When Honors English professor Dr. Kathryn Warren, during her first year of teaching, met a student who adamantly didn’t want to read her assignments, she found evidence for the theory that literature makes people more empathetic, including herself.

Dr. Warren wrote an article this semester for the Chronicle of Higher Learning about her experience with a student who refused to read the assigned literature. It gave her some insight on working with students who may have different opinion from hers.

The student, whom she gave the psuedonym Henry, had qualms with the material she assigned. He found the progressive American literature problematic compared to the more traditional British tales of heroism and valor he grew up with.

Dr. Warren concluded that for some students, reading the assignment can be a truly ethical dilemma when confronted with material that doesn’t reaffirm one’s worldview. It’s important to try — at the very least– to understand the other side. 

“The world is filled with people who aren’t like us,” she said. “To be able to imagine why somebody would think differently on political questions or academic questions or why would they approach a problem differently, it’s necessary first to empathize with them.”

Dr. Warren cites an article in The Guardian that shows strong evidence of what reading literature — specifically fiction — can do in terms of understanding people’s emotions.

But she also emphasizes the difference between empathy and sympathy.

“Empathy is different from sympathy in that sympathy means sort of standing apart from somebody,” she said. “Empathy, on the other hand, is imagining what it would be like to be that person in that situation and trying to feel what they feel.”

While empathy can lead people to sympathize with someone else, it consists of a different type of emotional structure, she said.

When it comes to students who have had different experiences from her own, she realizes the importance of understanding their view on a deeper level — even though she may never agree with them on social issues.

For example, another student of hers believed that an image in a graphic novel of two women getting intimate was too obscene (although Dr. Warren did warn students of the contents beforehand) but the whole point of the assignment was to see if students could empathize with that character.

“It’s a hard thing to do,” she said. “It makes us feel very vulnerable because I think human begins have formed a defensive mechanism in thinking, ‘my way works for me it’s the right thing for me’ and for people to challenge that it’s hard for us to open up to the possibility that we might be wrong.”