Reading in a Foreign Language and Empathy

Novels and Other People

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. And there is evidence that something measurable happens in your brain while it goes on.

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.

Some researchers see this simulation as the basis of literary empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fictional character. 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.

What Research Says About Fiction and Empathy

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.

It's worth being honest about what happened next, because it's 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 Mumper and Gerrig did find a small positive association between fiction reading in general and empathy measures, 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." Mar and Oatley's research found that how much fiction someone has read over their lifetime predicts better performance on social cognition and empathy measures, a relationship that held up even after accounting for personality (openness to experience, the trait most linked to fiction reading) and the tendency to get absorbed in stories. 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.

Adding Language: The Extra Layer

Here's where it gets interesting for language learners. 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 requires you to step outside your default way of processing the world. Every language encodes experience differently. The way Japanese structures politeness, the way Spanish handles subjective experience, the way German constructs compound concepts: these aren't just grammatical quirks. Many linguists argue they reflect different ways of organizing experience, though how far language shapes thought is still debated.

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. Translation always loses something, and some of what it can lose is the cultural perspective carried in the language itself.

Linguistic Relativity and Emotional Vocabulary

Languages differ enormously in how they categorize emotions. Portuguese has "saudade," a longing for something absent that doesn't have a clean equivalent in English. German has "Schadenfreude" and "Weltschmerz." Japanese has "mono no aware," a bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Russian distinguishes between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy) as separate colors entirely, 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.

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.

The Bilingual Empathy Advantage

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 speaking two languages help with perspective-taking? Several mechanisms have been proposed:

Constant perspective-switching. Bilinguals routinely switch between two ways of encoding experience. The idea is that this practice in mental flexibility carries over to social situations, making it easier to switch between your own perspective and someone else's.

Metalinguistic awareness. Knowing two languages makes you more aware of language as a system. The idea is that this makes you more attentive to how other people use language, including cues about how they feel.

Cultural code-switching. Bilinguals don't just switch languages; they often switch cultural frames. Speaking French with French friends and English with American colleagues involves adopting different norms, different politeness conventions, different humor styles. The idea is that this repeated practice in moving between worldviews builds empathy.

Inhibitory control. Bilinguals constantly inhibit one language while using the other. One proposal is that the same control helps with setting aside your own perspective to consider someone else's, a core part of perspective-taking.

None of these mechanisms 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 nobody has tested that directly. Every sentence asks you to understand it the way a native speaker would, rather than translating it back into your own framework.

The Neuroscience of Reading Across Languages

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, the picture is more complex. Language processing requires more effort, which means your brain is working harder.

In a 2015 fMRI study, Chun-Ting Hsu, Arthur Jacobs and Markus Conrad had German speakers with good English read emotional passages from the Harry Potter books in German and in English. Emotional passages produced stronger responses in emotion-related regions, including the amygdala, 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. Nobody has shown 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 how cultures handle direct versus indirect communication. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall described Japan as a "high-context" culture, where much of the meaning is carried by the situation rather than said outright. A Japanese novel may show characters communicating in ways that feel oblique to English speakers: leaving crucial things unsaid, communicating through silence. Reading this in Japanese, and learning to understand what's being communicated, can teach you something about those social dynamics that a summary in a cultural guide can't.

Or take Brazilian Portuguese, where the language itself carries a lot of affection: terms of endearment in casual conversation, and diminutives used to sound warm rather than to mean something is small. A Brazilian novel 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 It Matters

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 strongest evidence connects a lifetime of fiction reading, not any single book, to stronger social cognition. Reading in another language adds extra perspective-taking and cultural exposure on top of that. No study has yet 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 usually focus on cognitive advantages: better executive function, delayed cognitive decline, improved multitasking. Several of those are debated too. But the empathy benefit may be the one that matters most in daily life. A person who can genuinely 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.