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The biggest effect of rational fiction for me was feeling the “warm” glow of the ingroup in the fiction I consumed. I could empathize with the characters. I think this kind of effect is inherently good, as feeling like you’re a minority with no culture is bad and encourages homogenization.
I was already a “rationalist” before reading rational fiction, and the fiction works have always struck me as much weaker than the content on our forums. On using them to “convert” other people to rationality … Well one of my friends really took to HPMOR, and they did have a high point of vowing “to always be a scientist,” but it didn’t have any observable effect and they didn’t even finish reading HPMOR. HPMOR is also probably the most educational of all the current stories.
I shared some thoughts on this topic on a similar thread posted last year. An excerpt:
...so I suppose I'd say that (1) is important, but mostly when blended with (2). Rational fiction isn't uniquely instructive; instead, it takes lessons a reader could learn in many different ways and drives them deeper into the reader's identity than other media might be able to. There's an element of "I didn't know people could be like this" and an element of "this is the kind of person I want to be."
I'd guess the second element is more important, since most people have heard about actual moral heroes outside of fiction, but they may not have a sense of how such people think about/experience the world.