I’m not sure where to go, after that headline. Turns out only BAD sci-fi makes you stupid. But, in fairness, this is what I love about science as compared to religion: the ability, and even desire, to prove oneself wrong. That said, the first try was really dum dum experiment.
“It turns out our first study didn’t reveal much about sci-fi generally but about what we would now have to call ‘non-literary sci-fi’. The text we used for our new study is instead ‘literary sci-fi’, and it didn’t trigger poor reading at all. Not even when it was introduced with a paragraph describing the story as non-literary. Readers basically ignored that intro and engaged actively with the text itself anyway,” he said. “I assume there were plenty of readers in the sample groups who don’t like sci-fi, but it didn’t matter because they still responded to the literary qualities of the story. Their comprehension didn’t drop this time.”
