Literary technique of internal focalization helps readers forgive real-life wrongs

A story that lets readers slip inside the mind of a remorseful character can do far more than entertain. According to a new study from researchers at The Ohio State University, a specific narrative technique known as internal focalization not only encourages readers to forgive a fictional wrongdoer, but can also carry that forgiveness over into their real lives, softening grudges they have held against actual people who hurt them. The findings, published October 1 in Frontiers in Psychology, offer some of the most precise evidence yet that the way a story is written, not merely the fact that someone reads it, can measurably change human emotion and behavior.

Internal focalization is the literary device by which a narrative grants readers direct access to a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. In the experimental story used by the research team, that access took the form of a repairman’s private regret over a careless act. Senior author Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, explained that being transported into a character’s mind elicits empathy toward that character and, in turn, forgiveness for the wrongdoing. Crucially, participants who were prompted to reflect on a past transgression of their own tended to extend their forgiveness of the fictional figure to the real-life event, suggesting the emotional shift generalizes beyond the page.

“If you just give people a story without the empathy technique, they’re not likely to forgive a character. But if you put the technique in, they not only forgive the character, but are then more likely to forgive other people in their actual life,” said Fletcher. The distinction matters because much of the previous research on literature and empathy has treated reading as a monolithic activity, comparing broad categories such as literary fiction versus nonfiction. By isolating a single, historically developed narrative technique, Fletcher and his co-author were able to test the mechanism itself rather than the genre label attached to it.

The study was completed with Mark Matthews, a recent Ohio State PhD graduate in social psychology. The collaboration brought together two disciplines that rarely share a laboratory bench: narrative theory, with its two-thousand-year history of claims about literature’s moral and emotional benefits, and experimental social psychology, with its insistence on controlled comparison and replication. That history of claims is long and venerable. Since antiquity, writers and philosophers have argued that literature helps people overcome anger, see situations from another person’s perspective, and function better socially, all of which are considered beneficial to mental health.

Modern science has tried to confirm those intuitions with mixed results. A widely cited 2013 study reported that reading passages of literary fiction, compared with nonfiction or popular fiction, enhanced readers’ ability to understand others’ beliefs and desires, a capacity psychologists call theory of mind. But subsequent efforts to replicate that finding, both by independent researchers and by the original team, did not pan out. Rather than abandon the question, Fletcher and Matthews reframed it. “We said, ‘What do we know about the history of how artists develop these techniques for creating empathy?’ We put the most powerful of those techniques into a story, and then tested whether that story without the technique creates empathy and if the story with the technique creates empathy,” Fletcher said. “By being more precise about it, we were able to identify these very specific mechanisms and connections.”

The experimental story itself was carefully constructed to provoke a genuine moral reaction. It follows a woman named Mary who, as a child, watched her puppy die after being hit by a car and swore off dog ownership for the rest of her life. At age 85, she finally adopts a puppy in an attempt to heal her lifelong grief, and she hires a repairman, warning him explicitly to keep the door shut so the dog cannot escape. He leaves the door open, and the puppy gets out, to Mary’s horror. Participants were then given different information about the act: in one version, the repairman disregarded Mary’s warning entirely, making the loss fully his fault; in another, he accidentally left the door open because he was distracted by personal problems at home.

The manipulation of internal focalization came next, and it was deliberately subtle. In the literary condition, the narrative reported the repairman’s private thought: “The repairman thought to himself, I wish I didn’t leave the door open.” In the nonliterary comparison condition, the same sentiment was spoken aloud: “The repairman said to Mary, ‘I wish I didn’t leave the door open.'” The propositional content of the two sentences is identical; what differs is whether the reader is given privileged access to the character’s inner world or merely observes an external utterance that could be insincere. That single difference in narrative perspective proved powerful enough to change how participants judged and forgave the character.

Across three studies involving a total of 1,563 people, Fletcher and Matthews found that forgiveness of a fictional character could be reliably promoted through internal focalization, and that facilitating forgiveness of the fictional transgression in turn brought about forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Because of how the study was designed, the fictional forgiveness had to occur first, establishing a causal sequence in which empathy for a character opens a pathway toward empathy for actual people. The researchers also deliberately omitted any detail about whether Mary forgave the repairman, so that participants never learned the outcome and the effect could not be attributed to the story simply modeling forgiving behavior for readers to imitate.

The researchers emphasize that the pathway to forgiveness runs through outrage, not around it. Before forgiveness becomes possible, readers must first feel a genuine sense of indignation at the repairman’s apparent callousness about keeping the dog safe. Matthews also draws a technical distinction between two forms of forgiveness that psychologists differentiate: decisional forgiveness, the behavioral choice to forgo resentment, and emotional forgiveness, the deeper restoration of warmth and closeness in a relationship. “Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it. They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having,” Matthews said. “As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more.” Notably, both types of forgiveness, decisional and emotional, were elicited by the literary technique, both toward the fictional character and toward real-life offenders.

The implications extend well beyond literary theory. Gallup research has found that more than one in five people worldwide routinely feel angry, a figure Fletcher cites as evidence that stories may serve as a kind of prescription for better emotional health. “What’s really great about literature is you don’t have to be at a crisis point to use it,” he said. “It’s something that you can just use a little bit to help get you through daily anger, daily depression, daily pessimism, daily anxiety. The right literature, once you learn how to use it, can help pop you out of that, can give you more joy, more optimism, more love, more empathy, all of these positive effects.” The effect, he added, is not restricted to the written word; people often report being more in tune with their emotions while watching a film or reading a novel than in ordinary life, which he sees as a clue to a much larger phenomenon. In his view, the study captures one instance of an emotional health crisis driven by spending too much time with technology and too little with what he calls ancient sources of human wisdom. The core hope, as Matthews put it, is that exposure to literature changes our perception of the world around us. “That’s the hope. That’s the goal,” he said. “And in our study, we wanted to approximate that.” The work was supported by Ohio State’s Department of English.

Subject of Research: How the literary technique of internal focalization promotes empathy and forgiveness of real-life transgressions

Article Title: How literature can inspire us to forgive

Article References: How literature can inspire us to forgive. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: internal focalization, forgiveness, empathy, literature, psychology, narrative technique, theory of mind, emotional health, Ohio State University, Frontiers in Psychology, decisional forgiveness, emotional forgiveness