Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction
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Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction Suzanne Keen1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
In this essay, I expand upon my previous proposals about empathic inaccuracy: “A reader persuaded that she has felt with a fictional character may defy the stated or implicit intentions of an author.. .. Empathic inaccuracy, to craft a hypothesis out of this circumstance, may then contribute to a strong sense that the author’s perspective is simply wrong” (Keen 2007, pp. 139–40, emphasis in original). I base my definition of empathic inaccuracy on the psychological concept of empathic accuracy, studied by William Ickes and others. This cognitive capacity involves the relative abilities of people correctly to infer others’ dispositions, personality traits, and psychological states, including their thoughts and feelings (Ickes 1993). Empathic accuracy can be stronger or weaker in an individual, and it is usually measured after interviewing subjects and target individuals. Ickes makes the recommendation that “the most straightforward way to measure empathic accuracy is to compare the content of a target person’s actual thoughts and feelings with the content of the corresponding inferred thoughts and feelings reported by the perceiver” (Ickes 1993, p. 591). The ensuing psychological research program into empathic accuracy includes the recognition that even though most humans are adept at making these inferences, we also consistently overestimate our own empathic abilities (as cross-referenced with results on Mark Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index, or IRI [Davis 1980]). Ickes states, “various self-report measures of empathic skills and empathic accuracy proved to be disappointingly poor predictors of actual empathic accuracy” (Ickes 1993, Ibid) and concludes, “in general, people lack meta-knowledge regarding their own empathic accuracy” Ibid. Ickes cautions that in some circumstances, people may actually be motivated to misinterpret others’ thoughts and feelings by making inaccurate inferences about their dispositions (607).
* Suzanne Keen [email protected] 1
Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd., Buttrick Hall, Clinton, NY 13323, USA
Considering the unusual circumstance of fiction reading, in which the empathic transaction occurs between a real human being (a reader) and inanimate creations made up of marks on the page (characters and other actants), in my earlier work I reasoned that empathic accuracy in fiction reading is both common and unverifiable: one cannot interview a fictional character about her mind-content and emotions. However, I also intuited that most fiction readers simply accept the narrator’s reports about characters’ mental representations, bodily sensations, and fleeting thoughts and feelings. This kind of empathic accuracy could be regarded as a default setting in fiction, akin to the assumption that details of setting refer to the natural physical world unless otherwise noted. Readers readily extrapolate from dialogue, reported actions, and scenes with other things and persons of the fictional world
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