💐 The Science of Empathy
What happens when human compassion goes terribly wrong?
A sense of empathy helps us to understand each other. It allows us to take another person’s perspective and connect with what they’re thinking or feeling. When we act generously or assist people who are in trouble, empathy is often the motivator.
However, our empathy impulse is far from perfect. Here’s a look at what can happen when it misfires.
😱 When empathy goes wrong
In some lines of work, misunderstanding a person’s emotional reaction can have devastating consequences. Unfortunately, a study published earlier this year suggests that this may happen frequently.
Researchers showed people video clips of a courtroom reality show. As people watched the videos, they had to rate the emotional reactions of the accused person in the courtroom along with the likelihood that they were guilty.
People interpreted angry reactions from a defendant as a sign of guilt. And this wasn’t just restricted to reality TV courtrooms. The same thing happened when people judged written stories about criminal accusations or everyday scenarios such as an employer accusing an employee of wrongdoing. Anger was perceived as an inauthentic attempt to look innocent, and people didn’t trust it.
Even a group of legal professionals and police investigators believed that defendants who angrily denied accusations were more guilty than defendants who calmly denied accusations. Interestingly, complete silence was also viewed as a sign of guilt, just like anger was.
But here’s the rub. When researchers asked people to recall times when they were accused of wrongdoing, people reported feeling more angry after a false accusation than a justified accusation. Even though false accusations make all of us angry, we misinterpret and distrust anger when it comes from others.
When empathy goes wrong, we misunderstand beliefs and intentions in a profound way. In a legal system where the perceptions of a judge and jury really matter, misfiring empathy can condemn the wrong people.
💞 Empathy in daily life
Another recent study looked at the structure of empathy in daily life. Researchers gave 285 people an app that periodically asked them a few questions during their day. The questions asked about levels of happiness and opportunities to empathize with other people.
People reported around nine opportunities to empathize per day, and they reported empathizing with positive emotions three times more often than negative emotions. When we think about empathy, we usually think about it in the context of suffering. In reality, positive emotions seem to dominate our empathy drive.
The graphic I created below shows the structure of people’s daily empathy experiences according to the research. There are three important features to empathy: perspective-taking (seeing the world from another point of view), emotion-sharing (experiencing another person’s emotion yourself), and compassion (warmth and care toward others). In the vast majority of empathy experiences, all three of these features are present. But overall, perspective-taking is less common than emotion-sharing and compassion.
People reported more empathy toward those they were close to, which is consistent with the idea that we empathize more with in-groups than out-groups. Greater empathy was also associated with greater daily happiness (at least for positive emotions), and the more opportunities people found for empathy, the more benevolently they reported behaving during their day.
Empathy training is one sensible candidate for trying to boost benevolent behavior. If we can strengthen our feelings of empathy beyond our immediate networks of friends and family, then it’s likely we’ll feel a greater urge to help people outside those networks too.
The experience of empathy runs deep, and it isn’t limited to humans. As the video below shows, rats demonstrate empathy when they try to free their buddies who are trapped in a box during an experiment.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Remain calm: Angry denial or complete silence when confronted with an accusation are both wrongly seen as signs of guilt. People respond more favorably to calm denial (of course, in legal scenarios, you should speak to a lawyer and do what they recommend).
Expand your circle of empathy: One of the challenges with empathy is that it’s biased toward loved ones. But as society makes moral progress, it also expands its circle of empathy to include people from broader cultures (and broader species as we take animal welfare more and more seriously). Continuing with this expansion effort seems like a good idea for boosting benevolence around the world.
There are some important counterarguments to this point. The psychologist Paul Bloom is more pessimistic about the idea that empathy could be a solution to real social problems. If you’re interested in learning more, you can read his book “Against Empathy”.
Practice perspective-taking: Our daily empathy experiences contain compassion, emotion-sharing, and perspective-taking, but perspective-taking slightly lags behind the others. It’s possible that many of our social misunderstandings are driven by a failure of perspective-taking, so it’s helpful to mentally work through different points of view when someone upsets you. Are they intentionally trying to hurt you? Could they have woken up to some terrible news that morning? When you’ve been unfair to someone in the past, what was the explanation then?
💡 A final quote
“Compassion is probably the only antitoxin of the soul. Where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”
~ Eric Hoffer
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📬 I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD