The rat would have more empathy than the modern man ...

[Christophe]

To be less rat, you have to read more book: http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/la-litter ... 3078_3.php

Literature, source of empathy and social cohesion

Researchers are trying to understand the function of reading in the digital age, while the negative effects of screens are singled out.

MASSIMO SALGARO * AND ADRIAN VAN DER WEEL * (THE CONVERSATION FRANCE)

During the holiday season, your family is likely to read a bestseller on their phone, reading light or tablet. Since the arrival of the 2007 iPhone and Kindle in the 2010 reading market, the new media have changed the relationship we have with books. Most newspapers, including the New York Times, which has been around for 166 for the past year, have gone digital, and some only exist in the web version. In the scientific world, articles appear more and more in digital form, and sometimes are no longer published on paper. Yet, on the side of literature, the paper format shows an astonishing resistance.

Revolutionary inventions
The digital revolution that we are experiencing today can be compared to two other crucial moments in the history of humanity: the invention of writing, there is 6 000 years, with the cuneiform inscriptions engraved in tablets. clay, in Mesopotamia then, in the fifteenth century, the invention of typographic printing by Gutenberg, with the use of movable metal characters.

These inventions aroused many doubts at the time of their appearance. Plato regarded writing as a threat to human memory, while monks worried that their function as copyists would disappear. In 1492, Father Johannes Trithemius even wrote the praises of this work in De laude scriptorum manualium, which he nonetheless printed in 1494. And in both cases, we now know that the fears of contemporaries of these inventions were well founded.

Indeed, our ability to retain information is not at all the same as before the invention of writing, and the invention of printing has signed the end of scriptoriums monks copyists.

Naturally, the omnipresence of screens and the revolution it provokes also has its detractors, and again, their criticisms are based on scientifically based elements. In the research network E-READ, in which we work, we try to understand the function of reading in the digital age, while research continues to point out the negative effects of screens.

Addiction to screens
The use of smartphones in adolescents is sometimes compared to drug addiction. Many surveys around the world tend to show that a whole generation has grown constantly connected, checking their mobile phone up to 75 times a day. These "digital natives" as they are called, according to a recent Italian study, would be less autonomous and less happy than their predecessors. They are experiencing new forms of social anxiety called FOMO ("Fear of Missing Out" or "Fear of Missing an Event or Important News") or "vamping" (a practice of exchanging text messages late into the night) .

The first victim of these connected practices - encouraging a continuous connection that promotes distraction - is immersive reading, one that requires a certain level of concentration, whether it is literature, essays or scientific texts. .

Do we have the opportunity to counter the regrettable side effects of the digital revolution? The good news is that there is a solution, which is - among other things - to change our habits to read more fiction and to sanctuary moments of loneliness.

Experiencing solitude
With his colleagues at the University of Rochester, Thuy-vy Nguyen discovered that loneliness can lead to reduced stress and relaxation. As part of this experiment, researchers define loneliness as: "Being alone for a while, without access to any connected device, without interactions with others, without external stimuli, without particular activity. In the four studies conducted by these teams, the loneliness experiment lasted 15 minutes and the subjects had to sit alone, not practicing any activity.

During one of the sessions of the experiment, subjects were asked to read an article entitled "Glamorous Crossing: How Pan-Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s" (The Art of Glamorous Travel: Pan-Am's Success in 1930 years). With this variant, the results were the same as in the no-reading experience: the people who had experienced this moment of loneliness were simply more relaxed.

Reading, when it takes place in "fertile solitude," strengthens readers' resilience and makes them less susceptible to social pressure and solicitations, especially those that emanate from social media. But if reading is good in general, reading fiction is, it seems, even more beneficial.

Reveal the best in itself
Researchers have recently proven that fiction reading has positive effects on social cognition, social skills and empathy. The psychologist Raymond Mar and his colleagues discovered that the more people read fiction - regardless of the genre chosen - the higher their score when they were tested for a form of empathy.

In another experiment, psychology professor Dan Johnson highlighted the fact that participants who read an excerpt from the novel describing the social difficulties of an Arab woman of Muslim faith showed, after reading, an empathy greater for Arab people of Muslim faith in general, and more inclined to fight prejudices against people with characteristics close to the main character of this fiction.

Thanks to these effects on empathy, reading could well offset the devastating effects of hatred and indifference on the Internet. In experiments related to a current project of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris, we seek to demonstrate that people who read literature feel compassion for characters who are morally good and not for those who are malicious. At the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, we conducted an experiment in this direction, with different versions of the same literary text.

In one version, the protagonist is a volunteer doctor who works on the African continent, and in the other, it is a Nazi who fled to South Africa. In both versions we only changed four sentences, all of which related to the hero's morality. We have changed almost nothing else in the text, either in substance or in form. 120 Germans participated in the experiment, a group reading the version with a protagonist connoted as "good" and the other with a protagonist "naughty". They then had to evaluate the aesthetic and moral value of the text, and answer a number of questions associated with feelings of empathy / sympathy. Although the results of this study have not yet been published, they show very clearly that the evaluation of the sympathy felt towards the protagonist is directly related to his moral qualities.

Thus, literature can be seen as a moral laboratory capable of strengthening our ability to deal with social relationships.

But how can the youngest - our digital natives - read without being constantly interrupted by the various social networks they participate in, or by other invasive communication tools? Here are a few tips.

Learn to read (really)
To ensure that literature regains - or earns - a central place in each other's reading projects, the teaching of literature in the digital age deserves serious revision. While in Europe text-based approaches and authors tend to dominate, new studies show the need for "experiential" approaches, in which the focus is more on those to whom the text is directed. - for example, students.

Research tends to show that being attentive to what students like (rather than imposing texts on them) and helping them to choose the right book to accompany them at a key point in their lives causes them to become involved. much stronger on the part of young readers.

In this way, we will be able to ensure that fictional literature takes its place in the heart of the lives of teenage readers and maximize the benefits they can derive from them, both in their lives. social and for their personal development.

In addition, the paper could be an important ally in this case. Research proves that its material properties are better adapted to the functioning of our memory than digital media. The psychologist Rakefet Ackermann, who is also a member of the E-READ network, explains that despite the huge technological advances of recent years, students still prefer to learn on paper than on computer screens. She showed that while performance was good for those who had studied from a digital document, they were even better for those who had studied on paper. It is indeed our meta-cognition abilities that are affected by screen reading. This type of reading prepares us less well to evaluate our understanding of the text - or to evaluate how much we have memorized its content.

What our experiences around the appeal of the paper book have shown is that those who read on paper are more involved in their reading, while those who use digital tools tend to read more superficially.

Our goal is not at all to oppose screen and paper reading practices or to say that we must stop reading on screens. We simply need to adapt the tools we use to meet our needs and develop them for the purpose of making reading an essential part of our social and cultural habits. Because the better we understand how we read on screen, the better we can save the precious past we inherited.

The original version of this article was published in English.

Massimo Salgaro, RFIEA Fellows 2017-2018, IEA Paris, Researcher in Literary Theory, University of Verona. Adriaan van der Weel, Researcher Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University. The original version of this article was published in English.