I highly recommend a new article by Dr. Lisa Zunshine. She writes in “Why Fiction Does It Better” (Chronicle of Higher Education):

It turns out that informational texts don’t come close to containing the kind of metacognitive complexity so essential to fiction that we don’t even notice it. Consider these two inextricable fea- tures of fiction. It always functions on a higher level of metacognitive complexity than nonfiction, and it can achieve that higher level without explicit use of metacognitive vocabulary.

I prefer to describe this kind of complexity as “sociocognitive” rather than “metacognitive” because of its emphasis on the social aspect of cognition. Think of sociocognitive complexity as triply nested mental states—a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state—as in, for instance, “I didn’t want (first mental state) him to know (second mental state) that I didn’t like (third mental state) his gift.” Social situations featuring third-level-nested mental states are the baseline for fiction. By fiction I mean prose fiction, drama, and narrative poetry. Memoirs concerned with imagination and consciousness rather than chronology, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, also belong in this category.

Once you start reading a work of fiction, you encounter third-level nesting very soon and after a while are immersed in it. Different authors achieve this by different stylistic means, focusing primarily on mental states either of characters or of narrators and implied readers. Some writers operate on the fourth level of sociocognitive complexity, and some reach even to the fifth and sixth.

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…If you want nonstop high-level sociocognitive complexity, simultaneous with nonstop active reorganization of perceptions and inferences, only fiction delivers. Teach less of it, and only students whose parents encourage them to read a lot of fiction on their own will still do well. The less fortunate others will end up with poor vocabularies and grades.

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