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When you identify with a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, according to a new study.

A study conducted by Ohio State University researchers examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own - a phenomenon called “experience-taking.”

Researchers found that experience-taking may lead to real changes in the lives of readers.

“Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes,” said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study as a graduate student at Ohio State, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College.

“Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways,” added Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

In one of the experiments, researchers had 82 undergraduates who were registered and eligible to vote read one of four versions of a short story about a student enduring several obstacles on the morning of Election Day (such as car problems, rain, long lines) before ultimately entering the booth to cast a vote. This experiment took place several days before the 2008 November presidential election.

Some versions were written in first person (“I entered the voting booth) while some were written in third person (“Paul entered the voting booth”).

And some versions featured a student who attended the same university as the subjects, while in other versions, the protagonist in the story attended a different university.

After reading the story, the students completed a questionnaire that measured their level of experience-taking - how much they adopted the perspective of the character in the story.

The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these students reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later.

In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.