출처 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/how-writing-transforms-us.html
독서는 사람을 어떻게 바꿀까요
대다수 글은, 작가가 의도한 대로 독자가 생각하고 느끼게끔 하는 것을 목표로 쓰여집니다. 이 기사도 예외는 아닙니다. 필자 역시 독자가 특정한 대상을 특정한 방식으로 보게 되길 바라는 마음으로 이 글을 쓰고 있으니까요.
그러나 글이 미치는 영향력이 늘 직접적인 형태로 드러나는 것은 아닙니다. 작가의 의도대로 느끼거나 생각하게 만드는 대신, 글을 읽는 자기 자신을 돌아보게끔 하는 것 역시 글이 지닌 영향력의 또 다른 면모입니다.
2009년 <창의력 연구>에 실린 실험에서, 본 연구팀은 심리학자인 조에터만 및 피터슨과 함께 참여자를 두 집단으로 나누었습니다. 한 집단에게는 안톤 체호프의 불륜에 관한 단편소설 <개를 데리고 다니는 여인>을 읽도록 했습니다. 다른 집단에게는 원작 소설을 이혼 법정에서의 기록처럼 재구성한 비소설을 읽도록 했습니다.
비소설의 경우 원작 소설과 동일한 길이었을 뿐 아니라 난이도 역시 비슷했습니다. 같은 내용의 정보를 담고 있었고, 같은 대화 일부를 포함했습니다. 비소설이 원작 소설보다 덜 예술적이라는 평가에도 불구하고, 읽는 이들은 거의 비슷한 수준의 흥미를 느꼈습니다.
글을 읽기 전 모든 참여자에게 외향성, 신경성, 친화성, 성실성, 경험에 대한 개방성을 측정하는 ‘5요인 성격검사’(A test of big five personality traits)를 실시했습니다. 감정평가 역시 실시했습니다. 참여자는 열 가지 서로 다른 감정에 대하여, 자신이 현재 느끼는 정도를 0에서 10 사이의 숫자로 평가했습니다. 글을 읽은 후 다시 한 번 성격검사와 감정평가가 이루어졌습니다.
비소설을 읽은 집단의 경우, 두 성격검사 간에 큰 차이가 드러나지 않았습니다. 반면 소설을 읽은 집단의 경우, 크지는 않지만 통계적으로 의미 있는 차이가 나타났습니다. 이 차이는 사람들이 소설을 읽으며 느낀 감정이 얼마나 강렬한지와 관련이 있었습니다. 체호프의 소설은 사람이 자기 자신에 대해 새로이 돌아보게 만들었습니다.
2012년 <문학에 대한 과학적 연구> 저널에 실린 실험에서, 본 연구팀은 심리학과 대학원생인 매튜 칼란드와 함께 참여자를 두 집단으로 나누어, 한 집단에겐 여덟 편의 단편 소설을, 다른 집단에겐 여덟 편의 에세이를 읽도록 했습니다. 소설과 에세이의 평균 길이는 같았으며, 난이도와 흥미로운 정도 역시 같았습니다.
앞서 소개한 실험과는 달리, 이 실험에서는 소설을 읽은 참여자 집단의 성격검사 점수에서 큰 차이가 드러나지 않았습니다. 글의 장르는 큰 영향을 끼치지 않았습니다. 차이를 불러온 요인은 ‘글에서 예술성을 느끼는 정도’였습니다. 소설이든 비소설이든 읽은 글이 예술적이었다고 판단하는 경우, 그렇지 않은 경우에 비해 성격검사 점수가 큰 차이를 보였습니다.
문학작품을 읽을 때 우리 마음(과 뇌)이 어떻게 반응하는지에 대한 연구는 이제 막 시작되려는 참입니다. 독자에게 직접적인 영향을 미치는 대신, 독자 스스로 변화할 수 있도록 돕는 글의 영향력에 대해 심리학적으로 접근한 연구는 아직 드뭅니다. 이러한 글의 영향력에 초점을 맞추는 연구가 계속되기를 바랍니다.
출처 http://newspeppermint.com/2014/12/21/how-reading-transforms-us/
How Reading Transforms Us
DEC. 19, 2014
By KEITH OATLEY and MAJA DJIKIC
MOST writing seeks to influence you to think or feel how the author wants you to think or feel. The article you are reading now is no exception. We want you to think about certain things in a certain way.
But there’s another kind of influence, not typically associated with writing, that works in a different fashion. Here, you don’t try to make people think or feel in any particular way. Instead, you try to get them to be themselves.
As parents, for example, we urge our children to discover what will engage them, in a career perhaps, or in a relationship. And although we may wish that a spouse would be a bit more like this or that, we also know that the best kind of love enables someone to become his or her own true self.
Could a writer have an indirect influence of this kind, getting readers to think about themselves anew? We believe so. Indeed, in several studies over the past few years, we have found evidence that such influence is characteristic of literary art.
In one experiment, published in 2009 in the Creativity Research Journal, we and the psychologists Sara Zoeterman and Jordan B. Peterson randomly assigned participants to one of two groups: one whose members read “The Lady With the Dog,” an Anton Chekhov short story centered on marital infidelity, and another whose members read a “nonfictionalized” version of the story, written in the form of a report from a divorce court.
The nonfiction text was the same length and offered the same ease of reading as Chekhov’s story. It contained the same information, including some of the same dialogue. (Notably, though readers of this text deemed it less artistic than readers of “The Lady With the Dog” deemed their text, they found it just as interesting.)
Before they started reading, each participant took a standard test of the so-called big five personality traits: extroversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The participants also rated how they were feeling, on a scale of 0 to 10, for 10 different emotions. Then, after reading the text they were assigned, the participants were again given the personality test and asked to rate their emotions.
The personality scores of those who read the nonfiction text remained much the same. But the personality scores of those who read the Chekhov story fluctuated. The changes were not large but they were statistically significant, and they were correlated with the intensity of emotions people experienced as they read the story. Chekhov’s story seemed to get people to start thinking about their personalities — about themselves — in new ways.
In another experiment, published in 2012 in the journal Scientific Study of Literature, we broadened the scope beyond a single Chekhov story. We and a psychology graduate student, Matthew Carland, asked participants to read one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The stories included Frank O’Connor’s “My Oedipus Complex” and Jean Stafford’s “Night Club.” The essays included Henri Bergson’s “Why Do We Laugh?” and Rabindranath Tagore’s “East and West.” We altered the essays a bit so that their average length, ease of reading and interest to readers were the same as those of the stories.
As in our earlier experiment, we measured our participants’ personality traits and emotions before and after reading. We had expected that people who read a piece of fiction would experience the greatest fluctuation in their personality scores, but we didn’t find this. The genre of the text — fiction or nonfiction — didn’t matter much; what mattered was the degree of perceived artistry. Those who read a story or essay that they judged to be artistic changed their personality scores significantly more than did those who judged what they read to be less artistic.
Most recently, in a theoretical paper published last month in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, we drew on the studies described above, as well as on research that compared preoccupations of famous fiction writers with those of famous physicists, to outline a psychological conception of artistic literature as being based not on persuasion or instruction (as, for example, the Roman poet Horace theorized in “The Art of Poetry”) but on indirect communication.
A great deal has been written about art, but only recently has research begun in earnest about what goes on in the mind and brain when reading literature. Outside the domain of love relationships and some forms of psychotherapy, the idea of communication that has effects of a nonpersuasive yet transformative kind has rarely been considered in psychology. We hope our studies encourage others to investigate further this important kind of influence.
Keith Oatley is an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology, and Maja Djikic is a senior research associate, both at the University of Toronto.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: How Reading Transforms Us. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기