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vcmwI haven't figured out a way to extract this ranty-rant from its trailing illogical side tendrils, but I'll do my best. Since it's a) long, and b) of undoubtedly limited interest, it's all behind the cut. Format is almost purely philosophical - I'm all about the abstraction, so whatever real-world moments may have inspired this, I think I've kept them from intruding too much into the analysis.
I think our cultural expectations about empathy are deeply out of whack. I think this shows up in how we write about people suffering adverse circumstances. I think it shows up in how we write about people whose past includes serious trauma. And I think our unexamined assumptions about how empathetic relations between people work tend to poison a lot of conversations. I think that there is also a lot of unexamined and undeveloped thought about empathy in positive interactions, but I'm going to be focusing in this ranty-rant on empathy in or for negative situations.
My best definition for empathy: the ability to recognize and acknowledge the emotions that another person is experiencing.
And I don't think it's a free skill. I think it costs a lot to develop, and a lot to use. Many people have enough empathetic ability to recognize emotions, and enough empathetic capacity to acknowledge those emotions, to get through the average day to day experiences of their life. And so they take empathy for granted until they encounter a situation that tests their empathy, or a sequence of situations that exhausts their ability to use that empathy.
On the development side: It's much easier to empathize with someone who is undergoing an experience similar to one you've already undergone. But undergoing negative experiences does not in itself tend to make someone empathetic towards others. Some people respond to traumatic experiences by becoming very guarded of their emotions and unwilling to offer empathy to others. So articulating what experiences and thought processes can help someone develop empathy can be difficult.
Personally, I would think that in talking about empathy, we're talking about a skill that is similar to language - the potential for language acquisition is inborn in the human brain, but that doesn't guarantee language acquisition. If you are never spoken to as an infant or child, your chances of language acquisition as an older child or adult become much smaller (I haven't read the case studies closely enough to know if it is totally foreclosed or just really hard). Similarly, I think there's been psychological research on neglected infants (those in state care that aren't held or touched) and many of them develop deep and ongoing psychological problems that could be described as a lack of empathy - they don't recognize or respond to emotional connections very well. I don't have the science chops to know quite how this does or doesn't connect to the idea of mirroring neurons, but I vaguely understand that there are actual structures in our brain that help us when observing or imagining an action to feel its effect a little bit as if we were doing the action ourselves. So I would think for empathy that there are both nurture (exposure to emotional experiences as an infant/child) and nature (proper development of neurological and chemical systems) factors that would affect how easy it is for a person, as an adult, to experience or develop empathy.
On the use side: A lot of really negative experiences cause the person who is experiencing them to repress the experience, or to actively deny it on the surface even if they're aware of it underneath. Offering empathy to someone else undergoing that experience requires that you acknowledge your own experience to a certain degree. This act of acknowledgement can be very traumatic. So one factor limiting use of empathy is the emotional trauma that the person may experience in acknowledging this situation in another person. In a scenario of this type, offering empathy incurs an emotional cost in the form of remembering or acknowledging a painful event or feeling.
I think that another factor limiting use of empathy is similar to the exhaustion caused by decision making. Recently I've read a few articles about decision-making (as: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making) that suggest the capacity to make decisions is exhaustible in the same way a muscle is exhaustible - after a certain amount of effort is extended decision making conks out and needs a while to recharge. I am personally quite convinced (though I haven't read articles to this effect) that the capacity for empathy with others is similarly exhaustible, and after a certain amount of use (an amount that may be quite different from person to person and moment to moment) that capacity is exhausted and needs to recharge. I would assume that, like physical muscles, these capacities are expandable through repetitive effort.
So, quick summation: I see the capacity for empathy as a) requiring certain inputs for ideal development, b) requiring certain physical/inborn hardware for ideal development, c) incurring certain transaction costs per use, that may vary based on type of use, and d) having a finite quantity available for use in each person at any given time.
If you look at our conversations related to empathy, I think it's quite obvious that none of these factors are routinely considered in any conversation that assesses empathy. Rather than looking at inputs, variables, outputs, etc., the conversation about empathy focuses on words like "should" and "can't". That is "you should be able to understand how I feel about this" "you should know where I'm coming from", "If you were a ____, you would know how this feels" "I can't understand why you don't ___" "If you cared about me, you'd feel ____", or "If you felt the way I felt, you couldn't/wouldn't ___". In part, this is quite natural. These conversations don't tend to be intellectual or analytical conversations. They are emotional conversations that happen with a lot of heat and anxiety. Chemical responses in our brain heighten certain mental and behavioral likelihoods and decrease others.
But it does amaze me how differently we treat mental, emotional, and physical capacities. If a young person does not have the physical strength to lift a large object, that doesn't make them a bad person. If they want to lift large objects, they'll need to do some weight training. They may have been born with a physical difference to do with muscle or bone functioning that will prevent them from ever lifting large heavy objects without assistive technology. All of these factors, perhaps because they're somewhat visible, are known and discussed publicly. But the same surely applies to emotional factors. If we want to be caring and compassionate in our dealings with others, we must first have a large supply of empathy. If we do not have a well-developed capacity for empathy from childhood, we will need to lift a lot of emotional weight in order to develop our capacity. We may have inherent neurological differences that limit this capacity, in which case we may make use of social assistive technologies (which I'd argue, is what "polite rules" and "social norms" can consist of, at their best) in order to help us deal with our limitation.
People who would never want to speak judgementally about someone with a physical limitation on their capacity often are the same people who can be highly judgemental about the emotional capacity of others. In issues relating both to the physical and the emotional, I think it makes more sense to ask what social and cultural changes we can all contribute to that increase opportunities to develop capacity. Many of the factors that most affect someone's default adult potential are out of their control, due to early influences from their environment. That adult may recognize the deficit and make constant, concerted efforts to correct it without ever acheiving the level of, for example, empathetic functioning that someone else has enjoyed their entire life due to a fortuitous combination of inborn and environmental factors.
I think that this issue is much on my mind because I am absolutely one of those whose environment greatly affected my ability to feel or acknowledge empathetic connections. I have focused for over a decade on attempting to redevelop those connections, and for most of two decades on trying to learn and practice those social assistive technologies that allow me to best deal with this limitation. Yet I know that I routinely fail in ways that cause distress to my friends. And the effort that I continue to expend in this development is not free. It takes up a significant amount of time that I cannot then use to pursue other activities, both hobbies and career advancement related. It takes up significant emotional energy and exhausts me intellectually.
I am also sure that the use of empathy is not free for other people, whatever their relative supply of empathetic capacity. I know that I see many friends who seem to have very strong/large empathetic capacities who are motivated by that empathy to give up their free time to helping others, who spend late nights listening to friends in trouble - who, motivated by empathy, give a great deal to others. I think their behavior is generally a positive both for them and for those they interact with. And I know that they receive benefits from these interactions. But I also know that these interactions are not free - that these friends have acknowledged an emotional cost that these interactions incur, along with occasional physical costs, since emotional stresses can affect physical health.
Positive benefits of empathy include a sense of connection and a lessened sense of isolation. Social connections built on empathetic moments can provide long term material benefits in the form of increased trust and sharing for both parties. Empathy eases other forms of communication, including intellectual ones, providing increased opportunities to learn from each other. Empathetic connections also help create a social safety network - they contribute to the forms of emotional mutual insurance in groups where those with some contribute to those in need out of a shared feeling and a shared expectation of support in return. I keep using the word "share" - I think it is fair to say that without empathy, we don't share.
So I recognize the positive benefits of empathy, and the reasons why it is worthwhile to develop both my supply and my use-capacity of empathy. But I surely do resent the people who act and speak as if empathy is both free and infinite. In my experience, it is neither.
I think our cultural expectations about empathy are deeply out of whack. I think this shows up in how we write about people suffering adverse circumstances. I think it shows up in how we write about people whose past includes serious trauma. And I think our unexamined assumptions about how empathetic relations between people work tend to poison a lot of conversations. I think that there is also a lot of unexamined and undeveloped thought about empathy in positive interactions, but I'm going to be focusing in this ranty-rant on empathy in or for negative situations.
My best definition for empathy: the ability to recognize and acknowledge the emotions that another person is experiencing.
And I don't think it's a free skill. I think it costs a lot to develop, and a lot to use. Many people have enough empathetic ability to recognize emotions, and enough empathetic capacity to acknowledge those emotions, to get through the average day to day experiences of their life. And so they take empathy for granted until they encounter a situation that tests their empathy, or a sequence of situations that exhausts their ability to use that empathy.
On the development side: It's much easier to empathize with someone who is undergoing an experience similar to one you've already undergone. But undergoing negative experiences does not in itself tend to make someone empathetic towards others. Some people respond to traumatic experiences by becoming very guarded of their emotions and unwilling to offer empathy to others. So articulating what experiences and thought processes can help someone develop empathy can be difficult.
Personally, I would think that in talking about empathy, we're talking about a skill that is similar to language - the potential for language acquisition is inborn in the human brain, but that doesn't guarantee language acquisition. If you are never spoken to as an infant or child, your chances of language acquisition as an older child or adult become much smaller (I haven't read the case studies closely enough to know if it is totally foreclosed or just really hard). Similarly, I think there's been psychological research on neglected infants (those in state care that aren't held or touched) and many of them develop deep and ongoing psychological problems that could be described as a lack of empathy - they don't recognize or respond to emotional connections very well. I don't have the science chops to know quite how this does or doesn't connect to the idea of mirroring neurons, but I vaguely understand that there are actual structures in our brain that help us when observing or imagining an action to feel its effect a little bit as if we were doing the action ourselves. So I would think for empathy that there are both nurture (exposure to emotional experiences as an infant/child) and nature (proper development of neurological and chemical systems) factors that would affect how easy it is for a person, as an adult, to experience or develop empathy.
On the use side: A lot of really negative experiences cause the person who is experiencing them to repress the experience, or to actively deny it on the surface even if they're aware of it underneath. Offering empathy to someone else undergoing that experience requires that you acknowledge your own experience to a certain degree. This act of acknowledgement can be very traumatic. So one factor limiting use of empathy is the emotional trauma that the person may experience in acknowledging this situation in another person. In a scenario of this type, offering empathy incurs an emotional cost in the form of remembering or acknowledging a painful event or feeling.
I think that another factor limiting use of empathy is similar to the exhaustion caused by decision making. Recently I've read a few articles about decision-making (as: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making) that suggest the capacity to make decisions is exhaustible in the same way a muscle is exhaustible - after a certain amount of effort is extended decision making conks out and needs a while to recharge. I am personally quite convinced (though I haven't read articles to this effect) that the capacity for empathy with others is similarly exhaustible, and after a certain amount of use (an amount that may be quite different from person to person and moment to moment) that capacity is exhausted and needs to recharge. I would assume that, like physical muscles, these capacities are expandable through repetitive effort.
So, quick summation: I see the capacity for empathy as a) requiring certain inputs for ideal development, b) requiring certain physical/inborn hardware for ideal development, c) incurring certain transaction costs per use, that may vary based on type of use, and d) having a finite quantity available for use in each person at any given time.
If you look at our conversations related to empathy, I think it's quite obvious that none of these factors are routinely considered in any conversation that assesses empathy. Rather than looking at inputs, variables, outputs, etc., the conversation about empathy focuses on words like "should" and "can't". That is "you should be able to understand how I feel about this" "you should know where I'm coming from", "If you were a ____, you would know how this feels" "I can't understand why you don't ___" "If you cared about me, you'd feel ____", or "If you felt the way I felt, you couldn't/wouldn't ___". In part, this is quite natural. These conversations don't tend to be intellectual or analytical conversations. They are emotional conversations that happen with a lot of heat and anxiety. Chemical responses in our brain heighten certain mental and behavioral likelihoods and decrease others.
But it does amaze me how differently we treat mental, emotional, and physical capacities. If a young person does not have the physical strength to lift a large object, that doesn't make them a bad person. If they want to lift large objects, they'll need to do some weight training. They may have been born with a physical difference to do with muscle or bone functioning that will prevent them from ever lifting large heavy objects without assistive technology. All of these factors, perhaps because they're somewhat visible, are known and discussed publicly. But the same surely applies to emotional factors. If we want to be caring and compassionate in our dealings with others, we must first have a large supply of empathy. If we do not have a well-developed capacity for empathy from childhood, we will need to lift a lot of emotional weight in order to develop our capacity. We may have inherent neurological differences that limit this capacity, in which case we may make use of social assistive technologies (which I'd argue, is what "polite rules" and "social norms" can consist of, at their best) in order to help us deal with our limitation.
People who would never want to speak judgementally about someone with a physical limitation on their capacity often are the same people who can be highly judgemental about the emotional capacity of others. In issues relating both to the physical and the emotional, I think it makes more sense to ask what social and cultural changes we can all contribute to that increase opportunities to develop capacity. Many of the factors that most affect someone's default adult potential are out of their control, due to early influences from their environment. That adult may recognize the deficit and make constant, concerted efforts to correct it without ever acheiving the level of, for example, empathetic functioning that someone else has enjoyed their entire life due to a fortuitous combination of inborn and environmental factors.
I think that this issue is much on my mind because I am absolutely one of those whose environment greatly affected my ability to feel or acknowledge empathetic connections. I have focused for over a decade on attempting to redevelop those connections, and for most of two decades on trying to learn and practice those social assistive technologies that allow me to best deal with this limitation. Yet I know that I routinely fail in ways that cause distress to my friends. And the effort that I continue to expend in this development is not free. It takes up a significant amount of time that I cannot then use to pursue other activities, both hobbies and career advancement related. It takes up significant emotional energy and exhausts me intellectually.
I am also sure that the use of empathy is not free for other people, whatever their relative supply of empathetic capacity. I know that I see many friends who seem to have very strong/large empathetic capacities who are motivated by that empathy to give up their free time to helping others, who spend late nights listening to friends in trouble - who, motivated by empathy, give a great deal to others. I think their behavior is generally a positive both for them and for those they interact with. And I know that they receive benefits from these interactions. But I also know that these interactions are not free - that these friends have acknowledged an emotional cost that these interactions incur, along with occasional physical costs, since emotional stresses can affect physical health.
Positive benefits of empathy include a sense of connection and a lessened sense of isolation. Social connections built on empathetic moments can provide long term material benefits in the form of increased trust and sharing for both parties. Empathy eases other forms of communication, including intellectual ones, providing increased opportunities to learn from each other. Empathetic connections also help create a social safety network - they contribute to the forms of emotional mutual insurance in groups where those with some contribute to those in need out of a shared feeling and a shared expectation of support in return. I keep using the word "share" - I think it is fair to say that without empathy, we don't share.
So I recognize the positive benefits of empathy, and the reasons why it is worthwhile to develop both my supply and my use-capacity of empathy. But I surely do resent the people who act and speak as if empathy is both free and infinite. In my experience, it is neither.
