Abstract： A growing number of studies have suggested that reading fiction may improve individuals’ social cognitive abilities, such as enhanced understanding of other people, increased altruistic behavior, and reduced prejudice. Focusing on two social cognitive abilities, empirical research supports that individuals who read more fiction perform better on tests of empathy and theory of mind. However, research to date has mostly only demonstrated the phenomena rather than systematically explored potential causal mechanisms of fiction-reading’s positive influence. Besides, whether the correlational results are specific to literary fiction has not been established. Some research claims that different durations of participants’ reading may be the reason for the inconsistent results, while likely to be moderated by different processing depths and emotional involvements or different genres of fiction (e.g., literary fiction may require a longer time than popular fiction). Previous research has paid limited attention to the role of fiction characteristics, processing depth, and emotional involvement. To address this gap, the Simulation Theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, and Narrative Transportation Theory have been invoked with a focus on the social realism and literariness of the fiction. Simulation Theory states the critical process determining the relationship between reading fiction and improved social cognitive abilities is the mental simulation. Readers infer characters’ mental states as akin to understand others’ thoughts and emotions in real life. Highly socially realistic fiction is a mirror of the real-world that allows readers to gain social knowledge and hone key socio-cognitive abilities. The Elaboration Likelihood Model provides an explanation for the observed social benefits of fiction from the aspect of motivation. According to this model, the unique linguistic form of literary fiction makes the reading experience complex, ambiguous, and requiring more cognitive effort of the reader—activate readers' motivation to take cognitive strategies. With an emphasis on the vital role of emotions involved, Narrative Transportation Theory states that individuals’ emotional involvement would be higher when reading fiction with high literariness and socially realistic. Readers with highly emotional involvement would be transported into the story, resonate with the characters, and simulate the social experiences depicted in stories, thus promoting relevant social cognitive abilities. The above theories broadly focus on three main elements, namely: motivation, cognitive processing strategy, and emotional involvement, all of which are equally important. As such this paper proposes a motivation-emotion-cognitive strategy framework explaining how fiction-reading bolsters social cognitive abilities. First, the highly literary context creates an in-depth reading experience that requires cognitive effort, ing readers to adopt cognitive strategies to accurately process textual information. Meanwhile, highly literary fiction motivates the mental simulation strategy, turning formerly passive emotional participation into active. On the other hand, its socially realistic nature allows individuals to carry out the mental simulation, as well as triggering a higher emotional involvement, which promotes mental simulation, fed back by mental simulation. At this time, emotional involvement and mental simulation form a virtuous circle, which further deepens mental simulation, finally enhancing social cognition. Based on the proposed framework, this paper recommends several directions for future research. First, more empirical research needs to be conducted to precisely examine the explanatory power of the motivation-emotion-cognitive strategy framework. At the same time, boundary conditions such as narrative perspective, attention spans, and more individual differences should be taken into account and explored. Moreover, neuroscience studies could be carried out to provide further evidence for the brain mechanisms of cognitive processing during fiction-reading.