When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge, it does little to develop EQ, a far more elusive goal.

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Some of the most valuable skills that managers look for in employees are often difficult to define, let alone evaluate or quantify: self-discipline, self-awareness, creative problem-solving, empathy, learning agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, positivity, rational judgment, generosity, and kindness, among others. How can you tell if your future employees have these skills? And if your current team is lacking them, how do you teach them? Recent research in neuroscience suggests that you might look to the library for solutions; reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking.

When we read, we hone and strengthen several different cognitive muscles, so to speak, that are the root of the EQ. In other words, the act of reading is the very activity—if done right—that can develop the qualities, traits, and characteristics of those employees that organizations hope to attract and retain.

High-level business leaders have long touted the virtues of reading. Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, spends most of his day reading and recommends reading 500 pages a day. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban says he reads more than three hours a day. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, says he learned to build rockets by reading books. But business visionaries who extol the virtues of reading almost always recommend nonfiction. Buffet recommended 19 books in 2019; not one of the titles is fiction. Of the 94 books Bill Gates recommended over a seven-year period, only nine of them are fiction.

When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge, it does little to develop EQ, a far more elusive goal.

How Books Shape Employee Experiences

One reason fiction works so well in the workplace is that characters, plots, and settings in foreign locales help anchor difficult discussions. The narrative allows participants to work through sensitive and nuanced issues in an open and honest manner. For example, Nancy Kidder, a facilitator with the nonprofit organization Books@Work, recalled a workplace discussion about Chinua Achebe’s short story, “Dead Man’s Path.” In the story, a Nigerian headmaster named Michael Obi fails miserably when he attempts to modernize a rural school. When discussing the story, a team leader Kidder was working with noted that after participating in the discussion along with his team, they had a new language for discussing their work: “I drove execution in this way,” said one of the team members, “but I don’t want to be a Michael Obi here.”

Authentic sharing often means just putting folks together to discuss engaging texts. Joseph Badaracco, Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard, assigns Achebe’s works, along with other titles, like Sophocles’ Antigone, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer,” about a young and inexperienced ship captain who must make an important decision. Badaracco told HBR IdeaCast in 2013 that fiction provides an opportunity to complicate standard good versus evil tropes. Good literature presents characters with competing and often equally valid viewpoints. Business books, by their very nature, boil down issues until they are binary: this is right and that is not. In contrast, literature allows Badaracco’s students to see, for example, Creon’s allegiance to state and Antigone’s commitment to family and honor as equally valid positions—that cannot be easily rectified. Future business leaders won’t encounter the exact scenarios they read about, but they will be able to use an expanded ability to understand and respond to multiple competing viewpoints.

In Kidder’s experience, participants who read and discuss are more willing to tackle tough questions. Her participants have pondered questions about how we balance tradition with innovation; how we sometimes fail to see others’ viewpoints; and how we might listen to each other with more care. For instance, those seeking robust discussion about community connection might read Kindred by Octavia Butler, a science fiction novel that addresses the ways in which race shapes individual experience. Others, wanting to look at the familiar in an unfamiliar way, might read George Saunders’s short story, “Puppy,” about a child who wants a puppy only to discover that the puppy’s owner is keeping a boy on a leash. The point of reading in this way is to develop cognitive agility and acuity. It’s about reading to develop those in-demand emotional skills.

Why Reading Works

Research suggests that reading literary fiction is an effective way to enhance the brain’s ability to keep an open mind while processing information, a necessary skill for effective decision-making. In a 2013 study, researchers examined something called the need for cognitive closure, or the desire to “reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion.” Individuals with a strong need for cognitive closure rely heavily on “early information cues,” meaning they struggle to change their minds as new information becomes available. They also produce fewer individual hypotheses about alternative explanations, which makes them more confident in their own initial (and potentially flawed) beliefs. A high need for cognitive closure also means individuals gravitate toward smaller bits of information and fewer viewpoints. Individuals who resist the need for cognitive closure tend to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more comfortable with competing narratives—all characteristics of high EQ.

University of Toronto researchers discovered that individuals in their study who read short stories (as opposed to essays) demonstrated a lower need for cognitive closure. That result is not surprising given that reading literature requires us to slow down, take in volumes of information, and then change our minds as we read. There’s no easy answer in literature; instead, there’s only perspective-taking. As readers, we’ll almost certainly find Lolita’s narrator Humbert Humbert odious, but we are forced to experience how he thinks, a valuable exercise for decreasing our need for cognitive closure. Furthermore, the researchers point out that when we are talking about someone else’s actions, we don’t feel compelled to defend ourselves. We can have conversations that might not happen in any other context, at least not with the same level of honesty.

Investing in Reading

CEOs may be reluctant to invest the kind of time, money, and energy facilitated literary reading and discussion requires, but initial reports suggest that instructor-led literature groups are useful. Marvin Riley, President and CEO of EnPro Industries, a manufacturing company, was looking for ways to enhance the company’s “dual bottom line culture.” Riley wanted to “establish psychological safety, practice collaboration, embrace an idea-meritocracy, utilize critical thinking, and above all, create high personal engagement.”

Riley invited Books@Work to work with up to 20 participants at a time over several sessions. Participants read short stories and/or novels, which they then discussed together during work hours, guided by their facilitator. Riley credits the program with increasing work teams’ candor and general ability to communicate effectively through a shared language.

While there is no specific academic data on how incorporating guided literature study into workplace training and development programming impacts employees, research on reading shows literature study to be one of the best methods for building empathy critical thinking, and creativity. Maryanne Wolf, cognitive scientist and author of Reader, Come Home, argues that “the quality of our reading” stands as “an index to the quality of our thought.” If we want better thinkers in the business world, we have to build better readers.