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Is Empathy Even a Thing?

November 22, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

The Danger of a Single Story

April 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

This TED talk is very important and very moving. It made me think about and ask myself who are the people and what are the places I have a single story about?

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Stories matter. MANY stories matter.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie

Data’s Cat

February 27, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. –Muriel Rukeyser

There is a world of atoms (the physical world or so-called objective reality). But that’s not the world we inhabit. It isn’t even possible for us to inhabit that world—at least not directly.

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, Professor in Neuropsychology, University College London

And…

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. –David Eagleman, Incognito

The world we actually inhabit is made up of the stories we construct about the objects, events, and people in the physical world. Our stories are based on our impressions and perceptions of what’s out there. The problem is that we treat our impressions and perceptions—and the stories based on them—as if they are real and true.

The world of atoms constantly impacts us. And as it does, we are constantly interpreting, explaining, and assigning meaning to what happens. From moment-to-moment, we’re not aware of how much we don’t know, how much we’re missing, and how much high-speed processing our unconscious brain is doing to generate our impressions and perceptions.

We’re not robots or androids, nor would most of us choose to be. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lieutenant Commander Data was an android who inhabited the physical world and not the world of stories. He was superior to humans in a number of different ways. He didn’t make the kinds of mistakes people often make. Yet after spending time with humans, he opted to have an “emotion chip” installed so he could be more like us. He got a pet, an orange cat named Spot (who had no spots). There’s no logical reason to have a cat when you live on board a spaceship. Data’s cat signaled his entrance into the very human world of stories.

All of us, both individually and collectively, are driven to create and tell stories about our experience and then to believe that our stories represent reality. It’s how we make sense of life. The consequences can be amazing, amusing, or devastating. But whether our stories are good or bad, as long as we don’t recognize them for what they are, we’re imprisoned by them.

Fear of Cannibals

January 20, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

or, Learning How to Read Our Fears

Fear is one of the components of any significant transition, especially those made in midlife and later. At least the fear that accompanies these transitions seems to have a different flavor, maybe more urgency. But fear finds all of us at some point in our lives. We are human; therefore, we have fears. The question is, what do we do with or about them.

Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles, gave a TED talk in June 2012 called “What Our Fears Can Teach Us.”

As we grow up, we’re often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it’s no accident that we think this way. Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. So maybe that’s why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself.” Don’t worry,” we like to say to one another. “Don’t panic.” In English, fear is something we conquer. It’s something we fight. It’s something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?

She has an interesting premise, which is that if we look at our fears as stories, they might be able to teach us something.

Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? Because that’s really what fear is, if you think about it. It’s a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters.In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel….Fears also have suspense.

What Will Happen Next?

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.

Of all the possible things that could happen next, what fearful outcome(s) do you focus on? What’s your fear story? Walker’s TED talk centers around the 1819 sinking of the whaleship Essex more than 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile–an event that inspired parts of Moby Dick. The ship’s sailors had to make a decision about what to do–mainly which shore they should try to reach.

Walker quotes Vladimir Nabokov as saying that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments: the passion of an artist to get caught up in a story and the coolness of judgment to temper his or her intuitive reactions to it.

The sailors of the Essex, Walker says, had the artistic ability to vividly imagine many horrific outcomes–including being eaten by cannibals–but they were unable to apply the coolness of judgment to them. They were not adept at reading their own fear stories.

Reading Our Fears

Who or what are the cannibals in your imagination? Why are they so compelling? What is the likelihood they will actually “get” you? Does their specter swallow your attention and take it away from what actually needs attending to or from seeing things more clearly, more coolly?

Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature:a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing–the truth.

Watch/listen to the complete TED talk:

Everything Happens…

January 6, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Whenever I hear someone say that everything happens for a reason, I have to bite my tongue. The words are usually uttered either to comfort someone or to explain something that is very painful or difficult and often sudden. But I’ve never been sure how that’s supposed to work. Are we supposed to feel better because there was a reason for what happened? Are we supposed to be less devastated, injured, or cold and hungry (if we were to end up on the street, say)? I’d certainly want to know the reason why that happened.

But the point of the proverb is that we don’t or can’t know the reason, so we just have to trust that there is one. We are also supposed to believe that no matter how awful whatever it is is, it is in our best interest. Our long-term best interest, needless to say, since in the short-term it seems to be a monkey-wrench of major or minor proportion.

But reason implies intent on the part of someone or something—God or maybe the universe that is reputedly poised to align itself with our wishes. So God or the (sentient?) universe intentionally set this up as a means to some end. Since we aren’t privy to knowing why, we’ll just have to stumble along, suck it up Job-like, and wait for the outcome to be revealed.

In the meantime, we can try to wrest some meaning from it.

A Narrative Device?

Theological and philosophical minds much greater than mine have wrestled with this issue and arrived at their own conclusions. A simple explanation is this. Humans began making up stories to explain the world around them as soon as they had the language for it. It’s what we do. We crave explanation and certainty and the logical narrative structure that stories provide. Everything happens for a reason is merely a device for tying up those loose ends in the story that can’t otherwise be satisfactorily explained. Perhaps the reason will be revealed in the sequel.

All any of us can say with certainty is that everything that happens happens. Events we don’t expect may feel random, but there are plenty of here-and-now cause-and-effect explanations for most of what occurs. Those explanations may not be particularly satisfying, however. Bad things happen to good people. And it can be very difficult to come to terms with them when they do. Believing that everything happens for a reason might make someone feel less isolated and victimized and more hopeful that the terrible circumstance will eventually lead to a greater good.

It’s interesting, though, that we don’t use this expression or seek to find the deeper meaning when sudden and inexplicable good fortune befalls us. Shouldn’t the corollary be that unexpected happy events will eventually give rise to painful ones?

Maybe

Have you heard the Taoist story Maybe?

An old farmer worked his crops for many years. His horse ran away one day. His neighbors heard about this and came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said.

“Maybe,” replied the farmer.

The next morning, the farmer’s horse returned, bringing three other wild horses with it. “Wonderful!” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

The following day, the farmer’s son was trying to ride one of the wild horses but was thrown from it and broke his leg. The neighbors sympathized with the farmer’s misfortune.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The day after that, some military officials came to the farmer’s village to draft young men into the army. Since the farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they did not take him. The farmer’s neighbors congratulated him on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” he said.

Is this story implying there was a master plan in place that caused the farmer’s horse to run away, find and return with the wild horse the farmer’s son tried to ride but couldn’t, thereby breaking his leg and exempting himself from the military draft? Of course not.

The meaning of events is determined by the contexts within which they occur. As contexts change or are redefined, our interpretation of the meaning of events changes, too. We can count on the fact that contexts–and perspectives–will change. Does that mean that an event that seems disastrous today will look totally different down the road? Maybe.