The Effect of Reading a Short Passage of Literary Fiction on Theory of Mind: A Replication of Kidd and Castano (2013)

Collabra: Psychology

Iris van Kuijk¹  Rolf A. Zwaan¹  Peter Verkoeijen¹  Katinka Dijkstra¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam

关键词: theory of mind;    literary fiction;    replication;    meta-analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1525/collabra.117

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California Press

【 摘 要 】

The results reported by Kidd and Castano (2013) indicated that reading a short passage of literary fiction improves theory of mind (ToM) relative to reading popular fiction. However, when we entered Kidd and Castano’s results in a p-curve analysis, it turned out that the evidential value of their findings is low. It is good practice to back up a p-curve analysis of a single paper with an adequately powered direct replication of at least one of the studies in the p-curve analysis. Therefore, we conducted a direct replication of the literary fiction condition and the popular fiction condition from Kidd and Castano’s Experiment 5 to scrutinize the effect of reading literary fiction on ToM. The results of this replication were largely consistent with Kidd and Castano’s original findings. Furthermore, we conducted a small-scale meta-analysis on the findings of the present study, those of Kidd and Castano and those reported in other published direct replications. The meta-analytic effect of reading literary fiction on ToM was small and non-significant but there was considerable heterogeneity between the included studies. The results of the present study and of the small-scale meta-analysis are discussed in the light of reading-times exclusion criteria as well as reliability and validity of ToM measures.

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【 授权许可】

CC BY