After reading eight chapters on the horrible things that people have done to each other and the darker parts of human nature that spurred them, you have every right to look forward to a bit of uplift in a chapter on our better angels. But I will resist the temptation to please the crowd with
too
happy an ending. The parts of the brain that restrain our darker impulses were also standard equipment in our ancestors who kept slaves, burned witches, and beat children, so they clearly don’t make people good by default. And it would hardly be a satisfying explanation of the decline of violence to say that there are bad parts of human nature that make us do bad things and good parts that make us do good things. (War I win; peace you lose.) The exploration of our better angels must show not only how they steer us away from violence, but why they so often fail to do so; not just how they have been increasingly engaged, but why history had to wait so long to engage them fully.
EMPATHY
The word
empathy
is barely a century old. It is often credited to the American psychologist Edward Titchener, who used it in a 1909 lecture, though the
Oxford English Dictionary
lists a 1904 usage by the British writer Vernon Lee.
6
Both derived it from the German
Einfühlung
(feeling into) and used it to label a kind of aesthetic appreciation: a “feeling or acting in the mind’s muscles,” as when we look at a skyscraper and imagine ourselves standing straight and tall. The popularity of the word in English-language books shot up in the mid-1940s, and it soon overtook Victorian virtues such as
willpower
(in 1961) and
self-control
(in the mid-1980s).
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The meteoric rise of
empathy
coincided with its taking on a new meaning, one that is closer to “sympathy” or “compassion.” The blend of meanings embodies a folk theory of psychology: that beneficence toward other people depends on pretending to be them, feeling what they are feeling, walking a mile in their moccasins, taking their vantage point, or seeing the world through their eyes.
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This theory is not self-evidently true. In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William James reflected on the bond between man and man’s best friend:
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?
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So the sense of
empathy
that gets valorized today—an altruistic concern for others—cannot be equated with the ability to think what they are thinking or feel what they are feeling. Let’s distinguish several senses of the word that has come to be used for so many mental states.
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The original and most mechanical sense of empathy is
projection
—the ability to put oneself into the position of some other person, animal, or object, and imagine the sensation of being in that situation. The example of the skyscraper shows that the object of one’s empathy in this sense needn’t even
have
feelings, let alone feelings that the empathizer cares about.
Closely related is the skill of
perspective-taking,
namely visualizing what the world looks like from another’s vantage point. Jean Piaget famously showed that children younger than about six cannot visualize the arrangement of three toy mountains on a tabletop from the viewpoint of a person seated across from him, a kind of immaturity he called egocentrism. In fairness to children, this ability doesn’t come easy to adults either. Reading maps, deciphering “you are here” signs, and mentally rotating three-dimensional objects can tax the best of us, but that should not call our compassion into doubt. More broadly, perspective-taking can embrace guesses about what a person is thinking and feeling as well as what he is seeing, and that brings us to yet another sense of the word
empathy
.
Mind-reading, theory of mind, mentalizing,
or
empathic accuracy
is the ability to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling from their expressions, behavior, or circumstances. It allows us to infer, for instance, that a person who has just missed a train is probably upset and is now trying to figure out how to get to his or her destination on time.
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Mind-reading does not require that we experience the person’s experiences ourselves, nor that we care about them, only that we can figure out what they are. Mind-reading may in fact comprise two abilities, one for reading thoughts (which is impaired in autism), the other for reading emotions (which is impaired in psychopathy).
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Some intelligent psychopaths do learn to read other people’s emotional states, the better to manipulate them, though they still fail to appreciate the true emotional texture of those states. An example is a rapist who said of his victims, “They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been frightened myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.”
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And whether or not they truly understand other people’s emotional states, they simply don’t care. Sadism, schadenfreude, and indifference to the welfare of animals are other cases in which a person may be fully cognizant of the mental states of other creatures but unmoved to sympathize with them.
People do, however, often feel
distress
at witnessing the suffering of another person.
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This is the reaction that inhibits people from injuring others in a fight, that made the participants in Milgram’s experiment anxious about the shocks they thought they were delivering, and that made the Nazi reservists nauseous when they first started shooting Jews at close range. As these examples make all too clear, distress at another’s suffering is not the same as a sympathetic concern with their well-being. Instead it can be an unwanted reaction which people may suppress, or an annoyance they may try to escape. Many of us trapped on a plane with a screaming baby feel plenty of distress, but our sympathy is likely to be more with the parent than with the child, and our strongest desire may be to find another seat. For many years a charity called Save the Children ran magazine ads with a heartbreaking photograph of a destitute child and the caption “You can save Juan Ramos for five cents a day. Or you can turn the page.” Most people turn the page.
Emotions can be
contagious.
When you’re laughing, the whole world laughs with you; that’s why situation comedies have laugh tracks and why bad comedians punch up their punch lines with a
bada
-
bing
rim shot that simulates a staccato burst of laughter.
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Other examples of emotional contagion are the tears at a wedding or funeral, the urge to dance at a lively party, the panic during a bomb scare, and the spreading nausea on a heaving boat. A weaker version of emotional contagion consists of vicarious responses, as when we wince in sympathy with an injured athlete or flinch when James Bond is tied to a chair and smacked around. Another is motor mimicry, as when we open our mouths when trying to feed applesauce to a baby.
Many empathy fans write as if emotional contagion were the basis of the sense of “empathy” that is most pertinent to human welfare. The sense of empathy we value the most, though, is a distinct reaction that may be called sympathetic concern, or sympathy for short. Sympathy consists in aligning another entity’s well-being with one’s own, based on a cognizance of their pleasures and pains. Despite the easy equation of sympathy with contagion, it’s easy to see why they’re not the same.
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If a child has been frightened by a barking dog and is howling in terror, my sympathetic response is not to howl in terror with her, but to comfort and protect her. Conversely, I may have exquisite sympathy for a person whose suffering I cannot possibly experience vicariously, like a woman in childbirth, a woman who has been raped, or a sufferer of cancer pain. And our emotional reactions, far from automatically duplicating those of other people, can flip 180 degrees depending on whether we feel we are in alliance or competition with them. When a sports fan watches a home game, he is happy when the crowd is happy and dejected when the crowd is dejected. When he watches an away game, he is dejected when the crowd is happy and happy when the crowd is dejected. All too often, sympathy determines contagion, not the other way around.
Today’s empathy craze has been set off by scrambling the various senses of the word
empathy
. The confusion is crystallized in the meme that uses
mirror neurons
as a synonym for
sympathy,
in the sense of compassion. Rifkin writes of “so-called empathy neurons that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own,” and concludes that we are “a fundamentally empathic species” which seeks “intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.” The mirror-neuron theory assumes that sympathy (which it blurs with contagion) is hardwired into our brains, a legacy of our primate nature, and has only to be exercised, or at least not repressed, for a new age to dawn. Unfortunately, Rifkin’s promise of a “leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation” is based on a dodgy interpretation of the neuroscience.
In 1992 the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues discovered neurons in the brain of a monkey that fired both when the monkey picked up a raisin and when the monkey watched a person pick up a raisin.
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Other neurons responded to other actions, whether performed or perceived, such as touching and tearing. Though neuroscientists ordinarily can’t impale the brains of human subjects with electrodes, we have reason to believe that people have mirror neurons too: neuroimaging experiments have found areas in the parietal lobe and inferior frontal lobe that light up both when people move and when they see someone else move.
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The discovery of mirror neurons is important, though not completely unexpected: we could hardly use a verb in both the first person and the third person unless our brains were able to represent an action in the same way regardless of who performs it. But the discovery soon inflated an extraordinary bubble of hype.
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One neuroscientist claimed that mirror neurons would do for neuroscience what DNA did for biology.
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Others, aided and abetted by science journalists, have touted mirror neurons as the biological basis of language, intentionality, imitation, cultural learning, fads and fashions, sports fandom, intercessory prayer, and, of course, empathy.
A wee problem for the mirror-neuron theory is that the animals in which the neurons were discovered, rhesus macaques, are a nasty little species with no discernible trace of empathy (or imitation, to say nothing of language).
21
Another problem, as we shall see, is that mirror neurons are mostly found in regions of the brain that, according to neuroimaging studies, have little to do with empathy in the sense of sympathetic concern.
22
Many cognitive neuroscientists suspect that mirror neurons may have a role in mentally representing the concept of an action, though even that is disputed. Most reject the extravagant claims that they can explain uniquely human abilities, and today virtually no one equates their activity with the emotion of sympathy.
23
There are, to be sure, parts of the brain, particularly the insula, which are metabolically active both when we have an unpleasant experience and when we respond to someone else having an unpleasant experience.
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The problem is that this overlap is an
effect
, rather than a
cause
, of sympathy with another’s well-being. Recall the experiment in which the insula lit up when a participant received a shock and also when he or she watched an innocent person receiving a shock. The same experiment revealed that when the shock victim had cheated the male subjects out of their money, their insulas showed no response, while the striatum and orbital cortex lit up in sweet revenge.
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Empathy, in the morally relevant sense of sympathetic concern, is not an automatic reflex of our mirror neurons. It can be turned on and off and even inverted into counterempathy, namely feeling good when someone else feels bad and vice versa. Revenge is one trigger for counterempathy, and the flipflopping response of the sports fan tells us that competition can trigger it as well. The psychologists John Lanzetta and Basil Englis glued electrodes to the faces and fingers of participants and had them play an investment game with another (bogus) participant.
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They were told either that the two were working together or that they were in competition (though the actual returns did not depend on what the other participant did). Market gains were signaled by an uptick of a counter; losses were signaled by a mild shock. When the participants thought they were cooperating, the electrodes picked up a visceral calming and a trace of a smile whenever their opposite number gained money, and a burst of sweat and the trace of a frown whenever he was shocked. When they thought they were competing with him, it went the other way: they relaxed and smiled when he suffered, and tensed up and frowned when he did well.