Late morning. You returned from the
park. Carol walked about two miles and you walked over one. Yesterday it was
about the same at this time of day. – Amorella
1117 hours. I took a pain pill
earlier. It has been awhile. The pill helped but not much. These are the six-hour
pills I have left from after the carpel tunnel operations. It is another
beautiful Fall day.
Three-fourths the way through the walk you
sat on a bench overlooking the larger lake, sat quietly and thought – ‘I am the
trees’. The concept was enlarging-in-the-moment. – Amorella
1123 hours. I was not going to mention
it because it was not a real transcendental moment – a real one would not have
been conscious brought. I have been trees before. I gain a consciousness of a
momentary multitude of roots and limbs – earth to sky, so to speak, and I lose
the other particulars of humanity. Sounds silly now, but in the moment I feel
closer to the natural order of how life is for much of life on the planet. Humanity
rises up quickly shuffling the simplicity out of the way for complex matters.
Nature is not tranquil but our species is alien here; that’s my observation. Others
have their own viewpoints. I don’t think humanity makes much difference when
you have roots and limbs as well as earth, sun and water. Roots and limbs grow
until they don’t, it is pretty much that simple. No need to shout about it
either. (1133)
Post, with ‘no need to shout’ as the
headliner. – Amorella
You had Papa John’s for supper after
running several errands while Carol was working on washing clothes and cleaning
up as Jill K. is coming tomorrow to clean. Carol has breakfast with several of
her retired Blue Ash colleagues. You watched NBC News, the first episode of the
new season of “Manhattan” and “NCIS”.
2156 hours. I love “Manhattan”. I
thought of the tone of Kafka’s The
Trial in tonight’s episode.
** **
The Trial
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This
article is about the novel by Kafka.
The Trial (original
German title: Der Process, later Der Prozess, Der Proceß
and Der Prozeß) is a novel written by Franz Kafka from 1914 to 1915 and
published in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of a man
arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of
his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by
Dostoevsky’ Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went
so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's other novels, The
Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter, which brings
the story to an end.
After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary
executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The
original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am
Neckar, Germany. The first English language translation, by Willa and Edwin
Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century and as
No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Plot
On his
thirtieth birthday, the chief financial officer of a bank, Josef K., is
unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for
an unspecified crime. The agents' boss later arrives and holds a mini-tribunal
in the room of K.'s neighbor, Fräulein Bürstner. K. is not taken away, however,
but left "free" and told to await instructions from the Committee of
Affairs. He goes to work, and that night apologizes to Fräulein Bürstner for
the intrusion into her room. At the end of the conversation he suddenly kisses
her.
K.
receives a phone call summoning him to court, and the coming Sunday is arranged
as the date. No time is set, but the address is given to him. The address turns
out to be a huge tenement building.
K. has
to explore to find the court, which turns out to be in the attic. The room is
airless, shabby, and crowded, and although he has no idea what he is charged
with, or what authorizes the process, K. makes a long speech denigrating the
whole process, including the agents who arrested him; during this speech an
attendant's wife and a man engage in sexual activities. K. then returns home.
K. later
goes to visit the court again, although he has not been summoned, and finds
that it is not in session. He instead talks with the attendant's wife, who
attempts to seduce him into taking her away, and who gives him more information
about the process and offers to help him. K. later goes with the attendant to a
higher level of the attic where the shabby and airless offices of the court are
housed.
K.
returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in
with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing
his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to
be in league with Montag.
Later,
in a store room at his own bank, K. discovers the two agents who arrested him
being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes and as a result of
complaints K. made at court. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that
the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he
returns to the storeroom and is shocked to find everything as he had found it
the day before, including the whipper and the two agents.
K. is
visited by his uncle, who was K.'s guardian. The uncle seems distressed by K.'s
predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned that K. is
underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K. to a
lawyer, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K.'s uncle suspects is the advocate's
mistress. During the discussion it becomes clear how different this process is
from regular legal proceedings: guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is
vast with many levels, and everything is secret, from the charge, to the rules
of the court, to the authority behind the courts – even the identity of the
judges at the higher levels. The attorney tells him that he can prepare a brief
for K., but since the charge is unknown and the rules are unknown, it is
difficult work. It also never may be read, but is still very important. The
lawyer says that his most important task is to deal with powerful court
officials behind the scenes. As they talk, the lawyer reveals that the Chief
Clerk of the Court has been sitting hidden in the darkness of a corner. The
Chief Clerk emerges to join the conversation, but K. is called away by Leni,
who takes him to the next room, where she offers to help him and seduces him.
They have a sexual encounter. Afterwards K. meets his uncle outside, who is
angry, claiming that K.'s lack of respect has hurt K.'s case.
K.
visits the lawyer several times. The lawyer tells him incessantly how dire his
situation is and tells many stories of other hopeless clients and of his
behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of these clients, and brags about his many
connections. The brief is never complete. K.'s work at the bank deteriorates as
he is consumed with worry about his case.
K. is
surprised by one of his bank clients, who tells K. that he is aware that K. is
dealing with a trial. The client learned of K.'s case from Titorelli, a
painter, who has dealings with the court and told the client about K.'s case.
The client advises K. to go to Titorelli for advice. Titorelli lives in the
attic of a tenement in a suburb on the opposite side of town from the court
that K. visited. Three teenage girls taunt K. on the steps and tease him
sexually. Titorelli turns out to be an official painter of portraits for the
court – an inherited position – and has a deep understanding of the process. K.
learns that, to Titorelli's knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been
acquitted. He sets out K.'s options and offers to help K. with either. The
options are: obtain a provisional verdict of innocence from the lower court,
which can be overturned at any time by higher levels of the court, which would
lead to re-initiation of the process; or curry favor with the lower judges to
keep the process moving at a glacial pace. Titorelli has K. leave through a
small back door, as the girls are blocking the door through which K. entered.
To K.'s shock, the door opens into another warren of the court's offices –
again shabby and airless.
K.
decides to take control of matters himself and visits his lawyer with the
intention of dismissing him. At the lawyer's office he meets a downtrodden
individual, Block, a client who offers K. some insight from a client's
perspective. Block's case has continued for five years and he has gone from
being a successful businessman to being almost bankrupt and is virtually
enslaved by his dependence on the lawyer and Leni, with whom he appears to be
sexually involved. The lawyer mocks Block in front of K. for his dog-like
subservience. This experience further poisons K.'s opinion of his lawyer. (This
chapter was left unfinished by the author.)
K. is
asked by the bank to show an Italian client around local places of cultural
interest, but the Italian client, short of time, asks K. to take him only to
the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client does not show up,
K. explores the cathedral, which is empty except for an old woman and a church
official. K. notices a priest who seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a
small second pulpit, and K. begins to leave, lest it begin and K. be compelled
to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K.'s
name. K. approaches the pulpit and the priest berates him for his attitude
toward the trial and for seeking help, especially from women. K. asks him to
come down and the two men walk inside the cathedral. The priest works for the
court as a chaplain and tells K. a fable (which was published earlier as "Before
the Law") that is meant to explain his situation. K. and the priest
discuss the parable. The priest tells K. that the parable is an ancient text of
the court, and many generations of court officials have interpreted it
differently.
On the eve of K.'s thirty-first birthday, two men
arrive at his apartment. He has been waiting for them, and he offers little
resistance – indeed the two men take direction from K. as they walk through
town. K. leads them to a quarry where the two men place K's head on a discarded
block. One of the men produces a double-edged butcher knife, and as the two men
pass it back and forth between them, the narrator tells us that "K. knew
then precisely, that it would have been his duty to take the knife...and thrust
it into himself." He does not take the knife. One of the men holds his
shoulder and pulls him up and the other man stabs him in the heart and twists
the knife twice. K.'s last words are: "Like a dog!"
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
** **
2213
hours. I remember my Uncle Ernie and Aunt Patsy telling me I had to read this
book sometime during my extended college career. It was during the mid-sixties
from what I remember.
2221
hours. On another note. The Edge article arrived today. Empathy is an
interesting subject. I like to think it is important in lifting our humanity.
This article has other things to say about empathy too. It is usually good to
see another’s point of view. If it is unsettling, that’s a good thing too
because then you learn something about your own private nature. Well, that’s
how I see it. - rho
** **
From – EdgeDOTcom:
Choosing
Empathy
A
Conversation With Jamil Zaki
If
you believe that you can harness empathy and make choices about when to
experience it versus when not to, it adds a layer of responsibility to how you
engage with other people. If you feel like you're powerless to control your
empathy, you might be satisfied with whatever biases and limits you have on it.
You might be okay with not caring about someone just because they're different
from you. I want people to not feel safe empathizing in the way that they
always have. I want them to understand that they're doing something deliberate
when they connect with someone, and I want them to own that responsibility.
JAMIL
ZAKI is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and the
director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.
CHOOSING
EMPATHY
I've
been thinking an enormous amount about a puzzle concerning how empathy works.
Before describing it, I should make sure that we're on the same page about what
empathy is. To me, empathy is a useful umbrella term that captures at least
three distinct but related processes through which one person responds to
another person's emotions.
Let's
say that I run into you and you are highly distressed. A bunch of things might
happen to me. One, I might "catch" your emotion and vicariously
take on the same state that I see in you; that's what I would call experience
sharing. Two, I might think about how you feel and why you feel the way you do.
That type of explicit consideration of the world as someone else sees it is
what I would call mentalizing. Three, I might develop concern for your state,
and feel motivated to help you feel better; that is what people these days
call compassion, also known as empathic concern.
It
often seems like these processes—sharing someone's emotions, thinking about
their emotions, and wanting to improve their emotional state—should always go
together, but they split apart in all sorts of interesting ways. For instance,
people with psychopathy are often able to understand what you feel, but feel no
concern for your emotions, and thus can leverage their understanding to
manipulate and even harm you.
I
spent several years early in my career thinking about these empathic processes
and how they interact with each other, but in the last couple of years, I've
zoomed out. I've stopped thinking as much about the "pieces" that
make up empathy and started thinking about why and when people empathize in the
first place. This is where the puzzle comes in, because there are two different
narratives that you might hear about how empathy works. They're both compelling
and very well supported, and they're pretty much entirely contradictory with
each other, at least at first blush.
The
first narrative is that empathy is automatic. This goes all the way back to
Adam Smith, who, to me, generated the first modern account of empathy in his
beautiful book, The
Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Smith described what he called the "fellow-feeling," through which
people take on each other's states—very similar to what I would call experience
sharing.
His
most famous example of this is a crowd watching a tightrope walker. Smith said
that the crowd would become nervous watching this person wobble over a
precipice. Their palms would start to sweat, they'd balance and move their own
bodies as though they were trying to survive the tightrope even though they
were on relatively solid ground. Smith was adamant that this was something that
people could not control, it just happened to them.
That
view dominates current theory about empathy, and not without reason. It
certainly jibes with our intuition that we can't control our feeling of
empathy. If I were to ask you to imagine watching someone suffer a horrendous
sports injury, you probably wouldn’t think, "Well, I'd figure out how much
empathy I want to feel in this moment." You'd probably predict that a wave
of discomfort and empathy would just wash over you. There is lots of evidence
that is what happens. People take on each other's facial expressions within a
fraction of a second of seeing someone else pose an expression, even if they're
not aware that they're doing it. This type of imitation happens quite early in
the development. Babies, in the first weeks of their lives, will cry when they
hear another infant crying. This type of sharing is probably evolutionarily old
as well. Mice, who don't have the same cognitive firepower that we do, appear
to take on each other's states.
My
lab has been interested in another signature of empathy, which is what we call
neural resonance. This is something you can capture using techniques like fMRI:
When I see you experience some state—make a movement, feel pain, or exhibit
some emotion—my brain generates a pattern of activity consistent with what
you're experiencing, not with what I'm experiencing. It's as though my brain
rehearses your experience for me so that I can understand it implicitly. We,
and lots of other folks, have demonstrated that this happens, even absent any
instruction to empathize and even when you distract people. This suggests that
even this neural signature empathy might be occurring outside of our awareness
or control.
That's
one narrative, that empathy is automatic, and again, it’s compelling—backed by
lots of evidence. But if you believe that empathy always
occurs automatically, you run into a freight train of evidence to the contrary.
As many of us know, there are lots of instances in which people could feel
empathy, but don't. The prototype case here is intergroup settings. People who
are divided by a war, or a political issue, or even a sports rivalry, often
experience a collapse of their empathy. In many cases, these folks feel apathy
for others on the other side of a group boundary. They fail to share, or think
about, or feel concern for those other people's emotions.
In
other cases, it gets even worse: people feel overt antipathy towards others,
for instance, taking pleasure when some misfortune befalls someone on the other
side of a group boundary. What's interesting to me is that this occurs not only
for group boundaries that are meaningful, like ethnicity or religion, but
totally arbitrary groups. If I were to divide us into a red and blue team,
without that taking on any more significance, you would be more likely to
experience empathy for fellow red team members than for me (apparently I'm on
team blue today).
Another
interesting feature of this group-boundedness of empathy is that it doesn't
just affect the amount of empathy we feel, it also affects whether we feel
empathy automatically or not. Scientists have used EEG, for instance, to
demonstrate that folks exhibit less neural resonance for the pain of outgroup
as compared to ingroup members, and that difference appears within 200
milliseconds. It's not that you experience automatic empathy and tamp it down
if you're in an intergroup setting; it seems like in those contexts empathy
doesn't occur at all.
You've
got these two narratives. On the one hand, empathy appears automatic. On the
other hand, it diminishes and expands with features of your situation. How can
we square these two accounts? That's what I've been asking myself a lot these
days, and I feel as though I've arrived, at least preliminarily, at an answer:
we can resolve the tension between those narratives by letting go of some
assumptions about how empathy works. In particular, the idea that empathy is
out of our control.
Lately,
I've begun thinking about empathy not as something that happens to us, but
rather as a choice that we make, even if we're not aware we're making it. We
often make an implicit or explicit decision as to whether we want to engage
with someone's emotions or not, based on the motives we might have for doing
so.
Let
me try to unpack this. Let's say that you're watching TV and you learn that the
next thing coming on the station you're watching is a telethon meant to raise
awareness of leukemia, and this will include kids who are suffering from
leukemia telling their story. I bet you would predict, rightly, that watching
this telethon would cause lots of empathy to bubble up within you. Do you stick
to the channel and watch it, or do you turn away?
There
are lots of motives you might have for watching. For one, you might be curious
about the plight of folks living with leukemia. You might even feel that it's
your moral responsibility to find out more about this group. You might also
imagine that you'll be inspired to donate money to this cause, and that would
make you feel good, as though you're living in accordance with your virtues and
principles.
There
might also be reasons that you don't want to watch this telethon. For one, it
might hurt. It would probably be heart wrenching to hear these stories. It
might also make you experience guilt, especially if after watching this you
choose not to donate. If you're strapped for cash, you might feel as though
empathy will place you in a double bind, where you have to choose between your
wallet on the one hand and your conscience on the other.
Those
might be situations you want to avoid, by avoiding empathy in the first place.
I use the terms empathic approach motives and empathic avoidance motives to
describe drives that push people towards and away from other people's emotions.
People carry those motives out in lots of different ways. For instance, if I
don't want to empathize with you, one strategy is I can just avoid you
altogether. People often avoid situations that they think will inspire empathy
in them. I can also simply not pay attention to your emotions, or decide
through some appraisal process that your emotions are not important, or at
least less important than my own.
Over
the last couple of years, I've gathered evidence in support of a motivated view
of empathy. For instance, when it comes to avoiding empathy, we can go to the
example I just mentioned. You might be worried that empathy will cause you to
feel guilty or morally obliged to part with some of your money. It might be a
costly emotion.
It
turns out that Dan Batson, about twenty years ago, ran a beautiful study in
which he demonstrated this in a simple experiment. He told some people that
they'd have a chance to donate to a homeless person, and he told other people
that they'd have no such opportunity. He then asked people which of two appeals
they wanted to hear: one objective story about this person's life, and another
that was emotionally evocative. It turns out that people who thought they'd
have a chance to donate tended to choose the emotionally neutral version of the
story, consistent with the idea that they want to avoid experiencing empathy.
Another
reason you might not want to experience empathy is if you're in the position
where you have to harm somebody. Let's say that you're a linebacker, for
instance, and you have to deliver a vicious tackle to a running back. It
probably would behoove you to not feel everything that that person is feeling
and think a lot about their emotions or the pain you're causing them. This
happens in much darker contexts, of course.
In
war, soldiers are explicitly encouraged to dehumanize their enemy, to make it
less guilt inducing when they have to harm those people. This is what my
colleague Al Bandura would call a moral disengagement. Al and his colleagues a
few years ago demonstrated this in a very interesting and, to me, troubling
way. They found that prison guards, especially executioners, tended to downplay
the suffering of death row inmates consistent with their motive to do so and
avoid guilt at their own actions. You see this all the time in modern warfare.
Drone strikes, for instance, are a great way to avoid empathizing with the
targets of an attack.
Like
I said, people are not just motivated to avoid empathy. People approach empathy
as well. One example of this is loneliness. People who are lonely feel a deep
desire to connect with others, and in many cases they do so by ramping up their
empathy and focusing more on other people's minds and experiences.
Jon
Maner and Adam Waytz and others have demonstrated that if you induce someone to
be lonely, they'll pay more attention to other people's minds, connect more with
their emotions. They'll even pay attention to minds that are not there. For
instance, anthropomorphizing objects like robots. We see this to an extreme
degree in the movie Cast
Away, where Tom
Hanks is so lonely that he anthropomorphizes and empathizes with a volleyball,
Wilson, and thinks a lot about a mind that he imagines to be there but is
actually not.
Another
reason you might want to empathize is when it's socially desirable to do so. If
you learn that people around you value empathy, you might be encouraged to
experience empathy yourself. One of my favorite studies on this works over the
concept of gender roles in empathy. Thomas and Maio, seven or eight years
ago, ran a study in which they started out by demonstrating that on a standard
empathy test heterosexual men fared a little bit worse than women. This of
course plays into the stereotype that women are more empathic than men, but the
reason I like this study so much is because Thomas and Maio demonstrated
that this is not a constitutional difference in the abilities of men, but
probably instead represents a difference in their motivation. In a second
study, these scientists convinced men that women find sensitive guys
attractive, and it turns out that this motivation eliminated the gender gap in
empathy performance. Straight man who believed that being empathic would make
them attractive became more empathic, consistent with this motivated account
under which people choose to approach or avoid empathy depending on their goals
in a given situation.
What
is empathy, and where does it come from in our intellectual landscape? The
term, empathy, [was] generated by German aesthetic philosophers. The term in
German is Einfühlung, which is when you "feel yourself into" an art
object. The term originates from Theodor Lipps, following Robert Vischer,
another aesthetic philosopher. They both believed that the way we make contact
with art is not by assessing its qualities in an objective sense, but by
feeling into it, by projecting ourselves emotionally into a work. That was
translated into English 106 years ago by Titchener, into the word empathy.
It's
funny, if you use Google "engram," to examine the popularity of the
term empathy, it looks like it's got a hydraulic relationship with another
word: sympathy. Sympathy used to be much more popular. It has declined in
popularity, and empathy has risen in popularity at the same time. It's a
meaningful distinction between these two things. To my mind, sympathy is a more
detached form of pity that you might have for someone suffering, whereas
empathy requires a lot more emotional investment.
Empathy
is expensive, psychologically. It costs a lot to empathize with someone, and
there are many cases in which you might not want to do so. Scarcity is one
thing that drives empathy down, stress is another. This is why they say that
virtues are easier to abide on a full stomach. Empathy is, as well. If you are
worried about survival and the well-being of yourself and your closest kin—your
family—it's much harder to extend the "diameter" of your empathy to
larger social groups. Steve Pinker talks about this in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Peter Singer also talks about this in The Expanding Circle,
the idea that maybe we can again expand the diameter of our concern for others,
and maybe we have over the last decades. Even within one person's life, within
a moment in time, there are many factors that might drive you to feel empathy
or not.
The
costs of empathy include when it's painful, but also the responsibility that it
places on people. If you empathize with someone, it's hard to compete with
them. If you empathize with nonhuman animals, it's difficult to consume them.
There is a moral responsibility that comes with an experience of empathy,
especially if you want to continue being an emotionally authentic person.
It
does seem as though the social norms surrounding empathy have shifted. That's
important, because if you view empathy not as a fixed quality of who we are—something
that just happens automatically—but instead view it as something that we
choose, then cultural landscapes should shape our individual emotional
landscapes. We live in a more empathy-positive time than the past. People value
warmth towards others and care for others as part of what it means to be a good
person, now more than ever. That can make big changes in the way that people
experience empathy.
Erik
Nook and I along with our colleagues, ran a study recently where we saw whether
conformity can generate empathy in people. If you believe that others around
you value empathy, are you more likely to value it yourself? We found that
people were. If we convinced folks that their peers experience lots of empathy,
then our participants themselves reported more empathy and acted more kindly
towards strangers, even if those strangers belonged to stigmatized outgroups.
We think that a changing tide in our culture can change the way that people choose
to engage with empathy.
Obama
is probably the most empathy-focused President—or at least the President who
uses the term the most—I’ve seen in my lifetime. He often talks about there
being an empathy deficit, and says that one of the ways that we need to improve
our society and the fabric of our society, is by increasing our empathy. I bet
there are a lot of people who would disagree with that as a policy for running
a state. You saw this when Obama appointed Sotomayor as a Supreme
Court justice and said this is a woman who has great empathy for the plight of
many people. Well, that statement was vilified. He was pilloried for saying
that, and people felt as though empathy is one of the worst features that you
could select for when thinking about policy, when thinking about law, when
thinking about government, because empathy is an emotion subject to all sorts
of irrational biases. Justice should be blind, and presumably emotionally
neutral.
You
see this a lot in a movement that's taken hold recently. Paul Bloom and a set
of other psychologists have made what I think is a great and very interesting
case that empathy is overrated, especially as a moral compass. Their view is
that empathy generates kind and moral behaviors, but in fundamentally skewed
ways, for instance, only towards members of your own group and not in ways that
maximize well-being across the largest number of people. On this account,
empathy is an inflexible emotional engine for driving moral behavior and if you
want to do the right thing, you should focus on more objective principles to
guide your decision-making.
That's
a great argument. It's not one that I agree with. It follows from somewhat of
an incomplete view of what empathy is. If you believe that empathy is automatic
and either just happens to you or doesn't, then sure, the biases that
characterize empathy are inescapable and will always govern empathic
decision-making. If you instead view empathy as something that people can control,
then people can choose to align their empathy more with their values.
Empathy
has a long tradition in lots of different fields. In philosophy, you've got
Edith Stein, for instance, a nun who wrote beautifully about empathy. Also,
Martin Buber—I and Thou is a beautiful book about how people connect
with each other and share each other's experience.
Within
psychology, the study of empathy has an equally long history, and one that's
got a lot of players in it. For my money, the most powerful research
on empathy in the 20th century comes from Dan Batson, who's for decades
demonstrated the power of emotional connection to drive people to helping each
other—thinking about empathy as an engine for promoting cooperation and
altruism.
The
APA recently discovered that a set of psychologists had aided and abetted in a
program of enhanced interrogation, hugely controversial and enormously
problematic. It's so horrific to think about psychology being used in this way,
but you can imagine how that works.
I
mentioned earlier that individuals with psychopathy can understand what people
feel, but they use that understanding not to improve other people's states, but
sometimes to worsen their states. In a perverse way, the torturer needs to
engage with at least some forms of empathy in order to do their job
effectively. They need to know how to push someone's buttons, how to generate
as much distress as they can. This is the dark side of empathy.
There
is a dark side of empathy, especially when you experience one piece of empathy
without the others. Understanding someone, having emotional intelligence, might
just make you a better manipulator, if you're so inclined.
Viewing
empathy as a choice helps us understand the basic nature of empathy, why and
when people empathize and why and when they don't. It is more powerful than
that, because it can also help us address what Mina Cikara and I have called
empathic failures, cases in which people don't empathize, and that generates
some problems down the line.
I
mentioned this already with respect to intergroup conflicts, but empathic
failures happen in lots of other settings. For instance, when adolescents bully
each other, or when physicians fail to understand the suffering of their
patients, those are empathic failures. There are lots of interventionists doing
hard and important work to try to mitigate the effects of empathic failures.
This type of intervention tends to take on one of two flavors: either teaching
people empathic skills, like how to recognize other people's emotions, or
giving them opportunities to empathize, for instance, taking groups of
people who are in conflict and having them spend time together.
This
is a great approach, but viewing empathy as a motivated phenomenon encourages
us to take another approach as well, not just teaching people how
to empathize, but getting them to want to empathize in the first place. Not just training
skills, but also building motives.
That
is what my lab has been up to for the last couple of years; we've been
generating and testing social psychological “nudges” that might encourage
people to want to empathize. We're excited to bring this into a bunch of
spheres, including testing whether we can reduce bullying in adolescents and
help physicians be more effective in treating their patients.
There
are huge disparities in how people feel about empathy and what they think it
is, depending on where they fall on political and social landscapes. Both more
conservative and more liberal people can be extremely empathic or very
un-empathic. The question is, empathy for whom? Folks on the right end of the
political spectrum tend to be more empathic with members of their group;
they're oriented towards tradition, and towards establishing connections with
people who are part of those traditions.
At
least the cultural mores progressives tend to be more indiscriminate and to
value, in some egalitarian way, the emotions of everybody. There are shifting
cultural norms surrounding who should be empathic and who should not be
empathic. Men and women, for instance, are stereotyped into roles that drive
them towards being more and less empathic, respectively. That is almost certainly
a holdover from previous generations.
To
my mind, these constructions of empathy, as a Republican or a Democratic thing
or a male or a female thing, are historical more than they are embedded in the
structure of who we are. One of the things that's curious to me is how empathy
changes over time. A very famous and quite controversial study that came out a
few years ago by Sara Konrath and her colleagues at Michigan, found that
college students report being much less empathic now than they did thirty years
ago. There's a drop-off in empathy that's pretty steady across that thirty-year
period, but especially pronounced in the last ten years. People have jumped on
the idea that this has to do with electronic forms of communication, people
losing out on face-to-face contact in favor of contact that's mediated by some
an electronic device.
That's
an interesting assertion. To my mind, it's an easy conclusion to draw. I would
be just as likely to believe that people are not necessarily more or less
empathic, but rather, they feel that empathy is something different, and they
might not be as drawn to empathy as a construct. They might not feel that it's
as desirable as it was thirty years ago. This, of course, is interesting
because thirty years ago is the middle of the '80s, which people probably don't
consider the most empathic decade on record. Nonetheless, when we see changes
in peoples' empathic experience across cultural lines, across time, across
gender, it might reflect not only who people are, but who they want to be.
My
hope for our ongoing work and this line of thinking is that it can teach people
about empathy, but also teach people how to work with their own empathy. This
is one of those cases where education and intervention overlap. If you believe
that you can harness empathy and make choices about when to experience it
versus when not to, it adds a layer of responsibility to how you engage with
other people. If you feel like you're powerless to control your empathy, you
might be satisfied with whatever biases and limits you have on it. You might be
okay with not caring about someone just because they're different from you. I
want people to not feel safe empathizing in the way that they always have. I
want them to understand that they're doing something deliberate when they
connect with someone, and I want them to own that responsibility.
It's
easy to overdose on empathy, and empathy can be dangerous thing for an
individual's well-being. It can cause you to burn out. There's something known
as compassion fatigue, for hospice nurses and physicians working in hospices.
These are people who overload themselves on other people's suffering to the
point that they can't take care of themselves anymore.
The
idea that you can control empathy is not just meant so that everyone can turn
their empathy up to eleven all the time. It's just as important to know when to
turn down one's empathy, especially if you need to engage in self-care. If you
need to take care of yourself, sometimes it's important to not empathize.
My
wife is a clinical psychologist, and she says that the last thing that any of
her patients need if they're depressed, is for her to be depressed as well. She
needs to modulate her empathy on line in order to be able to guide those people
towards something that will help them, not just showing them that she feels the
same thing as them, but being a source of comfort for them. That requires
knowing not just how to turn up empathy, but also how to turn it down
sometimes.
There are
cases in which people can use other people's empathy to take advantage of them
or manipulate them. Advertisers do this all the time, and politicians. People
try to narrativize their ideas and turn them into stories about people's
suffering so that you will feel more connected to them. Any ad for Save The
Children starts with an example of a child who's in dire straights and the only
way that this child will survive is if you help them. This is explicitly meant
to tug on people's heartstrings in a very particular way. I don't think that
empathy is necessarily always morally positive or negative, it's somewhat
neutral and it's really in the way that you use it.
Selected and
edited from - EchoDOTcom
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Post - Amorella
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