Looking for something to read this weekend? We are intrigued by recent research on the importance of groups to happy, healthy workplaces. What’s more, we’re celebrating spring with reflections on literary essays and sports, sharing a favorite Books@Work book, and thinking about the relationship between language and our lived experience.
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Unlikeable characters pose a problem for readers. It’s hard to finish a book when the main character annoys or even outrages you. But the payoff for perseverance is real. By cultivating patience and empathy for an unlikeable character, we learn about ourselves and others—and we are reminded that disagreeable characters and people alike have hidden depths we cannot measure. Professor Joshua D. Phillips reflects on one unlikeable character, and what grappling with it taught him and the Books@Work group he was leading.
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In January, we experimented with something new. We at Books@Work and a number of volunteers who subscribed for this special series undertook to read a story, an essay or a poem every day for about three weeks. Intended as a springboard to think about mindfulness and to practice compassion, empathy and awareness (of ourselves and of the world we live in) the readings enabled—if nothing else—a few quiet minutes in the day to focus on something different, something literary or artful. Reading mindfully, we hypothesized, might be a way to decompress and engage our minds, with thought and deliberation. Here are our observations, plus a sampling of what we read.
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A 2013 study from the New School concludes that “reading literature improves theory of mind”—“the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.” As the authors note, theory of mind is critically linked to empathy, that all-important ability to intuit and experience the feelings of another. Together with the cognitive component of theory of mind (“the inference and representation of others’ beliefs and intentions”), empathy is a crucial element of “positive interpersonal and intergroup relations.” We need to practice it, in other words, to be effective and considerate people at home, at work and throughout our lives.
Reading fiction had previously been shown to increase empathy by “[expanding] our knowledge of others’ lives, helping us to recognize our similarity to them.” But in this study, authors David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castono argue that literary fiction helps people practice empathy because of its complexity, too.
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What’s a story? In response to that question, many of us might think of a tale with a beginning, middle and an end, or maybe a literary classic of short fiction like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.”
But stories exist beyond the page. They’re part of our everyday repertoire for coping with existence.
One way to define the term “story” is any attempt—written, told, or perhaps most commonly and powerfully, thought—to impose a narrative on life.
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From empirical studies on the psychological impact of reading to such philosophical perspectives as Martha Nussbaum’s notion of literature’s capacity to foster the “moral imagination” of readers, intellectuals across the disciplines have established a growing consensus about the power of reading to foster empathy, a crucial civic intelligence in a free society and a powerful aptitude for professional success and leadership skills. While a growing body of evidence reveals the incredible power of literary reading to promote imaginative empathy and intellectual curiosity, that potential may not be achieved through the reading experience alone, especially given inequalities in formal backgrounds and educational experiences at most workplaces (and in many communities).
My years of teaching have taught me that tried-and-true conversation is the most enduring method of bridging differences and sharing ideas, and conversations about books make the most of their capacity to enhance readers’ empathy.
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Talking about books is an opportunity to see even more perspectives and to gain a nuanced approach to our own. If we live in the echo chamber of our own heads and never listen to alternate voices, we risk missing the ways our thinking has become cramped or trapped–and we’ll never learn to disagree productively or to speak up at work, either.
Paying attention to and learning from other perspectives enriches our sense of the world and our place in it. It can help us feel less isolated, less cut off from people who disagree with us. It can help us find kindred spirits in even the most unlikely places. And, instead of “complaining because the rose bushes have thorns,” we are reminded to “rejoice because the thorn bushes have roses.”
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In the wake of last week’s massacres, we’re all thinking about how we can work to understand each other a little better, how we can overcome and appreciate difference. As Gianpiero Petriglieri writes for the Harvard Business Review, “Fostering civilization means cultivating our curiosity to recognize substantive difference, and our commitment to respect them – within and between groups.” And as novelist Jennine Capó Crucet reminds us, a good book “gives the reader a chance to see what it feels like to be someone else for a little while. And so, in doing that, it shapes a sensory experience that inspires compassion and empathy.”
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For Books@Work professor Gail Arnoff, James McBride’s The Color of Water is more than a memorable family story. It’s an opportunity for conversation, for exploring identity, family and history in the Books@Work seminar as well as in the traditional classroom. As she writes, “We talked about Ruth’s refusal to reveal anything about her background; childrearing; and racial and religious exclusion. In the last session, we discussed the burden of family secrets – in the book as well as in our own families. Most of all we talked about our identity, and the places from which it comes. So many passages in the book triggered discussions, including McBride’s own declaration: ‘Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul….[When] I look at Holocaust photographs…I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.'”
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The payoff for good, mindful work is a return to our senses. More than this: the labor that often goes unseen or unrecognized itself has many virtues, many hidden stores of knowledge the like of which the rest of us can only imagine. Nina MacLaughlin examines this often unseen work, and her book, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, offers insightful glimpses into mentorship, craftsmanship, and the rewards and difficulty inherent to learning.
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