The No. 1 Weekend Hobby The Smartest People Indulge In, By A Psychologist - Forbes

Most people who want to get sharper reach for nonfiction as a hobby. It feels like the responsible choice. A book about negotiation or economics or habit formation gives you something you can name afterward, which makes the hours feel accounted for. Fiction sits lower in that hierarchy. It’s what you read on a plane, or at the end of the day when you’re too tired for the real reading.

People who think for a living often have the opposite habit, and they’re not apologetic about it. They spend a whole Saturday afternoon inside a novel, take no notes, and get nothing out of it they could summarize at work on Monday. It looks like the least productive thing on their calendar. But it may be doing more for how they think than the books they feel virtuous about finishing.

The clearest way to describe what a novel does comes from the cognitive scientist Keith Oatley, who compared fiction to a flight simulator for social life. You get to spend hours inside another person’s head without any of the cost of getting it wrong.

The capacity being exercised is what psychologists call theory of mind, which is the ability to work out what someone else believes or wants when it differs from what you believe or want. It’s what tells you that a colleague agreed to something they resent, or that a friend saying they’re fine would like to be asked again.

A novel makes you do this continuously and without much help. You have to keep track of what a character understands about her own situation, what her brother wrongly assumes about her, and what you can see that neither of them can. Almost nothing else in an ordinary week asks you to hold three points of view at once for hours at a stretch. A book of frameworks asks nothing of that ability at all.

There’s a second thing going on that gets discussed less, and it might matter more.

Psychologists study a trait called need for cognitive closure, which describes how uncomfortable a person finds ambiguity and how quickly they reach for an answer to end it. People high in it tend to settle on an explanation early and then surround themselves with confirmation. A 2026 study published in Scientific Reports found that people high in the trait consistently gravitate toward similar others and pull back from people whose different views might complicate the picture, a pattern that gets stronger under uncertainty.

Nonfiction is built to relieve that discomfort. It states a claim, supports it and closes. Fiction is built to prolong it. Characters act in ways that don’t add up until much later, if ever, and plenty of good novels end without telling you what to conclude. Reading one means staying interested in a person whose behavior you can’t yet explain, and doing that for a long time without deciding.

That’s an unglamorous skill, but it’s close to the center of thinking well. Most bad calls in complicated situations come from settling on a story too early, not from a shortage of frameworks.

This is why fiction stops working the moment you try to make it useful. Mining a novel for insights, or reading one mainly to have read it, puts you in a different mental state than being lost in it.

Researchers describe the useful state as transportation, meaning the sense that youv’e left the room and are somewhere else — a 2024 review published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology lays out how thoroughly this immersed state has been studied. It’s fragile. It doesn’t survive highlighting, or a reading target, or the small mental note that this will come in handy later.

Something similar shows up in work on need for cognition, the disposition to enjoy hard thinking for its own sake. A 2024 meta-analytic review published in Collabra: Psychology ties the trait to real well-being gains — lower anxiety and depression, higher satisfaction — and points to the same distinction: it’s the enjoyment of thinking, not the volume of it, that seems to be doing the work.

So the absence of a point isn’t a shortcoming of the hobby. I’'s the condition it runs on.

The idea that reading a short story reliably raises your empathy score has had a hard time replicating study by study, and it’s worth being skeptical when someone states it as established. The clearest recent answer is a 2024 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, which found the effect is real but modest — and specific to empathy and perspective-taking rather than a general mental boost.

It’s also worth saying that none of this makes novel readers better people. Understanding what someone else is thinking is an ability, not a virtue, and it gets used both ways.

Still, if the aim is to think more clearly about people and situations that don’t resolve neatly, the hobby that looks the least like self-improvement is a reasonable place to spend a weekend.

Do you crave a quick answer the moment something’s unclear, or can you sit with a question that isn’t ready to resolve? Find out how your mind actually prefers to think with this science-inspired test: Cognitive Style Test