Re:Thinking with Adam GrantThe psychology of fiction with Jennifer Lynn Barnes | Re:Thinking with Adam Grant
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How psychology explains fiction’s pull—and shapes Barnes’ bestselling mysteries
- Barnes traces her dual career in fiction writing and psychology to a single fascination: gaining access to other minds through stories and scientific inquiry.
- She explains prominent theories for why humans invest in make-believe—especially the idea that fiction hijacks our evolved appetite for socially relevant “gossip,” plus Pinker’s “cheesecake” view that stories concentrate hardwired pleasures.
- Barnes describes how she operationalizes these theories in her writing process, using prompts, scene-level checklists, and deliberate “gaps” that invite readers to co-author, theorize, and solve puzzles.
- The conversation explores evidence on fiction’s effects (e.g., correlations between lifetime fiction exposure and theory-of-mind measures like Reading the Mind in the Eyes), while emphasizing the unresolved causation vs self-selection debate and mixed experimental results.
- Barnes shares findings from her child-development research showing young children often prefer “real” stories and are surprisingly indifferent between mundane and fantastical plots, plus writing advice that originality is overrated compared to voice and perspective.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFiction may work like “gossip about people who aren’t real.”
Barnes highlights Paul Bloom’s idea that stories exploit our appetite for tracking alliances, conflict, status, and relationships—topics with high social/evolutionary value—so “juicy” premises can be compelling even when invented.
A practical way to generate premises is to test them against psychological predictions.
Barnes uses theories as writing prompts (e.g., “What would make the whole world talk about an ordinary teen?”), which directly led to The Inheritance Games’ inciting setup of a billionaire leaving his fortune to Avery.
Great mysteries invite readers to “co-author,” not just consume.
Her Imaginative Engagement framework emphasizes gap-filling and theorizing; strategically withheld information (like Jameson’s scar) creates a puzzle space where readers actively predict and debate.
Imaginative engagement is multi-dimensional, not just “getting transported.”
Beyond being absorbed, readers differ in how much they reflect, mentalize characters, fill gaps, and project future events—dimensions Barnes tries to serve deliberately during revision.
Claims that fiction improves empathy should be made cautiously.
Lifetime fiction exposure correlates with theory-of-mind performance (often via the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test), but Barnes stresses correlational limits, self-selection, and mixed experimental findings.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesLike, when you read a book, you can actually get inside someone else's head in the way that you never could in reality.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Wait, I have a question about the way the mind works, and I can just go out there and answer it.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Why did we develop as a species that will spend so much time and money and resources on something we know is make-believe?
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Fiction is just gossip about people who happen to be make-believe.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes
People think monkeys are nice, but they are fuzzy, fluffy little balls of death and destruction.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
