One paradox of good fiction is that it centers on sadness. If fiction gives us pleasure, then why are we drawn towards what’s gravely unpleasant? Think about classics in the Western cannon. Romeo and Juliet ends with a double suicide; Anna Karenina throws herself in front of an oncoming train; in versions of Goethe’s Faust the Devil carries the protagonist off to hell; Santiago returns empty handed in The Old Man and the Sea.
There are few possible reasons why we’re suckers for sorrow. Sad stories make us feel better because they give us a chance to compare ourselves to individuals and circumstances that are worse than our own - life might be tough, but at least I’m not dead like Romeo and Juliet. Some research proposes that sorrow in fiction might be a form of psychological relief. A more fruitful explanation is that important virtues, values and morals that elicit uplifting emotions accompany sad moments in fiction.
[…] People flock to sad stories not for the sadness, Oliver says, but to experience these feel-good moments that sadness brings out.
[T]he enjoyment of many examples of entertainment that have been labeled as ‘‘sad’’ or as ‘‘tear-jerkers’’ may be described, in part, in terms of the experience of elevation in response to meaningful entertainment—an affective state associated with unique elicitors, emotional and physical responses, and motivational outcomes.
They discovered that elevation is not just a form of happiness but a distinct physiological reaction where people describe themselves as “moved” and wanting to help others. As Haidt says, “these emotional reactions involved warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desire to help others or become a better person.” This helps explain the sad-film paradox. Sad films display instances of moral beauty and moral excellence that implant a powerful need to “do good” in the moviegoer. Despite the sorrow, we’re elevated for a few moments before returning to everyday life
One hypothesis is that stories allow us to mentally rehearse moments of adversity without the consequences. Like a flight simulator, fiction generates virtual experiences of adversity for the benefit of practice. Steven Pinker put forth a version of this theory in his 1997 book How the Mind Works: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them… the cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.”
The results from Oliver’s study go one step further. “Rather than only providing viewers with models of prosocial behavior, eliciting elevation may further increase the likelihood of engaging in these behaviors, as elevation entails motivational enhancement.” In other words, a tragic moment on the big screen or on the page makes us want to be better people.