The Empathy Gym

Introduction

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In May 2007, an artist living in Chicago moved into a new place. It was a small room with white walls. The interior design was minimalist. There was a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, and a paintball gun.

0:25Affixed to the gun was a webcam. It live-streamed the room to the Internet. Anyone could look in, and anyone could take control of the gun, aim, and fire. At all hours of the day and night, the paintball gun would spring to life and begin shooting yellow pellets into the room. Some hit the walls or the furniture. Some hit the artist. I was shot at 70,000 times, and I received 80 million hits on the Internet from 128 countries.

1:01Wafa Bilal spent one whole month in the room, targeted tens of thousands of times by random strangers around the world.

Wafa Bilal Background

1:08Why would he choose to do this?

1:18Wafa was born and raised in Iraq. He came to the U.S. in the early 90s. I live this duality of living in two places. One is a comfort zone of the United States, and the other one is the conflict zone in Iraq where my family, friends live. In 2004, Wafa says one of his brothers was killed in an airstrike. One of my brother, Haji, was killed in air-to-ground missile, and I didn't know what to do.

1:50Wafa is a performance artist, and he wanted to engage others in the conversation that was running through his mind. Three years after his brother's death, he got an idea.

2:06I said, I want to lock myself in the gallery space for 30 days, and I'm going to build a robot connected to the Internet, and the robot shoots a paintball, and viewers online could direct that gun and shoot at me. It's day 16. My body is just getting weak by the day. I thought I felt better. As the days went by, Wafa started to feel crushed by the experience.

2:41It's late.

2:45At night, I feel extremely tired. But I'm afraid to go to bed.

2:57In some ways, Wafa was attempting to do what civil disobedience movements around the world have done. He was deliberately putting himself in harm's way in order to draw attention to a problem and affect change. I have the United States, I have Denmark, I have Ireland, I have the UK, I have France again, Canada. So it's not one place. It is almost global shooting. And I don't know... Somebody said, imagine an entire nation living like this.

3:34Why did strangers who knew nothing about Wafa take it upon themselves to hurt him? Do technology and modern life, and the anonymity they offer, make us less caring as human beings?

Building Empathy

4:01On today's show, building empathy in a connected and confrontational world. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain.

4:33Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources. Support for Hidden Brain comes from JustWorks. JustWorks helps small businesses support their teams with everything from HR to offering better benefits.

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Jameel Zaki Interview

6:01Jameel Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford University. He's the author of the book, The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Jameel, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks for having me. You have a very powerful story about how you came to be interested in the subject of empathy. Tell me about your parents, where they are from, how they met, what they went through, and what you learned from the experience. So, it turns out that in the early 1970s,

6:33Washington State University in Pullman had a program where they granted full scholarships for graduate studies to students from the world's poorest nations. My mother received the scholarship from Peru, and my father did not receive a scholarship, but nonetheless came to Washington State from Pakistan. So, they traveled from Lima and Lahore, these two massive cities, to the sleepy town of Pullman, where they fell in love. When I think about my parents, I think the biggest thing that they had in common

7:05was their sense of foreignness in the U.S. They sort of took comfort in each other in a place that neither of them understood. But as they grew more comfortable with the U.S. and were acclimated to it, they grew less comfortable with each other. And they divorced. They started splitting up when I was eight, but didn't finish until I was 12. And theirs was a long and acrimonious split, and I am their only child. And so, a lot of my childhood was spent kind of bouncing around between their houses,

7:38and it really felt like I was bouncing between parallel universes, because their priorities and values and fears are really as far apart as their hometowns. So, I would often feel confused. You know, as a small child, I would try to, when I was with my mom, figure out the rules that governed her heart and mind and make them true for myself. But then, when I would go to my dad's house, those same rules would stop working. And it was just very confusing,

8:08and it felt, I think, to all three of us, like I would really have to choose one of my parents and give up on really knowing the other.

8:18But I knew that I had to try for all of our sake. So I did, and I kind of kept working at it and eventually got better and learned to tune myself to my parents' different frequencies. And that kind of saved me as a kid. I think empathy saved me. Not because it was easy. It was work. I always think of my parents' divorce as an empathy gym for me that forced me to work out my ability to care about and understand other people. And you, as you've said,

8:51described this as an empathy gym. Were there times when you failed to show them empathy? I mean, I must imagine that as a small child, it must have been very difficult in many ways to comprehend what was happening and why these two adults were fighting over you and each was demanding that you see things from their point of view. Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the big realizations for me as a kid was realizing that both of them were in pain. I think as a child, it's very easy to focus on your own perspective

9:22and what you're going through and to blame others, especially adults. I think when I realized that my parents were both struggling, just like I was, it actually made me feel kinship towards them and made it easier to understand that I could connect with both of them. In fact, because what we were going through wasn't that different. Talk a little bit about the benefits of empathy. There's been a lot of work that looks at what happens when people receive empathy from their partners, for example, or from their doctors.

9:53Oh, yeah. I mean, in many cases, empathy benefits all parties involved. So, for instance, patients of empathic doctors are more satisfied with their care, but are also more likely to follow doctors' recommendations, which is important for things like preventative care. And spouses of empathic partners are happier in their marriages. But one thing that I think people don't realize as much is that people who experience empathy for others also benefit.

10:24It's not just receiving it, but giving it helps us too. Feeling empathy for others reduces our stress, and adolescents who are able to pick out other people's emotions accurately are better adjusted during middle school. Now, parents everywhere recognize the value of empathy. We have courses and classes that try and teach children empathy. I came by this clip on Sesame Street featuring the actor Mark Ruffalo and the character Murray. Take a listen to the clip. Murray. What?

10:54Did I tell you about that time when I lost my favorite teddy bear? Oh, no. It was... This is very sad. Did you love that teddy bear? I love that teddy bear. Oh, I can imagine exactly how you feel. It's a really sad feeling. It makes me want to cry like this.

11:17It was sad. It was so sad. But you know what? What? You know what empathy is. I do? That was empathy. What? You could understand how I was feeling, exactly how I was feeling and understood it. That's empathy. I get it now. Jamil, you've used a similar kind of scenario to explain empathy. Someone's talking with a friend, the friend gets a phone call. Walk me through the rest of that scenario and the three components that you've identified that make up empathy.

11:47Yeah, so again, imagine that you're sitting with a friend having lunch and they receive a phone call and whatever the person on the other side of the line says makes them visibly upset. You don't know what's wrong but your friend starts to cry and it's obvious that something is wrong. Well, as you see this, a bunch of things might happen inside you. First, you might become upset yourself, sort of vicariously catching their feeling. That's what psychologists often call emotional empathy. You might also try to figure out what's wrong,

12:19what they're feeling and why. That's what we call cognitive empathy. And if you're a good friend at least, you probably will feel concern for what they're going through and a desire for their well-being to improve. That's what psychologists call empathic concern or compassion. And even though these pieces of empathy sometimes go together, they also split apart in interesting ways. So for instance, different brain systems support emotional and cognitive empathy and empathic concern.

12:50And different groups of people struggle with different flavors of empathy. That's fascinating. It's almost like these are different muscle groups and you need all the muscle groups to be functioning to, in some ways, actualize your full capacity for empathy. I love that analogy. Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. At the same time that parents and books and motivational speakers and faith traditions cite the value of empathy, many of us are living in ways that isolate us from the people around us.

13:21Among people 18 to 34, for example, 10 times as many people live alone today as did in 1950. I asked Jamil whether there's a link between going solo and the amount of empathy we feel for others. It's hard to say. You know, and I do want to be clear that in looking at any demographic trends over time and trying to link them to empathy decline, we're necessarily speculating, right? There's no way to run an experiment where you have history

13:51occur multiple times and fiddle with different pieces of it to see what causes a decline in empathy. But certainly, you know, you can point to big shifts in the way that people live and one of them is that we're becoming more urban and more solitary. And when we interact with people, it's often in more transactional ways, right? Sort of some of the regular rituals that used to bring us into contact with other people often are giving way to more solitary pursuits.

14:22So there's some evidence, for instance, that anonymous interactions do not favor empathy. So I don't know, there's not data specifically on solitary living, but to the extent that living in, you know, a giant city, but by yourself where most of the people who you see are total strangers, there's some evidence that suggests that perhaps that might have an effect on our empathy. And of course, one of the other places where anonymity rules is the internet. And when you look at some of the changes

14:53that have unfolded and the timetable of those changes, they do coincide at least correlationally with the rise of internet technologies. And I'm wondering, is there reason to imagine that there's a connection between these two things, that the connections we have with one another online and on Twitter or social media where we often don't know whom we're communicating with or who's listening or who's not listening, could this in some ways be behind this decline in empathy?

15:19It certainly is possible. You know, I think that the internet and social media, I don't think of them as inherently antisocial. In a way, you can think of the internet as humanity's greatest empathic opportunity ever, right? We have the chance to connect with people around the world at any time on their own terms and respond with compassion. I mean, I think if you go back and read Wired, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, people were waxing poetic

15:49about the way that the internet could bring us all together into a global community. I think in some obvious ways that hasn't always occurred and I think that has to do in part with some of the ways that we tend to use the internet that might not be empathy positive. So for instance, oftentimes online, we don't have a chance to see each other's faces and voices in sort of real-time interactions, the kind of richness that we have when we hang out offline.

16:19Instead, we see avatars and strings of text and those might not be great triggers for empathy. There's a great study by Juliana Schroeder and her colleagues where they had people describe their political opinions sort of in an audio recording. They then had a separate group of people listen to those audio recordings or read a transcript of them. And what they found was that people were more likely to dehumanize the person whose opinion

16:50they were reading about if they were only reading it. Whereas if they were hearing the person's voice, they were less likely to dehumanize that individual. So it's almost as though we're leaving behind when we go online some of the cues that allow us to detect each other's real humanity. And there's a deep irony there, isn't there, Jameel? I mean, when we live in these big cities, we're living cheek by jowl with lots of other people, but in some ways we're not connecting with them. And the same goes with the internet. We have the capacity to connect with large numbers

17:20of other people, where we're connecting in often the superficial way instead of this deeper way.

17:26It is ironic, isn't it? I mean, we, in cities, for instance, we see more people than we ever did in human history, but we know fewer of them. And it almost is as though our interactions sort of favor a dehumanized perspective on each other. I mean, I know when I'm sort of stuck in traffic or trying to make my way down a crowded block in Manhattan, people become, not people, but obstacles for me on my way. And I think that that's sort of the way that it can often feel in modern contexts.

Empathy Paradox

18:01When we come back, more on the signs of empathy and why being empathetic can sometimes be bad for you.

18:10You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

18:19Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lilly. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources.

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19:23This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jameel Zaki is the author of The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. He conducts research on empathy at Stanford University. Jameel, people who have been through terrible suffering can respond in different ways. Some people turn inward to avoid future pain, while others turn outward. They show empathy for the suffering of other people. I feel like I've seen research studies that show both these things. Can you talk about these studies

19:54and why people might go in one direction or another after they experience trauma? Yeah, you know, I think that we often think of trauma, you know, sort of things like being through a war or being assaulted or suffering a terrible injury as things that, again, as you put it nicely, sort of draw us into each other, or even that trauma might perpetuate itself. We often hear about cycles of violence or the idea that hurt people hurt people. And that's certainly true

20:25in some cases, but there's a lot of research that's actually much more hopeful on what psychologists call altruism born of suffering. This is the idea that sometimes when we've gone through great pain, that actually sort of opens us up to caring more about other people and their suffering. So there are all sorts of examples of that as well. So for instance, people who have suffered from addiction often change their lives and become addiction counselors. People who have been assaulted

20:55often change their lives and become assault counselors, sort of because they resonate with the frequency of other people suffering more acutely.

21:07Psychologists don't really know that much about sort of what causes people when they experience suffering to go in one direction or another, but one important factor that they have identified is the support that we receive from other people. So if after a trauma, an individual is able to find a community of others who support them, well, then they're more likely to recover from their own trauma and they might also be more likely to turn around and provide that support to others. I'm thinking about research

21:38that Michael Wall and Naila Branscombe and others have done looking at how when you remind people of past traumas, you remind Americans, for example, of the 9-11 attacks, Americans become more willing to endorse or tolerate harsh interrogation techniques in the fight against terrorism. And in some ways, at one level, this seems very intuitive that you feel like you've been through something bad and I remind you of the bad thing you've been through. And there's a part of you that says, I don't want that bad thing

22:08to happen again and that increases my willingness to permit actions or behaviors that I might otherwise say, hang on a second, this is going to cause harm to other people. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think that it cuts both ways, right? I mean, I think reminding people of collective trauma, for instance, can make them more weary of outsiders and sort of more, as you say, willing to even endorse violence or aggression towards outsiders.

22:39But thinking of a common threat is also one way to bring people within a group closer together. I remember after 9-11 the way that Americans really felt like we were all one because we were facing this really deep trauma together. And likewise, there's all sorts of evidence that when people feel that they have a common threat that they're facing, they band together. So it's really interesting. What you're really pointing out is that empathy in some ways has this double-edged

23:10sword quality to it, which is on the one hand, it's prompting us to be outward-looking, but it's also driven in some ways by factors about who's in our in-group and who's not in our in-group. The psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote the book Against Empathy, The Case for Rational Compassion, he argues that empathy tends to be parochial and it tends to be biased, and that's why when we ask people to be empathic, we're really inviting them to be prejudiced. Is that true? I think that Paul is right in certain ways.

23:41Absolutely, empathy sort of begins parochially. Our instinctive empathy might be more driven towards people in our tribe than outside of it. I often think of oxytocin, you know, this chemical that sort of causes us to bond to other people, right? We often think of oxytocin as the love drug or the cuddle hormone, but it turns out that if you give people oxytocin intranasally, for instance, they become more caring about people in their group,

24:11but less caring about people outside their group. In essence, sort of turning up people's empathy in that case means turning up their parochialism. I think a big place where Paul and I differ is on what we do with this information. So Paul, I think, believes that, okay, empathy tends to be parochial and biased towards insiders versus outsiders, so we should give up on it altogether. I think differently. I think that that's a problem

24:41with how empathy tends to operate, but I try to focus us on the fact that we can control how we empathize and make choices about the way that we deploy our caring. And if we recognize that, hey, I'm empathizing in a parochial way, in a tribal way, we can try to make a different choice and broaden our empathy even towards people who are different from ourselves.

25:07You've done some very interesting work with police officers where you brought to bear this insight that you just talked about. Tell me about that work and tell me about how sometimes the right recommendation might actually be to tell people behave a little less empathetically. Yeah, so for the book, I profiled Washington State's Criminal Justice Training Center. Although these officers were very empathic towards citizens, they were even more empathic towards fellow police officers.

25:38And that included fellow police officers who had engaged in potential police misconduct, right? So while I was there, there was a case of police officers who had shot an unarmed man named Antonio Zambrano Montes. And during my visit to CJTC, the officers involved in that shooting, they were not indicted at all. So that seemed like a travesty of justice to many people in Washington State, but the people at CJTC were adamant

26:08that these were good guys who had just made a mistake. That level of empathy for people in their own group, I feel, and this is just my perspective, might have interfered with their ability to understand how the rest of the world saw what had happened.

26:26And in fact, this is consistent with research by my friend Emile Bruneau. He's studied sort of parochial empathy in a lot of different intergroup contexts. And what he finds is that sometimes if you want to predict when someone will be willing to be aggressive towards outsiders or unwilling to compromise with someone on the other side of a conflict, it's not enough to measure whether they empathize with the people on the outside. You have to also measure how empathic they are to their own group.

26:57And it turns out that people who are extraordinarily empathic towards people in their group, even if they're also empathic towards outsiders, are unwilling to compromise, unwilling to do anything that could threaten their own tribe.

27:12So what this suggests is that sometimes if we want to open ourselves up to other cultures, to people on the other side of a political or racial divide, maybe what we should start out doing is not just trying to get to know them and empathize more with them, but to recognize if we're empathizing so much with our group that we'll be unable to be flexible emotionally.

27:38I want to talk about another paradox of empathy. You say that about 50% of oncologists report feeling intense heartbreak when they communicate bad news to patients. So even as empathy is this very powerful driver of positive outcomes in medical settings, for example, it also seems to come at some personal cost. Yeah, in fact, even having medical students simulate delivering bad news makes them anxious, makes their palms start to sweat and their hearts start to race. Empathy is hugely

28:09beneficial, including in medical contexts, for the people who receive it. but it can be an occupational hazard for the people who give it. I understand that a friend of yours is a psychotherapist and she avoids scheduling depressed patients at the end of the day for in some ways the same reason? Yeah, yeah, because she feels as though their negative mood will seep into her and sort of leave her unable to interact well with her family. And I think this is part of

28:39the double-edged sword of empathy for people in caring professions. On the one hand, many of these people are driven to their work by a preternatural care for others. But on the other hand, that same care can cause them to lose themselves, especially if they're in really intense medical settings where they're surrounded by, sort of chronically surrounded by, other people's deep suffering. And as a result, oftentimes I think people in caring professions feel like they're stuck in a double bind

29:10between caring for other people adequately but potentially grinding themselves down or turning themselves off. This is something that is called in the medical profession defensive dehumanization. The idea that physicians and other healthcare professionals feel like they sometimes have to turn off their empathy and stop seeing their patients as people just so they can go on being people. You cite this interesting study that Mark Panser conducted in the 1970s

29:41which is another example of this kind of defensive behavior where