How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
Empathy and Concern
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From the course by Yale University
Moralities of Everyday Life
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From the lesson
Compassion
Where does concern for others come from? How is it related to empathy—and is more empathy necessarily a good thing? And what can we learn from the study of those who seemingly lack normal moral feelings, such as violent psychopaths?
Meet the Instructors
Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
So, why would people matter to us? Where does compassion come from?
You can imagine different possibilities.
You can imagine people have compassion of a sort, just out of selfishness.
It might be that your pleasure matters to me because in some way we're
in the sort of a relationship where you being happy leads to be being happy.
Maybe we're sort of business partners working together or
something or we're in some sort of mutual benefit
system, where your benefit is my benefit and your suffering is my suffering.
I'll leave it for a question for later whether this even
counts as compassion, but it's one source of nice behavior towards others.
We might care about other people because of our religious code.
You could imagine we care about other people
because we believe that God wishes us to.
We might care about other people because
we are committed to some philosophical theory
of morality of the sort we discussed earlier like consequentialsm or Kantian
theory in which other people's happiness and feelings and goals matter to us.
But many people have argued that a lot of what of
goes on in compassion comes from our gut, comes from our heart.
It is not a, it's not for self-serving benefit,
nor is it because of our belief system.
But, rather it's because we're wired up to care about other people.
And the specific proposal as to what could drive compassion, and some
people argue drive morality more generally,
is that empathy plays an important role.
So, let me define empathy. Empathy is based on a German word.
The term is a new term, it was coined in the early 1900s, and it
means to feel one's way into and when you think about empathy, you can
think of it as being in someone
else's shoes, putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
Now, the idea that empathy plays a big role in, our
morality and our compassion, is something again, you find in Adam Smith.
So, Adam Smith argues that sort of foundation
for caring about other people, is imagining yourself in their shoes.
And he gives an example of how this can be, can be done.
He says when, when we see a stroke aimed and just ready to
fall upon the leg or arm of another person we naturally shrink and draw
back our own leg or arm and when it does fall, we feel
it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.
Now, once you start looking
for examples of how empathetic connection, affects you,
you can see them all over the place.
Here's one of my favorite examples.
It's, It's a picture from a wonderful book
called Emotional Contagion and you can see the guy
is tensing up in anticipated feeling of the
pain of the needle of the child he's holding.
And you know, I saw the movie Casino Royale,
the James Bond movie a little while ago.
And there's a scene where the character James Bond is
shackled naked to a chair and then whacked in the testicles.
And me and I think just about every other
male in the theater is going oh, in vicarious pain.
But it's not just pain, it's also pleasure.
I'll show you one of my favorite Youtube videos.
I'll show you a brief clip of it.
And this video is,
I think, is watched so much because it just gives people pleasure.
>> [SOUND] >> [LAUGH] [LAUGH]
>> [SOUND] >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] [SOUND]
>> [LAUGH] >> So, What's
going on with that?
Why would anybody enjoy watching another person laugh?
Well, because somehow the happiness of the kid jumps from him
to us and so it's hard to watch a video like
that without being sort of cheered up a bit because we're
naturally primed to take on the perspective and feeling of others.
And in fact,
when people develop theories of empathy, theories drawing upon psychology
and neuroscience, they often see it as related to a more general,
propensity to imitate other people, to be the
people we are interacting with. Here is an example of the imitation.
A soccer player has just missed a big kick and he, he puts his hand
on both sides of his head. But now, look at the people around them.
We imitate each other all the time.
There are studies showing that, when you have two people who are talking to
each other, they'll unconsciously start to imitate
the, the, the behavior of the other.
My wife, when she's with her Texas relatives, she starts to drawl.
And in fact, whenever you're talking to somebody with an
accent, there's this irresistible temptation
to start speaking that accent too.
It's part of how we respond to other people.
And it shows up like a lot of what I'm talking about, even in babies.
So, the developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzov, many years
ago, found that, that babies are natural mimics.
Here is a clip of him making different
facial expressions and a baby making those expressions back at him.
And you watch a mother or father with a
baby, where you'll see is this sort of dance as
it were, where one of them will make an
expression other one will do it back and so on.
Some people have argued that there's a specific
neural system that underlies this imitation, underlies this empathy,
known as mirror neurons.
And mirror neurons were first discovered with, non human primates.
And what they are is they're activated when
you do an action like reach for something.
But they're also activated, when you
observe another individual do the same action.
And this suggest that, that at some neural level there's no distinction between
us and them.
There's no distinction between you and another person.
As we experience the, the, imitate the motor movements of another person you
could feel a connection to them and
this imitation could itself drive, drive empathy.
So, one demonstration of this involves facial expressions and here
the excellent works been done by the psychologist Paul Ekman.
So, Paul Ekman points out there's certain universal facial expressions.
Humans all around the world have them. And I've shown some of them here.
They're, you go around, the list there, anger,
fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, and surprise.
These are universal. But what's interesting is two things.
One thing is you'll naturally mimic someone's facial expression.
So, if you're sitting across from me and I'm frowning.
You'll start to frown.
Also when you imitate the expression, due to the facial feedback that,
that, that ensues you'll start to feel the same feelings that I'm feeling.
So, if I'm really happy and I'm grinning like a idiot, you'll start to
grin like an idiot and if you grin like an idiot it'll make you happy.
Some of the most annoying advice you can
tell a depressed person is you should smile more.
This is incredibly annoying but
it's true. It's true for two reasons.
One is, if you smile people will smile back at you and they'll like you more.
But the second one is, and there's, there's laboratory studies on
this, the very act of going like this, of moving the corners
of your lips upwards triggers the feelings typically associated with smiling,
that is, happiness and smiling in some small way, boost your mood.
It might be parenthetically that that is mirroring
of, of others and, and our propensity to
do so and the pleasure we get from
doing so, could exlpain some mysteries of human psychologies.
And these are mysteries that go quite a bit beyond the questions
of morality we are interested but I can't resist talking about it here.
So, I am going to show you a little clip.
I am going to show it's, I'll show you one minute
of this clip, and it's from a series of videos
called, Where the Hell is Matt.
Where this sort of non-descript guy dances
to music with different people across the world.
So, I show you this clip, the last like, minute, minute five seconds
and as your watching it, monitor your own, for example monitor what your doing.
And second, monitor your own feelings.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
[FOREIGN]
>> [MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
We were all dancing here, me, the camera guys, everybody.
That's one thing.
One thing is upon seeing this, you'll be tempted to move with it.
This is most extreme in children.
My sons and I, when they were younger,
we'd watch a lot of kung fu movies together.
And they can't watch a kung fu movie without
leaping up and kicking people and things, and so on.
It's just irresistible.
But second, not only are you tempted to move with it, but
often there's some sort of warm feeling associated with it, some human connection.
And this illustrates how other people's movements and
your movements, and your propensity to imitate these
movements lead to sort of connections
of feelings, and connections of positive feelings.
And this could be viewed as a manifestation of empathy.
So, let's step back.
You have concern for others, other people matter to you.
And you have empathy which is putting yourself in other people's shoes.
And you can do empathy through an act of imagination.
You could think I wonder what it's like to be her and think about that.
I wonder
what, what his experience is like.
But you could also do it viscerally by seeing another person, act in some way.
The theory worth taking seriously then is that empathy is a spark for compassion.
And it's not hard to see how this could work.
Let's assume, because it's true, but it's kind of obvious, that I don't
like feeling pain and so if I feel pain, I'll want to stop that.
But let's also assume that if I see you in pain
I'll feel your pain empathy, and I'll want to stop that.
Because by stopping you from feeling your pain, I'll stop me from feeling, my pain.
Suppose I see you happy and that makes me happy,
I'll want more of that because I like being happy.
You can say that empathy dissolves the boundaries between yourself and
another person.
And so, this predicts that when you are in empathetic state with
somebody, when you are taking their
persperctive, you will adopt their interest.
You will care about them. You will feel compassion and concern.
And there is a fair amount of evidence that this is true.
A lot of work comes from the psychologist Dan Batson.
And Batson has done dozens of studies,
perhaps hundreds of studies by now, where he, he gets people in a situation
where they have to choose whether to
help somebody or whether to care about somebody.
And he finds that if he can get them to feel
empathy, to see it how they feel, to see it how, how
the other person sees it, to feel it as the other person
feels it, the odds of them being kind and caring go up.
So, for instance, you could tell a story about a girl who is
in line for a life saving operation, and there's other people ahead of
her, and then if you just ask the person, ask your experimental subject,
try to take this girl's perspective, try to see it as she seen it.
That raises the odds your willing to take that girl and move her
up to the front of the line, that you're willing to rescue her.
Because the shared feelings motivate compassion.
They motivate caring.
In general, this effect, the fact that
empathetic connections with individuals boost up your
feelings towards them is the spark of
what sometimes called the identifiable victim effect.
The identifiable victim effect is the idea that we care a lot
more when there's a person in front of us than some numbers.
And,
and this is something which has been observed by many people.
Joseph Stalin apocryphally said, a single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
Mother Teresa said, if I look at the mass, I will never act.
If I look at the one, I will.
And there is actually experimental work done demonstrating this, so,
there's, a series of wonderful studies done by Deborah Small
and Paul Slovic and George Loewenstein, where you give people
the facts, you give people data about a crisis, involving
numbers and hard facts and you see how much they care.
And, and how much they'll donate.
And in this example where they throw out a lot of statistics
at people, your average person hearing it will give about a dollar.
But then another group, you tell about an individual, an individual
with a name and with a face. And
this bumps it up considerably. There are some studies that find
that you will care more and give more to save
one person with a name and a face, than five people who
you are not told their names and you are not shown their faces.
And this I think shows the power of empathy.
Now, nothing that I'm saying would be a surprise to those
who spend their lives trying to get people to give to charities.
So if you look at the, at the ads for
charities, they don't say, okay, here's our charity, here's the statistics,
here's the data, here's the graphs, and so on.
They'll show you a picture.
They'll tell you about an individual.
I know this from personal experience.
When I was in graduate school, I was extremely persuaded by
Peter Singer's argument which I talked about in a previous lecture.
That we need to give much more to charity, that, that we
are doing something wrong by not, by, by spending money on luxuries instead
of giving the money to save people's lives.
I was very persuaded by this and still am kind of.
And I would tell this to my friends.
I tell this to my fellow graduate students, and,
and you know, we'd be out for a beer
and we'd be drinking a beer and I would
say you know that beer could save a child's life.
And, and you are murdering a child, and me too, by drinking these beers.
And at one point one of my graduates, one of my friends
who was a graduate student, a philosopher actually, got really sick of me.
And he said, how much do you give to charity?
And I was sort like well, dude, it's a philosophical argument here.
But I thought, well nothing, actually.
And I was poor graduate student, but I was
much richer than the people I was concerned about.
So, I decided I should give money to charity.
So, I sent away, and this is pre-internet, so I
sent away a postcard to an organization, Child Reach and
asked for information.
And I remember getting the packet and I remember opening up the packet.
And I remember expecting to see a lot of information about what their
charity does and how they work and where the money goes and so on.
But they were much smarter than that.
I open up the packet, and there in it was
a picture wrapped up in plastic of a small child.
And the letter
said, Dear Mr. Loom, we know, we know you have not commited to giving us any money.
We know, we know you're just asking
for information and that's, that's fair enough.
But, but we have enclosed a pictrure and then he told
me that this is, and he told me the child's name.
And they said, we know you are not committed to giving us money.
But if you do give us money, this is
the life you will save.
And that is psychologically so much more powerful than, than data and then facts.
And, and, and actually my family's still sending money to
that, to that child and his family many, many years later.
Now you, you could argue further that the kindness the boost we get from empathy is,
can motivate kind behavior not just to individuals but
to the groups that the that those individuals belong to.
And this is a claim defended by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
So, Nussbaum writes, talking about Greek tragedies, although
all of the future citizens who saw ancient
tragedies were male, they were asked to have
empathy for suffering of many whose lot could
never be theirs, such as Trojans and Persians
and Africans, such as wives and daughters and mothers.
And her argument is that one of the things fiction can do, fiction, also journalism
and stories, movies, T.V. shows, is they can put you, get you to have empathy.
Get you to put you in the shoes of those who you wouldn't otherwise be, be with.
And by doing so, you might care not just about,
about that individual, that fictitious individual, but rather the group that
the individual belongs to. My own, my own bet, is that
feelings in America towards, homosexuals were radically affected by situation
comedies like Will and Grace, which showed gay people in a positive way.
Made you root for them, made you care for them, put yourself in their shoes.
Attitudes in America towards African-Americans,
I think, were transformed by
shows like The Cosby Show, which again put people in
the shoes of these, these African-Americans who were perfectly fine
and fun and enjoyable, and people you could sympathize with.
And then the sympathy expanded to the group as a whole.
Now, this is largely speculation.
But we do know, historically, that there are cases where fiction has
caused interesting and important moral changes.
And one example has to do with Harriett Beecher Stowe.
The story goes that, Abraham Lincoln invited her
to the White House at the beginning of the
Civil War and said to her, so you're
the little lady who's caused this great big war.
And he was talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin, and
Uncle Tom's Cabin is not a book of great
philosophy or legal reasoning or, theology or morality.
It's it-, it, it's fictional.
But what it does is, it get, it got the readers
who were predominantly white people, some of whom were slave owners,
to put themselves in the shoes of of slaves and see
what their experience was and by doing so, served as a
catalyst for moral change.
So, I have argued that empathy could be a force for morality, both
at a individual level but also maybe as at the group level too.
In further support of this, I think we could look now
at precisely what's wrong with people, who don't care about other people.
People who lack compassion.
And this brings us back to psychopaths.
So, psychopaths also known as sociopaths, you
can use what ever term, they're not sensitive.
They're typically male.
To be a psychopath is defined by all sorts of characteristics.
A clinical psychologist named Hare developed a psychopathy test.
If you're curious about yourself you could take it online.
Psychopaths tend to be selfish,
they're callous, they're impulsive, they're promiscuous
and have a deficit in normal feelings.
They have a deficit in love and loyalty and guilt and shame and anxiety.
They tend to be cold blooded characters.
Psychopathy comes in all sorts of flavors.
In some extreme cases you have these cold
blooded psychopaths who are also very violent people.
And these people cause
so much of the misery in the world.
I'll give you a few quotes to give you a feeling for psychopathy.
you, by the way when you think of
a psychopath you may well think of Hannibal Lector.
Who is a classic Silence of the Lambs psychopath.
But I tend to think of James Bond to
show you that they're not all necessarily bad guys.
Some of the psychopaths might be on our side.
But James Bond also fits many of the characteristics.
The Daniel Craig James Bond, not the Roger Moore James Bond.
So, so, how do psychopaths talk?
How do they think?
Well you have to use extreme examples one of them which was reported by Damon in his
book on morality is of a 13 year old who who would mug blind people.
And he'd mug blind people because he figured they couldn't identify them,
him later.
And he was then asked later on, so you know, don't you
care about the people whose lives you destroy, the people you assault?
What about this woman you just attacked?
And his response, I think, perfectly captures
what a person is like without compassion.
He said, what do I care? I'm not her.
And in some way that's a good argument. You're not her, why should
you care?
Well, because humans normally are usually wired up to care,
but it's hard to figure a logical argument, why you should.
Ted Bundy, who was a serial killer, was once, once in a, in an interview while
in prison, expressed surprise at the fuss that
was made, on, that all of his murders.
He said at one point, you know there are so many people, he was kind of puzzled
why people were so concerned.
And, one of the creepier examples, and this is from Jon
Ronson's excellent book The Psychopath Test, is a guy named Peter Woodcock.
And and this guy he he had raped and murdered 3 children
and ended up in a psychiatric facility for the rest of his life.
But he did get a three-hour leave to walk around
the grounds after some years of good behavior.
In the course of this, he invited a friend of his who was also on
this leave to join him for a walk, and then killed his friend with a hatchet.
So, he was asked, interviewed later about this event.
And, and here's how he described it.
So, the interviewer says, asks, what was going through your mind at that time?
This was somebody you loved.
And the psychopath answers, curiousity, actually, and an
anger, because he had rebuffed on my advances.
And why did you feel someone should die as a result of your curiosity?
I just wanted to know what it would feel like to kill somebody.
And the interviewer asks, but you had already killed three people.
And Woodcock replies, yes, but that was years and
years and years and years ago. So, what's wrong with psychopaths?
Well, one answer is, that among their many deficits,
they don't have normal empathetic feelings, towards others.
They don't feel other people's pain, they don't feel other people's pleasure.
And because of that the suffering that they caused doesn't come
back at them, it doesn't resonate.
Some people have argued that along with all of their deficits including
empathetic deficits there's something very specific,
very specific that's wrong with them.
And this comes from the work of the psychologist Abagail Marsh.
So Marsh did a series of studies where she took psychopaths who
were in her lab and she showed them a series of faces.
And the idea is you have to identify the face.
What emotional expression, you, correspondents to that face.
So, they would look at the face, on the,
on the upper left and say, boy that woman looks
angry, and they look at the face of the guy
in the middle bottom and say that's one happy guy.
But there was one sort of face, that they had a lot
of problems recognizing.
That is, they would look at that face and they wouldn't have the foggiest idea what
the person was feeling, though for a normal person, it was it was obvious.
So, the face I'm talking about is in the top middle.
It's fear.
And Marsh argues that psychopaths have this specific
deficit, empathizing with the fear of other people.
She tells a story of, of, of a study, an interview, with actually a female
psychopath, who identified all of the faces easily,
except could have no idea what fear was.
And then, finally, it came to her, and she said,' I don't know what
that expression is called, but I know it's what people look like,
right before I stab them. And I'll end with that.
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