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By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others.

Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn't just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.

Fiction is about possible selves in possible worlds.

In terms of 21st-century psychology, we might best see fiction as a kind of simulation: one that runs not on computers, but on minds. Such mental simulation unfolds on two levels.

Fiction, as Lisa Zunshine has emphasized in her 2006 book, Why We Read Fiction, engages our theory-of-mind faculties and gives us practice in working out what characters are thinking and feeling. Indeed some genres of fiction—for instance, the mystery novel—are entirely concerned with working out what characters are up to when they are trying to conceal it.

The second level of simulation is about what happens when people get together.

Austen is running a simulation in order to understand what happens in social groups when expectations clash in this kind of way. She's offering insight into people's lives and manners—insight that's just as relevant to our world as to Elizabeth Bennet's.

Our results confirmed that reading fiction is associated with increased social ability. We found that people who read predominantly fiction were substantially better than those who read predominantly non-fiction at the Mind in the Eyes test, and somewhat better at the Interpersonal Perception Test.

But could it be that the personality characteristics of more socially intelligent people incline them to read fiction?

The result: The two sets of readers had similar analytical reasoning skills, but the short-story readers showed a stronger understanding of social situations than the essay readers.

How do we explain these results? My colleagues and I think it's a matter of expertise. Fiction is principally about the difficulties of selves navigating the social world.

So with fiction we tend to become more expert at empathizing and socializing. By contrast, readers of non-fiction are likely to become more expert at genetics, or cookery, or environmental studies, or whatever they spend their time reading and thinking about.

My colleagues and I also believe that readers of Chekhov's story were taken out of their usual ways of being so that they could connect with something larger than themselves, beyond themselves. This is an effect that goes beyond fiction. All art aspires to help us transcend ourselves.

But at some point in the evolution of the human brain, 30,000-50,000 years ago, the domains of our cognitive structures started to interpenetrate, and metaphor was born: marks on the wall of a cave could become a rhinoceros.

Such crossings of domain boundaries still surprise us. It is that surprise which can help expand our understanding of ourselves and the social world