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# The Case for Reading Fiction
- URL: https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-case-for-reading-fiction/
- Published: 2026-07-30T19:47:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-31T07:20:37.000Z
- Description: Men read less fiction than women, by a wide and consistent margin, and most men who don't read novels have a perfectly reasonable-sounding excuse for it.But there is a body of research on what fiction does to the brain.
- Author: Jerry Kennard
- Tags: Understanding Your Mind

Do you know the man who never reads fiction novels? He just can't see the point. He'd rather watch TV. Having said that, he will happily spend several hours absorbed in a biography of a general, the history of the Roman aqueduct system, or a book about the 1966 World Cup. 

This is really about status. Fiction has, in the way of a strand of British masculinity, acquired the faint whiff of the frivolous — something for other people, something a bit soft, something that doesn't obviously improve you the way a book about Wellington's supply lines obviously does.

As a [fiction writer myself](https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/J.-J.-Kennard/author/B00680HEV4?ref=ap%5Frdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true), I have my own opinions on this.

### What fiction is asking your brain to do

When you read non-fiction, you are absorbing information. When you read fiction — properly, absorbedly, the way a good novel demands — you are doing something considerably more strenuous. You are tracking multiple characters' beliefs, desires, and intentions simultaneously, including their beliefs about other characters' beliefs, often while knowing something the characters themselves don't. You know Anna is lying to Mark, and you know why, and you know Mark suspects nothing, and you're holding all of that in mind while also following the plot.

This is called [theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory%5Fof%5Fmind?ref=drjerrykennard.com), or mentalising. It's the cognitive capacity to attribute mental states to other people and to reason about what's going on inside their heads. It is one of the more sophisticated things the human brain does, and it happens to be exactly the skill this site keeps circling back to under other names: reading a partner accurately, noticing what's actually going on beneath someone's stated position, understanding why your son went quiet at dinner.

The psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar, working out of the University of Toronto, have spent a good part of their careers arguing that fiction acts as a kind of flight simulator for exactly this skill. Their research found that the more fiction people read, the better they tended to perform on tests of empathy and social reasoning — not correlated with intelligence generally, but specifically with the capacity to read other people accurately.

A widely cited 2013 study published in *Science*, led by David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, went further and specifically isolated literary fiction — the kind with genuinely complex, ambiguous characters, as opposed to plot-driven genre fiction or straightforward non-fiction — and found that even a short session of reading it produced measurable, immediate improvements on tests of theory of mind, compared with reading non-fiction or nothing at all. The effect wasn't from reading in general. It was specifically from being made to work at understanding a complicated fictional person.

That's not a soft, vaguely improving pastime. That's targeted cognitive practice, and it happens to be practice in precisely the skill that the article on [alexithymia ](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/cant-name-what-youre-feeling/)identifies as underdeveloped in a great many men — not the capacity to feel, but the capacity to accurately name and track emotional states, in yourself and in others.

## What this offers men who struggle to name what they feel

I want to tease this connection out properly, because I think it's the most practically useful part of this entire argument.

A recurring theme on this site is that a significant number of men have not been given much practice at identifying emotional states — their own or anyone else's — because the cultural training most men received actively discouraged the attempt. The result, as the alexithymia article covers in depth, is a kind of emotional illiteracy that isn't a character flaw, just an undeveloped skill.

Fiction is, among other things, a low-stakes rehearsal space for exactly this skill. A well-written character doesn't announce "I am feeling humiliated and covering it with bravado." The novel shows you the behaviour and expects you to infer the internal state — which is precisely the muscle that reading a real, complicated human being in your own life requires, and precisely the muscle that goes unexercised if your reading diet is entirely composed of material that states its conclusions directly.

This is not a claim that reading novels will fix alexithymia on its own, and I wouldn't want to oversell it. But as a piece of the wider picture — alongside the body-based approaches and the vocabulary-building work covered in that article — regular fiction reading is a genuinely evidence-supported way of practising the specific cognitive skill that underpins emotional recognition. It asks you to sit with ambiguity about what someone else is feeling and work it out from the available evidence, rather than being told. That's the whole skill, right there, dressed up as entertainment.

> *The man who says he doesn't see the point of fiction because nothing in it is real is missing what it's actually for. The people aren't real. The practice at reading people is entirely real, and it transfers.*

## What it does for stress 

There's a specific piece of research worth knowing because it's concrete enough to be genuinely useful rather than just interesting.

A study conducted at the University of Sussex measured stress levels in participants using heart rate and muscle tension, then had them engage in various relaxation activities — walking, listening to music, drinking tea — and measured the reduction in stress produced by each. Reading fiction outperformed all of them. Six minutes of reading was found to reduce stress levels by around two-thirds, more than any of the other activities tested, including music and walking.

The mechanism is fairly intuitive once you think about it. Genuine absorption in a fictional narrative requires full attention in a way that scrolling a phone or half-watching television doesn't. It's the same attention-restoration principle covered in the articles on [in defence of the shed](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/in-defence-of-the-garden-shed/) and [man and dog ](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/man-and-dog/)— a total, singly-focused engagement that displaces rumination rather than merely distracting from it. You cannot simultaneously follow a plot properly and run through tomorrow's difficult conversation in the background. The novel takes the whole seat.

This matters directly in the context of the article on [what chronic stress does to the male body over time](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-chronic-stress-does-to-the-male-body-over-time/). An activity that reliably produces a measurable reduction in physiological stress markers, in six minutes, using nothing but a paperback, is not a frivolous use of an evening. It's a cheap, side-effect-free intervention that happens to look, from the outside, like doing nothing.

## The loneliness angle, which nobody expects

Here's one that surprised me when I first came across the research properly.

There's a concept in social psychology called social surrogacy — the idea that fictional relationships with characters can, to a meaningful degree, provide some of the same psychological benefits as real social connection. Not a replacement for it, and I want to be careful not to overclaim this given how much of this site argues for the irreplaceable value of genuine human contact — but a genuine, measurable supplement, particularly useful during periods when real connection is thin on the ground.

Research in this area has found that people experiencing loneliness or social exclusion often turn to favourite fictional narratives, and that doing so produces real reductions in the distress associated with isolation — engaging with a beloved book or a familiar character activates some of the same psychological comfort as thinking about a real, supportive relationship. This is directly relevant to the article on [why so many men are lonely](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-so-many-men-are-lonely/), which identifies the specific vulnerability many men have to social contraction in midlife. Fiction isn't the solution to that problem — the human contact described in that article is the actual solution — but as a stopgap, particularly for a man in a genuinely thin patch, a good novel is doing something real rather than nothing at all.

## The cognitive ageing angle 

For readers of this site specifically — men in midlife and beyond, thinking about the long game rather than just this week — there's a further piece worth having.

Regular reading has been associated in longitudinal research with reduced rates of cognitive decline in later life. A widely cited study following older adults over several years found that those who engaged regularly in mentally stimulating activities including reading showed a notably slower rate of cognitive decline than those who didn't, and other research has found that frequent readers show reduced risk of the kind of memory impairment associated with early dementia.

The specific advantage fiction offers over other cognitively engaging pursuits — crosswords, sudoku, the various brain-training apps that promise a great deal and generally deliver rather less — is the sustained narrative demand. You're not solving a discrete puzzle and moving on. You're holding an entire cast of characters, their histories, their motivations, and the accumulating plot in working memory over hours or days, which is a considerably more demanding and more varied form of cognitive exercise than most brain-training products actually provide.

This connects directly to the article on [getting older: what's actually happening to your mind](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/getting-older-whats-actually-happening-to-your-mind/), which makes the case that the capacities most worth protecting into later life — integrative thinking, pattern recognition, sustained attention — are exactly the capacities that engaged, complex fiction reading exercises. It's not a supplement you take. It's an evening you spend anyway, redirected toward something that happens to be doing you some good.

## For the man who's been putting this off

If you're the sort of man who genuinely hasn't read a novel since school, a few honest, practical points.

**Start with something plotted, not something worthy.** The stereotype of literary fiction as slow, dense, and vaguely punishing is not helping anyone come back to it. A well-constructed thriller or crime novel with genuinely complex characters does the same theory-of-mind work as anything shelved as Literature, and it's considerably more likely to get finished.

**The Kindle article on this site makes the case for format flexibility, and it applies directly here.** If the physical stack of books feels like a commitment you're not ready to make, the barrier to entry on an e-reader or an audiobook is considerably lower, and the cognitive benefits of a well-narrated audiobook are broadly comparable to reading print, particularly for the theory-of-mind and stress-reduction effects described above.

**Six minutes counts.** The Sussex study's headline finding wasn't about marathon reading sessions. It was about six minutes producing a measurable stress reduction. This is not a hobby that requires a free Sunday afternoon. It's compatible with the same fifteen minutes before bed that most men currently spend on a phone, for considerably worse effect on both sleep and stress.

**Don't finish books you're not enjoying out of some misplaced sense of duty.** This isn't homework. If it isn't landing after fifty pages, that's information about the book, not a verdict on you. Put it down and try something else. The benefits described above come from genuine absorption, not from grim completion.

Fiction has an image problem among a certain kind of man, and the image problem is almost entirely undeserved. It isn't soft. It isn't a lesser use of time than a biography of a field marshal. It is specific, targeted practice in reading other people accurately, a remarkably efficient and side-effect-free stress reduction tool, a genuine if partial buffer against loneliness, and one of the better-evidenced protective habits against cognitive decline in later life.

None of that requires you to enjoy Tolstoy, wear a cardigan, or discuss anything at a book club. It requires picking up a well-plotted novel and giving it six minutes on a night when you'd otherwise have given the same six minutes to your phone.