Internal focalization influences real-life empathy: a literary contribution to wellbeing

Literature has often been hypothesized to cultivate an empathy that persists after reading, yielding real-life wellbeing benefits. But the subtle complexity of literature's aesthetic form has made this hypothesis challenging to test. To simplify the challenge, we isolated a single formal technique-internal focalization-historically used by literary fictions that focus on a specific kind of empathy: forgiveness. We incorporated internal focalization into a fictional narrative, and across three preregistered studies (N = 371; N = 449; N = 743), we measured the effect on participants' likeliness to forgive. In Study 1, we found that internal focalization prompted increased likeliness to forgive fictional transgressors. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicated this finding and further demonstrated a link between forgiveness of fictional transgressors and forgiveness of real-life transgressors. These findings suggest that literature's wellbeing benefits can be assessed by parsing its form into separate techniques.