How Reading Builds Empathy (and Scrolling Destroys It)

There's a specific cognitive skill called Theory of Mind: the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives different from your own. It's the foundation of empathy, social competence, and not being a jerk.

Reading fiction is one of the most reliable ways to build it. Scrolling social media is one of the fastest ways to flatten it.

The Science paper

In 2013, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a landmark study in Science (one of the most prestigious journals in the world) showing that reading literary fiction improves Theory of Mind.

The mechanism: when you're absorbed in a story, you're simulating another person's inner world. You're tracking their motivations, predicting their behavior, feeling what they feel. Mirror neurons fire as if the events are actually happening to you.

Your brain doesn't fully distinguish between experiencing something and reading about someone experiencing it. A character's embarrassment, fear, or joy activates the same neural regions as your own.

It's measurable on a scanner.

Kids and storybooks

Research on children ages 4-6 found that kids exposed to more juvenile fiction performed better on Theory of Mind tasks than kids with less fiction exposure. This held up after controlling for age, gender, vocabulary, and parental income.

The benefit goes beyond reading alone. Discussing stories ("Why do you think she did that?") amplifies the social-cognitive development effect. The conversation adds a layer of reflective processing on top of the simulation.

Fiction vs. nonfiction

This distinction matters. Studies found that lifetime exposure to fiction was associated with cognitive empathy (understanding others' perspectives), while being "transported" by a story was associated with affective empathy (actually feeling what others feel).

People who predominantly read nonfiction showed less well-developed empathy and Theory of Mind.

That doesn't mean nonfiction is bad. It means the empathy-building mechanism is specific to narrative fiction, where the reader has to inhabit another mind.

What scrolling does to empathy

Adam Alter, author of Irresistible, has expressed concern that children who overuse technology "may never learn appropriate social skills like empathy."

The problem is structural. Scrolling promotes shallow, rapid engagement. You see a 15-second clip of someone's life, react (or don't), and move on.

There's no sustained engagement with another person's inner experience.

Social media interactions are surface-level by design. A like, a comment, a share.

None of these require understanding what someone else actually feels. Many of them reward the opposite: dunking on people, performing reactions, reducing others to content.

Maryanne Wolf's research at UCLA shows that habitual skimming (the default reading mode on screens) changes both critical thinking and empathy. The brain adapts to its most frequent processing mode. If that mode is scanning headlines and swiping past faces, the circuits for deep emotional processing atrophy.

The age factor

Empathy development peaks during childhood and adolescence. This is when the neural circuits for perspective-taking and emotional understanding are most actively being built.

A 10-year-old who spends 2 hours a day reading fiction is logging thousands of hours of empathy simulation across their developmental window. A 10-year-old who spends those same hours scrolling gets none of that practice.

By the time they're 16, these two kids have structurally different social-emotional capabilities. The reader can intuit what a friend is feeling, navigate complex social situations, and process their own emotions through the lens of characters they've internalized. The scroller has a faster thumb.

25% more connection

When parents read physical books with young children (versus reading on tablets), joint attention occurred 25% more frequently. The shared experience of a physical book creates more back-and-forth, more pointing, more "look at this," more co-processing.

Reading aloud to a child also releases oxytocin in both parent and child, the same bonding hormone triggered by hugging and skin-to-skin contact. The empathy benefits are relational, not just cognitive.

What this looks like in practice

You want a kid who can:

• Sense when a friend is upset without being told
• Understand why someone might act differently than expected
• Navigate disagreements without cruelty
• Process their own complex emotions

Those skills come from practice. Fiction reading is that practice. It's a flight simulator for social-emotional intelligence.

Keep reading: For the brain science behind why books and screens produce different outcomes, see Your Kid's Brain on Books vs. Screens. For the attention side of this equation, read The Attention Span Crisis Is Real. And for practical strategies, here's 5 Things That Actually Get Kids Reading More.

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Sources

• Kidd, D. & Castano, E. (2013). "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind." Science, 342(6156), 377-380.
• Mar, R. et al. (2009). "Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds." Journal of Research in Personality, PMC 3559433.
• Aram, D. et al. (2019). "Joint reading of picture books and children's socio-cognitive development." Early Education and Development, PMC 6370723.
• Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home. Harper. UCLA research on skimming and empathy.
• Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology. Penguin.
• PsyPost (2025). "Children's brains function differently during book reading and screen time."