Empathy isn't a trait you're born with or without. It's a skill, and like any skill, it develops with practice. The question is what kind of practice, and the research increasingly points to a specific answer: stories.

In 2013, David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a study in Science that made headlines around the world. They found that reading literary fiction — even brief excerpts — temporarily improved participants' performance on tests of Theory of Mind, the ability to infer and understand what other people are thinking and feeling. The effect didn't occur with nonfiction, popular genre fiction, or not reading at all. Something specific about literary fiction activated the mental machinery for understanding other minds.

The study generated both excitement and skepticism. Replication attempts have produced mixed results — the effect appears to be real but smaller than the initial study suggested, and it may depend on the type and quality of fiction involved. But the broader pattern has held up across multiple studies and research groups. A 2006 study by Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley, and colleagues found that lifetime exposure to fiction positively predicted performance on empathy measures, even after controlling for personality traits. A 2009 follow-up confirmed the finding and added that fiction exposure correlated with social support, while nonfiction exposure correlated with loneliness. These are correlational findings — they can't prove that fiction causes empathy — but the experimental evidence from Kidd, Castano, and others supports a causal pathway.

The mechanism makes intuitive sense. When you read a story, you step inside a character's perspective. You experience their fears, desires, confusions, and realizations from the inside. This isn't passive observation — the brain recruits the same neural networks it uses for understanding real people's mental states. Functional MRI studies have shown that reading about a character's actions activates the motor cortex. Reading about a character's emotions activates the emotional processing regions. The brain doesn't fully distinguish between real and fictional social experiences. Fiction is, in a meaningful neurological sense, a social simulation.

For children, this is especially significant. Theory of Mind is a developmental skill that emerges around age four and continues developing through adolescence. Young children are just beginning to understand that other people have inner lives — that the kid crying at drop-off is feeling something, that the friend who shared their toy made a choice. Stories accelerate this development by giving children access to perspectives they couldn't encounter any other way.

A five-year-old can't know what it feels like to be an immigrant, or to use a wheelchair, or to have two dads, or to lose a grandparent — unless a story takes them there. The book doesn't replace real-world experience, but it provides something real-world experience often can't: a window into someone else's internal world. You can observe a child in a wheelchair, but you can't feel what they feel. A well-written story can bridge that gap.

A 2013 study by Bal and Veltkamp found that fiction's empathy-building effect was mediated by "emotional transportation" — how fully absorbed the reader becomes in the story. Readers who were more transported into the narrative showed greater increases in empathy afterward. This suggests that the quality of the reading experience matters. A child half-listening to a story while playing with a toy gets less benefit than a child curled up, absorbed, living inside the narrative. The depth of engagement is the active ingredient.

This has practical implications for how we read with kids. Choosing books that genuinely engage them — books that match their interests, their emotional maturity, and their developmental moment — isn't just about making reading pleasant. It's about maximizing the empathy-building potential of the experience. A child transported by a story about a dog they love is practicing empathy more effectively than a child enduring a book they find boring, no matter how "good" the book is by adult standards.

It also means that fiction shouldn't be treated as a frill in education or at home. When school budgets get cut, arts and literature are often the first to go, with the implicit argument that "real" subjects (math, science) matter more. The empathy research pushes back on that assumption. Fiction isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure for social functioning. Kids who read stories about people different from themselves grow into adults who are better at understanding, communicating with, and caring about people different from themselves. In a world that desperately needs more of that, fiction isn't optional. It's essential.