There's an associated danger with fiction: though it reflects how the author sees the world, it may not match how the world really is. Fiction can intentionally or unintentionally invite readers to draw universal lessons which are misleading.
I'd even suggest that some authors, particularly those with strong political views, may be motivated to write fiction in order to give support to their own ideas. It's a blank canvas onto which to project an idealized world, and to fulfill wishes. (If that's the case, it can serve as a mildly negative Bayesian signal about whether the ideas are really true. If there were so many real-world examples illustrating the beliefs, why would the author be moved to write fiction to promote them?)
Apart from politics, plots are more interesting when they're surprising, but almost by definition, surprising plots are less likely to be generalizable to the world.
(Of course, non-fiction can really be fiction in disguise, but at least non-fiction can be fact-checked. To cite a recent Hollywood example, wherever the movie Argo is suspenseful, it's simply made up. Minor spoiler: If you drew a lesson about how going directly against the instructions of both the President and your CIA boss can be a useful tool to cause your boss to suddenly rally around you and later commend your success, you would be gravely misled. Interesting plots thrive on such unrealistic conflict.)
This danger is hardly confined to fiction. Even a completely true set of facts can be presented in multiple ways to support different agendas. Also--who takes the time to check every fact in every book they read? Quite a lot is taken on trust when reading nonfiction.
Anyway, this is only a danger if the reader is credulous about what they are reading. But reading a lot of fiction can help a person learn to detect an author's point of view, biases, and, in some cases, hidden agendas.
This learning can be greatly accelerated by training. College-level literature courses teach students the mental framework to critically evaluate any piece of writing.
Yes, but that wasn't really my point. It's about forming the habit of mentally inhabiting someone else's shoes. Gaining the ability to even consider that something might look different from another person's perspective. Having the awareness that others have equally complex internal lives and factors affecting them.
That's what a lot of good fiction is superb at installing in one's mind. It's what books can do like no other medium. Good fiction is as close as listening in on another's thought stream as we get. I think it's particularly valuable for children.
Now, there's also non-fiction writing that can do this - experience reports, auto-biographies, letter collections (some of my most formative young-age reading experiences were Robert Falcon Scott's expedition diaries and his letters of good-bye and regret written near his death). But there's an element of someone presenting themselves to the world there that I think fiction more frequently isn't affected by. Though it's true that authors speak through their characters, so fiction writing isn't unbiased either, of course.
But fiction comes with a warning, specifically that it is fiction. You can fact check non-fiction but fiction is completely open about the fact that you should consider what it's saying to be suspect - the default position on it is "this is made up".
The danger is - and Argo is one example but there are far, far worse (cough Dan Brown cough) - where you get fiction "based on true events". There are some lovely fictional biopics based on real people (Carter Beats the Devil springs to mind) but when you get the likes of the Da Vinci Code being taken as having some underlying truth I can see where you're coming from.
But I doubt very much that those people believing the "truth" in those works of fiction are the people fact checking non-fiction. In both those cases it feels as if the book isn't the problem, the person is.
The basic idea (making a sci-fi film as a cover for getting people out of Iran) is true, after that it's fairly heavily dramatised and pro-Americanised.
Worth saying that Affleck has always been relatively upfront about the dramatisation when asked about it in interviews, though I've not seen him asked about his depiction of the actions of the Canadian, British and New Zealand governments.
I'd even suggest that some authors, particularly those with strong political views, may be motivated to write fiction in order to give support to their own ideas. It's a blank canvas onto which to project an idealized world, and to fulfill wishes. (If that's the case, it can serve as a mildly negative Bayesian signal about whether the ideas are really true. If there were so many real-world examples illustrating the beliefs, why would the author be moved to write fiction to promote them?)
Apart from politics, plots are more interesting when they're surprising, but almost by definition, surprising plots are less likely to be generalizable to the world.
(Of course, non-fiction can really be fiction in disguise, but at least non-fiction can be fact-checked. To cite a recent Hollywood example, wherever the movie Argo is suspenseful, it's simply made up. Minor spoiler: If you drew a lesson about how going directly against the instructions of both the President and your CIA boss can be a useful tool to cause your boss to suddenly rally around you and later commend your success, you would be gravely misled. Interesting plots thrive on such unrealistic conflict.)