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Empathy and the Boston Marathon Bombing…How?

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I tried to write about the Boston Marathon bombings a week ago and got one sentence written before I was stuck; I sat there staring at the screen for some time before I gave up.

This is a very difficult thing to write about in regard to empathy. Of course, we have empathy for the victims. Of course, many write about our common humanity that emerges in these kinds of situations–the heroism, the selflessness. Harder is the question of empathy for the perpetrators. Is it important to understand them and what would cause them to do something so heinous? It feels like doing so is somehow condoning it. “Yes, I understand” usually means, “I sympathize, I can see where you’re coming from, I’d probably do the same in your situation…” Certainly no one means that when they say we should have empathy for the bombers. Can we just write them off as evil? Apparently not, since so many who knew the younger brother, Dzhokhar, cannot reconcile their personal knowledge of him as a nice, normal kid with a terrorist.

A reader sent me a very interesting link to a blog in Boston.com: Reactions to Dzhokhar: Hatred, anger… empathy? I’d recommend checking it out.

But just now, as I was writing this, it became clear to me why I am struggling so with this particular subject. It’s that Dzhokhar himself showed zero empathy to his victims. There are reports from his victims of him looking them in the eye as he set the bomb down and walked away, knowing that he was about to kill them. Fellow humans beings: children, fathers, mothers, friends. He had to completely turn off whatever empathy he normally felt for other people–and people who knew him testify that he was an empathetic, caring guy–to be able to do this. He had to turn off his empathy long before he committed the crime, while he was planning it for however many days. He had to keep it turned off as he was getting himself to the scene, knowing in his head what he intended to do, looking at people as he walked by them, completely dissociating himself from humanity. And then, he had to keep it turned off in the days following, as he saw evidence of the pain and suffering he had caused, as he learned the names of his victims, as he heard about the boy he killed, and the BU student, and the young working woman. He had to keep it turned off as he watched the people he maimed being interviewed on TV, as he watched the families of the victims crying on TV. We all cried as we watched it. How did he not?

How does this happen? How does empathy in a normally empathetic person get so completely turned off? That’s the million dollar question.

Obama: Peace starts with Empathy

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President Barack Obama recently gave a brilliant speech to the citizens of Israeli, asking them to consider how things are from the perspective of their adversary, the Palestinians. He said that the only way to get to peace between their two peoples is to have empathy for one another.

He spoke very forthrightly and directly to the Israelis: “It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of
their own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army
that controls the movements not just of those young people but their
parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when
settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It’s not right to
prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a
student’s ability to move around the West Bank or displace Palestinian
families from their homes.” He emphasized the commonality between young persons of different cultures:  “Four years ago, I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young
people. Politically, religiously, they must seem a world away. But the
things they want, they’re not so different from what the young people
here want. The ability to make their own decisions, to get an education
and a good job, to worship God in their own way, to get married, to
raise a family. The same is true of the young people in Gaza …”

As Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, writes in a blog for CNN, “In religious studies courses, professors often try to get their
students to see the world through Hindu eyes or to walk a few miles in
the shoes of a Confucian. Anthropologists refer to this as cultivating
an emic (or insider) perspective. The less fancy name for it is empathy.
Barack Obama is, for better or worse, an empathetic man who has tried
for years to see the world through Republican eyes even as he has
pleaded for Republicans to walk a few miles in Democratic shoes. As a
former community organizer, he knows that you need a little empathy all
around to get anything done among people with different world views.”

As we say on our Empathy Symbol site–Empathy: The first step to peace in our families, schools, communities,nation, world. President Obama knows this. What could be accomplished if only people in our country and around the world took the wisdom of our president to heart!

Science and Empathy

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I just finished listening to a broadcast of a fascinating radio show about empathy, from a scientific viewpoint, that aired on January 16th on WUNC from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. You can listen to the show first, and then join our discussion here in this blog. Or read the high points here first, and then listen to the in-depth discussion.

Two neuroscientists from Duke University, Lasano Harris and Pate Skene, approach the biological foundation of empathy with a more precise definition of empathy than I use, in that they include not just the ability to put oneself into another’s shoes and understand both cognitively and emotionally what that person is experiencing, but that this results in the desire to help that person. Jesse Prinz, a professor of philosophy,  joins the discussion from his viewpoint of the history of morality.

Interestingly, and rather distressingly, they claim that in measuring a person’s brain activity to determine how much the mirror neurons fire, they found that people are much more empathetic toward people who are like themselves, or toward people to whom they are close. At first in the discussion, they seem to claim that people actually can’t feel empathy toward those who are “other”, which I found distressing, since that’s the whole point of the empathy symbol. But later they say that one’s group doesn’t necessarily have to be defined narrowly as one’s race or cultural group, so they’re not saying that I, as a white woman, cannot feel empathy for a black man. But they do make a very interesting point. To increase empathy, we need to find ways to increase our “group”. If my empathetic neurons are going to fire more for a white, middle-aged, middle-class woman than they are for a homeless Latino man, then I need to find ways to mentally and emotionally expand my group to a broader range of humanity.

On the other hand, if our “group” is all of humanity, then we are burdened with unsustainable empathy. They talk about how a person cannot continue functioning on a day-to-day basis if he or she becomes overwhelmed with empathy for all the suffering people of the world. Certainly this is a journalistic truism, that people will be more interested in stories that are closer to them, and that the further away the reader gets, the less concern the story generates. So a fire that puts a family out on the street is interesting, and generates an empathetic response from us, if it happens in our town. We really cannot care about every fire that happens to every family in the world. A tsunami on the other side of the world is certainly big enough to attract our attention and interest, but we probably need to see video of real people getting swept out to sea or of sobbing parents discovering the body of their child for our empathetic neurons to fire, and thus to cause us to get out our wallets and donate to the relief effort.

They talk about empathy for animals as well (certainly not a natural part of our group, but then many of us bond closely with our pets, and enjoy learning about animals in the wild.) They talk about how people who have higher levels of empathy need to shut that down so they don’t get overwhelmed, and they even mention “roadkill” as being too distressing for a highly empathetic person. I found that interesting personally, since every time I drive past a dead squirrel on the street or a dead raccoon on the side of the road, I imagine their spirits leaving their bodies, and I feel a bit sad. If I’m driving on a busy street, I also can’t drive past a car waiting on a side street to enter the road without checking my rear view mirror to see if they were able to get on the street. I feel concerned for them, and am compelled to check on them, even though it drives me crazy that I do that.

This was an fascinating discussion that broached on many aspects of empathy, including one that I discussed in a very early blog about empathy in autistic people. There is a common belief that autistic people cannot feel empathy or make that connection with other people’s experiences and feelings, but the father of an adopted severely autistic child, Ralph Savarese (an English professor), enters the discussion about half-way through and thoroughly disputes that. He also brings in the angle of feeling empathy for characters in literature, and talks about how his son (now a successful college student) was overcome with empathy for Huck Finn and other characters in Twain’s novel.

They even talk about empathy and the law, in that Pate Skene is now a law student. How do we get laws passed that protect the rights of minorities if we don’t feel empathy for them because they are not part of our group? This is a good question that is very relevant to the current debate about gay marriage. As more gay people are open about their sexuality, more people will know them as individuals with whom they work, or as neighbors or members of their religious group, and will thus be able to include them in their now-expanded “group”. It will be easier to empathize with their desire to be in a married relationship.

Lots of food for thought in this compelling broadcast. I invite you to listen to it, and add comments to the discussion in this blog.

Empathy in 6 words

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Michele Norris of NPR has created an elegant, brilliant way to get the conversation on race kick-started again. It’s called The Race Card Project. It started out simply, when she was on a book tour for her new book about race, The Grace of Silence: A Memoir. She handed out 200 postcards and asked people to write their thoughts on race in six words. The response floored her. To date, two years later, she has gotten back over 12,000 postcards! Clearly, people are aching to be heard, and to be heard clearly. That’s the beauty of the six words. They succinctly sum up what a person most wants to say about race.

Here are some examples: “You know my race. NOT ME!” “Chinese or American? Does it matter.” One that has ignited a firestorm of response lately is “We aren’t all Strong Black Women.” This really hit a nerve for a lot of people, particularly black women, of course. Some of the responses were eye-opening for white people, since many would assume “Strong Black Woman” is a compliment. Not necessarily so. There is much more to it than that. Read the article, and the responses, and see for yourself.

Now that this has taken on a life of its own, Ms. Norris has created a website devoted to it, where people can post their six-word thoughts on race, and respond to others. What a brilliant way to open up the conversation on race–a conversation that is not nearly finished yet, despite what some may think. Check out the website here.

So what six words would I write? Maybe, “I take for granted white benefits.”

empathy for one, empathy for all

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A devoted reader sent me a link to an interesting article in the New York Times about the science of compassion: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-compassion.html?_r=2&hp&

The article reported on a study that found that inducing a compassionate feeling for someone leads the person to feel compassion for others as well, even when they might not “deserve it.” Another study found that creating a feeling of commonality between people, even an artificially-created meaningless commonality (tapping in rhythm with another person) led people to feel more compassion and more of a desire to help the other person.

The author of the article, David DeSteno, who was also a researcher on the second study, concluded: “Simply learning to mentally recategorize one another in terms of
commonalities would generate greater empathy among all of us — and
foster social harmony in a fairly effortless way.”

Wow.

So the question is, how do we foster more of a feeling of commonality among people in general, and people who specifically don’t feel that commonality with people of other groups?

One way would be to make it easier for people to discover commonalities. I think Facebook is useful in this way. When people become “friends” with people whom they really don’t know well, such as through a neighborhood page (my neighborhood has one on Facebook), they will easily discover commonalities. When they view profiles of people who are friends of their friends, but who seem quite different from themselves, they will likely discover commonalities.

Actual physical proximity helps. When you shop at a grocery store, and you see people of various cultures and ethnic groups, and you notice them reaching for the same cereal box you do, or you see them dealing with the same issues with their children (you can recognize a child whining for a treat in any language), you feel the commonality. Your empathy level increases.

Media helps. When you see Cam and Mitchell, the popular gay couple on the TV show “Modern Family”, squabbling about little things, just like you do with your spouse, your feeling of commonality increases. Your empathy level increases.

I think it’s interesting that the study found that even trivial commonalities increase compassion. This leads me to believe that humans are innately driven to seek and find what they have in common with each other–not just people of their own group, but all people. The drive to empathize is inherent in our make-up. Empathizing with one another is good for human survival.

Blogs: The 21st Century Empathy Tool

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Social media offers an amazing opportunity for the growth of empathy. In particular, blogs give people the chance to connect with and understand others’ experiences and feelings on a vastly larger scale than ever before.

When I was growing up in the mid-20th Century, there were 2 avenues for increasing empathy: personal experience, or the media: TV, books, newspapers, magazines. Growing up in a small, nearly 100% white town in Minnesota, I didn’t even meet a black person until I moved to a larger suburb in 11th grade. We had one Asian at our school. I made my first Jewish friend when I went to grad school. For anyone in such a situation today (and fortunately, the country, and even my small Minnesota hometown, are far more diverse now), they can connect with a person different from themselves on the Internet.

Let’s say you have a relative in their 20’s who tells you he has cancer. You are stunned, even though he tells you that it is the highly curable kind. Clearly, this is a life-changing event for your relative. How do you relate? How do you begin to understand what he is going through? Of course, you can talk directly with him. But you can also read the blog of a person who is going through a similar situation. A follower of this empathy blog, Roger Lumpp, commented recently that he has a blog that chronicles his journey as he dealt with a cancer diagnosis as a young adult. You can find it at .http://www.liftliving.com/.

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a young stay-at-home mother of a newborn, or a lawyer mother of 3 children, or a father of a teenager, or the parent of a special needs child? There are blogs for all of these, and any other parenting situation you, or someone you know, may find yourself in. A great part of empathy is just understanding–learning about and understanding someone else’s life, feelings, culture, situation, etc. Blogs are perfect for this! Do you have a nephew who has just come out as gay? Do you have a niece who’s getting married to someone outside of your faith? Is your best friend getting divorced after 40 years of marriage? Find a blog, and increase your empathy!

I have a niece who is teaching in Indonesia. Reading her blog has increased my understanding of Indonesian culture. Tell us–what blogs do you read, and how have they increased your empathy?

The Line Between

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The empathy symbol is defined by the line between the two halves of the symbol, portraying two groups who would benefit by reaching out to each other and opening up to understand one another. The reaching-out and opening-up aspects of empathy are defined by the two Y’s in the symbol, lines that pass through the divide and then open up.

Two recent events, one in Duluth and one in Florida, highlight the tendency of some to reinforce the barrier between the two halves of a group–in this case, the racial groups White and Black. The Florida event was the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth, by an armed self-appointed neighborhood watch man, George Zimmerman. This has spurred many articles by black people relating how they have to have “the talk” with their sons when they are as young as 5 or 6 years old. “The talk” has nothing to do with sex–it is about how to more safely “walk while black”, because many people will assume a young black man is hostile and dangerous, and will react to him accordingly. This is not something most white people have ever thought about discussing with their sons, nor are most white people aware of the need for such a talk in black families. This is a perfect opportunity for white people to expand their empathy toward black people, to better understand what it is like to be black in America, even in 2012.

And yet, the reaction to this has been hostility from some white readers, rather than increased empathy. Which brings me to the other event. the one in Duluth. A group called The Unfair Campaign put up billboards in Duluth, as well as elsewhere, that said, “It’s hard to see racism when you’re white.” This produced a surprising amount of backlash from whites, who claimed it was reverse racism. The comments on an MPR story about this campaign were pretty shocking, with many equating anti-racism with being anti-white. The article does say that follow-up discussion groups have been organized. Perhaps this face-to-face discussion will help–if people can open up the barrier between each other, rather than clinging tightly to it while trying to reinforce it.

It is a fact that being white can still be an advantage in 2012 America–an advantage that most white people don’t have to think about. It just is. Perhaps the white people who react defensively to this don’t feel advantaged. Perhaps they feel that life is against them, and that many people, including those of other races, unfairly have it better than them.

50 years ago, John Howard Griffin wrote a book about his experiences when he chemically darkened his white skin, and traveled through the deep South as a black man in the 1950’s. The book, Black Like Me, shook up American society. Talk about the ultimate exercise in empathy! Of course, if a black person had written the same account about his experiences in segregated America, it would have dropped like a stone in a pond, without a ripple. It took a white man being shocked by the experience, and sharing it with his fellow white people, to create a splash.

Maybe it’s time for white people to finally let down the barriers, put away the defenses, and actually listen to and understand it when black people tell them that yes, being black in America can still have an impact on one’s life in unfair, and even sometimes deadly, ways.

Empathetic Rats

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A friend sent me a very interesting link to a report about empathy in rats. I was interested for 2 reasons–1) the question of whether animals as well as humans can feel empathy is very intriguing, and 2) I really like rats. They’re one of my favorite animals.

Please check out the video on YouTube. Then consider the emotional life of rats and other animals with me.

We had a pet rat in my class of 4- and 5-year-olds for several years. His name was Squeaks, and he was the most gentle, good-natured guy you’d ever want to know. He would sit on the kids’ laps and let them pet him like a cat; he would let them carry him around in their sweatshirt pockets; he would give them little rat kisses. I learned a lot about rats, studying them with the kids. Rats are highly social creatures, organized into coherent and efficient social structures in their rat societies. They’re very smart, and I have to think that intelligence is a necessary component of empathy. I don’t think turtles are smart enough to be able to understand something from another turtle’s viewpoint; I think rats are that smart. I also think that caring for infants is another requirement for empathy. Animals–mainly mammals and birds–that care for their own young have to be able to feel compassion and to understand what their infants need–i.e. they must have empathy for their infants.

So I believe that many animals can and do feel empathy, not only for others of their own species, but also for other species sometimes (dogs and their owners will back me up on that, I’m sure!)

Of course, this raises the question of whether we humans should feel empathy for other animals, and what we should do about that. One obvious thing is that we should feel the pain of animals raised on factory farms in horrible conditions (see the movie, “Food, Inc.”) Are we participating in the torture of animals when we order a hamburger at a fast food place or pick up one of those convenient, already-roasted chickens at the grocery store? I’d say yes. Taking it one step further, many vegetarians would say that our empathy for animals should prevent us from eating them at all. Where do you fall on the food continuum? My older son won’t eat intelligent animals–no more calamari, no more pork–but will sometimes eat fish, or humanely-raised chickens or beef. My middle son is a vegetarian. I can no longer in good conscience order chicken or other meat in a restaurant unless they specifically say it comes from a local, sustainable, humanely-conducted family farm. I’m still thinking about the issue of eating intelligent animals.

Well, I guess we’ve gone a bit afield from the question of whether animals can feel empathy. Do watch the video. You’ll learn that rats are nicer to each other than we humans often are!

The Science of Evil book review

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I said back in May that the next book I would be reading was “The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty” by Simon Baron-Cohen. It took me till mid-August to get the book from the library, because there were so many holds on it–which is good, that people are interested in this subject.

Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, and has been studying empathy for 30 years. He has concluded that there is a biological basis for empathy or the lack thereof, as well as factors in the environment that affect the development of empathy. He and his colleagues have discovered some genes related to empathy, and expect to find more. They have pinpointed areas in the brains that are activated when a person has an empathetic response (or not very activated in the brains of those low in empathy.) He talks about hormonal factors–testosterone negatively affecting empathy, and oxytocin increasing empathy. (Not surprisingly, males on average rate lower than females on empathy.)

He presents a bell of curve of empathy, with those at the lowest end being termed either “zero-negative” or “zero-positive.” The zero-positives are autistic people, particularly those with Asperger Syndrome, who are unable to understand another’s point of view, but who nonetheless have a moral code and understand that they must live by the rules of society. (See blog post from Nov. 20, 2009 for a discussion from a reader on the difficulty of being married to a person with Asperger Syndrome–her husband literally just did not understand her.)

It’s the zero-negatives that are commonly labeled evil. They lack an ability to appreciate another person’s feelings or experiences, and are totally centered on their own selves–their own needs and desires. These people probably have a lethal combination of bad genes and a bad environment, most likely having been raised in abusive homes by zero-negative parents. They include sociopaths, narcissists, and people with borderline personality disorder. Whether their zero-negative state leads them to be angry at others all the time and to lash out verbally or physically, or whether it leads them to be coldly manipulative of others, or even to murder someone, the results are always bad for both the person and those around him.

Baron-Cohen talks about evil as simply being a complete lack of empathy, and it certainly makes sense that one would not be able to commit evil acts if one felt the pain of one’s victim. I don’t know that being zer0-negative is the sum total explanation of evil. It doesn’t seem to explain those that get pleasure from others’ pain. Particularly when it comes to psychopaths, such as Eric Harris, the Columbine killer, something else must lead them to move from not caring about causing pain to others, to actively seeking to cause pain. Psychopaths, says Baron-Cohen, can intellectually understand another’s viewpoint, which is why they’re so good at manipulating people, but they are unable to care. But psychopaths also seem to have a great deal of contempt for anyone but themselves, regarding others as inferior and deserving of whatever they do to them. This additional step seems to be necessary to get to evil.

One of my favorite movies is Fargo, partly for its brilliant portrayal of an ordinary, evil man. The car salesman, Jerry Lundegaard (played superbly by William H. Macy) is clearly a zero-negative person. He has absolutely no empathy for the terror he is willing to put his wife through in staging her kidnapping in order to solve his financial problems. He has absolutely no empathy for his son–what a painful, moving scene when he stands in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, seeing his son in so much pain over his kidnapped mother, and is unable to comfort him. At the end, he has absolutely no remorse for what he has done–just fear of the consequences for himself.

The book raises a lot of provocative questions. For example, it is often asserted that anyone is capable of committing evil acts, even murder, given the right circumstances. Is this true? People cite the famous psychological studies in which ordinary people can be induced to give painful electric shocks to strangers (or so they believe), or the experiment in which college students were randomly divided into guards and prisoners, and the guards ended up treating the prisoners (really their fellow students) cruelly. However, not everyone who participated in those studies did these bad things. Some people refused to do so, despite the experimenters’ attempts to push them into it. Baron-Cohen’s bell curve of empathy helps to explain this. Those in the lower to middle range, who score a one t0 a four, would be more easily induced to ignore any feelings of empathy for the other. Those at the high end, who score a five or six on the scale, would be those who would walk out or refuse to inflict pain on others, no matter what.

There is no denying that being zero-negative on the empathy scale is a necessary condition for evil. Certainly, environmental factors would have to contribute. (Often, but not always, parenting. Other factors might come into play–peers, media, and so on.)

The consideration of evil is a big topic, far to big to cover in one, or several, blog posts. But I would recommend this book as a fascinating jumping-off point. Let me just conclude with my favorite quote from the book: “Each drop of empathy waters the flower of peace.”

Teaching Empathy in College

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A faithful supporter recently sent me an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which the writer asks the question: should empathy be taught to college students? The author, Richard Kahlenberg, asks: “In higher education, should colleges affirmatively seek to teach students empathy or is doing so inappropriate because it is unrelated to academic achievement and might be overtly political?”

First, I have to say I see nothing political about empathy. One would hope that politicians of every persuasion would see the pro-social value of empathy in our society. Yes, some on the far-right side of the political spectrum do not believe that values should be taught in school, but rather should be left strictly to home. Also, as the speaker to whom Mr. Kahlenberg was listening pointed out, President Obama was castigated by some Republicans for saying, when he was in the process of making his last Supreme Court appointment, that he would be looking for a justice with the trait of empathy. (See previous blog post from May 2009 for my take on this topic.) But I seriously doubt any political party would wish to call itself “anti-empathy”.

There are 2 questions to be answered as to whether teaching empathy to college students is advisable: is it worthwhile, and is it possible?

Possible? Maybe, maybe not. Empathy is a human trait that I believe is built into the human brain and the human social system, and it is learned naturally just as we learn language, the social mores of our particular group, and many other things. Most humans develop empathy to a certain degree–some more, some less, and a few, not at all. (See my blog posts on March 2009 and May 2o11 for further discussion of this topic.) Mr. Kahlenberg discusses a college which is requiring its students to take part in an 8-week program in which they do things like spending a day in a wheelchair, or a night in a homeless shelter. My feeling is, this may help some young people broaden their understanding of what people less fortunate than themselves experience, so why not do it? Of course, spending one night in a homeless shelter cannot give a true, deep understanding of what it is like to be without a home–to live in uncertainty day after day, to not be able to own more than you can carry on your back or maybe store at a friend’s house, to not know where you will be sleeping each night, to not have a neighborhood and the sense of belonging that comes with that… But even having a taste of the experience might open up some eyes and hearts to things the person had not understood and thought about before.

And I too am only speculating and imagining what being homeless would be like, because I have not personally experienced that. In fact, I would hope that the college would pair each “experience” with a guest speaker who could talk to the students about what their life is like and how they feel about it, and who could answer the students’ questions and engage in a deep and meaningful dialogue with them.

As far as whether it is appropriate for colleges to teach empathy? Absolutely! Gaining understanding of the larger world is pretty much the mission of higher education, isn’t it? Don’t most English literature classes involve analyzing and trying to understand the characters’ feelings and experiences? Don’t sociology classes, anthropology classes, psychology classes and many other college courses expand a student’s empathy and understanding of other people?

The intention of a liberal arts education is to broaden young people’s understanding of the world and those who live in it. Enhancing students’ empathy gives them another tool to do so.

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