LITERARY FICTION AND EMPATHY

Based on this article, reading literary fiction helps you build a higher capacity to understand people's emotions.  Literary pieces such as Hamlet let you become the main characters and experience their thoughts, emotions, and hardships.  This alone helps readers develop a higher capacity to understand people in real life.  Reading into characters like Hamlet gives readers the chance to understand new emotions that they have never experienced before.  By discovering these new emotions through literature, readers have a higher capacity to understand them in real life.  For example, if someone has never experienced the emotion of losing a parent, they could experience it through reading Hamlet.