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Empathy: What Is It Good For?

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I wish I could have a discussion about empathy with a particular friend who, unfortunately, is no longer here. She was a caring person, generous with time, money, and attention. She was a good friend to me. She likely considered herself to be empathetic, although I don’t recall her making such a claim.

But there were some attitudes she espoused and actions she took that I was perplexed and a little bit horrified by. For example, I remember her telling me she’d gone out of her way to congratulate a woman paying for groceries in a supermarket with the equivalent of food stamps on her good (nutritious?) food choices. My reaction was along the lines of You did what? I could write an entire article on the assumptions underlying that interaction.

And when there was much talk about airport security following the events of 911, she and I discussed the problems posed for people with metal implants going through scanners. Her opinion at the time was that this group of people ought to give up air travel for the sake of making it easier on the rest of us. I (let us say) disagreed. We also strongly disagreed on the subject of undocumented immigrants. However, she later changed her stance on that one.

We were of the same political persuasion, so that wasn’t the basis for our sometimes strong differences of opinion. Those differences never really got in our way, anyway. I enjoy a good argument, and once she figured that out, she was willing to engage.

On the other end of the spectrum, this friend (most definitely a cat person) dropped everything to come to the aid of a neighbor who needed daily assistance with her dog for at least a month after surgery relegated her to a wheelchair. And she seriously considered moving to another state to help out a niece who hadn’t even made a request.

Empathy vs. Compassion

In my ongoing research into the subject of empathy, I’ve encountered numerous takes on what it’s supposed to be, as well as what it’s supposed to be good for. Consistent with my previous research on what it’s supposed to be, there’s no consensus on what it’s supposed to be good for. While many people still claim that empathy is necessary and useful all around, others report that it actually only comes into play in regard to the closest members of our in-group—people we already know and care about and presumably understand to some extent.

Psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy, in which he cites research supporting the idea that empathy doesn’t lead to prosocial action—that people substitute feeling (or thinking they’re feeling) someone else’s pain or distress for doing something to alleviate it. Compassion, on the other hand, which doesn’t necessarily involve relating to other people empathically—which in fact involves having some emotional distance—does lead to prosocial action.

By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So if you’re in pain and I feel your pain—I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re being anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings.

A lot of people think this is merely a verbal distinction, that it doesn’t matter that much. But actually there’s a lot of evidence in my book that empathy and compassion activate different parts of the brain. But more importantly, they have different consequences. If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better. —Paul Bloom

Can You Relate?

My friend was financially comfortably well off (not on food stamps), did not have any metal implants, and was born and raised in the U.S. The three examples I gave all involved a reaction to others, people who were not members of her, or my, in-group. I would say she didn’t or couldn’t relate to them. And I think the concept of relating is separate from the concept of empathy. For example, I relate to people who share major personality traits with me. I “get” them in a way that’s both easy and deep. No imagination is required. No effort. No attempt to understand.

When another friend whose son I have spent very little time with during his 20 years on the planet (but who is quite a lot like me) tells me of her interactions with him or his responses and reactions, I can sometimes physically feel what he might be feeling: the feelings that make his resulting response entirely logical. That’s not empathy. If empathy were good for something, it would be assisting us in “getting” people we don’t automatically relate to or resonate with—people in our out-groups—and then lead us to take compassionate action in response. But as much as so many people wish it did do that, it doesn’t and ultimately can’t.

Empathy appears to be an outdated folk belief we really ought to retire.

The Map Is Not the Territory

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And the menu is not the meal. In other words, beware of confusing models of reality with reality. It sounds obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, so we end up believing a lot of things that are just not true.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

There’s a handful of threshold concepts that can shed some light on how we might know ourselves (or think we do) and how we might know others (or think we do)—and cause us to consider the possibility that we might be wrong about how we do both.

In and of themselves, threshold concepts are both transformative and irreversible. Once you fully grasp them, your understanding of what underlies your experience, your perception, and your behavior will be transformed. Once you cross the threshold from not knowing to knowing, you will no longer be able to view yourself, others, or the world the way you did before.

Threshold concepts are inherently difficult to grasp.

That’s why these concepts are considered to be troublesome knowledge. They’re troublesome because they conflict with preexisting beliefs, they are counterintuitive and disconcerting, and/or they seem illogical. They don’t slip easily into the mental architecture most of us have already constructed. In fact, they often bounce right off. So they bear repeating…repeatedly. (Recently someone said she had probably heard me mention a particular threshold concept a hundred times, but it was just in that moment that she got it.)

Each of these concepts is important individually, but many of them connect with and relate to each other. That’s another aspect of threshold concepts: they are integrative.

One

The brain is not wired to experience reality as it is. That’s troublesome because it’s counterintuitive and conflicts with our belief that we experience an objective reality. But the interior of the brain is a dark, silent space, in which the primary activity is the interpretation of electrical impulses to give us a sense of what is going on inside and outside of us.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. —Chris Frith, neuropsychologist

There is a real world. But you’ve never lived there. You haven’t been there even for a visit. —Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist

Two

The brain operates on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, which means System 1 (the unconscious) directs most of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That’s troublesome because our experience is that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are consciously determined. But consciousness can only process 40 bits of information at a time, while the unconscious process 11 million bits at a time.

If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. —Timothy D. Wilson, social psychologist

It can take huge amounts of time for our conscious brain to think about every scenario deliberately. Everyday life requires us to suspend rationality, to be mindless about countless risks. —Shankar Vedantam, journalist and host of The Hidden Brain podcast

Three

The brain is predictive rather than reactive. It focuses on determining what’s going to happen next so it can figure out ahead of time what action to take instead of waiting for something to happen and then deciding what to do about it. That’s troublesome because, once again, our experience is that, moment-to-moment, we are making conscious or intentional decisions based on our conscious perceptions.

Your brain is wired to ask the question, “The last time I was in a situation like this, what sensations did I encounter and how did I act?” —Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and psychologist

Our primary contact with the world…is via our expectations about what we are about to see or experience. —Andy Clark, cognitive philosopher

Four

The brain pays far more attention to what we do than to what we feel, what we think, or what we think about doing. This is troublesome because we tend to believe that the brain is for thinking and perceiving—I think, therefore I am, as Rene Descartes famously said—and not for figuring out what action to take. We also expect there to be a more direct correlation than there is between what we think about doing (intend) and the action we ultimately take.

Our brains interpret the world primarily as a forum for action and only secondarily as a realm of facts. —Colin G. DeYoung, psychologist

The course of an individual’s life is determined by the action she takes in the world. —Gabrielle Oettingen, psychologist

Five

The brain generates a mental model of the world that represents what’s normal for each of us both internally and externally. Our model of the world determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it. That’s troublesome because we have the sense that we directly perceive what is available for us to perceive, when in fact we perceive everything through our unique filters.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, neuroscientist

When we experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. —Anil K. Seth, neuroscientist

We Ought to Be Less Certain…

In attempting to know ourselves, we’re faced with the same problems we encounter when attempting to know anyone else.

For one thing, we have no direct access to either our unconscious or the unconscious of anyone else, even though that’s the part of the brain that runs us most of the time. For another, just about every perception we have had or will have is an interpretation. We are interpreting ourselves just as we are interpreting others. And those interpretations, generated by internal or external cues, are based on our individual mental model of the world, which means they are all highly subjective and necessarily distorted.

Furthermore, we’re literally living in the past, since our predictive (autopilot) brain has already determined the nature of a situation and initiated the appropriate response before we’re consciously aware a response is called for.

In spite of all this, we have a strong, if false, sense of certainty about who we are, who others are and what they are experiencing, as well as our overall experience of being in the world.

…and More Curious

The best way to get a remotely objective clue as to who we—or someone else might be—is to pay attention to what we or they do, note our interpretation of the action, and attempt to reason backward. What might that behavior indicate about me or Joe or Olivia? What belief or character/personality trait might that reflect? What don’t I know? What other explanations could there be?

There’s no guarantee we’ll come up with the correct answer, of course. But curiosity gives us some room to maneuver, to question our assumptions and interpretations instead of merrily running off a cliff with them.

Know Thyself (or Not)

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Know Thyself is the first of three maxims inscribed at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the one everybody remembers. Fairly succinct at just two words, it’s loaded, nonetheless. It’s difficult, impossible even, to pin down who said what when or the specific meaning that was intended by the ancient Greeks. And Pythia, aka the Oracle at Delphi, was known to be cryptic, so no help there.

Looking at know thyself now, I’m reminded again of listening to a philosopher expound on the meaning of the word is for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Know is similar in that regard.

It can mean, for example, that I fully grasp or understand something; that I am—or more likely, I feel—certain about something; that I have a working acquaintance with some process, thing, concept, etc.; that I’ve memorized something; that I recognize someone or something, or that I can make distinctions—among other things.

Thyself is a similar kettle of fish since it both assumes a sense of self and implies that each of us is a single self—which, in the latter case, is not the case.

So I don’t know what know thyself is supposed to mean or can mean. Once upon a time, I probably thought I knew. But as I’ve been reflecting recently, I understand more and more that I understand less and less. This seems to be a logical outcome of learning.

To know that one does not know is best; not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease. —Lao Tzu

It’s so Meta

Stephen Fleming has written a book titled Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. From the bits I’ve read, he appears to consider self-awareness and metacognition to be essentially the same thing.

Self-awareness could be defined as having knowledge of one’s own traits, feelings, motivations, behaviors, etc. (This ought to ring some bells.)

Metacognition could be defined as thinking about our own mental processes—or thinking about thinking.

Self-awareness is meta even without the prefix. Both terms describe System 2 (higher order) processes or functions. I haven’t determined whether there’s a significant distinction between them or the extent to which they overlap or converge.

At any rate, Fleming, who is a cognitive neuroscientist and a very good writer, penned a fascinating article on Theory of Mind. In the entire 4,200+ word article, there was not a single reference to the concept of empathy. That’s because he was writing about the possibility that we know our own minds (or don’t know them) in the same manner and to the same extent that we know other minds. And there’s plenty of room for improvement all around.

I Think, Therefore I Am

Rene Descartes thought that we humans have privileged access to information about ourselves and that we can’t be wrong about what we perceive.

I know clearly that there is nothing that can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind.

This is still a pretty popular view of things, even though it is obviously incorrect. We most certainly can be wrong about ourselves, and we certainly can and do lack self-knowledge. (If that were not the case, there would be no need for the What Do You Want? course. Everyone would automatically know what they want.)

Another philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, had a different take:

The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.

So, from the perspective of what is known as the inferential view, we don’t need one explanation (privileged access) for how we know ourselves and another (Theory of Mind) for how we know others. Furthermore, the methods we employ to know—or not know—ourselves and others are the same methods we employ to know anything about anything else in the world. What are the implications? And what do you think some of those methods might be?

Another Threshold

I would like to be able to say (maybe) that I intended all along to get to this point, but I’ve simply been following the breadcrumb trail, and it has inexorably led to the threshold concept* that happens to be the focus of December’s Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain):

The brain generates a mental model of the world, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it.

Our mental models of the world, which circumscribe every aspect of our present experience, as well as what is possible for us to do and be, are not simply abstract concepts; they are encoded in the brain.

More next time on the impact a handful of threshold concepts might have on how we know ourselves or others.

*A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. —Jan Meyer and Ray Land, 5/4/03

You Feel Me?

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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…

Is Empathy Even a Thing?

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My post on theory of mind last week elicited several comments and some good discussions about empathy.

What do you think empathy is? How would you define it? Do you consider yourself to be empathetic? Do you think empathy is a personality trait? Can it be developed? Where does it come from to begin with? Can you tell if someone else is—or is being—empathetic? How? How does one express or demonstrate empathy? Are there different kinds of empathy? Is empathy always positive and/or constructive?

If you don’t have clear and immediate answers to these questions, you’re not alone. Neither do the people researching empathy nor the rest of us.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy

Not knowing what we’re talking about is a common trait of humans. So the lack of even a consensus agreement on what empathy is doesn’t stop anyone from studying it or making assertions about it.

What are the many ways researchers define empathy? Sometimes empathy is regarded as a trait of a person, meaning that some people have more or less of it as part of their personality. Sometimes, researchers are interested not in individual people’s characteristics but rather in their behaviors, particularly how they treat other people. A therapist might reflect back a client’s feelings with “I hear you saying you are feeling overwhelmed right now,” or someone might hug a distressed friend, and such behaviors might be considered demonstrations of empathy. Sometimes empathy is viewed as having certain emotional reactions, such as getting sad when someone else is sad. Sometimes it is the skill of being able to read other people’s emotions from their face, voice, or body language. Sometimes it’s taking another’s perspective by trying to imagine why they feel and act as they do. Sometimes empathy is a very broad notion that seems to be not too different from being a very nice, considerate person, while sometimes it is defined very narrowly, for example as the activation of certain brain areas when seeing someone being poked by a needle. —Judith A. Hall and Rachel Schwartz, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

My favorite dictionary’s definition of empathy is:

the ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual’s emotional state.

That’s a pretty good definition of theory of mind, which I’ve already expressed my opinion of. The secondary definition is more akin to what I think really passes for empathy:

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].

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert talks about a concept called presentism that makes it difficult for us to imagine feeling different from the way we’re feeling right now. In the context of affective forecasting, he’s referring to feeling different in the future. But the same principle applies in regard to empathy. We can’t actually know how someone else is feeling—or how they felt—about something. All we have are our own feelings. Is projecting them onto others—with all the assumptions that go along with that—really helpful?

Can You Relate?

There’s an anecdote I’ve told a number of times over the years of an incident that occurred when I was a child. The story, when I tell it straight, generates emotional responses in listeners: they imagine how they might feel in that situation. That’s all they can do. Almost no one can imagine how I felt, though, unless and until I describe my reactions. And even then they may be able to understand—if they know me, they can make the connection between the adult me and the child me—but most of them can’t relate.

Roger Schank (Tell Me a Story) says that understanding consists of the brain locating a similar personal story to the one being listened to and interpreting the other’s experience based on our own experience. He adds that if we don’t have a similar experience, we literally can’t understand the other person. (Also it’s System 1, the unconscious, that is locating what it considers a relevant story, and System 1 is far more interested in efficiency than accuracy.)

Are we better off assuming we get what’s going on with other people, when it’s more likely than not that we don’t, or might we actually make more headway in communicating, connecting, and solving problems by acknowledging that we really don’t know, but we want to, and then asking how we might be able to find out?

My clients tease me about writing a book titled Is That Even a Thing? I’m just going with the flow now.

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