💗 How Your Empathy Rises and Falls With Your Social Circles
The latest neuroscience research shows that empathy is socially contagious
You’ll often hear neuroscientists talk about “prediction errors”, because these are a fundamental component of how we learn about the world. When you expect one thing to happen, but something different happens, it creates a prediction error, which is used by the brain as a learning signal: “something went wrong, so let’s adapt our beliefs about how the world works”.
New research suggests this is exactly the kind of information our brain uses when deciding on the appropriate amount of empathy to express. We don’t just feel empathy based on the amount of pain someone is in, but rather our sense of empathy depends on what other people around us are doing. We check how other observers react to a person experiencing pain, and we use observational prediction errors to inform how we ourselves should feel too.
This can be both a good thing and a bad thing depending on the kinds of communities we live in and whether we think empathy is a helpful moral guide. So let’s discuss what the research actually shows and what we can learn from it.
🫶 Empathy is socially contagious
In a study published in 2024, researchers recruited 55 participants for a brain imaging study on empathy. Each participant first met two other “participant” collaborators, who were actually just research assistants posing as participants.
While getting their brains scanned, the real participants watched a video of someone receiving a painful electric shock to their hand. After each shock, participants had to complete one of two simple tasks:
Rate how bad they personally felt watching the person receive the shock (on a scale from 0-100)
Predict how bad one of their collaborators would feel watching the video (on a scale from 0-100), then observe the collaborator’s actual response.
In a first-step analysis, the researchers found a positive correlation between people’s initial empathy levels (as measured by a well-established survey) and how bad they felt watching the person in the video suffer pain. The higher a person’s empathic tendencies were, the more hurt they reported feeling while watching the video. This isn’t particularly surprising, since it’s merely saying people who have a lot of empathy show high empathy responses when seeing others suffer, but it confirmed that empathy was really at work in the experiment.
Now, the more important question: how did people react to prediction errors about other people’s empathy responses? The data showed that people’s personal empathy toward the person getting electrical shocks declined over time when a collaborator’s empathy was lower than expected. When collaborators were lacking in empathy, people’s own empathy declined in tow.
Similarly, when collaborators repeatedly gave higher empathy ratings than the participant expected, the participant’s own empathy ratings increased over time during the experiment. High empathy bred higher empathy.
These changing empathy ratings didn’t correlate with a desire to fit in with social norms—people weren’t just pretending to feel more or less empathy in order to look good in their social group. The ratings were driven by actual empathic feelings, and levels of empathy changed based on what people were seeing in the reactions of people around them.
Previous research has shown that an area of the brain known as the anterior insula is involved in processing other people’s pain, so the researchers examined this area in their brain scanning. The anterior insula is a relatively deep piece of cortex that becomes visible if you pull apart the outer temporal and frontal lobes of the brain (I’ve highlighted it in green below).
Consistent with their expectation, the researchers found that brain activity in the anterior insula was higher for people with more empathy at the start of the experiment.
Furthermore, levels of insula activity changed based on who people observed during the experiment. If they observed low-empathy collaborators, their anterior insula activity was lower at the end of the experiment compared to the beginning. In contrast, if they observed high-empathy collaborators, their insula activity was higher by the end of the experiment.
The areas of our brain that process empathy adjust their sensitivity depending on how empathetic the people around us appear. When we participate in a social circle or culture with low empathy, our own empathy levels sink. And when we surround ourselves with more empathetic people, our empathy grows in response.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Be an empathic role model: Since our empathy responses are so sensitive to social influence, we should all be doing our best to act with empathy and set the right contagious examples. Whether we’re playing with our children, hanging out with friends, or giving feedback at work, our moments of empathy are likely to stimulate empathy in others. So share little gestures of kindness whenever you get the chance.
Be an excellent listener: One of the best ways to truly understand and relate to what others are going through is to listen well. We’re often quick to want to resolve a situation or provide advice to a friend, but giving the right advice is easier when we fully empathize with a problem. So start with your listening ears.
Broaden your horizons: It’s easy to have empathy toward our family and friends, a little more difficult for acquaintances, much more difficult for strangers, and often extremely difficult for people on the other side of the world. For this reason, some people argue that empathy is not a great signal to use in moral behavior, since it may limit us to helping people we can relate to. For now though, empathy remains an important signal in our lives, so broadening our empathy circle to include more people can only be a good thing. Travel, reading, documentaries, and many other types of exploration can be a great way to learn about other communities and cultures. And the more aware we are of the range of possible lives on Earth, the more empathy we’re likely to feel for people.
“Let a soul radiate in every direction love and compassion, and thoughts of hatred can find nothing to which they can attach themselves.”
~ Annie Besant
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👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD