 Recently efforts have been made to test the idea that literature does, on occasion, provide cognitive benefits. It has been claimed that exposure to fiction—even single episodes of reading—measurably improves empathy and theory of mind (Kidd &amp; Castano 2013); the effects, if real, seem to be small and the claimed results have been hard to replicate (Panero et al. 2016; Kidd &amp; Castano 2019). Other work in this growing field also does not point in a single direction. Some studies suggest that fiction has a capacity to improve aspects of social cognition (Calarco et al. 2017; Mar 2018a,b) while others find no such effect (e.g., Wimmer et al. 2021a, b; see Currie 2020; chs 9–11 for general discussion). Humanistic scholars who claim educative effects for fiction may respond that these effects are slow and cumulative, and unlikely to be visible in studies of single episodes of reading; testing such claims will be difficult. But their claims are, nonetheless, empirical.