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Know Thyself (or Not)

December 6, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

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?

November 29, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

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?

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.

Theory of Mind:
Less than Meets the Eye

November 15, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In his second book, Brain Changer (which you don’t need to read), David DiSalvo, who also wrote What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (which you should read), says:

Humans are mind-synced in ways we never realized.

Yes, this is true. It is also true, contradictory though it may be, that we believe we are far more mind-synced than we actually are. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that because we intuit some things about others correctly, we assume that most or all of the rest of our intuitions about them are also correct. As far as this second part goes, we are bound to be wrong—often surprisingly and significantly wrong. (And, no, predicting what someone else might do in a particular circumstance isn’t the same thing as understanding why they’re doing it.)

Theory of mind refers to the ability or tendency to attribute mental states to ourselves and others. It’s pretty straightforward. (1) We attempt to determine our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations. (2) We do the same for others. (3) And we distinguish ours from theirs.

Clueless

One of the six actual needs we humans have is other people. So it makes sense that we would have a capacity to understand others. But after my numerous decades of life on this planet—observing myself and others, mostly with dismay—one thing I have learned is that we are relatively clueless about our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations.

That makes determining what others are feeling or where they are coming from clueless squared. At a minimum. And although we are pretty good at distinguishing our own selves from other selves, we suck at imagining that other people might legitimately have completely different perspectives and reactions than ours. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be so easily confounded by their actions and reactions.

The conscious part of the brain prefers to avoid expending mental effort and energy on critical thinking. So it leaves most of the driving, and the heavy lifting, to the unconscious part, which excels at generalizing and extrapolating from personal and/or incomplete information.

What’s So for Everyone

Of course there are things that do apply to all of us.

We all have the same functional brain networks.
We are all motivated by the brain’s reward system.
We all view and experience the world through a mental model of it.
We are all at the effect of various cognitive biases.

These facts tell us something about who we are, but they don’t help us understand each other as much as the specifics—or the differences—do.

What’s So for You (vs. Me)

For example:

We don’t access the functional brain networks exactly the same way or to the same extent.
We don’t have identical neural pathways or find the same things rewarding.
Our mental models differ based on our temperament, experiences, beliefs, etc.
We are more prone to some cognitive biases than to others.

So What?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach or explanation when it comes to the specifics (what’s so for you vs. what’s so for me). That’s why when social psychologists claim that “situations” determine behavior more than personality does, I call b.s. And that’s why when systems thinkers claim that one person will react pretty much like any other person within a given system, I also call b.s. (It isn’t that situations and systems have no effect on behavior, but you and I are unlikely to be affected identically because we are not identical to begin with.)

More importantly, that’s why we need to become less clueless about how we operate, so that we can then become more intentional in our own lives and less clueless about how other people operate. At least, that is, if we’d like to make some progress in upping our own game or finding solutions to any of the significant global problems we face. As long as we continue operating under the assumption that we have more clues than we do about ourselves and others, we’re likely to continue getting the results we’re getting now.