- [Voiceover] Welcome to Rehm library,
it's good to see a nice
crowd out this afternoon.
I'm Tom Landy, I'm the director
of the McFarland Center for
Religion, Ethics, and Culture.
And throughout the year, the
McFarland Center sponsers
and supports programs that
explore basic human questions
of meaning, morality,
and mutual obligation.
This lecture today, like many of our
most significant lectures,
is sponsored under the egis
of the Deitchman family
lectures on religion and modernity,
and I'm grateful to the Deitchman family
for making it possible.
Today's talk considers
the links between morality
and empathy.
And the degree to which empathy
is an effective way to meet
our mutual obligations,
a foundation for morality.
We've already fielded a
few comments from folks
who are puzzled on why
we would sponsor a talk
against empathy,
and I'm sure that our guest speaker,
Paul Bloom, will clear
that up in a few minutes.
He says he going to be provocative.
Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Susan Regan
professor of psychology
and chair of the cognitive science program
at Yale University.
His research explores
how children and adults
understand the physical and social world,
with special focus on morality,
religion, fiction, and art.
His argument today draws
upon his research in
psychopathy, criminal
behavior, charitable giving,
infant cognition, cognitive neuroscience,
and Buddhist meditiation practices.
He's past president of the
society for philosophy and psychology,
and co-editor of Behavioral
and Brain Sciences,
one of the major journals in the field.
He's written for scientific
journals such as,
Nature and Science, and for
popular outlets such as,
The New York Times, The
Guardian, The New Yorker,
The Atlantic Monthly,
that's now too popular now,
but we'll call that popular, good.
He's the editor of six
books including one,
"Just Babies: The Origins of
Good and Evil", and another,
"How Pleasure Works: The
New Science of Why We Like
What We Like".
Bloom has won numerous awards
for his research in teaching,
including Templeton Foundation grants,
National Science Foundation grants,
the Stanton Prize from the Society
for Philosophy and Psychology,
and the Lex Hixon Prize
for teaching exellence
in the social sciences at Yale.
So please join me in welcoming Paul Bloom.
(audience applause)
- [Voiceover] Thank you for
the very gracious introduction,
and actually, thank you
Tom for inviting me,
and for all of your for being here.
I really appreciate it.
So, sometimes friends
ask me at social events,
what I'm up to,
and you know, to be polite,
and then I tell 'em, I'm writing a book.
And it's still to be polite, they say,
so what's it about, they ask.
And I say, I'm writing a book on empathy.
And I noticed that when I say the word,
people kinda smile, they
think it's a nice topic.
And then I say, I'm against it,
and then there's often
kind of nervous chuckle,
and a look away.
And I've learned that
people that that's nuts,
being against empathy is like
being against world peace,
or being against kittens.
But I am against empathy,
and I wanna convince you,
or you guys take seriously,
the idea that you should
be against empathy too.
Now, part of the problem
here is terminal logical,
that people mean different things
by empathy.
So, some people when
we talk about empathy,
they mean everything good.
Concern, compassion, kindness,
love, morality.
And, if that's what you mean by empathy,
I'm totally for it.
These are all obviously good things.
What I want to argue is actually,
it's because I think
these are good things,
I'm gonna make the argument that I will.
Now, some times when
people talk about empathy,
they refer to what
psychologists often call
social cognition or social intelligence,
theory of mind, mind reading.
But also sometimes, cognitive empathy.
Anfd this is the capacity
to judge what others
are thinking and feeling,
to make sense of what's going on
in other people's heads.
Now, I have mixed feelings about this,
I think that this is really important
if you wanna be a good person,
if you wanna be a good
person, it's very important
to know what other people want
and what other people feel.
But on the other hand, this,
like any other form of intelligence,
it is amoral,
in that, a really bad person,
a con man, a psychopath, a seducer,
also would benefit from these great powers
to discern the minds of other people
in order to exploit and manipulate them.
That's not what I mean by empathy either.
What I mean by empathy,
is what scholars like Adam Smith,
in his wonderful book, "The
Theory of Moral Sentiments",
described as sympathy.
And here's Smith outlining it.
He says, when we see somebody
in some sort of suffering
or pain,
we place ourselves in his situation,
and become in some measure
the same person with him,
and thence form some
idea of his sensation,
even feel something which,
though weaker in degree,
is not altogether unlike them.
And, you know, to put ourselves
in other people's shoes.
This is what I mean by empathy.
Smith gives all sorts of examples,
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.
This is my favorite
illustration of an empathic
response.
There's a huge literature, sorry,
there's a huge literature
in cognitive neuroscience,
an effective neuroscience, now.
Looking at the neuro
foundations of empathy,
and one of the cool findings
that's been replicated
dozens, probably 100's of times by now,
is that, there's sense in
which empathy is literal,
and that we literally feel
what other people are feeling.
So, for instance, in this study,
if you see somebody else in pain,
either because they're
poked or shocked or burned,
parts of your brain will become active.
And these are, to some
extent, not entirely,
but to some extent, the very
same parts that would be active
if you yourself were
shocked or poked or burned.
So, (mumbling) we literally
feel one another's pain.
There's a lot of enthusiasm
for mirror neuron
theories of empathy,
and I'm actually quite critical of them,
for reasons I'm happy to discuss.
But, it does seem clear that empathy
might be a specific instantiation
of a more general propensity we have
to mimic other people, to mirror them.
So, and we behave, really,
mirror other people.
Here's my favorite example,
this guy is at a soccer game,
and a guy misses a big kick,
and he puts his hands
on the side of his head
in anguish, and that's
not very interesting.
But, look at the people around him.
(laughing)
So,
and I'm a developmental psychologist,
and one of the things we know
is that empathy emerges early.
So, even young children,
when they see someone else in pain,
will express the pain themselves
or would hurt them as if they themselves
were experiencing it.
A lot of psychologists and philosophers
are interested in empathy,
Dan Batson has done more
work than anybody else,
exploring what he calls, the
empathy altruism hypothesis,
which is that, if you
feel empathy for somebody,
it makes you more willing to help them.
Martin Hoffman has argued that empathy
is a source of morality in children,
it's, this is their origin,
a more subtle morality.
Frans De Waal argues that
even takes it broader,
to talk about primates.
Arguing that we don't
live in age of reason,
but rather, an age of empathy.
Simon Baron-Cohen, I think,
makes the most extreme claim,
arguing that evil
basically is to be deficient in empathy.
All evil equates to, for Baron-Cohen,
empathy erosion, it's nothing
more and nothing less.
But, it's not just psychologists,
public figures, prominent public figures
also applaud empathy.
More than any other president,
Obama has sung praises of empathy,
he says, for instance,
when you choose to broaden
your ambit of concern
and empathize with the plight of others,
whether they are close friends
or distant strangers,
it becomes harder not to act,
harder not to help.
The biggest deficit we have in our society
and in the world right now,
is an empathy deficit.
If you look on Amazon for books
with empathy in the title,
you find over a thousand.
These include
sort of self help books,
they include books for
children, to give to children,
or for parents raising children,
they include marketing books like,
"Well Designed: How to Sell
Your Products Through Empathy",
and the occasional science
book like, "Mirroring People".
The use of empathy has gone up
steadily in literature since
the term was coined in 1909.
And has gone up steadily
in Google searches
over time.
So, what's not to like?
Well, one thing to realize is,
even if you're the biggest fan of empathy,
you should acknowledge
that there are other ways
to come to moral judgements
and moral actions.
So, this is a classic
example in moral philosophy.
First thought everything
by the Chinese philosopher,
Mencius, but then used by contemporary
western philosophy Peter
Under and Peter Singer.
Which is, you're walking down a road,
and you see a child drowning.
And it's easy for you to just kind of
go in the water and pull
the child out and save her.
And people say, you know,
philosophy is different, everybody
says that's a good thing.
Everyone would acknowledge
that's a good thing.
And I imagine if you
were in this situation,
you would do this.
But, now, you could do this
through empathy in the literal sense.
You could see her drowning,
and feel what's it's like to be drowning,
experience drowning yourself,
and that could catalyze your behavior.
We could imagine her
parents, hypothetically,
hearing that she died.
Sense their anguish, feel
that anguish yourself.
You could do all of that,
this is ridiculous, no body would do that.
You see her drowing, you say,
what, that's really a bad
thing for a kid to drown,
and you'd wade in and pull her out.
And more generally, the
philosopher Jesse Print points out,
there's all sorts of cases
where we recognize something
as wrong,
but there's no, empathy
can't be involved in it,
in part because there's no
specific victim to focus on.
So, for instance, he talks
about harmless wrongs.
So, people have certain sex acts
that they might believe are morally wrong.
Peeping at somebody from a distance,
or molesting somebody
even if they don't know it, a
sleeping child or something,
that we say is wrong even if
we can't pick out a victim.
More generally, there's a lot of things
that we recognize as wrong,
that have diffuse effects,
that you can't really point
to one person to empathize with.
Most of us would view it wrong
to throw our garbage
out of our car window,
or cheat on our taxes,
or shoplift from a large store,
or if you're a scientist, fake your data,
or lie on a grant proposal,
even though you can't
point to a single person
to empathize with,
you still know this is wrong.
And this just goes to show that morality
and empathy have different scopes,
something could be
immoral without triggering
empathic concern.
You could even pit empathy against
morality, in a certain way.
So, I said before, Dan Batson is this
huge champion of empathy as a moral force,
but he's also very
sophisticated about his limits.
He developed this lovely study,
so he tells people in the study,
about Sherri Summers,
and Sherri Summers is a hypothetical girl,
he's described her in
detail, who's going to die,
she has a disease and
she's in a lot of pain,
and she's going to die.
And there's nothing
much you can do for her,
but there's a treatment that
will alleviate her pain,
make her years be far more enjoyable.
And she's on a list, and it's a fair list,
you know, people get on the list
because severity and all sorts of things,
and she's low on the list.
And the question that you
face, as a subject is,
would you move her up the list?
And you're told if you
move her up the list
and another child who's
deemed to be more deserving,
won't get the treatment.
Now, if you just ask people like that,
people tend (mumbling), no.
It's really sad, but you
know, if it's a fair list,
why should I penalize
some other kid for her,
that seems wrong.
The other group of people are
told exactly the same thing,
but Batson just adds one sentence,
he says, put yourself in her shoes
and feel what she's feeling.
That single sentence flips things.
And now, a majority of
people are willing to
move her up the list,
even though they know
it caused another child to drop down,
and Batson, and you know,
your mileage may vary,
you might think about
this in different ways,
but Batson says, this is
a case where your empathy
motivates you to do a
decision that upon reflection,
isn't the right one.
Now, the fans of empathy
will tell you that it's like a spotlight.
And they may say, look, empathy
may have its limitations,
it may not, but (mumbling),
it's a spotlight,
in that, you initially may
not care about somebody,
or a situation, but
empathy can zoom you in
and can make things matter.
And the idea that we care,
that we're motivated to help,
individuals that we feel for,
as opposed to sort of
statistical abstractions,
is well known.
So, Stalin apocryphally said,
A single death is a tragedy,
a million deaths is a statistic.
Mother Teresa, in an interview said,
If I look at the mass, I will never act.
If I look at the one, I will.
And there's clever
experiments looking at this,
so this is work by Deborah Small
and Jord Glowinstein,
and what they do is,
they collect donations
for Habitat for Humanity.
And in fact, they really do,
the money that the subjects give
really goes go to Habitat for Humanity.
And it actually is a
real subtle manipulation,
they say, your money's
gonna go to a family
to help them build a house.
Half of the subjects are told
the family has been chosen,
the other half are told
the family will be chosen.
You might think, what's the difference?
There's a 60 percent
difference in donations.
And the way they explain this is,
when you say, has been chosen,
you can envision a specific
family, they now exist.
Will be chosen, they're an abstraction,
and you give less.
They did another study where
they asked for donations
to save the children,
and they gave people
statistical information
about the crisis.
And this was average donation
over dollar per person.
Another group got none of the information.
But they were told about a girl,
and they heard her name,
and they heard a picture,
and they saw a picture, and got her age,
and added donations jumped up.
So, you have this
spotlight effect of empathy
where it zooms you in,
when you feel empathy for something
it zooms you into focus on it.
There's abundant evidence
from Batson and others,
like the Sherri Summers experiment.
If I put myself in your
shoes, you'll matter to me,
more than other people.
So, but the problem is,
spotlights have certain problems.
So, spotlights
have narrow focus,
and we often point them
in the wrong places.
And what I wanna suggest is,
because of the spotlight
properties of empathy,
it's biased, innumerate,
concrete, and myopic.
So,
to get to that, I wanna give some examples
of the sort of things over
the last 30 or so years,
that Americans have been
very concerned about,
that have really hit the news.
And one of them is baby Jessica,
and many people here
are too young for this.
But the older people remember,
baby Jessica was a girl
who got stuck in a well,
and it was a huge rescue operation.
And during that period,
America was transfixed
by her concern.
More recently, there was Natalee Holloway,
who was a girl lost,
perhaps abducted and killed
while traveling,
and it caused an enormous
amount of concern.
The psychologist Paul Slovic calculated
that when Natalee Holloway was lost,
she got more network attention,
she got 18 times more network attention
than the current famine in Sudan,
which was killing tens
of thousands of people.
And then more recently,
and this speaks to people who
live in Connecticut, as I do,
there was the tragedy in Newtown.
Where many children were
murdered by Adam Lanza
in an elementary school.
And these are all, all of these cases,
the girl in the well, Natalee Holloway,
certainly the children of Sandy Hook,
are real serious cases.
But, psychologists wonder why them?
And the plaintiff's not
the objective importance.
So, we are obsessed with mass shootings.
But, from 1980 to the
present there's been about
60 mass shootings, about 500 dead.
I'd have to update my slides,
it's now more like 520
dead.
You look at this as a proportion
of American homicides,
it's point one percent.
What this means,
what this means is,
that if you could snap your fingers
and make it that there will never
be a mass shooting again
in the United States,
later on, looking at crime statistics,
no one will know that you did that.
It correlates to the random variation,
it would make literally no difference
to the numbers.
Yet, that's not how it
feels psychologically,
and the reason why,
was nicely elaborated by the
economist Thomas Shelling
many years ago,
as part of what he called
identifiable victim effect.
So, Shelling writes,
let a six year old girl with brown hair
need thousands of dollars for an operation
that will prolong her
life until Christmas,
and the post office will
be swamped with nickels
and dimes to save her.
But let it be reported
that without a sales tax,
the hospital facilities of
Massachusetts will decline,
and cause a barely perceptible increase
in preventable deaths,
not many will drop a tear
and reach for their checkbooks.
Statistical deaths don't
trigger our empathy
and they don't move us.
While the death and suffering
of particular individuals do.
Then there's bias.
This was a journalist's
rendition of the ebola crisis.
And it was done to
represent the fact that,
sorry, this was a cartoonist
depiction of the ebola crisis,
to represent the fact
that journalist devoted
an extraordinary amount of attention
to the relatively few
white victims of ebola.
While ignoring the far greater suffering
among black victims.
In fact, again, there
was much more attention
and money given to the ebola dog,
a dog that was sick and brought to Texas,
than were to many of actual real victims
of ebola.
And the raise effects in empathy,
and in concern of
compassion are no secret,
they're very strong.
The work of Jennifer
Eberhart, for instance,
finds that holding everything else equal,
and she's done statistical analyasis,
and experimental tests,
you are far more likely to be executed,
have a jury decide to execute you,
or a judge decide to execute you,
if you look like the man on the right
than the man on the left.
Because there's a power,
even if you're black,
the degree in which you're black
correlates to how punitive
your punishment is.
And again, this is no secret,
(mumbling) the Onion recently satirized it
with a headline saying, judge
rules white girl be tried
as black adult.
And so, basically, the court
drawer or artist was instructed
to draw her like that,
as a part of her punishment.
Now, none of these
things I'm talking about,
the focus on individual
and identifiable victims,
the racial bias is special to empathy.
But empathy is particularly
vulnerable to it,
because empathy works
by putting yourself in
particular people's shoes.
It is incredibly manipulated
both by the specific focus
and also, by bias.
Annie Diller, the writer,
puts this in kind of
a tongue in cheek way,
she says, there are one
point two billion people
alive now in China.
To get a feeling for what this means,
simply take yourself,
in all your singularity,
importance, complexity, and love,
and multiply by one point two billion.
See? Nothing to it.
And, the laboratory studies
tell the same story.
So, yes.
If you're suddenly poked in the finger,
part of your brain,
as if you yourself were poked
in the finger, lights up.
But it depends what kind of finger it is.
The effect is more powerful
if it's the same gender finger,
and the same color finger.
We don't empathize as much with people
who look different from us.
This is true, for instance,
you feel pain, you see
someone else in pain,
you will feel their pain.
But that depends critically
on who the other person is.
In one study in Europe,
they had male soccer fans wired up,
and they watch someone else in pain,
and they were told either,
this was somebody in their,
supporting their same team
or a different team.
If it's the same team,
when they saw the other person in pain,
parts of their own brains
associated with pain, lit up.
When they were told they
were from a different team,
the parts of the brain
associated with pain
did not light up,
instead, parts of the
brain associated with
vicarious pleasure became active.
Another study by Jean Desede,
I just heard of it a few
days ago, John Desede
at the University of Chicago,
looked at, showed people
videos of people suffering
from AIDS,
when they were told that
these people were suffering
from AIDS because they were
given a blood transfusion,
there was tremendous
empathy both in self report
and in neuro response.
When they were told that these people
got AIDS through intervenes drug use,
all of that went away.
So, your empathy isn't this
sort of natural response,
it's highly selective on your own biases
and your own preferences.
And this sort of thing can
matter, in the real world.
So, yeah, a hypothetical case,
a vaccine comes out and
a child gets the vaccine,
and because there's something
wrong with the vaccine,
the child dies.
Surely that vaccine
program would be shut down.
It would be shut down even if there were
statistical evidence
that the vaccine program
saved the lives of a dozen children.
Because you could
empathize with this girl,
the family, the loss,
you could really see it, feel it,
as you feel the suffering
people in Newtown.
But, the idea statistically
of a rise in deaths due
to lack of vaccination,
who do you empathize with?
To take a real case that
runs parallel for this,
this is Willy Horton,
in 1987
then Governor Michael Dukakis,
he was released as part
of a furlough program.
And he went on to rape a woman
and assault her fiance.
As a result of this, the program
was immediately shut down.
Dukakis apologized, said it
was an embarrassing failure
and he was attacked by it, both by
his opponent Al Gore in the primaries,
and then George Bush afterwards.
And Willy Horton became a famous figure
which perhaps, ended Dukakis'
hopes for Presidency.
Now, analysis later on
showed the furlough program
actually saved lives.
In that, statistically,
when a furlough program
was operative, and in the
places, it was operative,
there were fewer murders,
and rapes, and assaults.
That meant nothing to people,
because you would empathize tremendously
with somebody who was been assaulted.
But you can't empathize with somebody
who would have been assaulted, but wasn't
because of a program that's in place.
There's a huge asymmetry that your
empathic engagement sets up.
Or take, as a broader issue (mumbling),
third-world aid.
So, countries like the United States
divert billions of dollars
to help in the third-world.
And often, the aid is motivated
by certain empathic police,
non-governmental organizations,
different organizations,
make the suffering of
certain people salient,
so as to motivate help.
But, there is, as I'm sure people know,
huge debate over the
extent to which this aid
is making things better.
Where some people say
it's making things better,
some people say it's not
making things better,
and there are some cases
were the aid is clearly
making things worse.
And you can imagine how, for instance,
it might be very tempting to run in
and rescue a bunch of people,
but if by rescuing a bunch of people,
you destroy local institutions
that would normally help,
you could end up leaving things worse.
And there are specific cases of that,
Linda Paulman, at one point,
asked warlords in Sierra Leone,
why did they chop off children's limbs.
And this is a horrible thing,
why did they do that?
And two of them independently
told her the same thing.
We do it for you.
If there's not a
sufficiently gory atrocity,
western nations are
uninterested in our country.
When NGO's and western governmental agents
come to our country,
they pays us to be there,
they pay a tax to be there.
So, all of these programs
in Africa that don't help,
pay a tax to warlords, we need the money,
we had to bring you in.
Or take another case,
child beggars.
So, most people,
when you see a child
beggar in India or Africa,
it's often irresistable
not to give to them.
But there's a virtual consensus,
that by giving to them,
you're making the world worse.
You're supporting a criminal organization
that kidnaps and often manes, you know,
tens of thousands of children.
And, but the empathic force of this,
the feeling you get,
there's somebody in trouble
that you could help,
is very powerful.
But I think it gives the wrong answer.
I'm gonna return to this,
but, and I think,
I wanna return to this but,
the answer, I don't think,
is some sort of nihilism
or despair,
but rather, one should
try to help other people,
but one shouldn't be governed
by the emotional feelings
that are evoked, one should, you know,
as this very nice slogan goes,
you should use your head and your heart.
Now, a lot of people think
when defending empathy,
I think a lot of people,
particularly liberals,
think empathy is on their side
in domestic issues that they argue for.
A lot of liberals think
that liberals are empathic,
and liberal policies are based on empathy,
and conservatives are un-empathic,
and don't draw on empathy.
And they would see that
because they're liberal,
as an argument for empathy.
And in fact, both
liberals and conservatives
think liberals are more
empathic than conservatives.
And when you give people empathy tests,
liberals are more empathic
than conservatives.
It's not a huge difference,
but it's a reliable one.
By far, the least
empathic are libertarians,
they just say, "oh,
I'm nothin'", you know.
But, you know, and so, yeah,
people like George Lakoff
who says basically,
you know, what progressive-ism is,
is basically empathy,
and if you believe that, (mumbling),
and you're progressive,
you're gonna be very much
in favor of empathy.
But I think that's a poor argument.
I think it's a poor
argument in a couple ways,
for one thing, if you look at real debates
that people have over policy,
and how empathy is exploited
in the course of these debates,
it's a bizarre caricature
to say the liberals
are using empathy and
the conservatives aren't.
Rather, what you often see is a sort of
figure ground perspective.
Where, it's not whether
empathy is being used,
it's to whom it's being targeted for.
If you're in favor of affirmative action,
you may try to drive home your case
by drawing people's empathy
towards a black kid who
can't get into college.
If you're against affirmative action,
you may draw people's
empathy towards the white kid
who would have gotten into college,
and couldn't because of
a program blocking him.
If you're in favor of abortion rights,
you might
focus very much, for empathy,
for the pregnant mother.
While, if you are pro-life, you may focus,
try to sell empathy for
the fetus or embryo.
If you're in favor of gun control,
whenever something like the
Newtown tragedy happens,
you'll try to evoke tremendous empathy
for the people suffering
from gun violence.
But if you're against gun control,
you would come out, as people do,
and talk about empathy for
people who are defenseless,
who are defenseless against criminals,
because the government
has taken away their guns.
There's even some cases
where there's sort of
some paradigmatically empathic causes.
Where empathy is not decided at all.
And here so,
Jeremy Rifkin talks about
the environmental crisis
in this book, "The Empathic Civilization".
And he's using empathy
in a very broad sense,
there is nothing wrong
with what he's saying,
when he says we need more empathy.
But if you take empathy in
a more small, literal sense,
empathy is useless
when it comes to global warming
and climate change.
Because, there's nobody to empathize with,
it's all future
individuals.
The best you got, is something like that.
But that's as good as you're gonna get.
And compare that to opponents,
people who oppose making
changes to our current
economic or tax system
due to climate change,
will bring out real victims,
people who's lives will be messed up
if you raised your gas tax,
if you make it more
expensive to drive a car,
and so on.
So, I've been talking about empathy
in the context of public policy,
I wanna sort of bring
it down a little bit,
and talk about, sort of, a
certain intimate relationships.
And one intimate relationship
is between a doctor
and a patient.
So, many people believe that doctors
should be more empathic,
and there are many programs
at medical schools,
right now, have,
where they try to train doctors
to be more empathic.
Maybe, surprisingly, I
have nothing against this,
when you look at what they mean,
well they say, they should make them,
they should be nicer, they should listen,
they should try to understand, and so on,
all good things.
But, what about the
literal sense of empathy,
in that, feeling their patients' pain?
Well there, I think, there's
some really good arguments
against it,
and this is actually put
very elegantly by Leslie
Jamison (mumbling)
"The Empathy Exams".
So, Jamison talks about her work
as a model patient.
So what she did was,
she pretended to be a patient as part of
medical students' training,
and then she ranked the
doctors in training,
on different abilities
including the empathy scale,
which is how empathic they were to her.
And as she's doing this,
she's really valuing the
exercise of empathy by them.
But then she gets sick,
she gets sick and has to
see a series of doctors
for real.
And then her perspective changes,
I think, in an interesting way.
And she writes, empathy is
always perched precariously
between gift and invasion.
And she talks about a doctor
who was very cruel to her
and how negative it was,
but then she talked to another doctor
who was kind, but not empathic.
And she said, and she liked it.
I didn't need him him to be my mother,
even for a day,
I only needed him to
know what he was doing.
His calmness didn't
make me feel abandoned,
it made me feel secure.
I needed to look at him and
see the opposite of my fear,
not it's echo.
And I think this is most extreme
in the context of therapy.
So, therapists should, of course,
understand their patients,
should care for their patients,
and so on.
But, if I go to my therapist,
and I'm a little anxious and depressed,
and I'm saying, my life is useless,
it's horrible.
I don't want her to get
anxious and depressed,
and to say, oh, your life's horrible.
You know, I want her to care about me,
and I want her to understand me.
But I don't want to infect
her with my feelings,
I don't want her to absorb my feelings,
because it would make her less effective.
Now, in some way,
this all comes under a
rubric of a 1970's term,
verno,
and there's actually some evidence
that people who feel more empathy,
are more subject to verno.
But the idea here, is an old one.
And I think it's best
expressed in Buddhism,
and Buddhist theology.
So, Buddhist theologians
make a distinction between
what they call, sentimental compassion,
and great compassion.
And sentimental compassion
is what I've been calling
empathy, which is feeling the suffering
of another person.
And they recommend against it,
it will exhaust you, you will not be able
to do it for long, you
will be useless to help,
because you will help for a month,
and then you will give it up.
What they recommend, is great compassion,
which is, at a distance.
You feel a loving kindness towards people,
you want their suffering to go away,
but you yourself don't
feel their suffering.
Now, this is all sort of
theoretical abstraction,
but these ideas show up in this
wonderful research program,
by the neuroscientist Tonya Singer
and a biologist, and Buddhist meditator
Matthew Ricard.
And what they did was,
they've been doing for like
a decade now,
a series of studies,
where what they do is,
they train people
to feel empathy,
to put themselves in
shoes of other people.
And often, they do neuro imaging studies
when they train people.
Then they train other
people to feel compassion,
and those undergo loving
kindness meditiation,
they're explicitly taught not to feel
empathic connection to other people,
but to love them, to care for them.
And here's how they, kinda
chop up what they find.
Compassion is an other related emotion,
linked up to positive feelings like love,
good health, approach and
pro-social motivation.
Empathic distress, which arises from
an empathic connection,
is a self related emotion,
you start worrying about yourself,
it leads to negative feelings
of stress, poor health,
and burnout, and withdrawal
and non-social behavior.
So, I'm not arguing I want
you to be cold blooded,
as we'll see, you know,
you need some sort of,
you need to care for other
people in order to motivate you
to do the numbers, to calculate (mumbling)
make it a better world.
But I would push for a
distinction, caring for people,
compassion and feeling empathic for them.
Finally, let's get even more intimate.
When some people think about individuals
who lack empathy,
they think of a psychopath,
and they, well, you know,
you don't wanna lack empathy,
because you'd be like a psychopath,
you don't wanna be a
psychopath, that's horrible.
And it's true, psychopaths
are really bad people.
But, and there are some people,
like John Roson and this wonderful book,
who argue that, the core
feature of psychopathy
is lack of empathy,
the lack of feeling the
pain of other people
is drives them to do terrible things,
or enables them to do terrible things.
And I wanna bookmark this,
I'll get back to this at
the very end of the talk.
But here's what I wanna note first.
There was a recent study, a meta analysis,
which brought together every study done,
looking at the relationship
between aggression and empathy.
Looking at physical
aggression, verbal aggression,
and sexual agression,
testing people with every
empathy test on the book.
And you would see the
results from the title,
"The (Non)Relation Between
Empathy and Aggression:
Surprising Results From a Meta-Analysis".
What was surprising is, there
was no relationship at all.
What this means is,
if I wanna know, for any one of you,
how likely you are to slap your partner,
how likely you are to
sexually assault somebody,
how likely you are to yell at your child.
And I could give you 100 tests,
I wouldn't bother giving
you the empathy test,
because it has no predictive power at all.
We'll return to that.
Okay, now I wanna say some
nice things about empathy.
And then say even worse
things about empathy.
So, my complaints about empathy has been,
empathy and its capacity
for moral judgement,
and for moral action.
But there's no doubt that empathy
could be a great source of pleasure.
So, we love putting ourselves into shoes
of fictional characters,
one of the great pleasures
of life, I think, of movies, and TV shows,
and so on.
Adam Smith points out
that there's a certain
special pleasure that arises from empathy,
gives this great description.
When we've a read a book or poem so often
we no longer find any
amusement in reading it
by ourselves, we can still take pleasure
in reading it to a companion.
To him it has all the graces of novelty,
we enter into the surprise and admiration
which it naturally excites in him.
That's a very old-timey example, books,
but, right now, what we do is,
we forward things, we forward lul cats,
and Facebook shares, and so on.
I find something funny, you know,
a cat trying to use an
alarm clock or something,
I laugh, I forward it to you.
The pleasure I get imagining your pleasure
lights me up.
And this is one of the great
things about having kids.
So, one of the great things
about having kids is,
it lets you experience pleasures
that you've long experienced,
for the first time all over again,
through your child's eyes.
Eating ice cream, seeing
a Hitchcock movie,
whatever,
you do it with your kid
and you experience it
all over again.
And it's this case in empathy's favor.
Michael Slote points out,
there's more to this.
Michael Slote makes, and
I think this is right,
points out that empathy may be related
to sort of, intimacy, in a way.
So, he gives the example of a father
whose daughter collects stamps.
And says, the father could
approve of his daughter
collecting stamps, could be proud of her,
could encourage her,
but wouldn't it be better, Slote said,
if he could share her enthusiasm?
If he could engage with it?
And I think he's right.
A final case in favor
of empathy is,
it can be utilized to do good things.
The spotlight effect can be directed
by people who have certain causes,
and to motivate people to do good things.
So, the identifiable victim effect
is no secret to people
who organize charities,
cause they use this all the time
to drive us to give.
And, more generally,
there's some arguments
that it's been used to
affect social change.
Martha Nussbaum writes,
talking about Greek tragedies,
although all of the future citizens
who saw ancient tragedies were male,
they were asked to have
empathy with the suffering
of many whose lot could never be theirs,
such as Trojans and Persians and Africans,
such as wives and daughters and mothers.
And it could be that the engagement,
the empathic engagement, even
with fictional characters,
can motivate moral change
when done in the right hands.
This is Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the story goes that,
in the height of the Civil War,
Abraham Lincoln invited
her to the White House,
and said to her, so you're the little lady
who started this great big war.
And he was talking about
"Uncle Tom's Cabin",
which few people see as a
great work of literature,
or a philosophy, or theology,
but what it did was, it got it's reader's,
mostly white people,
to engage empathically
with the suffering of the slaves,
and maybe sort of
catalyzed a moral effect.
In here, empathy does good.
I think more recently, a lot
of the changes we've seen
in American society,
is sort of expanding the
American moral circle,
can be explained in terms of this sort of
empathic engagement through fiction.
Not in books, but in television shows
and particular situation comedies.
So, the Cosby Show,
and yes, I have to update my slides.
But, the Cosby Show, to give it credit,
did expand a lot of white Americans'
sensibilities and care for
black Americans.
Shows like Will and Grace,
and more recently, Modern Family,
have done the same thing
for gay men and women.
So, empathy can be used, you know,
empathic engagement with a character
can be used to expand
your circle of concern.
But, it's not quite as simple as that.
Because we also have empathic engagement
with bad characters.
The TV critic, Emily Nussbaum,
describes the phenomena that she calls,
the bad fan.
The bad fan watches Tony
Soprano or Walter White,
and sees them as heroes, even though,
even if you haven't seen the shows,
these are people who end
up doing terrible things,
and Walter White is an interesting case,
because, for those of you who haven't seen
(mumbling) television show, Breaking Bad,
and the idea is, he
starts off as a relatively
mild mannered high school teacher,
and goes on to become a
drug dealer and killer.
And, but what happens
is, he's so well act,
and the story's so well told,
that one falls into his
shoes and takes his side.
This reached a point when his co-star,
Anna Gun,
Anna Gun played his wife in Breaking Bad,
and basically, towards
the end of the series,
her role is largely relegated to say,
Walt, can you stop killing so many people?
And, as a result, people hated her,
they hated her character, Skyler White.
But they also hated the actress,
ultimately making death
threats against her,
for playing a moral
character who was subverting
the goals of the person whose shoes
they were falling into.
You know, and this is
the power of fiction,
the power of fiction,
empathic engagement of fiction
is amoral.
This is, "Lolita" is one
of my favorite books,
and it's told in the first person,
it's beautifully written,
and it's the story of this guy
who ultimately seeks out to
have sex with this young girl,
and his progress through
this to seduce her
and sell her.
And it is, I would argue,
impossible to read it
without rooting for him.
Impossible to read it
without some significant
part of you wanting him to succeed.
And so, the force of
fiction is an amoral one.
For every "Uncle Tom's Cabin",
there's a "Mein Kampf",
for every "Schindler's List",
there's a "The Birth of a Nation".
Okay.
Finally, I wanna talk
a bit about atrocities.
So, psychologists and political scientists
are interested
in important issues like,
why are there atrocities
like the Holocaust in Europe,
and the lynching of African Americans
in the American south.
And we tend to talk about things like,
de-humanization, and hatred.
But one significant force
is the force of love, compassion,
empathy.
Not for these individuals, of course,
but for people who are set to be
their victims.
And this is point made
by Adam Smith, again.
So, Smith writes, when we see one man
oppressed or injured by another,
the sympathy which we
feel with the distress
of the sufferer seems to serve only
to animate our fellow,
feeling with his resentment
against the offender.
We are rejoiced to see
him attack his adversary
in his turn, and are eager
and ready to assist him.
And in fact,
the lynchings were provoked by stories of
African American men
attacking white women,
the attacks on Jews were
provoked by stories of
Jewish men preying on innocent children.
And, using this technique,
sparking care for the victim to motivate
reprisal, is nothing new.
Sorry, it's not just history.
When Obama wanted to bomb Syria,
there were endless stories of chemical
warfare,
and the victims of Assad.
Should we go to war with ISIS?
We'll see more and more
beheadings and stories like this.
And, my point is not necessarily
a pacifistic one, I think,
you could talk about the benefits of war,
the cost of wars,
some wars may well be moral.
But, our empathic engagement,
suffering victims,
balances things too much
on one side of the scale.
It strongly motivates us to intervene,
while the suffering of the people who,
that might occurs as a
cost of this intervention,
is invisible to us, it's
airy and statistical.
Well, for graduate student, Nick Stagnaro,
I've started to do a series
of studies exploring this.
We did
one study where we
tested people's empathy,
then we (mumbling) on a
standard empathy scale,
then we told them about an
atrocity in the Middle East,
where some journalists were kidnapped
and tortured,
and then we said, what should America do?
And we gave a list of actions.
For everywhere from
nothing to stopping aid,
to a ground invasion.
It turned out that, the
more empathic they were,
that's the scale on top,
the stronger of reprisal that they wanted.
And we now replicated this twice over.
Okay, so I've argued
that empathy is biased,
innumerate, concrete, and myopic.
It directs our concern
to the wrong places.
But what's the alternative?
And I would think that, I wanna go back
to the slogan of effective altruism.
Engaging both the heart and the head.
Adam Smith, one of the
great champions of empathy,
asked, why are we nice to strangers?
Why do we care about justice?
And he said, at one point,
it's not what you think it is,
it's not empathy, it's not
the soft power of humanity,
it's not that feeble spark of benevolence
which Nature has lifted
up in the human heart,
it's reason, principle,
conscience that calls to us,
with a voice capable of astonishing
the most presumptuous of our passions,
that we are but one of the multitude,
in no respect better than any other in it.
And this is often described
as the principle of
impartiality.
It shows up in religions,
in different forms of the Golden Rule,
in philosophy, in utilitarianism,
our (mumbling) principles.
But my favorite rendition of impartiality
is from Humphrey Bogart
at the end of Casablanca.
So, spoiler alert,
he's telling his lover
they have to separate,
caused three people a lot of pain,
and he explains why.
It doesn't take much to see that
the problems of three little people
don't amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world.
And this is, as nice
an expression as you could imagine,
of the need to escape
from the particulars that,
emotionally, empathy draw you into,
towards a more broader, moral view.
Finally, on this, at
one point in his book,
Smith asks, what does it
take to be a good person?
What do you need to be a good person?
And he doesn't say, you need
to be a person of feeling.
He lists two things:
he says, you have to be smart.
Superior reasoning and understanding, why?
Because that enables you to understand
the consequences of your action.
If you're a dope, you don't know
what your actions will cause.
And, you need to have self command,
what we now call self control,
cause that's what keeps
you to do the action
you know is right, as opposed to,
go over to temptation
of the immediate action.
And for that, let's go
back to psychopaths.
This is a psychopath test.
These are items that define a psychopath.
And as you can see, there are
all sorts of items involving
your interpersonal
relationships, your emotions,
your lifestyle, and your behavior.
And, psychologist Jennifer Skeem,
and a series of other psychologists,
have explored, at length, the question of,
of all of those items,
what predicts bad behavior?
What makes a psychopath a psychopath?
You might think it's
callousness and lack of empathy.
It plays almost no role.
Again, if you had a bunch of psychopaths,
and you had to figure out, (mumbling)
released from prison,
and you had to figure out
which ones will come back,
and you could give them an empathy test,
I wouldn't bother.
It has no predictive power.
What has predictive power?
I can't tell you.
There.
All of these things.
And, need for stimulation,
proneness to boredom,
impulsivity, irresponsibility,
behavorial problems,
exactly what Adam Smith
would have told us.
The source of evil, in this way,
is far more attributable
to lack of self control,
than it is to lack of empathy.
Then there's the heart.
People often quote David Hume here,
arguing that pure reason isn't enough.
Reason is, said Hume, and ought only to be
the slave of the passions.
I agree with this.
I think you need something
to motivate you to do good.
Cost benefit analysis isn't sufficient
cause it will never motivate
you to do the right thing.
But, as we've seen from these cases,
the motivation need not be empathy,
it could be compassion.
People use empathy in different ways,
and some people might wanna insist
that a term should be used for concern,
compassion, and so on,
and I'm totally comfortable with that.
I have no interest to make
a terminological argument.
My argument is just this,
whatever you wanna call it,
putting yourself in other people's shoes
is a moral mistake, it
makes us worse people,
not better people.
And we should stop it, thank you.
(audience applause)
We have time for questions?
- [Voiceover] We do.
- [Voiceover] Yes?
- [Voiceover] Hi.
- [Voiceover] Hey.
- [Voiceover] So, I'm
a neuroscience student,
so really everything about
today goes against that.
Sorry (muffled speech), wherever you are,
but, I guess my ultimate
question to you is,
as somebody who's maybe,
a little less different,
or abnormal all the time, you know,
it's hard to be labeled
as something like that?
You know, it just,
you were doing something really good,
you know, people will try
to take that away from you,
and what do you have,
like, I think I look at empathy,
or I like the word
sentimental compassion better,
because it gives people a voice,
it gives people courage,
and it gives people hope,
and that's how I have to look at it,
because, you know, otherwise,
what would you be without that?
Like, I think empathy, a lack of empathy,
in a lot of ways,
gives people the right to label you
and the right to judge you before they
even know who you are, like.
You know, especially with
regard to mental illness,
I think that's one of the hardest things
in this country that we're dealing with,
and how can you look at someone who knows,
(muffled speech)
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Has symptoms of PTSD,
has symptoms of all, multitudes of things,
and how can you look at someone
and just go by the label and not try,
even a mere attempt of
trying to understand it,
goes a long way.
It could save a life, what
are your thoughts on that?
- [Voiceover] So, you're saying
a couple different things,
and I'm.
So, one aspect of what you're saying is,
we should certainly try to
understand other people,
which I totally agree.
But I wanna zoom in on your first point,
and maybe this isn't the
direction you were taking it,
but it strikes me as a
really interesting way
to think about what you are saying.
Which is, we don't like people
who are not,
who don't have empathy, you're right.
Somebody without empathy,
is considered a weirdo,
is considered strange,
nobody, you know, nobody wants
to give the Nobel Peace Prize
to Peter Zinger,
nobody, you know, nobody.
What you want is a
person of feeling, right?
And this is a way in which some people
are stigmatized,
and I'm thinking particularly people
with Autistic Spectrum Disorder,
or Aspergers Syndrome,
who lack, who tend to
lack, empathy of this sort.
And people think there's something
morally wrong with them.
I think you're exactly right
to make that observation.
I just think people are mistaken,
you think my talk is saying,
people's common sense notion
of what it takes to be a good person
is wrong.
It turns out, for instance,
that people with Aspergers Syndrome
are, in both their actions
and their judgements,
every bit as moral as anybody else,
their empathy deficit does
not degrade their morality.
It turns out, that people
who are of great feeling
and of super high empathy,
actually, in various tests,
are less likely to help,
because they find it overwhelming.
So, I think you're raising
a perfectly good thing
about people's conception of what's good.
I wanna try to shift that conception.
I'll tell you a story,
this is like (mumbling),
I was on a radio once, talking about this
to a pastor,
and we're having this great discussion,
and I mentioned the child beggar example,
and I say, so, you know,
even though you feel empathy for kids,
you shouldn't give to them
because it makes the world worse.
And then she said, well,
I gotta disagree with you.
I like the intimacy I
get when I help people,
when I help the homeless.
It makes me feel better, a better person.
And, I'm horrible at thinking on my feet.
So I said, oh, okay.
But then, like a day
later, it occurred to me
what was the issue here,
which is, it depends what you want.
If you wanna feel like a good person,
and have the people around you
see you as a good person,
empathy is the way to go.
Deep, profound expressions of feeling,
a person of heart.
If you wanna actually help people,
you should go in a different way.
- [Voiceover] Why can't you do both?
- [Voiceover] When it comes to,
you either give to the child beggar,
or you give to (mumbling)
You could give to both,
but if you give to a child beggar,
if it makes the world worse,
you made yourself happy,
and helped ruin a life.
and this is, the world is tough,
the world is not designed, such that,
our positive feelings,
and our feel good feelings
are rewarded with positive results.
It's tough because, in part because
the world is complicated,
and in part because
there's unscrupulous people who exploit
our positive feelings for evil ends.
But, I think in some way,
there's a choice to be made,
there's hard, moral problems,
and I think empathy has
got an easy pass on 'em.
Yes?
- [Voiceover] Thank you.
This was a really thought
provoking presentation.
I don't have a very well formed question,
it's kind of a, isn't it
funny type of question.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] Isn't it
funny how, when we do
have one of these mass killings,
that in the public media,
there's a lot of attention
given to the survivors,
families of survivors,
- [Voiceover] Yep.
- [Voiceover] They tell
us their life stories.
And then, when the conversations
take a public policy term,
turn,
- [Voiceover] Yep.
- [Voiceover] For public
policy, there's a blacklash
about, you know,
politicizing of the event.
As if the
empathic, kind of, indulgences,
maybe have more moral than taking
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] And kind of,
public policy analysis on it.
- [Voiceover] So, I like that case,
I'll give an answer
which you may not like.
I'll let you respond if you want to.
I actually think the
backlash about politicizing
these events, is the right one.
And I'll give a contemporary example.
Donald Trump talks all the time
about a woman named Kate.
Should watch Donald Trump,
and he'll just call her Kate,
because by now, her
audience knows who she is.
She's a woman in San
Fransico was murdered,
a random murder, by an
undocumented immigrant.
Donald Trump wants Kate to matter,
when it comes to shaping our laws.
Comes to shaping our laws,
our immigration policy, and so on.
And, now, I have nothing
interesting to say
about what immigration policy should be,
but I know this,
one salient individual
should not divert policy.
One salient event shouldn't.
If you wanna make a case for gun control,
show me statistics,
let's look at the statistics.
If you wanna make a case that
undocumented immigrants
are killing people,
let's see some numbers.
Now, this is of course,
when people wanna say,
oh my God, Kate was killed by a Mexican,
let's move, let's act.
And, I think that
there's some sort of lawyer
claim that says that,
you know, hard cases make bad laws,
and I think that these
emotionally salient cases matter
way too much to us.
And so I think we should guard against
taking 'em too seriously.
Does that make any sense?
- [Voiceover] It does make sense.
I think your first point, that these
isolated cases shouldn't,
but I don't like that people then
don't want to talk about numbers.
- [Voiceover] Oh, yeah,
no, I totally agree.
I totally agree.
I mean, and in fact, this is in fact why,
unfortunately why can have both.
So again, I'm a mild Donald
Trump obsessive these days,
as we all are, on both sides.
And I've seen Trump challenged by saying,
look, these places that you say
are loaded with illegal immigrants,
are statistically safer than other places
which don't have illegal immigrants.
And Trump says, don't
give me these numbers,
have I told you about Kate,
and you're so,
so, I would like to change
what every (mumbling)
President does in the
state of the union is,
they bring up a string
of victims up there.
Killed by, if you're a democrat,
killed by gun violence.
If you're a republican, killed by too much
government regulation, you know,
here's the families up there.
And then, look, and now
the person stands up,
and then there's applause.
I wanna make appeals
to empathic instances,
I would say that we should
find that as repugnant,
as open arguments based in racism.
People should say, I
know what you're doing,
you're trying to make me turn away
from the numbers, from
what really matters,
and appeal to my gross sentiments,
and I won't let you do it.
So, I agree, we should be obsessed
with the data.
Not because data's important,
but because data summarizes
the fate of people.
And it's the best way of
thinking about what matters.
Yeah?
- [Voiceover] So, you should
and would like to see.
What do we know about
what's actually possible?
I mean,
these (mumbling) group of people
who aren't simply going to be motivated by
empathy by cases,
who we will never get
to look at the numbers,
and say, I should care about
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] You know, (muffled speech)
- [Voiceover] Yep.
- [Voiceover] You know, whatever.
- [Voiceover] It's a great question.
I mean, it could be told
at many different levels.
So, there are arguments that
have certain policy levels,
you could set up structures
that give you wise non-empathic solutions,
as part of a general
policy that people have to
follow, that doesn't rely on individuals.
Here's a good example.
Suppose you wanna have
a job hiring process,
that's not effected by
racist or sexist bias.
So, what you could do is say,
well let's find a pool
of judges who are not
racist or sexist.
Well, how do you do that?
Maybe we all are, maybe
we're all vulnerable.
But, instead what you could say is,
well, let's have a policy where,
which is there a blind
reviewing procedure,
where we don't know the
gender or race of the person.
Or let's have a quota system, or whatever,
you know, whatever your idea is.
So, you set policies in place in general.
The charity case is interesting.
So, and I don't know the answer.
But, there is a movement
of effective altruism.
There are at least some
people, for instance,
who go to the website called, Give Well,
and there's other websites
who, Yale actually
has one too, and MIT as well,
that ranks charities under effectiveness.
And they say, I'm not
gonna give to the charity
that's gonna show me the cutest baby.
I'm not gonna give to the
charity the shows me people
who look like me.
Who have, you know,
who give me some horrible
villian in Africa
to fight against,
or some figure like Bono, to share for.
I'm gonna look at what a
cold blooded analyists say
will give me the most
altruism for my buck.
Now,
Larissa McFacwore has a critique of this
where she calls it sort of,
the drone policy of altruism.
Altruism, statistical and abstract thing.
And some people will work that way.
Will everybody?
Well, some people will be,
refuse to?
Probably.
And so, it's empirical question.
In ten years we'll see
how much people's giving
has been shaped by
these assessments of the
quality of the giving.
You know, maybe the effect of altruism
will just kind of fizzle out,
and we're back to where we started from.
I'm more optimistic,
but I honestly don't know.
So, you're making two good points.
The first one is whether
I'm being fair to Smith,
and I have another friend of
mine, Michael Fraiser who said,
no matter how much I make my views
more and more (mumbling),
It's not quite Smith, Smith is
much (unintelligible noise).
And, you may well be right.
That in end, I can't enlist Smith
as on my side, as a foe of empathy.
Certainly, you're right,
that Smith's developmental theory
puts empathy at the core of morality,
as does Humes,
and I think they're both mistaken.
If I had another half hour,
I could talk developmentally
to suggesting that
empathy is not the
developmental core of morality.
But you're right, that Smith's views
are not totally aligned with mine,
and he's a smart guy,
so, maybe I shouldn't worry about that.
But now, put aside Smith,
I actually think it's just, and here's
maybe a disagreement that
you and I might have,
which we can talk about later,
is that, you don't need empathy
for a lot of what I'm talking about.
So, take the Batson case.
When you say it's not fair
to move this girl up.
At no point, psychologically,
do you need to imagine a child
and feel his or her pain.
When you do a utilitarian analysis
of whether the world's better off
if you continue the vaccine program or
cut it off.
At no point, do you need to do empathy.
We could literally go into your brain,
take out the parts that do empathy,
and your moral capacity would be intact.
This is not a developmental claim,
I have not defended
developmental claim.
But, I think in the end,
even appealing to an impartial spectator
or a John Rowl's original position,
does involve kind of bringing up a person
that you look at,
but it does involve empathy
in an interesting sense.
- [Voiceover] Yes.
- [Voiceover] So, there's
two seperate questions.
One question, as you argued is, right now,
for me to be impartial,
requires no empathy.
For me to be utilitarian
requires no empathy,
(mumbling) requires no empathy.
There's another argument which is,
my capacity to take
impartiality seriously,
must have emerged at some point
from an empathic capacity in development,
or in human history.
That I don't believe,
but I haven't made the
argument either way.
- [Voiceover] But my claim
about the irrelevance of empathy
is a descriptive one, a
psychologically descriptive one.
- [Voiceover] And you're right,
that it may be a normative justification
for certain ways of life,
our decisions may
ultimately, rest on empathy,
but that's a separate question.
I didn't have a single epiphany moment,
but basically, I'll tell ya,
it's kind of you to ask,
I'd written a lot, actually, in this book,
available at considerably
reduced rates on Amazon,
and else where, against disgust.
So, some people argue, like
Leon Cassom (mumbling),
that disgust is a powerful moral guide,
the disgust you feel towards something,
has some wisdom to it,
telling you it's wrong.
And, over the course of,
I've always argued it as mistaken,
I've argued that disgust
is a horrible moral guide,
and give evolutionary arguments,
and other sorts of arguments,
but it occurred to me
that one could go through
each sort of emotion and talk about it,
and give it the same level of scrutiny.
So anger, is an interesting case.
I'm actually more against empathy
than I am against anger.
I think there are cases that say,
anger might be a necessary emotion
for certain forms of
positive moral change.
So, you can look through
each one kinda clinically,
and ask gratitude, pride,
envy, and so on.
And so, I started to look at empathy.
Honestly, the reason why
I focused on empathy is
because I'm very much of a rationalist,
I think these feelings are for the birds,
and if I try to make this
case by giving you disgust,
every liberal would say, oh
yeah, disgust is horrible.
That's what makes us hate
interracial marriage,
and gay marriage, and that.
But then you say empathy,
well, empathy is great.
So, if I could convince people
to be critical of empathy,
all the rest of the emotions
will fall along with it.
I've revealed my plan.
(audience laughter)
Yes?
- [Voiceover] You were
saying we, not really,
do you not even believe that
we don't need feelings at all?
- [Voiceover] No, I think we need,
that would be putting it too strong.
I think Hume (mumbling).
I think, first thing, there's all reasons
why we might want feelings,
that have nothing to do with morality,
I think it's part of a rich life
to have love, and empathy, and hate,
and anger, as part of, you know,
a rich life for all sorts of other ways.
Also, I think, for morality,
you're not gonna be a moral person
unless you care for people,
unless people's life has value.
If you were an entirely
emotionless creature,
as Hume would say, there'd be no reason
to care more about the
death of 1,000 people
than stubbing your toe.
What's the difference?
(mumbling)
But, so you need some caring.
I'm very impressed by the Buddhist work,
and then the neuroscience work,
distinguishing compassion from empathy,
and I think that as empathy,
you can make a case against empathy,
and I think compassion
moves in to fill the gap.
Yes?
- [Voiceover] You might have just answered
a little bit of my question,
but, you didn't have
a chance to talk about
some of the infant
- [Voiceover] No.
- [Voiceover] Which seems to suggest
that babies have, what looks like,
an empathic response and I
guess my question would be,
it seems to suggest that we are wired in
to have empathy, what's the
purpose of building human beings
with empathy then?
- [Voiceover] That is
a wonderful question.
Babies are,
just cause this is, we
kinda ran outta time,
so your question,
they're kind to each other.
There's evidence for
sharing, for compassion,
there's experimental work of the sort
I think you're alluding to,
where like a mother pretends to be hurt,
and then a child will
console her and so on.
There's a work by Warneken and Tomasello,
showing spontaneous helping in toddlers.
And so,
but, what I'd like to argue,
is that when you look
at these things closely,
there's actually very
little evidence for empathy,
as opposed for compassion and caring.
And so, you look back at the studies by
yeah, I love that video,
you look back at the studies of Haydel
or Caroline (mumbling).
And some of these studies look at distress
that children show at
the suffering of others.
And it turns out that,
it's only for the much older children,
you get reliable
correlations between distress
and the suffering of another,
and the ability to help.
Nancy Isenberg does the same stuff.
Early on, you seem to have
compassion without empathy.
This is also true for
non-humans.
So, Fernaz Dewal points
out that animals will help
one another, if they lost the fight,
they'll groom the loser
of a confrontation.
But what's interesting, Paul
Harris points this out is,
look at the face of
the creature helping.
They're not in distress
or anguish, just care.
Now, that raises the question,
what's empathy for?
Cause, you know, I'm an
evolutionary psychologist,
I'm a Darwinian, what's it for?
I guess you have two possible answers,
and maybe you have a third,
or maybe you favor one.
One, is that empathy is actually a,
that effective emapthy,
empathy in a Smith sense,
is a way of understanding other people.
Is a shortcut for
understanding other people.
I see you bang your hand, my hand hurts,
oh, that must hurt for you,
and it's a very quick and dirty way
of getting access into
other people's heads.
A second claim, and this is
the claim that Batson has made,
is that empathy exists for
a developmental purpose,
but not for kids, but for parents,
in particular, for mothers.
So, that empathy has
evolved as a mechanism
to get us to sync with our infants.
And, the argument for this,
one argument for this
is that, hormones like
oxytocin,
which are related to
things like child birth,
and lactation,
also, are related in some
interesting sense to empathy.
So, empathy might not
be a thing for babies,
it might be a thing for parents.
Now, if that were true,
it would make a whirring
thing for my argument.
Which is, what would
happen if you took away
all empathy from a mother having a baby?
She has compassion, she loves the baby,
and all that, but she doesn't
have empathic connection.
My claim based on my arguments would be,
everything would be Aok,
but I could be wrong.
- [Voiceover] I guess you could look at
some of those children,
you're suggesting they're not empathic.
- [Voiceover] Yep.
- [Voiceover] But maybe we could look at
how their brains light up,
and see if those empathy
regions are active.
- [Voiceover] Certainly, by
the time you could scan 'em,
like six and seven year olds,
you do get the same results as adults,
you do get the same mirroring capacity.
It's just that the Hayedol
study, it looked for distress,
they filmed, they look at these kids,
and they don't find, so kids watch a kid,
another kid, bang his
head, kid starts crying,
the other kid looking
doesn't start crying,
he's kinda cool.
And you'd expect kids, now you say,
well, the kid's hiding it and being stoic,
but that's not what a ten month old does.
So, we don't have the
neuro data, certainly.
But, behaviorally, they don't look
like they're mirroring the
pain, which is really cool,
and you know, there's all this,
it used to be the lore in infancy,
including stuff that I
wrote in my books was,
babies are hugely empathic,
they're imitating everything,
they're copying everything.
Andrew Melsoft has done
wonderful work, and so on.
But recently, there's been a backlash,
people like Celia Hayes, have
done these careful reviews,
and it's very hard to find
empathy in kids under six months.
Most studies don't find it,
same with imitation needs to work hard
Does that make sense, does
that fit your (mumbling)?
Okay, thank you.
The first question is,
would it be possible
to lose your empathic
responses (mumbling)?
And I don't think it is.
But a second question, is it
possible to override them?
And there, I would give the same analogy
I gave before,
which is, when I see
somebody who is attractive,
I feel a lot more fond towards them
than somebody who's ugly.
When I see somebody who is my race,
my country, my language,
I feel a lot more pull to them,
than for a stranger,
certainly when I see my kid,
I feel this huge rush of love.
And if I see somebody else,
(unintelligible noise),
not so much.
And I think for any of these,
we're not gonna get rid of that,
that's our biology, that's fundamental,
but, we could say,
yeah, I know I tend to like
people who look like me more,
but it's wrong to be racist,
and I'm gonna try not to be.
I know that an attractive person
applies for the job and the
ugly person applies for the job,
and I know I feel much better
towards the attractive person,
attractiveness biases are so powerful,
they're way above race
biases in a lot of studies,
but I know that's wrong,
unless if it's for a research assistant,
and not a model, you know,
how they look should
be totally irrelevant.
So I could fight it.
And I think we're kind of good
in fighting in other ways.
I think we're good at,
so, when I'm,
and we're good because we can do it
in our personal level, but we can do it
at a structural level.
I had to hire a research assistant
this summer,
it so happened my son was free,
but I wasn't allowed to hire him,
because Yale has rules that you can't
hire your kid.
Although at the time, I would have wanted
to hire my kid, I appreciate,
that's kind of a smart rule, you know.
I might really wanna hire, you know,
graduate students who
look like me,
and who don't speak with an accent,
and who are attractive, all the biases.
I know that's wrong
though, so I try not to.
And I even try to instill procedures
to stop me from doing so.
So, to answer your question,
which is a good one,
is I don't think these gut feelings
are gonna go away.
Same for disgust,
some things I see might disgust me.
Some sexual orientations
that are very different
from my own, might say,
oh my, that's gross.
But, I think I could say,
well, that's how I feel.
But, unless I have a good argument
why it should be immoral or illegal,
it's none of my business.
So, I'm not saying get rid of feelings,
I'm saying, we can transform
what we do with them.
Defective altruists, for
instance, aren't people who
don't care about other people, who aren't
struck by a small child and so on,
they're people who've
chosen not to let it matter.
Empathy, one of things
which I hadn't thought of,
but it's a nice answer,
empathy can help you
learn from other people.
Which is, I see you
put your hand in a fire
and scream,
you say, well that's interesting.
But if I have empathy, I feel your pain,
and now I'm not gonna
put my hand in the fire,
and that's actually a
fairly interesting theory.
- [Voiceover] (muffled speech)
- [Voiceover] Yes.
Yes, yes, it's a very
mirror neurony story,
yes, thank you.
Yes?
- [Voiceover] I'm sympathetic
to the part of your argument
that wants to look beyond empathy,
in terms of the source of morality.
And,
I'm also attracted to
the idea of compassion.
But I would add one thing.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] And that is,
compassion is something
that's not, in a sense,
in us ahead of time.
It's evoked by the other,
right?
And so, you know,
what you find with, you know,
the hand coming up, the, you know,
the drowning boy and hand coming up,
is that there's something
quite spontaneous
that's going on, right?
There's not a calculation going on,
you're right to say there's
not empathy (muffled speech).
- [Voiceover] Mhm, yup.
Yup.
- [Voiceover] But somehow,
that other in distress
is holding for your care.
And in many situations,
that happens very spontaneously.
- [Voiceover] Yup.
- [Voiceover] How do you understand
the emergence of care?
- [Voiceover] So, that's
a really good point,
I mean, from a
developmental point of view,
I think what you're talking about
is actually, and again,
there's a bit of terminology
problems, cause when people say,
when people say, kids
start off as empathic,
it wouldn't be right for me to say,
oh you're so wrong, I have
so much data against you.
What (mumbling) mean by empathic,
is what you're talking about.
Which is, they start off
valuing other people.
I think that that's part
of our basic equipment.
I think that that's innate,
I think obviously, it's
molded, and shaped,
and expanded by culture, and parenting,
but I think some valuing of the other
is wired within us.
- [Voiceover] How do you
understand the evolution?
I agree, how do you
understand that evolution?
- [Voiceover] So, I would
view that as a sort of
standard, the standard
Darwinian story of morals,
more generally involving kin selection,
you know, which is, you know,
there's a huge advantage
to being good to people
who share your genes (mumbling),
and reciprocal altruism, and so on.
Which of course, makes a prediction,
which is, the prediction is,
what you're talking about
should be highly selective.
It should happen with people who are
familiar, who are clearly kin,
and should not happen with strangers.
And what I argue in this book,
which is now in paperback
at a considerable discount,
is that, that's in fact, that that's,
oh my God,
oh and that's such a bad move.
But, what I argue is,
that's in fact, true.
So, what you're talking about,
that compassion, concern exists
right from the very start.
But, as one would say from
a Darwinian perspective,
it's limited in scope.
So, I make a claim, which I'll put forth,
you might take this as controversial.
Which is,
in our distant past,
or when we're in hunter-gatherer groups,
if you saw a perfect stranger drown,
you wouldn't care at all.
Their value would be nothing.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, I
find that hard to imagine.
It could be a lack of my imagination,
but I'm not sure why that would be.
(mumbling)
- [Voiceover] So, it's,
I mean, there's a long
argument to be made,
but one part of the argument
would go, you look at
reports by people like
Jared Diamond and actually,
Margret Mead before then,
of current hunter-gatherer groups.
And what they both say,
in different ways is,
if you're a hunter-gatherer tribe,
and you walk across, and
you see a strange person.
What your best move to do,
what you would naturally do,
is bash their head in.
Now, that's not, now in some way,
you might assume that they're your enemy,
you might worry about threat,
I actually don't know what it would be,
I'm making a prediction, even
if it was a child drowning,
and I'm not sure if that's true.
I know it's true for chimps,
when chimps, when warring tribes,
when chimp encounters a strange chimp,
there's like, there's blood on the moon.
So, but,
to me, it's actually one
of the really interesting
issues, that is yet unresolved.
You may, in the end, turn out to be right.
There may be some natural
affinity to people,
that would even extend to strangers,
I don't think there is.
- [Voiceover] It could
also be the case that,
tribalism may well overwhelm
- [Voiceover] Yes.
- [Voiceover] One's own spontaneous moral
reason.
- [Voiceover] Yes, yes, so,
it might be that the hunter-gatherers,
absent their tribal
values that they've done,
would be fine with strangers.
- [Voiceover] Thank you so much.
- [Voiceover] Thank you.
- [Voiceover] For good questions.
(audience applause)
