It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Do you remember the first novel you fell in love with?

Jane Eyre maybe, or crime and punishment, or the color purple.

A great novel can crack your heart open. It can introduce you to a whole new world.

But can it also make you a more moral or compassionate person?

In this hour, does fiction make us good? That's a question the acclaimed British writer Ian McEwen has thought about.

One thing that novels do, I think, better than any other art form, is to give us some idea of what it's like to be someone else.

I think that is fundamentally moral.

I mean, I think an act of cruelty is ultimately a failure of imagination.

If you knew what it was like to be someone else, you couldn't be cruel to them.

And I think empathy is at the basis of our moral interaction.

So we all love the feeling of getting lost in a good story, seeing the world through a

character's eyes. But recently psychologists have gotten interested in the question of whether

that experience actually changes readers. Novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley is the author

of Such Stuff as Dreams, the Psychology of Fiction.

He tells Steve Paulson how reading literature can help you be more empathetic.

Keith, a lot of your research looks at how fiction might be good for us. But is there anything

wrong with reading just because we enjoy it? Well, no, I think probably that's the best way.

But teachers like to know,

for instance, that what people are doing when they're reading for leisure is good for them,

and I think it's probably good for all of us to know. Now, in the past few years, you and some other researchers have found that reading fiction actually increases our empathy. Why would that be the case?

Probably the main reason is that although in ordinary language we think of fiction as something

that has been made up, really that's not very helpful. The right way to think about fiction is

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