By Clairemarie LoCicero
Just over a month ago, a
bitter battle of ideological differences was played out in this country: the
presidential election. During election season, there was no shortage of
name-calling or inability to see the other side’s point of view. Humans have
robust systems in place that give us a natural ability to empathize, so how can
there be so much animosity between people with different political ideologies? A
talk given by Jean Decety, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, and research conducted at the University of
Michigan can help answer that question.
Human beings are very well equipped with
mechanisms designed to foster closeness between each other. From birth, we can
perceive sensory and somatovisceral information, which makes us sensitive to
our social environments (Decety, 2012). For example, experiments have shown that
infants show more distress when listening to other newborns’ cries than when
listening to recordings of their own cries (Martin & Clark, 1987). As
infants grow into toddlers, their increased self-awareness becomes closely
linked to more advanced forms of socializing. The development of a theory of
mind, usually by age 5, is particularly important to empathy because it requires
knowing that a person’s distress is a result of his or her subjective experience.
By age 7, similarity becomes an important factor in experiencing empathy (Decety,
2012). In his talk, Decety used attitudes towards obesity as an example of how
ingroup/outgroup bias influences empathy. He pointed out that, often times,
very thin people are likely to hold obese people more responsible for their
weight than people of more average weight. Overall, Decety’s discussion of how
empathy develops indicates that, as we age, our perceived similarity to others
becomes an important determinant of how much empathy we feel towards them.
A study conducted at
the University of Michigan supports the fact that empathy is at least partially
dependent on perceived similarity. The study, conducted by O’Brien and
Ellsworth (2011), tested how people would project their own visceral state on
those who shared similar political views. The researchers gave participants a
story about a hiker, who was either a democrat or a republican, and asked
participants how cold, hungry and thirsty the hiker was. Participants were either
outside (average temperate 6° F) or in the library. Cold participants who identified with the
hiker indicated the hiker was very cold, while participants who were warm did
not follow this trend. The results indicated visceral states influence social
judgments only for similar others. So, people are more likely to feel empathy
for someone who is similar to them than for someone who is not.
It’s not very nice to
have more empathy for a person just because their opinion regarding taxes or
gay rights is similar to yours. But, whether it’s nice or not, it’s unavoidable
because there are “automatic, deeply rooted mechanisms” (O’Brien & Ellsworth,
2012) that cause empathy to be related to similarity. Decety points out that,
from an evolutionary stance, our empathy for a person is dependent on our social
relatedness to them because that improves our odds of surviving and passing on our
genes. The results of the study conducted by O’Brien and Ellsworth indicate
that this principle is relevant in the political sphere as well. Even though
your political opinions do not influence your likelihood of survival, they
serve as an important social identifier which people use to determine how
similar or dissimilar they are to other individuals.
Since our empathy for a person is affected by our perceived
similarity to them, republicans and democrats have a hard time getting along. As
a result, politics is a pretty terrible place to admire the empathic abilities
of humanity. Unfortunately for people who seek political compromise (or live in
Ohio), politics will likely continue to be pervaded by disagreement as a result
of the way we are wired to experience empathy.
O’brien, E. & Ellsworth, P., 2012. More than
skin deep: visceral states are not projected onto dissimilar others. Psychological
Science, OnlineFirst. DOI: 1177/0956797611432179
Decety, J. & Svetlova, M., 2012. Putting
together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspective on empathy. Developmental
Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 1-24.
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