Cross-Cultural Investigation Into the Associations of Fiction Reading Habits With Mentalizing Skills and Stereotyping Among Adults in the United Kingdom and Japan.

Abstract

Fiction reading habits are thought to be associated with a favorable social–cognitive profile, including increased mentalizing skills and decreased stereotypical beliefs. However, the available evidence for this association is largely based on a specific task, the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test (RMET), and on data collected fromWestern populations. This raises questions regarding the generalizability of the findings. We addressed this issue by examining the relationships between fiction reading habits (as measured by the Author Recognition Test) and several social cognitive variables, such as basic emotion recognition from facial expressions and the acceptance of stereotyping, in adults in the United Kingdom and Japan. Among U.K. adults, fiction reading habits were positively correlated with performance on both the RMET and the basic emotion recognition task and negatively correlated with the acceptance of stereotyping in general, although their relationship with facial stereotyping (common beliefs linking facial appearance to personality) was unclear. Meanwhile, these relationships were not statistically significant in Japanese adults. Thus, in the United Kingdom, the positive association of fiction reading habits with mentalizing skills seems to generalize beyond the RMET, whereas the negative association with stereotypical beliefs may not hold for facial stereotyping. The lack of similar associations in Japan may reflect differences in the measurement materials and/or storytelling traditions between the two countries, highlighting the importance of further research in non-Western populations.