Empathy: Then and Now

            Did you cry at the end of The Notebook when the nurse discovers that Allie and Noah died in each other’s arms? What about in Old Yeller, when Travis is forced to shoot his beloved dog? If you responded yes to either of those questions, chances are you were experiencing empathy. In Jean Decety’s talk The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, he describes how empathy allows people to experience emotions because they witness someone else experiencing those emotions. Unlike normal emotions, empathetic emotions are not triggered by a firsthand experience. Empathy involves knowing what the other person is feeling, and then feeling enough concern for that person to experience the same emotion.

            Empathy has contributed to the evolutionary success of humans. One of the most important ways is through parental care. For example, when you hear a baby cry, you will feel distressed. You are programmed to feel distress when you hear that the baby is distressed. You will work hard to stop the baby from crying not just to bring comfort to the child, but also to comfort yourself so that you will no longer feel distressed due to your empathy with the baby. In this way, empathy is beneficial because it compels parents to care for their children when they are distressed in order to ensure a longer life for their child. If we didn’t experience empathy, the baby’s cries would only attract a predator and would confer no evolutionary benefit.

            Another important way that empathy gives humans an evolutionary edge is our ability to empathize with the pain of others in order to avoid the experience that brought that pain to them. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.” In the wild, this quote was especially applicable because learning from the mistakes of others could mean the difference between life and death!

            However, humans don’t experience the same level of empathy for everyone they observe. A study showed that subjects felt more empathy for their loved ones if they were in pain than they did for a stranger that was in pain. Both succeeded in activating the portion of the brain associated with pain, but when an enemy experienced pain, the pleasure center of the subject’s brain was activated. This shows that our ability to empathize is tied to the social constructs in our world.

            While most likely not the underlying cause, it is possible that the enmity we may feel towards another person is exacerbated by our lack of empathy with that person. A study by MIT suggests this. The article, MIT research: The power of being heard, describes a study by MIT where subjects from a dominant social group and subjects from a disempowered social group were asked to write an essay describing their lives and the hardships they face or read and summarize an essay from the opposite social group. The subjects were a part of this study during a time of particular tension between the two groups. This study found that subjects from the disempowered groups developed more positive attitudes toward the other group if they wrote their story and had someone from the other group read it because they felt that they were being heard. Subjects from the dominant group developed more positive attitudes when they read stories from people in the other group because they could show that they are good people that don’t deserve to be blamed. Overall, this study supports the idea that empathy can help to change our attitudes about another person. When we understand more about the life of another person and can empathize with them, we tend to feel a stronger and more positive connection with them. Humans may have developed empathy thousands of years ago, but its effects are still prevalent throughout our world today.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/03/16/mit.research.the.power.being.heard