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. Authentic sharing often means just putting folks together to discuss engaging texts. Badaracco told HBR IdeaCast in 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. 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. The point of reading in this way is to develop cognitive agility and acuity.
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. Books can teach us plenty about the world, of course, as well as improving our vocabularies and writing skills. But can fiction also make us better people? The claims for fiction are great. Characters hook us into stories.
Aristotle said that when we watch a tragedy two emotions predominate: pity for the character and fear for yourself. This exercise in perspective-taking is like a training course in understanding others. Just as pilots can practise flying without leaving the ground, people who read fiction may improve their social skills each time they open a novel.
In his research, he has found that as we begin to identify with the characters, we start to consider their goals and desires instead of our own. When they are in danger, our hearts start to race. We might even gasp. But we read with luxury of knowing that none of this is happening to us.
Having said that, some of the neural mechanisms the brain uses to make sense of narratives in stories do share similarities with those used in real-life situations. If we read that a character pulled a light cord, activity increases in the region of the brain associated with grasping. To follow a plot, we need to know who knows what, how they feel about it and what each character believes others might be thinking.
To get around this, Oatley and colleagues gave students a list of fiction and non-fiction writers and asked them to indicate which writers they had heard of. The number of writers people have heard of turns out to be a good proxy for how much they actually read. From the eyes and surrounding skin alone, your task is to divine which emotion a person is feeling. Many people would relate to this. Melville writes, "in the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue," Melville 1.
Then, there is Turkey, who I have more personal relation in the fact that the character is not a morning person, and works better later in the afternoon. The presence of these twp characters provides the two different spectrums of the situation.
Thus, Melville provides both a morning and night person for his readers to relate to. On a more serious note, Bartelby can be related to some beliefs that are being.
Get Access. Read More. Magical Realism In The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka Words 5 Pages genres such as absurdist fiction, which focuses on the individual dealing with a purposeless life represented by meaningless actions.
Magical Realism In The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka Words 6 Pages literary genres, such as absurdist fiction, which focuses on the individual dealing with a purposeless life represented by meaningless actions. Popular Essays. The Legalization of Organ Sales.
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