Empathy

 

Extract from Rutger Bregman's 'Humankind: A Hopeful History'

I thought this chapter might be of use to a couple of friends of mine who are experiencing empathy overload.

“As I read about the split nature of infants and toddlers – basically friendly, but with xenophobic tendencies – I was reminded of the 'love hormone' oxytocin. That's the stuff found in high concentrations in Lyudmila Trut's foxes in Siberia (see Chapter 3). Scientists now know that this hormone, which plays a crucial role in love and affection, can also make us distrustful of strangers.

Could oxytocin help explain why good people do bad things? After all, people have another impressive instinct rooted deep in our puppyish nature: the ability to feel empathy. We can step out of our bubble and into someone else's shoes. We're hardwired to feel, at an emotional level, what it's like to be the stranger.

Not only I can we do this, but we're good at it. People are emotional vacuum cleaners, always sucking up other people's feelings. Just think how easily books and movies can make us laugh or cry. For me, sad movies on flights are always the worst (I'm constantly pressing pause so fellow passengers won't feel the need to comfort me).

For a long time I thought this fabulous instinct for feeling another person's pain could help bring people closer together. What the world needed, surely, was a lot more empathy. But then I read a new book by one of those baby researchers.

When people ask Professor Bloom what his book's about, he'll say:
'It's about empathy.'

They smile and nod – until he adds:
'I'm against it.'

Paul Bloom isn't joking. According to this psychologist, empathy isn't a beneficent sun illuminating the world. It's a spotlight. A searchlight. It singles out a specific person or group of people in your life, and while you're busy sucking up all the emotions bathed in that one ray of light, the rest of the world fades away.

Take the following study carried out by another psychologist. In this experiment, a series of volunteers first heard the sad story of Sheri Summers, a ten-year-old suffering from a fatal disease. She's on the waiting list for a life-saving treatment, but time's running out. Subjects were told they could move Sheri up the waiting list, but they're asked to be objective in their decision.

Most people didn't consider giving Sheri an advantage. They understood full well that every child on that list was sick and in need of treatment.

Then came the twist. A second group of subjects was given the same scenario, but was then asked to imagine how Sheri must be feeling: Wasn't it heartbreaking that this little girl was so ill? Turns out this single shot of empathy changed everything. The majority now wanted to let Sheri jump the line. If you think about it, that's a pretty shaky moral choice. The spotlight on Sheri could effectively mean the death of other children who'd been on the list longer.

Now you may think: 'Exactly! That's why we need more empathy.' We ought to put ourselves not only in Sheri's shoes, but in those of the other children on waiting lists all over the world. More emotions, more feelings, more empathy!

But that's not how spotlights work. Go ahead and try it: imagine yourself in the shoes of one other person. Now imagine yourself in the shoes of a hundred other people. And a million. How about seven billion?

We simply can't do it.

In practical terms, says Professor Bloom, empathy is a hopelessly limited skill.

It's something we feel for people who are close to us; for people we can smell, see, hear and touch. For family and friends, for fans of our favourite band, and maybe for the homeless guy on our own street corner. For cute puppies we can cuddle and pet, even as we eat animals mistreated on factory farms out of sight. And for people we see on TV – mostly those the camera zooms in on, while sad music swells in the background.

As I read Bloom's book, I began to realise that empathy resembles nothing so much as that modern-day phenomenon: the news. In Chapter 1, we saw that the news also functions like a spotlight. Just as empathy misleads us by zooming in on the specific, the news deceives us by zooming in on the exceptional.

One thing is certain: a better world doesn't start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.

This is the mechanism that puppy expert Brian Hare talked about – the mechanism that makes us both the friendliest and the cruelest species on the planet. The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They're two sides of the same coin.”
~Rutger Bregman, 'Humankind: A Hopeful History'