Potentiating Empathic Growth: Generating Imagery While Reading Fiction Increases Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

The value of narrative fiction as a vehicle for empathic growth is touted across diverse disciplines, but these ideas have rarely undergone empirical scrutiny. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether enhancing imagery generation while reading fiction can potentiate empathy and prosocial behavior. Participants (N = 98) were randomly assigned to generate imagery across multiple sensory domains while reading (imagery-generation condition), focus on the semantic meaning of words in the story (verbal-semantic condition), or read the story as they would for leisure (leisure-reading condition). Participants who generated higher levels of imagery were significantly more transported into the story and felt significantly higher empathy for the story's characters. Individuals in the imagery-generation condition were over 3 times more likely to exhibit prosocial behavior than individuals in the leisure-reading condition.