Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
[...]and if you doubt the truth of that sentence then you don't have a clue about what science does.[...]
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You may note that I queried the phrasing of your sentence rather than your understanding of science. Although, given that I know you write about science, I suppose that may be considered as bad and perhaps explains why you felt you had to go on the attack.
As I assume you know, there is a difference between designing an experiment to test a hypothesis and designing an experiment to achieve a particular result. The latter often leads to a confirmation bias - and I think we could be seeing that here.
This is an experiment based on excerpts, despite the fact that the books are intended to be read as a whole. It is also unclear how the books and the excerpts were chosen. And then, from the link WT Sharpe gave us, we see weasel words like "tends" and "often", suggesting a lot of wriggle room in the interpretation of the experiment and the results.
I would argue that the experiment tells us nothing about literary vs other genres as a scientifically valid conclusion. We might, of our own experience (but without scientific study for support), assume that literary fiction often has certain attributes, but that does not deny those attributes may exist in other genres, nor does it insist that every literary novel possesses those attributes. To go from "excerpts showing these attributes produce these results" to "reading literary novels improves empathy" seems (to me) a larger leap than is called for by the experiments.