The Book That Changed How You See 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 it does something measurable to your brain.
When you read fiction, you don't just process words on a page. Your brain simulates the experiences described in the text. Neuroimaging studies show that reading about a character running activates motor regions. Reading about a character's fear activates the amygdala. Reading about someone's pain activates pain processing regions. Your brain, to a remarkable degree, treats fictional experiences as if they were real.
This simulation is the basis of literary empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fictional character, which then transfers to understanding real people in the real world.
Now, what happens when you do this in a language that isn't your own? Something surprising, and surprisingly powerful.
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, an independent team of researchers (Panero and colleagues) ran a large preregistered replication across three separate labs with nearly 800 participants, designed to settle the question properly. It found no significant advantage for literary fiction over the other conditions. Kidd and Castano then ran their own preregistered follow-up in 2018, across three more labs, and got a mixed result: two failures to replicate and one success. A broader 2016 meta-analysis by Mumper and Gerrig did find a small, consistent 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 the person's personality traits. 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 mechanism isn't mysterious: fiction is a flight simulator for social life. It gives you practice understanding perspectives, motivations, and emotional states in a safe, low-stakes environment. And like any practice, it makes you better at the real thing.
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. They reflect different ways of organizing thought.
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 what it loses is often precisely the cultural perspective that makes the reading empathy-building in the first place.
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 research by Winawer et al. shows this distinction affects how speakers perceive color.
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. Your emotional vocabulary expands, and with it, your ability to recognize and understand those emotions in yourself and others.
This is empathy in its most literal form: the expansion of your emotional palette. You gain access to feelings and perspectives that were invisible to you, not because you couldn't feel them, but because you had no framework for recognizing them.
Reading in a foreign language gives you a front-row seat to these untranslatable emotional landscapes. You encounter concepts your native language doesn't name, and over time, those concepts become part of how you understand the world.
The Bilingual Empathy Advantage
Research on bilingualism and social cognition has produced some interesting findings. Fan et al. (2015) found bilingual advantages in Theory of Mind tasks, and Rubio-Fernandez and Glucksberg found that bilinguals are better at taking other people's perspectives in communication tasks. The relationship between bilingualism and empathy is still being studied, but the pattern across multiple labs points in a consistent direction.
Why would speaking two languages make you more empathetic? Several mechanisms have been proposed:
Constant perspective-switching. Bilinguals routinely switch between two ways of encoding experience. This practice in mental flexibility appears to generalize to social cognition: they become better at switching between their own perspective and someone else's.
Metalinguistic awareness. Knowing two languages makes you more aware of language as a system, which makes you more attentive to how other people use language, including the subtle cues that reveal emotional states.
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. This constant cultural flexibility builds empathy through repeated practice in understanding different worldviews.
Inhibitory control. Bilinguals constantly inhibit one language while using the other. This cognitive control appears to help with inhibiting one's own perspective in order to consider another's, a core component of empathy.
You don't need to be fully bilingual to start gaining these benefits. The process of reading in another language, even imperfectly, engages many of the same mechanisms. You're practicing perspective-taking every time you read a sentence and have to understand it the way a native speaker would rather than translating it back to your own framework.
The Neuroscience of Reading Across Languages
Neuroimaging research has revealed fascinating differences in how the brain processes narrative in a first language versus a second language.
In your native language, narrative processing is highly efficient. The language processing networks are so automatic that your brain can devote most of its resources to the simulation: 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. But this additional effort has an unexpected benefit: it appears to engage deeper processing of the content.
Research on emotional processing in a second language (including work by Hsu, Jacobs, and colleagues on fiction and emotion) suggests that reading emotionally charged passages in a second language produces different patterns of brain activation than reading them in a first language. Second-language readers appear to engage more regions associated with cognitive empathy, understanding another's perspective through reasoning, rather than affective empathy, automatically sharing another's emotion.
In other words, reading in a foreign language may shift your empathy processing from automatic feeling to deliberate understanding. You work harder to understand what characters are experiencing because the language barrier forces you to be more intentional about it. And that deliberate practice in perspective-taking may be more transferable to real-life situations than the automatic empathy you experience when reading in your native language.
This is one of those rare situations where the difficulty is the benefit. The extra cognitive effort required to read in another language isn't just an obstacle to enjoying the story — it's training your brain to work harder at understanding other people.
Cultural Empathy: Understanding the Water the Fish Swims In
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. A Japanese novel will show characters communicating in ways that feel maddeningly oblique to English speakers: saying the opposite of what they mean, leaving crucial things unsaid, communicating through silence. Reading this in Japanese, and learning to understand what's being communicated, teaches you something about Japanese social dynamics that no cultural guide could convey.
A Brazilian novel will immerse you in a social warmth and physical closeness that feels foreign if you come from a more reserved culture. The language itself reflects this: terms of endearment scattered through casual conversation, diminutives used with affection, a way of talking about relationships that reveals a different understanding of social bonds.
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 absorb these cultural patterns sentence by sentence, building an intuitive understanding of how another culture thinks and feels.
This cultural empathy, the ability to understand not just individual people but entire frameworks of meaning, is perhaps the most valuable thing reading in a foreign language can give you. It's the difference between knowing that another culture exists and understanding, from the inside, what it feels like to live in it. The effect becomes especially powerful in 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 puts you in a position of radical empathy: not just understanding a character, but understanding a collective experience through the linguistic lens 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
The empathy benefits of reading are amplified when you discuss books with others, 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.
The Bigger Picture
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. Add reading in another language, with the extra perspective-taking and cultural exposure that comes with it, and the case gets even more compelling, even if science hasn't nailed down the exact mechanism yet. And building empathy through reading has an advantage over other methods: it's sustainable, enjoyable, and self-reinforcing. The more you read, the better you understand people. The better you understand people, the more you want to read.
When researchers talk about the benefits of language learning, they typically focus on cognitive advantages: better executive function, delayed cognitive decline, improved multitasking. These are real and important. But the empathy benefit may be the most consequential of all. 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 moves through the world differently.
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 get a little better at 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.
