Gregory Currie questions the capacity of literature to produce insight about psychology:
One thing that psychological research these days does systematically is reduce the flow of meaning on which so much literature depends. Take that staple of literary psychology: character; character explanations are top predators in the hunt for meaning: show that someone’s action flows, not just from their wishes but from their character, and you have the best example there is, short of invoking the deity, of behaviour found to be meaningful. But a lot of evidence suggests that character plays a surprisingly insignificant role in human behaviour, which is highly sensitive to small, even trivial changes in circumstances. Certainly, our own ordinary treatment of the notion of character is close to paradoxical. We put down our own failings to circumstance, and those of others to bad character – an error as crazy as thinking that wherever I happen to be marks the centre of the universe.
The Dish 