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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.

A Brief “Reality” Check

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We all accept the reality presented to us.
–David Eagleman

If you’re a synesthete, your reality may differ considerably from consensus reality. In your reality, numbers and letters of the alphabet might have colors. And they might have personalities. Or maybe you can see sounds or taste words.

It used to be thought that synesthesia was a rare condition, but it now appears to be present in at least 4% of the population and likely has a genetic trigger.

David Eagleman, who studies synesthesia (because of course he does) thinks non-synesthetes may have synesthetic correspondences in the brain but just aren’t aware of them. For example, people tend to think louder tones are brighter than soft tones and that dark liquids have stronger smells than lighter ones.

One of the shapes on the right is named “bouba” and the other is named “kiki.” Which do you think is which?

Some synesthetes consider the condition to be uncomfortable, some consider it a gift, and still others don’t even know they have it. Remember that experience is reality. At least it’s the only reality we have access to. So if your brain connects the color purple with the letter J, then J is purple. Consider the implications.

If you do or you don’t automatically associate colors with numbers and letters, are you creating that reality? Yes. Do you have any control over that reality you’re creating? No.

You operate within a host of biological constraints, many of which you share with all humans, others of which you share with various groups of them. You also operate within cultural constraints and the constraints of your own temperament, knowledge, and experience.

All of these constraints, which are part of your mental model of the world, conspire to determine what you perceive of the world “out there.” Your brain gives rise to (creates) your experience by matching streams of electrical impulses with prior experience, expectations, or beliefs about the way the world is. As a result, you are actively looking for certain things that you predict you will find so you will know how to respond.

Our experienced world comes from the inside out, not just the outside in.
–Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex

Anticipation or Apprehension?

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In his bestselling book Behave, Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsy says that anticipation requires learning. (That appears to be more the case for some personality types than others, but casual observation suggests that quite a few people have some degree of difficulty with anticipation.)

I think the learning needs to begin with making a distinction between anticipation and expectation, two states that are oriented toward a future event and tend to be used interchangeably, thus muddying the waters considerably.

Expectation is the sense that something is about to happen. We can expect positive, negative, or neutral things to occur. The unconscious part of our brain, System 1, is continuously predicting the immediate future so it can determine what actions we should take next, and those predictions sometimes give rise to conscious, System 2, expectations. Of course sometimes the predictions bypass consciousness and go directly to motor neurons that control movement.

For our purposes, it makes sense to view expectation as essentially a functional process.

Anticipation, on the other hand, is a feeling of excitement and pleasure about something we expect will occur, especially in the near future.

The opposite of anticipation would be apprehension, also a feeling, but one of fear, anxiety, unease—even dread—about something we expect will occur in the future.

Anticipation is associated with excitement; apprehension is associated with anxiety. While excitement has positive connotations and anxiety has negative connotations, these two states are not as different from each other as they might appear. In fact, the difference is primarily a matter of interpretation.

Name that Emotion!

Both excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states with similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. Certainly context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) contributes to our interpretation of it. But some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

So the first thing to focus on in learning how to anticipate is your experience of this emotional state and your interpretation of it.

Central to both experience and interpretation is the concept of emotional granularity, which means putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. But as psychology professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who coined the term, says:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely. 

The more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing circumstances to determine the most appropriate response. The payoff for the brain (System 1) is efficiency. The payoffs for us (System 2) are numerous, including more nuanced interpretations of our feeling states, greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making.

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

How does the brain figure out what any collection of bodily sensations means? Most likely it does the same thing with internal sensations that it does with external sensations: it makes something up, i.e. it constructs. The brain is continually constructing our experience in—and of—the world based on our mental model, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and what it all means.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. —Lisa Feldman Barrett

Although we operate under an assumption that emotions have some sort of independent existence and are “triggered” by events and experiences, this does not appear to be the case. The brain, which always goes for the path of least resistance, is merely making the easiest and fastest interpretation it can make so it can determine what action to take. We are not passive experiencers of our emotions even though we may believe ourselves to be. In actuality, the more often we interpret a set of bodily sensations as a particular emotion, the likelier we are to keep interpreting it that way.

Get Granular

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. In addition to her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett has a great article and TED talk on how to increase emotional granularity, which I highly recommend.

But as a quick example of the concept, here’s an excerpt from a 2018 article in lucidwaking that involves moving from the non-granular general feeling bad to the first distinction of angry/mad (as opposed to sad or anxious, for example), and then fine-tuning that feeling to a permutation of angry/mad, such as:

resistant … belligerent … offended … agitated …  indignant … resentful … irritated … furious … cranky … annoyed … perturbed … enraged … hostile … huffy … wrathful

You can also check out this feeling vocabulary chart to train yourself to detect more nuanced emotions.

The bottom line is that you aren’t entirely at the effect of your brain’s habitual interpretations of your emotional state. Sometimes apprehension is an apt emotional interpretation of a situation or set of circumstances. But if apprehension is always your interpretation of that set of sensations, you are letting your brain off easy, which may feel comforting but limits your options and your possibilities. (Bad brain!)

OK, one more post on anticipation and delayed gratification.View the previous two posts here and here.

Randomness Does Not Compute

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Have you noticed that the brain has an answer for almost everything? Not only does it work overtime to predict what’s going to happen next, it works nearly as hard to explain what happened after the fact.

The associative machinery of the brain seeks causes.

When something unexpected occurs, the brain tries to explain it and incorporate that explanation into our mental model. Random acts or events, however, are impossible to anticipate and account for.

A random act or event is one that is governed by or dependent upon chance.

Synonyms are: stray, accidental, arbitrary, indiscriminate, haphazard, unplanned, fortuitous, aimless, desultory, hit or miss, unpremeditated, purposeless, adventitious, chance, unintentional, and unexpected.

We’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. … In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

After the fact, everything seems inevitable. After the fact, the past appears coherent as a result of our storytelling mind imposing order on it. After the fact, we have a sense of having had far more control over the direction of our lives than we actually had. But a story is still a story, and there’s no such thing as a “true story.”

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was.  —Robert Todd Carroll, The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary

The brain makes post-hoc dot connections.

It’s not surprising that when the brain looks back, it can construct a neat cause-and-effect explanation for an event that was not expected. The hindsight bias helps all of us maintain the illusion of control by seeming to eliminate randomness. But it’s only possible to clearly and accurately separate the signals from the noise—and connect the dots—after an event has occurred and the outcome is known. Even then, our explanations are going to be coming from our brain, which means our experiences, our point of view, our beliefs, and our biases.

Our brain looks for patterns in order to explain unexpected events so it will be better prepared to predict and respond to them the next time they occur. But no matter how good it may be at figuring out and responding to a single unexpected event that has occurred, it will never be able to predict truly random events.

The question is would you want it to?

Can you recognize a random act and accept it as such or are you more comfortable having an explanation for it even if that explanation isn’t true?

The photo at the top of the post is from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has been trying to decide how to kill off the main character in her novel. She finally figures it out when she notices an apple fall onto the sidewalk and roll away.

Conspiracy: Making Distinctions

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While the brain is quite good at categorizing, it is not very adept at making distinctions. (Much like the human brain, neither is Google.)

We encounter this problem in the area of personality or temperament. Just because behavior X is a characteristic of a particular group of people doesn’t mean that every individual in that group will demonstrate behavior X. Believing that everyone in a group demonstrates all of the same characteristics is the basis of stereotyping.

So the problem also routinely arises in regard to ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, age, and political preference, among others.

Categorizing is an automatic System 1 (unconscious) process. Distinguishing is a System 2 (conscious) process that requires intention, attention, and effort. Categorizing is easy; confirmation bias makes it feel right. Eventually tracks are laid down in the brain that carry us along effortlessly. We have no reason to question our perception. Distinguishing is hard and generates cognitive dissonance, which does not feel good.

Making distinctions after those tracks have been laid down in the brain is called change. Changing our perception of another person or group of people may alter our perception of ourselves, as well. Our sense of self is a construct; our beliefs are one of the things that contribute to that construct. And our brain takes our sense of self very seriously. Changing a belief, therefore, is not a small matter.

What Is Up with Conspiracists?

All of that is by way of getting to some recent thoughts about conspiracy theories currently being floated and about those who have bought into them so completely that they see “evidence” for them everywhere. These people appear to be living in a very different world than I’m living in. If I didn’t already know something about the extent to which we create our own reality, I would have concluded either they are delusional or I am.

But I know that our brains do not allow us to experience reality first-hand or directly. We have to be trained even to be able to see what’s out there. So while there are no doubt extreme conspiracy theorists who are—or border on being—delusional, most of them are simply processing the world differently from the way I process it. And that interests me.

When I started exploring the subject from a psycho-social, neurological, philosophical, and historical perspective, I accessed a few resources I already had. And then I turned to Google, which does a great job of categorizing everything related to conspiracy, but is absolutely abysmal at distinguishing between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.

They are definitely not the same thing. Conspiracies do exist. Conspiracy theories are speculations. Furthermore, the word theory has a broad definition. A conspiracy theory is not the equivalent of a scientific theory, which is the result of research, evidence, and consensus. Good scientists modify or even abandon their theories when new information is uncovered. Conspiracists either reject conflicting information out of hand or expand the theory to incorporate it. More importantly, scientific theories are falsifiable; conspiracy theories are not.

Understanding the Concepts

Here are some definitions (from freedictionary.com):

Conspiracy: (1) an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, (2) an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action, (3) a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

Examples of conspiracies: Watergate, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis

Conspiracy Theory: a theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act.

Examples of conspiracy theories: JFK’s Assassination (various), Moon Landing (didn’t happen), Illuminati (alien shapeshifters who run the world)

Looking for Answers

Some of the questions I’m hoping to answer for myself include:

  • Who believes conspiracy theories? Are some people more temperamentally inclined to believe them than others?
  • If a large percentage of a population believes in conspiracy theories, does that have an effect on actual conspiracies (committing or uncovering them, for example)?
  • What’s going on in the brains of conspiracists vs. non-conspiracists?
  • Are different groups of people more inclined to believe particular conspiracy theories than others—and does it matter?
  • How do conspiracy theories affect real-world outcomes?
  • How can we distinguish possible from highly improbable conspiracies?

I’ll share what I learn. I’m compiling some useful articles on the topic that I will eventually put into a shareable format for anyone who is interested.

I believe this is a timely subject that bridges brain, behavior, and change. And I hope that exploring it may lead to some measure of understanding. We could surely use more of that in our troubled world. What do you think?

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joycelyn@farthertogo.com
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