This article presents a competence-oriented experiment on the comprehension of ideas in modern literature. Comprehension is defined as being indicative of competence as opposed to qualification. Participants were 117 students from various educational programs in a Swedish gymnasium course on modern literature and society. Students were exposed to three videotaped projections of model societies on two occasions. They then responded to 15 propositions about the quality of life in the proposed societies using an instrument that measured competence of civilization through two factors, eigenvalues (F1) and visibility of social texture (F2). The model societies represent three dimensions of ideas connected to three scientific paradigms: affinity, structure, and process. These dimensions had been related and discussed in conjunction with the literary and cultural concepts of behaviorism, structuralism, and functionalism. Before the participants' second exposure to the video, they were given a recognition test in which they were asked to react to 15 ideas, each of which described an idea discussed. According to the analysis of variance there is a significant degree of difficulty in the ideas but no difference at all between the classes. The degree of difficulty was used to establish a super-ordinal scale that measures comprehension of ideas linked to the cultural dimensions of society. The values on the F1 and F2 competence factors were filtered through the values on the literary scale, making the dimensions of the model societies that describe degrees of competence apparent. These results show that literature is an instrument for perceiving the disparity of a society and for developing competence, provided that its basic idea is transparent. (Contains 6 tables, 3 figures, and 16 references.) (Author/SLD)