Angus Fletcher

We naturally assume people are managing their image, which makes it nearly impossible to actually trust the sincerity of what they're saying out loud.

Which I guess leads us directly into this 2026 research from Angus Fletcher and Mark Matthews published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Yes, they were investigating this exact problem, like the failure of the spoken apology and our tendency to hold onto grudges.

But rather than looking at, I don't know, communication strategies or conflict resolution therapy, they studied a 2,000-year-old literary device.

They didn't just chronicle what a character did or said.

They gave us absolute access to their quiet internal struggles.

So Fletcher and Matthews took this from like the realm of literary analysis and brought it into a rigorous lab environment to measure its neurological impact on empathy.

Exactly.

Would you feel differently? Researchers at Ohio State University decided to explore that very idea using a fictional character, a runaway puppy, and one unfortunate oven repair.

The study was published in Frontiers in Psychology in October 2026 and was conducted by Angus Fletcher, a professor of English, and Mark Matthews, a social psychology researcher.

They focused on something called internal vocalization.

It means letting readers experience a character's private thoughts and feelings instead of simply watching what happens to them.

It, it reminds me of, um, I've had a guest on a couple times.

His name's Angus Fletcher.

He's like a, he has like a PhD in Shakespeare, and-

Oh

It's really just the ability to plan that is important, and the ability to do that constantly over and over again.

This is reminding me a lot of a conversation we've had on this podcast many-- about two years ago with a professor called Angus Fletcher, who does some really interesting work at Ohio State University.

Um, he leads their project narrative, and so he's, he's like a story scientist is what he calls himself.

And he talks about how, you know, the, the ability to plan is something that you can learn.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So this is where, like, again, it sort of re- re- reminds me of this work of Angus Fletcher.

So it, there's like a sense of, there's no such thing as a perfect answer, right? There's no such thing, like the everything is a work in progress, right? It is, it's almost like a mindset shift to like everything is a work in progress, um, which it's, that sounds like what you're getting at there.