You Feel Me?

In my previous post on the subject, I sided with a secondary definition of the word empathy, which is:

the projection of one’s own feelings or thoughts onto something else, such as an object in a work of art or a character in a novel or film [or another person].

As it turns out, that’s much closer to the original meaning of the source of the word for empathy, which is a translation of the German Einfühlung. According to a PubMed article:

The term “Einfühlung” literally means “feeling into” and refers to an act of projecting oneself into another body or environment, i.e. …to an imaginary bodily “displacement” (“Versetzung”) of oneself into another body or environment, which is aimed at understanding how it feels to be in that other body or environment.

Kudos for multiple uses of the words “body” and “environment” in a single sentence.

I was surprised to learn that the translation of Einfühlung into empathy didn’t take place until 1908. And even then the word was related to aesthetics rather than to interpersonal relationships (understanding other people). The meaning and application that it has today didn’t begin to develop until the 1930s. That seems really recent until you consider that Theory of Mind didn’t arrive on the scene until the late 70s.

Given this relatively recent—and, in the case of empathy, revisionist—history of these concepts, the extent to which so many people now take them for granted, and at face value, is a little mind-blowing.

Early Days: Telling Stories

Rosalind Dymond, a psychologist at Cornell University, appears to be the first person to have attempted to measure empathy. In 1946, she used a set of cards “depicting images of archetypal personalities and dramatic scenes” and tasked subjects with telling stories about the characters pictured.

The stories were rated good, fair, or poor. Good stories described the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Fair stories only described the characters’ external characteristics. Poor stories simply named the characters. Those individuals whose stories were rated good were found to also have greater insight into their own relationships—the implication being that the better, more in-depth stories people can tell, the more aware they are of themselves and others.

If you’ve read Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal or have seen his Ted Talk, you won’t find this surprising.

According to Susan Lanzoni, author of Empathy: A History:

[Dymond’s] characterization of empathy as the ability to tell in-depth, imaginative stories of another’s feelings and circumstances was closely tied to empathy’s early aesthetic meaning.

We communicate in stories and understand the world in terms of stories. As poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” I think this early take on empathy was probably the most useful. But it didn’t last.

Later Revisions

Dymond went on to redefine empathy as “the ability to accurately predict how another person saw themselves” and ultimately to be “an accurate appraisal of how someone else felt and thought.”

A little later some psychologists at Dartmouth College determined that subjects were pretty terrible at predicting other people’s preferences, meaning they had little “empathic accuracy.” Dartmouth then began offering a course to “increase students’ sensitivity to the attitudes and feelings of others.”

Many psychologists have gone on to lament the lack of empathy and the dearth of studies of empathy, including Dymond (1949), Gordon Allport (1960), and Kenneth B. Clark (1980). Yet there never has been—and still isn’t—a consensus agreement on what this concept or word refers to or means.

Nor is there agreement as to how we, as individuals, become—or fail to become—empathetic. Some researchers seem to believe empathy is straight-up the result of mirror neurons. Others believe we have genetic predispositions to be more or less empathetic. It has been proposed that we have an empathy circuit in the brain, which can “go down.” Individuals may then experience “empathy erosion.”

According to a 2018 article by Fabrizio Mafessoni and Michael Lachmann in Nature:

Contagious yawning, emotional contagion, and empathy are characterized by the activation of similar neurophysiological states or responses in an observed individual and an observer.

That raises an interesting line of inquiry. Maybe another time.

What’s the Point?

Many people claim that empathy is essential for the survival of our species and possibly the planet, too. But for purposes of survival—from the Pleistocene to today, whether on a one-to-one or group basis—we need to be able to predict what other people are likely to do in a particular situation. The part of the brain that excels at predicting is System 1, the unconscious. Animals do it, too. The only difference between us and animals is that we’re not satisfied with the predictions unless we believe we understand what’s behind them. So we tell stories about what we think is going on with other people, the same way we tell stories about what is going on with us.

Of course, as I’ve been saying for years, there’s no such thing as a true story.

to be continued…