025162
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• Wiktionary: saudade, Schadenfreude, Weltschmerz, mono no aware, -inho
• 敬語 (keigo) on Jisho: jisho.org