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Getbig Main Boards => General Topics => Topic started by: Benny B on November 07, 2012, 05:52:56 AM

Title: Literacy Breeds Empathy, Reduces Violence
Post by: Benny B on November 07, 2012, 05:52:56 AM

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker links the Humanitarian Revolution, an historical decline in violence, to widespread literacy. "It's plausible," he explains, "that as people consume fiction, drama, history, and journalism, they start to inhabit the minds of people unlike themselves, which conceivably could expand their empathy and decrease their taste for cruelty."

Title: Re: Literacy Breeds Empathy, Reduces Violence
Post by: dr.chimps on November 07, 2012, 07:14:39 AM

This has been debated for a while now -ie. see Uncle Tom's Cabin re: slavery; Dickens' works re: child labour, oppressive poverty. Anecdotally, here at Getbig, it holds up - all the hard-talking corporate Christians are not 'readers.'    :-\

Title: Re: Literacy Breeds Empathy, Reduces Violence
Post by: magikusar on November 07, 2012, 08:27:28 PM

master of the obvious!

also note with literacy comes greater productivity and less need to stab next guy for his dinner

Title: Re: Literacy Breeds Empathy, Reduces Violence
Post by: Roger Bacon on November 07, 2012, 08:42:11 PM

Hmm...

Explains a thing or two about black people.

Title: Re: Literacy Breeds Empathy, Reduces Violence
Post by: Pray_4_War on November 09, 2012, 01:04:51 AM

Patently false.  I was an English major and I'm hella-violent.