Understanding Is Not A Feeling (NYT Op-Ed Misconstrues Empathy)

[koganbot]

In a New York Times Op-Ed ("Compassion Made Easy"), social psychologist David DeSteno describes experiments designed to test whether "empathy with the suffering of others is... a special virtue that has the power to change the world." The results are interesting, but I have one little pissy point to make.

The relevant definition of "empathy" (definition 2) in my American Heritage Dictionary says, "Understanding so intimate that the feelings, thoughts, and motives of one are readily comprehended by another." Now, that's a pretty high bar for empathy. The social psych experiments were designed to explore the impact not of such wholesale, overall empathy but rather of people's localized empathetic understanding of another person in a particular predicament. That's fine with me, and worth exploring, and I can be on board with that. But nonetheless, even with this reduced standard for empathy, there's still the one eeny teeny tiny pissy little quibble I have with the piece, which is that the experimental subjects show absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the people towards whom they feel compassion or "empathy" or "commonality." None. Whatsoever. The people they are feeling compassion towards are acting, faking, lying; are confederates, stooges; and the experimental subjects don't know this.

You could say that the experiments actually explore the effects of compassion, whether the compassion is warranted or not, and of feelings of commonality, whether warranted or not. But not of actual empathy. "Empathy" that is not actual understanding of someone else (not just a feeling of understanding, based on what you think someone else is also feeling, but rather understanding what someone else actually is feeling, and thinking, and attempting) is not empathy. Empathy requires knowledge.

Interesting question, though: can one feel empathy towards, say, a character in Dickens; that is, a fictional character? I'd say "yes," even though this weakens my point above. But the basic point is that if "empathy" isn't allied with a search for truth, it can quite well be something other than empathy. I mean, one can feel empathy towards all those unfortunate elderly people who will be the victims of death panels under Obamacare, except that — I've read, without having researched the matter myself — such people won't exist, since there will be no death panels. In any event, this isn't empathy.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Dickens half-raises the problem with the purist version of the definition: can we feel empathy for invented people? But what about actors, in films or plays? Obviously you don't feel empathy with the actor -- well, you may, if s/he falls off the stage and breaks his/her arm -- but a key point of acting is to generate [something]pathy for some of the characters, no? Sometimes antipathy, of course (would this fall under your fatwa?)

So do we need a better, more subtle word or potential qualification ("provisional empathy")? Especially as isn't fiction -- and story-telling generally -- is actually one of the means by which we learn to extend empathy towards those less obviously like us?

(You're a Wittgenstein scholar and I'm not, but isn't there also a "private language" issue peaking in here? How do I know the pain I feel is like the pain you feel? Indication, description of cause, assumption of similarity of bodies -- surely somewhere in this a not-dissimilar jump to that which occurs when we empathise with the fictional occurs when we empathise (in this specific sense, sharing what a pain feels like) with non-fictional people, maybe?)

[koganbot]

One thing we do when reading fiction is to suspend our disbelief and decide that what the author says is definitive for the world that's being presented (or what the author is implying by way of an untrustworthy narrator is definitive, or what the author is doing by fucking around with all that, is nonetheless definitive). Also, for fictional movies, seeing is believing, unless the movie specifically tells us otherwise (as in Rashomon). And in nonfiction, there's a provisional going along with the author without which we probably wouldn't be able to read with any kind of comprehension.

As for speculative nonfiction, a street and traffic specialist designing a new intersection can certainly feel empathy for a hypothetical person on crutches who is trying to cross the hypothetical street in the hypothetically allotted time.

Don't think there is a private language or skepticism issue here. E.g., "How do I know he's not faking in this instance?" can at least conceivably be answered by observing other instances. "How do I know he's not faking in every single thing he says and does throughout his life?" is not an intelligible question. If there's no behavioral evidence of faking in anything he does, then he's not faking. Or, if I want to be more generous and say that the second question is a real question, the fakery the word "faking" refers to is a different species from the fakery in the first question and therefore doesn't address any sort of fakery I will ever care about. Should probably be called a different word. And this applies as well to the word "know" in "How do I know the red you see is the same as the red I see?" If there's no difference between your and my behavior in the presence of red that I or you or an eye doctor or a cognitive psychologist can ever observe, then nothing is at issue. (This doesn't mean that science fiction writers and philosophers shouldn't play with such questions, but I would challenge the idea that these are deep questions.) Ditto for pain.

In any event, what I'm raising questions about is states of mind etc. that we can conceivably know but don't.

Think DeSteno might have been wise to use some word other than "empathy." Actually, "compassion" was the issue more than "empathy." There are different shades of meaning between the words "compassion" and "sympathy" and "empathy." I can say, "She's great at sympathy but lousy at empathy." She's warm-hearted and generous, will give you the shirt off her back, will step in front of a bullet to protect a child, cares very much about people who are feeling poorly, but is very bad herself at knowing in advance what will make someone unhappy, doesn't always pick up that someone is unhappy when this is not obvious, and is slow to understand what made the person unhappy. But when she sees the unhappiness the instinct is to help and commiserate, though that can sometimes go awry. You want her in your world, but not necessarily in charge of human resources or foreign policy.

Except of course there are things people can do to alert themselves to potential misunderstandings, and to learn how to understand better. Young children can be warmhearted but aren't always so great at understanding what's going on with others. Supposedly we older people have learned at least a little bit over the years.

[koganbot]

In Citizen Kane there's a scene where we hear a man pounding on a door and calling a woman's name, and we hear her heavy, woozy breathing, and see a bottle of pills, and put this together from what we've seen earlier in the movie to know with one hundred percent certainty that the character has attempted suicide. Whereas in real life this would be a matter for further research.

[koganbot]

But not every viewer will necessarily perceive the scene correctly. Maybe a five-year-old will misunderstand, as might one of the Martian stay-behinds from the War Of The Worlds who finds itself in a movie theater. I'd probably say that such a viewer lacks understanding rather than that the viewer lacks empathy, though such a viewer out in real Earthling life might be equally bad at grasping the social life on the street.

Empathy and Prejudice (Spoiler)

[koganbot]

And thinking of fictions within fictions, we can say that Elizabeth Bennet originally thought she was empathizing with Wickham and his mistreatment at the hands of _____, but eventually discovered that the Wickham she was empathizing and sympathizing with was a fictional construct invented by the actual Wickham, who was much less worth sympathizing with (though to convolute this a little further, some readers might think that the author was too harsh in her judgment of Lydia and Wickham, despite her having invented them and having given us some of the information by which we potentially decided not to judge them as harshly as she did — readers in the modern world perhaps being more empathetic to the Wickham and Lydia types as we've actually run across them; though this perhaps also shows a lack of complete empathy towards the author and her world, in which the behavior of the Wickhams is more disruptive than it would be in ours).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Agreed that the use of "compassion," "empathy," and "kindness" are frustrating. These experiments seem to measure acts of kindness and acts of cruelty in context with what we know about others' immediate behavior. When someone acts unfairly, we justify acting (perhaps excessively) cruelly to them; when someone expresses pain or sorrow, we express a kind of blanket kindness, or at least moderate restraint from cruelty.

Beyond not really being sure what this "measures," since we very rarely encounter situations like this outside of a laboratory, where any number of other factors will in part shape our actions (including what other people around us are doing), it doesn't seem to me that these experiments have anything to do with empathy, and have more to do with either sympathy, though I think even that is a bit of a stretch, and would just call it "acts of kindness." But I can perform an act of kindness to a stranger on the street without ever wanting to learn anything about that person. In fact, learning anything about a person may even complicate my ability to act kindly. (I imagine there's a kind of "uncanny valley" of kindness, between knowing very little, or something very vague and representative, easy to project onto -- as in an advertisement appealing for aid to children -- and knowing very much about a person, so much so that you feel, e.g., obligated to help them even though you also know a lot of bad things about them, too, as in filial obligation.

Empathy cuts both ways -- when you understand a person's experiences and motivations, you know how to help them and hurt them. Effective bullies and trolls can use a kind of understanding of how others "work" to hurt them far more than a random and general attack (I think that empathy distinguishes lots of trolling from mere hatefulness or vandalism).

The bigger issue is likely which "strangers" are the most "stranger-like," meaning your understanding of them is either zero or even in the negative category (you have very little accurate information about them and lots of bad information); given some semblance of shared experience, you'll likely act with more kindness than with those who are more unfamiliar or easier to marginalize, whether consciously or not.

Actually, the trait that intrigues me most in these particular studies is the role of pity. To find someone pitiful may require a certain lack of empathy, since pity doesn't tend to be a trait we think of positively in the context of our closer relations. (Nor is it something that someone else may want foisted upon them -- hence the further importance of actual understanding of the person.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Other thoughts here, including further hand-wringing about pity.