USA Africa Dialogue Series - Barack Obama and the 'empathy deficit'

Barack Obama and the 'empathy deficit'

The US president claims the 'empathy deficit' is a more pressing
problem than the federal deficit, but empathy may be merely a product
of changing scientific fashions

Mark Honigsbaum

The Observer, Friday 4 January 2013 16.30 GMT


In 2011, researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a simple
experiment to ascertain whether a rat would release another rat from a
cage without being given a reward. The answer was yes. After several
sessions, the rats learned intentionally and quickly to open the
restrainer and release the caged rats. The rats also repeated the
behaviour even when they were denied the reward of reunion. Even more
astonishing, when the rats were presented with two cages, one
containing a rat, the other chocolate, they chose to open both cages
and "typically shared the chocolate".

For the researchers, the conclusion was inescapable: the rats were
displaying empathy. Announcing the results in Science, the lead
researcher, Peggy Mason, explained: "There is nothing in it except
whatever feeling they get from helping another individual."

Neuroscientists are not the only ones to see empathy – or its absence
– everywhere these days. According to Barack Obama, the "empathy
deficit" is a more pressing political problem for America than the
federal deficit and holds the key to the success of his second term as
he seeks to build bridges with Republicans and tackle the wave of
horrific shootings that last year disfigured American communities from
Colorado to Connecticut. On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile,
George Osborne's enthusiasm for welfare cuts is explained by the
coalition cabinet's "lack of empathy" for the poor.

But can the solution to violence, cruelty and the divide between
liberals and conservatives really be a matter of promoting a trait
that we appear to share with rats? And are scientists and politicians
talking about the same thing when they invoke empathy in these
different experimental and social contexts?

One of the problems with using the same word to describe the pro-
social behaviour of rats and similar behaviour observed in humans is
that people are infinitely more complex and reflective than rodents.
It also confuses the different psychological and philosophical
meanings of empathy.

Thus modern-day neuroscientists and social psychologists, drawing on
the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith's notion of a "moral
sentiment", have come to regard empathy as intrinsically pro-social.
When we empathise, they argue, we mirror the distress of an "other"
and, unless our brains are damaged or we are developmentally abnormal,
we are moved to alleviate their suffering.

The result is that, like other modern moral sentiments such as trust
and altruism, empathy is increasingly seen as a "social glue" and the
evolutionary basis of human co-operation. But what if this notion
reflects nothing more than the current vogue for connectedness that
permeates the post-Darwinian sciences and our internet-obsessed times?
What if, instead of empathy being the basis of modern social life, it
is merely a product of changing scientific fashions?

Although empathy has become something of a political buzzword, it is
surprisingly difficult to define. Moreover, a survey of the scientific
and historical literature reveals that its meaning has shifted
significantly over time.

The word first appeared, misspelled as enpathy, in a 1909 lecture by
the Cornell psychologist Edward B Titchener, and in a translation
credited to the Cambridge philosopher and psychologist James Ward the
same year. Inspired by the German aesthetic term Einfühlung, meaning
"feeling into", Titchener compared empathy to an enlivening process
whereby an art object evoked actual or incipient bodily movements and
accompanying emotions in the viewer.

This made it very different from the far older term sympathy, or
Victorian notions of the "sympathetic imagination", which novelists
such as George Eliot considered a cognitive act in which readers
learned to extend themselves into the experiences, motives and
emotions of fictional characters.

For empathy to become more like sympathy, it first had to transit from
aesthetics to interpersonal psychology and the new brain sciences. The
key shift came in 1992 when a group of Italian researchers observed
neurons in macaque monkeys that fired both when they picked up a
raisin and when they saw a person pick up a raisin. A few years later,
similar "mirror neurons" were identified in humans.

Since then, neuroscience has greatly expanded our understanding of the
"empathy circuit". The key brain regions appear to be the amygdala,
which is involved in the regulation of emotional learning and the
reading of emotional expressions, and the anterior cingulate cortex
(ACC), which activates when people experience their own pain or
observe others in pain. Another important area is the anterior insula
(AI), which lights up in response both to one's own pain and a loved
one's pain, as well as to other emotional elicitors, such as
disgusting tastes and images.

But perhaps the most important region of all is the medial prefrontal
cortex (MPC), also known as the prefrontal lobe. A "hub" for social
information processing, the MPC modulates self-awareness and our
awareness of other people's thoughts and feelings. It also appears to
play an important role in "marking" certain emotional experiences so
as to provide us with emotional shortcuts to actions that are positive
and therefore likely to be rewarding.

The neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio have shown that patients
with damage to the ventromedial part of the MPC – the section closely
associated with self-awareness – typically have great trouble learning
from previous emotional experiences or making decisions, seeing equal
merit in every course of action. Such patients also show less of a
change in their heartbeat and other autonomic responses when shown
distressing images. In this respect, their response mirrors that of
sociopaths who may have suffered no medical trauma.

For some writers, these discoveries show that empathy is hard-wired
and that we are primed for morality, hence the writer Jeremy Rifkin's
claim that these circuits are the source of humanity's desire for
"intimate participation and companionship".

However, as Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism spectrum disorders,
has shown, this is frequently not the case. Psychopaths, for instance,
tend to be very good at reading other people's emotions while
remaining emotionally unmoved themselves. Adolescents with a history
of violence and diagnoses of "conduct disorder" exhibit similar
traits.

By contrast, people with autism and Asperger's syndrome are very poor
at reading non-verbal emotional signals and other social clues, but,
once they become aware of how others are feeling, they are capable of
sharing those emotions intensely. The result is that, while both
psychopaths and people with Asperger's could both be characterised as
having "zero degrees of empathy, only psychopaths are capable of
extreme cruelty.

Where Baron-Cohen and others run into difficulty is in accounting for
emotions such as schadenfreude. Far from being a form of counter-
empathy, schadenfreude appears to involve empathically mirroring
another person's distress and taking pleasure in that distress at the
same time. Indeed, in role-playing games involving "altruistic
punishment", brain researchers have found that both the ACC and the
dorsal striatum – the brain's pleasure/reward centre – are activated.

Neuroscientific approaches also tend to give too little weight to the
cognitive dimensions of empathy. A horrific illustration of this was
the cold-blooded shooting of 69 Norwegian Labour activists by Anders
Behring Breivik in 2011. At his trial, Breivik argued that he was
fully capable of empathy but had used a "meditation technique" to
override his feelings. "If you are going to be capable of executing
such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind,
your psyche, for years," he explained.

As the German historian of emotions Ute Frevert puts it: "The fact
that human beings are naturally equipped to feel what others feel does
not mean that they always do so. They might just turn away and act
indifferent."

So how can we make it less likely that people such as Breivik or Adam
Lanza, the 20-year-old responsible for the horrific shooting in
December in Newtown, Connecticut, commit acts of mass murder in
future?

The most common answer is by fostering greater perspective-taking.
Decades of scientific research show that people are kinder to those
they view as human beings. The reason is that, when we make the
imaginative effort to step into the shoes of another person and see
things from their perspective, we become less capable of ignoring
their suffering. Indeed, brain imaging studies of Buddhists who use
meditation exercises to contemplate compassion on a daily basis show
increased activation of the amygdala and other parts of the brain's
empathy circuit.

Novels, television and the internet can also foster greater empathy by
exposing us to the perspectives of people whose lives we would not
otherwise consider. This is particularly the case when empathy is
married with "humanitarian reason" – the force that Harvard
psychologist Steven Pinker credits for the steady decline in levels of
societal violence since the Enlightenment.

However, as the response last year to Invisible Children's video about
the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony showed, this sort of empathy can be
short-lived. Yes, nearly 100 million people shared Invisible
Children's video on YouTube, but the outcry against Kony was temporary
and people quickly found new objects for their indignation.

Moreover, far from being a guide to what is right, empathy often leads
us astray, as when judges go easier on white-collar criminals who
share their social background, which is why we frequently invoke other
values and principles to balance such tendencies. This is precisely
the argument made by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind:
Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt maintains
that empathy, or what he labels the "harm/care" module, is just one of
several emotional dispositions that undergird our moral outlook, the
others being fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and purity/
sanctity. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that,
while liberals focus almost entirely on care and fairness,
conservatives tend to give equal weight to all six dispositions.

In theory, this should be good news for Osborne as he seeks to counter
perceptions that his austerity measures are "uncaring", and even
better news for Republicans, especially as something like 42% of the
American electorate self-identify as conservative. However, as Obama's
response to Mitt Romney's unfortunate remarks about the "47%"
underlined, the perceived absence of empathy is a powerful weapon with
which to browbeat a political opponent. Perhaps this is why, rather
than defending his comments about the 47% on traditional conservative
grounds, Romney spent the closing weeks of last year's campaign
desperately trying to persuade voters that he was just as
compassionate as Obama.

Even before hurricane Sandy upset the candidates' campaign plans,
however, that was not an argument that carried much weight with the
undecideds and, following the pictures of Obama embracing the victims
of the storm damage in New Jersey, it was pretty much game, set and
match to the incumbent.

Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the 2012 presidential
election, it is that empathy is here to stay and that where candidates
once talked about "the economy, stupid" they would now be well-advised
to use a different E-word.
Altruistic punishers: when it feels good to act cruelly

Empathy is not the only "moral emotion" that is enjoying a renaissance
thanks to social neuroscience. Scientists have also been probing the
biological processes involved in trust and altruism.

One theory is that when we empathise oxytocin and other chemicals
flood the brain's pleasure centres, resulting in a "warm glow" effect.
Similar surges occur when people are asked to play economic exchange
games designed to elicit trust.

According to neuroeconomists such as Paul Zak, this suggests that
empathy and trust are two sides of the same adaptive response – the
idea being that our brains have evolved so that it literally feels
good to empathise and to trust people.

Primatologists such as Frans de Waal believe that altruism may be the
result of similar selection pressures. Spontaneous assistance has long
been observed in apes, hence the adoption of orphans by wild male
chimpanzees who may devote years of costly care to unrelated
juveniles. And, as the Chicago experiment illustrates, rats also
exhibit similar altruistic behaviour without their altruism being
repaid.

In the case of humans, altruism is more complicated as over the course
of a lifetime we will co-operate with thousands of genetically
unrelated strangers with whom we are unlikely to interact again. In
such societies, the advantages of forming a good reputation are
minimal. At the same time, it is easy for unscrupulous individuals,
known as "free-riders", to exploit the "trusting" instincts of the
majority.

To explains this, neuroeconomists posit that a unique form of co-
operation has evolved in human societies in which social norms are
learned, co-operators are altruistically rewarded and free-riders are
altruistically punished.

This theory is supported by studies of economic role-playing games in
which punishment is used to motivate two players to co-operate and a
failure to show and reciprocate altruism leaves both players worse
off.

However, such games also pose a problem for the notion that humans are
hard-wired for pro-sociality and morality as brain scans of
altruisitic punishers show that they both empathise with the free-
rider and take an active pleasure in his or her punishment. In other
words, as anyone who has experienced schadenfreude knows, sometimes it
feels good to act cruelly.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.

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