title: No support for the claim that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind: A reply to Kidd and Castano's commentary on Panero et al. (2016).
abstract: Kidd and Castano (in press) critique our failure to replicate Kidd and Castano (2013) on 3 grounds: failure to exclude people who did not read the texts, failure of random assignment, and failure to exclude people who did not take the Author Recognition Test (ART). This response addresses each of these critiques. Most importantly, we note that even when Kidd and Castano reanalyzed our data in the way that they argue is most appropriate, they still failed to replicate the pattern of results reported in their original study. We thus reaffirm that our replication of Kidd and Castano (2013) found no evidence that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind. Our objective remains not to prove that reading literary fiction does not benefit social cognition, but to call for in-depth research addressing the difficulties in measuring any potential effect and to note the need to temper claims accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Boston College.
authors.forename: Maria Eugenia
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Panero
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Deena Skolnick
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4000-4941
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Weisberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Black
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Pace University.
authors.forename: Thalia R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Goldstein
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma.
authors.forename: Jennifer L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Barnes
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Boston College.
authors.forename: Hiram
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Brownell
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Boston College.
authors.forename: Ellen
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Winner
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D011932:Reading; D012919:Social Behavior; D056345:Theory of Mind