Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesEmanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd worked on a study that found that reading literary fiction leads to better performance on tests of social perception.

Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists reported Thursday.

A striking new study found that reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

They and other academic psychologists say such findings should be considered by educators designing student curriculums, particularly the Common Core standards, adopted by most states, which increase the amount of nonfiction students are assigned.

In the study, a series of five experiments conducted by social psychologists at The New School for Social Research in New York City, people who read excerpts from literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry) scored better than people who read popular fiction (Gillian Flynn, Rosamunde Pilcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart) on tests asking them to infer what people were thinking or feeling – a field that scientists call “Theory of Mind.”

People who read literary fiction also scored better than people who read nonfiction (in this case, pieces published in Smithsonian Magazine, like “How the Potato Changed the World”). Interestingly, when subjects were asked, they said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much as popular fiction.

And in two experiments, some participants read nothing at all before taking the tests, yet performed as well as the participants who read popular fiction. Both of those groups made more mistakes on the tests than literary fiction readers, reported the researchers, Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, a doctoral candidate.

“It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”

Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Darwin College, Cambridge, said, “I would have thought reading in general” would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading is remarkable. I think it’s going to generate a lot more research and I hope it’s going to generate some discussion in education.”

To find a broader pool of research subjects than the college students who typically participate, the researchers used Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs. Between 78 and 456 people, ranging in age from 18 to 75, were recruited for each experiment and paid $2 or $3 each.

“Theory of Mind” is a relatively new field. Tests measure people’s ability to decode emotions shown in photographs of people’s faces (irritation, fear, sadness) or to predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. The tests have been used in efforts to gauge empathy in children with autism, for example, or to zero in on which areas of the brain are used when people think about things from the perspective of others.

Experts who have studied the correlation between reading and “Theory of Mind” say the new study is consistent with some previous research, but is more powerful because it suggests a direct effect – quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got – of reading literature for only a few minutes. It suggests that people can be “primed” for social skills like empathy, just as, say, watching a clip from a sad movie can make one feel more emotional.

“This really nails down the causal direction,” said Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study. “These people have done not one experiment but five and they have found the same effects.”

There is much that the study does not address: How long lasting could such effects be? Would three months of reading Dickens and Austen produce effects that are larger, smaller or have no effect? Are the differences in scores all attributable to the type of fiction? Would the results hold if the same person read all the different types of material? And would it matter if the literary fiction was particularly difficult? The researchers did not use James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

Raymond Mar, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Canada who did not work on the new research, said another study by one of his graduate students found that lifetime exposure to romance fiction resulted in the best scores on one of the empathy tests, compared with other genres. But he said that did not necessarily disprove the new study’s results because it showed only a correlation and not a causal connection.

Albert Wendland, director of a master’s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University, said, “Frankly, I agree with the study.”

Dr. Wendland said that “reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position.”

“Lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction, it makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives,” he said. “Popular fiction is a way of dealing more with one’s own self maybe, with one’s own wants, desires, needs.”

David Kidd, one of the authors of the study, said that “in popular fiction, really the author is in control and the reader has a more passive role.”

In literary fiction – Dostoyevsky, for example – “there is no single overarching authorial voice,” he said. “Instead, each character presents a different version of reality and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”

Dr. Castano, a study author, added that in many cases, “popular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot. Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described. The plot is what’s interesting.”

Louise Erdrich, whose short story, “The Round House,” was used in one of the experiments, said she was heartened to hear of the study.

“This is why I love science,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Kidd and Castano found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction. Also, I feel personally cheered. Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It’s nice to be told what we write is of social value. (However, I would still write even if novels were useless.)”

But while the findings brought Ms. Erdrich a measure of relief, she also suggested that the direct intertwining of science and art can only be taken so far.

“Thank God the research didn’t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,” Ms. Erdrich said. “You never know.”