“He just doesn’t listen to me!” “She never understands what I’m going through!”

There I sat, their psychotherapist, sandwiched between this couple who had been married at least 50 years. The husband, a Vietnam veteran with metastatic cancer, longstanding PTSD, and increased impairments from dementia. The wife, a full-time caregiver and retired school administrator, stressed out and facing her own increased cognitive challenges. This marriage, woven together by three children, many grandchildren, five military deployments, countless life celebrations and family funerals. Their love language: arguing.

Of course, they didn’t call it fighting—they saw their “discussions” as spirited debates. Seeing their faces brighten when they talked over each other almost felt like eavesdropping on covert foreplay. They vaguely reminded me of my own grandparents, except now I couldn’t sit back and watch bemusedly from the roomy backseat of Poppy’s Lincoln.

As their therapist, I had to engage, mediate, and navigate their needs. I had to assert therapeutic neutrality, balancing both parties’ perspectives while also managing my own viewpoints and biases.

“Neutral” conjures a sense of complete objectivity, impartial and dispassionate, that rarely exists in realistic realms of human experience. When I work with couples or families, instead of completely removing myself from the conflict, I focus on how to acknowledge, validate, and work with all perspectives in the room, even if some disagreements can never be fully resolved.

It doesn’t always come easily. When I trained in geriatrics, I had little coursework in family and couples therapy and no idea what working with families would be like. Referrals typically called for individual therapy, but patients often wanted loved ones in the room—or, in the presence of dementia, needed them there.

Complex dynamics led family members to try to curry favor with me, seeking validation that they were the “correct” party. Boundary setting became even more crucial. Who was my primary patient? Did they even want family therapy? I work in a medical system designed for veterans, which typically favors their needs, even with built-in caregiver supports. How do I ensure I’m addressing the needs of spouses or other family caregivers, while also staying true to the veteran patient?

Literature on “therapeutic neutrality” is sparse, but reading what’s out there offered me a helpful framework to start from. I was particularly drawn toward psychologists Charles Gelso and Katri Kanninen’s definition. They posit that effective therapeutic neutrality occurs when the therapist “takes an observer position in the relationship…refrains from taking sides in the patient’s inner struggles…[and] does not take sides in the patient’s relational struggles.”

One of the major challenges of any kind of therapy with multiple people is that it challenges therapeutic rapport: If I align with one person, I run the risk of pushing against another. Family therapists Mark Butler and colleagues offer a solution: maintaining a stance of dynamic neutrality, in which the “therapist invites and facilitates each person in gaining an empathic window on others’ experience and perspective and then holding their partner’s experience equally valid with their own and equally significant to relationship success.”

In my work with families and couples navigating complex medical issues, I had, without fully realizing it, already been employing this technique, taking extra time to observe all viewpoints and not jump to conclusions.

This is especially essential when I am a part of family meetings among patients, family, and medical providers in the hospital. Once, I found myself and three doctors jammed into every crevice of a small hospital room, hashing things out with a patient and two of his sisters. Nobody was happy. Not the patient, who was frustrated by a prolonged hospital stay and wanted to relocate to one of his sisters’ houses. Not his sisters, who wanted to move him to an assisted living facility. Not the medical and psychiatric teams, who wanted to send him to a skilled nursing facility for rehab and likely longer-term care, whether he wanted it or not.

They debated what should happen next. The patient couldn’t stay in the hospital indefinitely, for medical and financial reasons. But he also still needed a lot of help managing his pain and completing personal care such as toileting, bathing, and dressing.  Everyone in the room was frustrated and overwhelmed.

I sat and listened, and tried to balance the complex facts with each party’s opinions, feelings, and needs. Everyone wanted a solution—their solution—so badly, that no one, least of all the patient himself, was heard and respected. Rather than offering solutions, I mediated, trying to create time and space for each person to talk. We did not come up with an answer, but we made progress in listening.

The conclusion the group reached several days later—trying out a skilled nursing rehab location close to the patient’s home and family, with eventual plans to transfer home—wasn’t perfect, but the meeting reset the conversation to a place of greater equity and inclusivity.

Neutrality helped me balance the needs and limitations of a difficult reality. In a space of narrow choices, this one was best aligned with the care the patient wanted.

With the Vietnam vet and his wife, this notion of neutrality as observation helped me reconnect the couple with the things that brought them together in the first place. Rather than leaning into their disagreements and arriving at judgments about who was right, we took trips down Memory Lane. We discussed how they met in college, set up by friends, and how they have been arguing for decades. They talked about what they admired and found attractive about each other. They remembered their accomplishments, their goals, and their mutual commitment.

I don’t approach therapeutic neutrality with a cold, dispassionate lens. Instead, I try to find ways to use curiosity, exploration, and observations of points of connection to help couples, families, and medical teams work through conflict. Rather than focusing on how someone wants another person to change, I use prompts to help people rediscover what they value, and how the people around them bring them closer to it. I’ve learned that my job, as a neutral therapist, is to help patients and their loved ones strengthen their bonds.

The post How Does a Therapist Stay Neutral? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Illustration by Ruby Alvarado. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square that Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

For this fifth and final installment, we pulled in people working to understand our contentious public debates. From vitriolic fights over race, gender, and sexuality to the polarized, partisan brawls over policy to the protests cropping up across U.S. campuses, our contributors share how we might make civil discourse more civil.

They tell us: How do we disagree in public?

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The belly pain is so bad that Mrs. Alves*, a woman in her 40s, is worming uncomfortably on the ER stretcher. “I need an answer,” she says. I promise her that pain medicine is on the way. What I can’t promise her—despite countless tests and specialists’ opinions already on record—is the definitive answer. The diagnosis, the root cause of her symptoms, proves elusive. But her distress is real. And when there’s distress, there’s a story.

To be an emergency physician for nearly 30 years is be humbled again and again by the mysteries of the body and the humans inhabiting them. Mrs. Alves is one of an endless number of patients I’ve seen with the urgent need not just for a diagnosis or treatment of some kind, but to be heard, to have an ear turn its clinical attention to their story.

Stories are not just listened to, they’re constructed, and both tellers and listeners are part of the process. And yet, discussions around doctor/patient communication ignore this fundamental truth.

Healthcare stresses evidence-based practice, clinical decision-making informed by well-designed research studies. However, it’s less interested in scholarship that complicates this paradigm. Knowledge is tied to belief, and the greater our confidence in our beliefs, the more likely we’ll consider it knowledge. Our confidence in our beliefs, experts say, depends less on the quality of the evidence than the coherence of the story constructed in our minds.

The best evidence-informed decisions are useless, if not dangerous, unless we first get the patient’s story right.

In healthcare professionals’ training, a patient’s story is generally shorthand for a medical history—current and past symptoms, medical and surgical problems, and social history. But a medical history isn’t the same as the patient’s story. A detailed description of symptoms can still miss the deep troubles and unspoken needs plaguing a particular person at a specific moment in their life.

I was taught that my job as a doctor was to find the patient’s story—this solid, complete entity—and bring it back by listening diligently, paying attention, and being present. Important practices, but they ignore a central challenge of working with stories—they’re less like polished jewels and more like first drafts.

Patient stories, like all stories, are created out of fragments of information. Deciding which details to include and what to leave out is daunting for writers blessed with quiet and time to revise. Imagine an ER patient in that pressured moment, surrounded by loud noises and strangers, expected to describe experiences that can be complicated, frightening, and embarrassing—and not knowing which details are relevant to their problem and which aren’t.

When we’re listening in this moment and others, doctors are not just receiving information. We’re continuously sorting, prioritizing, and interpreting fragments to create an orderly and coherent narrative. We’re making micro-decisions about which details might be relevant to the problem and discounting others. And our story-making brains don’t need much to construct a believable reality.

This tendency is demonstrated in a well-known 1944 social psychology study. Researchers Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed subjects a simple animated movie where a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moved in and out of an opening and closing rectangle. Then, they asked research subjects to describe what happened. Respondents took these inanimate shapes and described drama, bullying, jealousy, and romance. Only one person told what their eyes observed—geometric objects moving about a screen.

When I played this film for my students, they created confident, specific, and even passionate narratives: a lesbian love story with a disapproving father, a terrified mother and child escaping from an abuser, children’s playground dynamics.

They laughed uneasily, as if catching their mischievous minds in the act. They also learned how subjectivity, assumptions, and their own personal histories contribute to the construction of an apparent objective experience. I illustrated the point with my own narrative mistakes, like the one I made with an uncooperative man with severe back pain and a history of opioid use disorder. I suspected drug-seeking behavior. I thought my words respectful and unbiased, but we began to knock heads. Then, he told me about how he was in recovery, and desperate for other types of treatment to control his pain. He was finally back at work and didn’t want to lose this job. He went on to explain how he could tell from the tone my colleagues and I used that we came into the room with a story fixed in our heads. And to my shame, he was right.

For all the attention given to medical harm in hospitals, or instances where patients felt their needs went unheard by clinicians, doctors rarely examine these situations as narrative missteps.

Narrative is defined in various ways, including a report of connected events and chronology with meaning. A more expansive interpretation draws on the word itself, which is derived from the Latin narrare, which means “to tell” or “to know,” and invites us also to consider narrative’s capacity for knowledge production. Sometimes, the narrative the patient wants us to hear is what’s unsaid. But physicians are poor at picking up on these cues.

Take the older patient who presents to the ER after a fall. The physician asks about the circumstances, including why he fell, his history with falls, and possible injuries. She learns he’s not eating or drinking. He’s not getting around like he used to. He lives alone. She could stop there and move on to the physical exam. Or she could keep him talking.

Studies show that patients may cue their negative emotions or their real concerns indirectly. In this case, the man’s family lives out of state, his wife recently died, he’s been grieving, and he won’t leave the apartment that holds a lifetime of memories. He’s not eating because getting up and down the two flights of stairs is not as easy as it once was. This proud man wearing a Navy cap won’t offer up these details, but his vulnerability unspools once he’s asked.

Patients want their physicians to ask questions. Unfortunately, health providers often respond by focusing on logistical or biomedical issues. By neglecting emotional communication, we miss opportunities to express empathy.

Such behavior is often attributed to time constraints, but research shows that when we pick up on patients’ often quiet or even silent cries for help about psychological or social issues, time is often saved.

When we work with stories and recognize the different ways they are constructed and communicated, we begin to appreciate not only their power but their fragility. For patients to tell their stories, they must first overcome the vulnerability that results from admitting fears and insecurities, new frailties, and limitations. And as physicians reaching branch points in the conversation, we must be sensitive to the presence of other directions the narrative might go, and how and why we might be motivated to steer it down a particular path. Is this path safer, or clearly marked, leading to an identifiable destination?

We must be willing to interrogate our story-building process as rigorously as our research methods. What stories are we listening for, what assumptions or beliefs are we bringing into the story, and how are these value judgments influencing the stories we hear?

As I listen to Mrs. Alves crying for an answer, my first instinct is to order more labs and diagnostic imaging. Instead, I take a seat, and ask her not only to describe her pain but the experience of being in pain, and what distressed her enough to come to the ER. She tells me about the specialists who won’t call her back or dismiss her symptoms when tests come back normal. Her doctor is hard to reach. Besides, he thinks it’s all in her head. What she wants from them is what she desires from me: someone willing to listen for a few minutes, who will be curious about the pain, but more importantly, appreciate how it’s disrupted her life. Quality and compassionate patient care are only possible when the physician and patient work from the same story.

*The names in this piece have been changed.

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And yet: many are largely disconnected from the pain, unwilling or unable to recognize or process the loss.

Where is the collective mourning? I am an empathy scientist, and I can report that we are not a nation of psychopaths. People have a limited capacity to process mass suffering, rather than a callous lack of care. Cognitive biases—common errors in thinking—make it difficult to process tragedy of this scale over time, creating a sense of psychological distance between us and the number of COVID-19 deaths. By understanding how various cognitive biases work, however, people can train themselves to feel the weight of our country’s losses again.

Several types of cognitive bias are warping Americans’ ability to process COVID today. First is the numeracy bias, the brain’s inability to wrap itself around large numbers. I logged onto Facebook recently and was saddened by a message from one of my friends announcing the death of his cousin from COVID-19. My friend wrote that behind every statistic, there is a person and a family—and that this time, it was him. He was echoing a popular quote: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” which has been attributed to Stalin. The quote demonstrates something that scientists have long known. We can easily feel empathy for specific individuals, especially those who are close to us. But as these individuals turn into groups, our empathy is diminished. Their suffering becomes more emotionally distant and abstract, and turns into a statistic. And people are not good at reasoning about statistics.

We don’t like to think of ourselves in this cold way. In studies, participants predict that they would feel worse if thousands of people were victims of a tragedy, compared to only a few. That reaction, they feel, is the morally right response. But in reality, most of us experience an “emotional flatline,” with no greater feelings of sadness as the death toll from a tragedy grows—as long as we are not personally affected.

Paul Slovic, a leading researcher on numeracy bias, writes, “Just as we don’t notice the difference between 30 lit candles and 31 lit candles, our feelings do not register the difference between 30 deaths and 31 deaths.” In typical numeracy bias studies, some participants read a passage about an individual victim (“Rokia, a 7-year-old girl facing starvation,” for instance), while other participants read about an unnamed group of children, experiencing the same tragedy. When asked to donate money to help, study participants who read about the single victim are more likely to give than those who read about the group. In one study, Slovic found that even moving from one to two victims reduced emotional responses and donations.

Another cognitive bias at work during the COVID crisis is the ostrich effect: people’s tendency to avoid negative information, including everything from bad financial returns to another person’s misery. Daryl Cameron is a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who studies compassion avoidance. In his studies, he shows participants pictures of distressed people, such as refugees. Immediately afterward, participants can then choose to “try to feel what the person feels” and “empathically share in the internal emotional experience of the person,” or they can choose to simply describe external details about the picture, such as the person’s age and gender. Participants choose empathy only 36 percent of the time. Cameron’s research shows that people actively try to suppress their emotions to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the face of mass tragedy. Sometimes it’s easier to avert our eyes in the face of others’ pain.

This may be because of a sense of helplessness, common in the face of mass tragedy. Even if we want to help, our actions never seem to be enough. In “The Eleventh,” the classic short story by Henri Barbusse, a servant invites 10 people into his master’s palace-hospital each month, but has to turn away the 11th. At first, he enjoys being able to help the 10, but soon closing the door on the 11th person becomes torturous. This story highlights the dangers of becoming overwhelmed by those we cannot help, rather than focusing on those we can.

Time messes with our concrete sensory brains, too. The recency effect creates a crippling nearsightedness, where events that are closer to the present are more vivid in our imaginations. A process called hedonic adaptation numbs us to the pandemic’s rise over time, as one death per day becomes 10 deaths per day, then 50, then 500, then 1,000, then 2,000. While COVID seemed to have taken over our lives very quickly, the number of deaths accelerated and then crept up or down subtly over weeks and months, giving people time to get used to the new normal, and dulling their emotional response.

Vivid experiences can skew perception by activating a type of cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic, the tendency to overestimate the prevalence of events that more easily come to mind. This type of bias is the reason people worry about airplane crashes and terrorist attacks, which generate countless dramatic news clips that make them easy to picture, despite the fact that they are rare and are not among the top causes of death in the US. According to a survey from late August, 27 percent of Americans said that a close friend or family member had tested positive for COVID-19, and 15 percent said that a close friend or family member had died from it. Despite our lives having drastically changed as the summer drew to a close, the vast majority of Americans still had no personal experience with the virus. Yet COVID-19 is now third leading cause of death in the US—after heart disease and cancer. Although statistics clearly demonstrate that the illness is dangerous and deadly, the availability heuristic makes us underestimate the likelihood of events that are not easily available in memory. Since those of us without vivid personal experiences with COVID mainly experience it through statistics in the news, we downplay its seriousness.

So what can we do to counter these deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, and become more sensitive to mass suffering?

To combat numeracy bias, some might suggest thinking more logically would be the solution. Yet, research finds that logical thinking can actually backfire: When it comes to charitable donations, for instance, people driven by logic often realize that giving to individual victims is an emotional response that doesn’t really make sense. A better approach involves expanding one’s sense of compassion so that we can apply it to more than one individual at a time. Some people are better at this than others. For example, those who feel secure in their relationships with others show less numeracy bias. They do not need to know someone’s name or see a picture to understand that a tragedy is a tragedy—even when it affects a group. For more insecure people, thinking of someone (whether a person, an animal, or a deity) who loves them unconditionally can help them extend more compassion to the world, even when events are remote and actors are anonymous.

A procession of vehicles drive past photos of Detroit victims of COVID-19, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020 on Belle Isle in Detroit. Courtesy of Carlos Osorio/Associated Press.

Some studies have found that people who have experienced adversity are less likely to show the numeracy bias, and actually feel more compassion for groups, compared to individuals. Shifting into a more interdependent frame of mind can also help people resist the numeracy bias. Focusing on “we-ness”— the simple act of thinking about what you have in common with others—can increase this mindset. Another realistic response is to simply accept that numeracy bias is a part of how our brains work, and focus on individual victims instead of large groups. Public memorials can be helpful for this. At the end of May, when the country reached 100,000 deaths, the entire front page of the New York Times was a list of names, ages, locations, and short descriptions of individuals who had died. It was hard not to be moved; I still think of Rodrick “Rod” Samuels, 49, who “never let anyone mess with his younger brother.” Matching names to faces is also important. One study found that people no longer showed numeracy bias—that is, their feelings of empathic sadness increased along with the number of victims—when they could see pictures of the people affected. The city of Detroit, which lost more than 1,500 people to COVID-19, created a public drive-by memorial in Belle Isle Park with hundreds of portraits and names of victims.

As for the ostrich effect, feelings of helplessness at the scope of suffering can prevent us from acting, but they don’t have to. There are some people who deliberately seek out others in need. These highly empathic people aren’t superheroes or saints, but instead, expect that helping others will feel good. And plenty of research supports this idea, finding that those who feel a sense of efficacy—that they can do small things to help—don’t get as overwhelmed. Such efforts don’t have to be heroic or costly. In the case of the pandemic, we can save lives by hand washing, mask wearing, and social distancing. Focusing on these concrete ways that we can make a difference can help people feel less overwhelmed.

To regain initial sensitivity to the pandemic and combat hedonic adaptation, we can try to mindfully accept negative information. Instead of focusing on the number of deaths yesterday, we can compare today’s total number of deaths—more than 277,000—to the end of February’s—one death—or the first day of Fall—201,000. The contrast may feel more appropriately shocking when tracked this way. And to counter the availability heuristic and make the pandemic’s effects seem more real, we can peruse our social media with renewed focus. Sharing personal experiences with COVID online may be one of the best means available, at the moment, for painting a vivid portrait of the disease—and encouraging people to take CDC-recommended precautions.

Cognitive biases may psychologically minimize the scope of the pandemic, but there are small steps that we can each take to actually minimize the scope of it. Mother Teresa had some sage advice on this front: “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.” By wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying home whenever possible, and otherwise socially distancing, you are doing just that.

The post Why Is It so Hard to Mourn the Vast Number of COVID Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hersey’s perspective had roots in his childhood in China, where his parents were American missionaries. His capacity for empathic identification with even an enemy people was widely shared by a generation of missionaries and children of missionaries—among them other prominent writers and activists—who came to be among the mid-20th century’s most vocal opponents of white supremacy and imperialism. Their stories show how the missionary movement, which was started to bring Christianity to faraway lands like China, came to have its most profound impact on the culture of the United States.

American Protestants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a prosperous, confident lot, convinced that their own religion could save the world’s peoples from degradation. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus of Nazareth was understood to have directed (Matthew 28:19). Thousands of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and members of other denominations, often graduates of Oberlin, Princeton, and Yale, went all over the globe, but in the highest numbers to China, Japan, and India. They built schools and hospitals as well as churches, and they learned the local languages. Many of their children counted Chinese or Japanese as their native tongue.

Among the influential children of this group of missionaries was Pearl Buck, whose 1931 novel The Good Earth approached the Chinese in much the same concrete, humanizing fashion in which Hersey depicted the Japanese. During World War II, missionary organizations were by far the most visible groups opposing the internment of Japanese Americans. In the U.S. State Department and in intelligence agencies, missionary sons criticized traditional links with the European colonial powers and urged new alliances with non-white, decolonized peoples. Children of missionaries were prominent among the Anglo Americans who devoted energies to the civil rights struggle of black Americans, as early as the 1940s and 1950s. In 1947 a missionary son from the Philippines, George Houser, was with the black activist Bayard Rustin on the first “freedom ride,” which became the model for the more famous interracial defiance of Jim Crow public accommodations in the early 1960s.

A closer look at the career of John Hersey reveals how he took the ethos of his childhood and gave artistic and political expression to the ethical imperative to get “beyond national boundaries,” as he put it, and to embrace “the world as a whole.” Hersey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1944, A Bell for Adano, introduced readers to an American soldier devoted to the interests of a community of war-devastated civilians in occupied Sicily—people who, like the Japanese of Hiroshima, were citizens of what had been an enemy regime. Years later, Hersey allowed that this soldier was a “displaced missionary”—a man determined to bring what justice he could to a wounded world.

Pearl Buck receiving the Nobel Prize in literature from the King of Sweden in 1938. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hersey described many of his other fictional characters as displaced missionaries, too, including the hero of his 1953 novel, The Wall. There, in what is usually regarded as the first serious fictional treatment of the Holocaust in English, a Jewish scholar records the experience of the Warsaw Ghetto with a sensitivity that Jewish reviewers found astonishing—particularly because it was the imaginative creation of a Skull-and-Bones man from Yale whose parents had been Congregationalist missionaries. Hersey also wrote with widely praised sensitivity about African American victims of racist violence in The Algiers Motel Incident (1968) and about the Japanese Americans confined to prison camps after Pearl Harbor.

Hersey’s finest literary achievement, other than Hiroshima, was about a real missionary, not a moral surrogate for one—and it shows that he eventually grew critical of the missionary endeavor. In 1986, he wrote the epic novel The Call, offering a rueful narrative of the entire missionary project in China. The missionaries won few converts and came across to many Chinese nationalists as agents of Western imperialism. Hersey showed in painful detail that what doomed the missionary project from the start was its arrogant presumption that American Protestants knew better than the indigenous peoples of Asia how to live a good life. Hersey himself retained and redirected the egalitarian, all-men-are-brothers outlook that missionaries espoused, but The Call registers his eventual conclusion that the missionary project violated that very ideal of human solidarity.

This sentiment was common among Hersey’s fellow missionary children. In 1933, Buck declared herself “weary unto death with this incessant preaching,” and demanded that American Protestants switch from conversion to social service as the theme of activities abroad, traumatizing the Presbyterian community she had grown up among. But between the 1930s and the 1950s, most of the ecumenical, “mainline” denominations made exactly this change. The resulting social service programs had an unexpected but important long-term effect: They served as a model for the Peace Corps.

The careers of Hersey, Buck, and many others who shared their missionary upbringing were driven by a recognition that the peoples of the world were much less in need of American Protestant supervision than had been supposed. The missionary encounter with peoples beyond the historically Christian North Atlantic West produced relatively generous dispositions toward the varieties of humankind. The memoirs and letters of missionary families record the spiritual impact of discovering how deep and complex were the civilizations of Asia, and how emotionally vibrant and intellectually capable were many of the rank and file “heathens” the missionaries had come to liberate from a life of darkness. These foreign peoples were not so bad, not so much in need of being made over into copies of Baptists in Indiana or Virginia. Hersey’s The Call ends with the disillusioned missionary protagonist—based largely on Hersey’s own father—trying to assure himself that “it had not been all error.”

Perhaps it was American life that needed to be changed? Many of the folks at “home” had narrow, provincial attitudes that were obstacles to a genuine, world-wide community. Instead of trying to convert the rest of the world, the missionary-influenced Protestant Americans applied to their home society the “Christian” ideals that continued to be affirmed by those who remained committed to the faith, and also, in a secularized fashion, by the many who, like Hersey and Buck, abandoned the churches of their parents. The blowback from missionary experience abroad was profound; it took form as an obligation to transform the society that had generated the missionary project to begin with.

A remarkable feature of this imperative was its moral intensity, inherited from the original missionary endeavor. “In the night, or a dozen times a day,” Buck once told her sister, “I find myself thinking furiously about the peoples of the world, as if they were my personal responsibility.” Indian-born Robert Goheen, who as president of Princeton University orchestrated the admission of women to that previously all-male institution and hired its first black faculty member at the rank of Professor, said that his missionary parents instructed him to “live a life of service.”

Campaigning against white supremacy in multiple contexts, this group of Americans advanced an outlook that would later be called “multicultural.” Indeed, the first appearance of that word in print is found in the 1941 novel Lance, written by a son and grandson of missionaries, Edward Haskell. Although multicultural did not come into common usage until about 1990, several missionary-inspired writers employed it during the intervening decades. In this spirit, missionary children led the development of Asian Studies in American universities and colleges after World War II. Edwin Reischauer, the academic entrepreneur who built Japanese Studies at Harvard University and later served as Ambassador to Japan, was a missionary son. Missionary-dominated programs in “Foreign Area Studies” undermined what later came to be called “Orientalist” images of foreign peoples long before the 1970s, when Edward Said called yet wider public attention to the depth of American prejudice against the cultures of the “the East.”

Not everyone in this cohort shared this perspective. The case of Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time and Life, can remind us that there were important exceptions to the pattern. Luce was born in China, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. Later, his notorious advocacy of an “American Century” put him at odds with most of his fellow former missionary kids, who faulted Luce as an extreme nationalist and even as an imperialist. When Luce urged Americans of the 1940s to use their power to make the world over in their own image, he transferred the old missionary goal of conversion to the American nation-state. Among Luce’s most severe critics was Hersey himself, who had worked for Time before he angered Luce by publishing Hiroshima as an article for the rival magazine, The New Yorker.

Luce’s boss-the-world outlook has often been assumed to exemplify the American missionary mentality, but Hersey was more genuinely representative. He disagreed with Luce about almost everything, but is rarely associated with the missionary past. Luce, the vigorous nationalist, learned little from the blind spots of the missionary project that nurtured him. But Hersey flew in the missionary dusk with the wings of Minerva.

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Q: As an historian, what do you think about the dueling arguments that, on the one hand, there is an empathy deficit going on, and on the other, social media is constantly bombarding us with things to be empathetic with?

A: I would say that the duel is not just about empathy deficits. There are also dueling positions about whether empathy is a bad basis for human rights or international politics, generally, because it acts as if [these things are] an affective question when [they’re] really a political question. But there is considerable interest in the question of empathy. So, on the one hand people say that it’s not a good thing to be thinking about, and on the other hand lots more people are thinking about it.

Part of it is a general shift in the humanities and social sciences, especially in the humanities, toward being more interested in the affective, emotional side of everything. There was a turn within neuroscience to be more interested in how emotions are crucial to reasoning and that kind of set [off] a lot of different kinds of arguments: philosophical, literary, you name it.

Q: One of the things that really struck me in reading your book—about how epistolary novels connected to human rights and revulsion around torture—was this real, incredible, excitement that people had reading these novels like Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie. The heroines of these novels, the people that men and women were empathizing with, were women. I wondered if empathy is still seen as female, and does that give it its weird moral authority? Because it definitely continues to have a very strong moral authority.

A: I think, for me what was really interesting about the 18th century was precisely that it was actually not assumed that it was just women who were going to empathize with these female characters. I think it was assumed that men were going to empathize with these female characters, and they did empathize with these female characters.

But a female character was the best representation of these agonies over personal autonomy. Women felt constrained, so they could be the subject of tragedy in a way that men couldn’t, because men were assumed to be autonomous and could just leave. We have many more novels about men leaving [for] picaresque adventures in search of autonomy.

This is inconceivable for women. So women become ideal for the representation of conflicts over autonomy. They can’t leave. They have to fight it out—either in their current situation or in a very constrained orbit. In Clarissa there is actually quite a bit of movement but it’s within England, if not within London. Whereas men can join the army, they can go overseas, they can join the navy.

Finds Pamela Writing. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: There is a sense among some people that human rights are naturally expanding, because if they’re based in empathy or a feeling of distress the line will naturally continue to move. How do you see the future of human rights based in empathy?

A: It’s an interesting question, when it’s not an incredibly tragic one. This is exactly what everyone is dealing with on immigration. Some part of the population is urging that we empathize with people fleeing who want to come to our country, that we see their common humanity. And some part of the population is saying this has gone too far, there need to be borders, we can only protect the community by keeping other people from getting into it. So, the issue of who you are supposed to have feelings for, and what the consequences of those feelings should be, is right now very much front and center. It would be a mistake to say it’s an easy question.

The chances for mobility are now so great in the world, even if they’re dangerous and horrible chances for mobility, that it’s a real issue. Is it really imaginable that a nation would say, “We’ll take anyone who wants to come”? Probably not. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s realistic to say, “Let’s have closed borders.” Which is why it’s such a complicated question.

Q: People are moving more. There’s also the growth of faster and faster communication. I wonder if you see the potential for even great empathetic leaps as the communication changes, along with other sorts of artistic experiences creating empathy.

A: I don’t think this works in lockstep: You get a new media technology and you get a new boundary of empathy. I don’t think it works quite that way. It’s so hard to predict how this line is going to move. Gay rights is obviously a stunning example of this. I saw a program on TV recently about AIDS back in the 1970s and 1980s. I lived through that, these were my friends, and I can’t even believe it … The kinds of things that people said about gay people in the 1980s—I almost can’t even believe it because we live in such a different world now. That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.

At some point slavery became so intolerable to some portion of the population, not everybody, but to some portion. And it goes really quickly from being tolerable to being absolutely intolerable. That’s what I’m interested in. Slavery for centuries and no one did anything about it to speak of, and then at the end of the 18th century all of a sudden there is this revulsion.

Obviously it’s an emotional feeling—but it’s not like people automatically start to feel it when X happens. Gay Rights, for example. You go from some huge portion of the population being disgusted by the idea to some rather large portion of the population saying “Well, okay.” I mean it’s the same people. We’re not talking about some new generation. How that interior feeling of right and wrong gets activated—that’s the thing that interests me. Now we’re seeing that with trans people.

Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs. Jewkes and Mr. B. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: Beyond trans rights, do you see another frontier that’s coming up?

A: Animals. I’m a meat eater but I say to all my friends: X number of years from now, I don’t know how many it’s going to be, we’re going to stop eating meat. I just think it’s going to happen. Again, it’ll probably happen for some people rather suddenly. People just can’t do it anymore.

Q: Obviously terrible backlashes have been part of the process of the establishment of human rights. Going forward do you think empathy is up to the task for what we have to do or are we asking too much of empathy?

A: I think it actually has to be up to the task. It has proved to be a very powerful force and it is much more powerful than rationally arguing cases. (Though the courts in this country have an absolutely fundamental role in all of this, don’t get me wrong.) The backlash part isn’t really so much that people don’t believe in human rights. It’s more a question of who they apply to.

Very few people have argued that they don’t think people have rights. It’s that they think they have to be limited: They have to be limited to the citizens of your country; they have to be limited to straight people; they have to be limited to whatever. It’s more the question of where the boundaries are.

The reason that’s the case is because it’s not obvious what the alternative would be. If you want to say that human rights are nonsense, which is a position that people have taken, you can make a strong philosophical argument. The issue that you have to resolve then is: “What is it that you think is the appropriate replacement?” And the only thing that people have been able to come up with is the rights of citizens within a nation or the rights of the nation as a superior community. But that led to such problematic things in the 1930s that I think that people aren’t super into that argument anymore. The backlash opinion now is that rights should be limited to the citizens of the nation as it is currently constituted. Of course, in the United States there are staggering numbers of people from other places. Who are, however, all too willing to shut the door now that they’re here.

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I orginally got involved in studying empathy because I was raised by a single mother, with seven siblings, and felt grateful to the many people who offered their heartfelt assistance. One of these people, Ruth, a volunteer with a local nonprofit organization, became part of our lives—offering practical support like rides and babysitting, and also emotional support. She did so without judgment or expectation of anything in return. As I progressed in my education, I couldn’t help but wonder about what motivated people like Ruth.

However, I actually started my graduate student career by studying the opposite end of the spectrum—narcissism. We found that narcissism has been rising in American college students since the late 1970s. So I wondered whether empathy could also be declining across that same time period. Though I wasn’t really old enough to notice generational changes, more seasoned professors gave countless examples of the changes that they had seen in college students over the previous decades. I was skeptical: Didn’t the older generation always say this about the younger? But data suggested that this time there was evidence to back up their claims.

That data came from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the most commonly used tool that psychologists use to measure empathy. It asks people to what extent certain statements describe them. The statements include: “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” and “When I’m upset at someone, I usually try to ‘put myself in his shoes’ for a while.” Participants’ responses are calculated on a 1 to 5 scale.

A family in Korea, one of the ten most empathetic countries in the world, according to reseach. Photo courtesy of raYmon/Flickr.

In 2010 we published a research paper finding declines in empathy among American college students over time. It got a lot of press—perhaps because of those stereotypes about younger generations. A clever marketing person at my university suggested that we post the empathy survey along with the press release so that people could find out their own scores. Over 100,000 people took the quiz!

That’s when I and my colleagues Bill Chopik and Ed O’Brien thought about using the data to better understand how empathy varies across cultures.

There were limitations to our data. As you can imagine, our surveys were only posted in English, since we never expected people from all over the world to be interested in the topic. So, only English speakers would have taken the survey, and among those, we can’t be sure whether these people were orginally from that country or just temporarily living there.

Yet we had reason to believe that the data was roughly accurate. For example, lots of research demonstrates that across a wide variety of ages, higher empathy scores are associated with more giving, helping, and sharing behaviors. Using data from high quality surveys (like the Gallup World Poll), we found that higher empathy countries had higher rates of volunteering and helping. So it seemed that our data captured empathy reasonably well.

Here are the ten countries with the highest empathy scores.

When showing these results to American friends, no one seemed to be surprised to see Denmark, a Northern European country, at No. 4. Nor was anyone surprised to see the United States at No. 7. I was a bit disappointed to see that my home country, Canada, trailed behind at No. 12.

The clearer patterns, though, are the clustering of countries from the Middle East (three countries), South/Central America (three countries), and East Asia (two countries) in the top 10. My friends seemed surprised to see the Middle Eastern ones at the top. That could have something to do general lack of knowledge about these cultures, since even college educated Americans find it difficult to point out Middle Eastern cultures on the map. Or it could be owing to stereotypes that Americans may hold about people from Middle Eastern cultures.

However, there are other possible implications beyond stereotypes. Our study suggests that certain types of social structures can make people super-empathizers. In our study, we found that cultures that tend to be more collectivistic also tend to have higher empathy scores. Collectivism involves seeing oneself as being part of a larger, interconnected group of familial and other close relationships, with a priority on fitting in with others and maintaining harmony. So it’s not surprising that empathy would be higher in such cultures.

On the flip side, our study found that on average, more individualistic cultures scored lower on empathy. Individualism involves seeing oneself as distinct and separate from others, with a priority on showcasing one’s uniqueness and valuing self-expression. It is possible that when people are focused on being separate and unique, this can sometimes obscure the commonalities that we share, which could impair our willingness or ability to feel compassion for others and to imagine what it is like to be them.

The countries with low empathy scores were also a surprise. Finland, a Northern European country like Denmark, is No. 58. This doesn’t quite fit with the stereotype of Northern Europeans as places with a strong sense of social welfare. A similar result was found with Venezuela (No. 62), which doesn’t fit in with other South/Central American countries in the top 10.

A lonely bench in Finland, one of the least empathetic countries in the world, according to research. Photo courtesy of Alexander Kosolov/Flickr.

We don’t have enough information to explain these variations. Perhaps there’s something in the history of Finland and Venezuela that make them different from their neighbors, or perhaps people in the cultures that appeared less empathetic feel uncomfortable overtly saying that they are kind and caring people, which would affect responses to our measure of empathy.

Which brings us to the bigger question of what respondents to our survey, around the world, thought they were doing. Empathy is a morally laden topic. In some cultures it might be important to demonstrate that one is morally good. In others it might be more important to measure one’s “real” nature—regardless of how “good” that nature is. So, when they answered questions about their own empathy, some respondents may have been demonstrating, while others were measuring. This could lead to biased responses.

There’s also the question of the recipient of empathy. Unfortunately the measure of empathy that we used doesn’t separately ask questions about empathy directed toward family and close friends, versus empathy directed toward strangers or people from different backgrounds. We don’t know whether people from the most empathetic regions of the world are mainly thinking about their loved ones when answering the questions, or if their empathy is more universally applied.

Perhaps the biggest take-home point from our data is this: Deep cultural knowledge of specific countries is likely to be more important, in further research, than applying a broad brush across many cultures. Most of the quantitative social science research on empathy so far has been conducted in what psychologists call “W.E.I.R.D.” cultures: Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, and Democratic. This is a problem because we don’t know how empathy operates within cultures that have different assumptions about the world, views of the self, and values. And cross-cultural psychology research mainly focuses on differences between Western countries and East Asian countries, with very limited research on Eastern Europe, South America, or the Middle East. Overall, we have a fragmented picture of the complex contextual factors at play.

We need to do a lot more research. In particular, we need culturally sensitive measures that are designed by people from other geographic regions to better capture what empathy means to them. We need to distinguish different recipients of empathy, such as close others versus strangers. For now, our study remains the largest study on empathy that exists, but hopefully future researchers will help us to paint a more careful picture of the world’s mosaic of empathy.

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Empathy has been touted as a necessary quality in leadership, the solution to a wide range of social ills and a central component of social justice. If we see from another’s perspective, imaginatively experiencing her or his thoughts, feelings or predicaments, we will open up lines of dialogue, ameliorate conflicts and grievances, and engage in more ethical or socially responsible action. The problem, however, is that empathy is much more uneven and unpredictable than these narratives convey.

Empathy is often seen as a tool for overcoming the vast chasm between the privileged and the not—yet it remains rooted in that chasm, and may even reinforce it. One international development program, for example, creates greater empathy among staff by having them live and work with a “poor family” in a “developing context” for three or four days. Development practitioners and government officials might feel that they have accessed “the truth” of poor people’s lives and struggles—and that they can therefore speak more confidently on their behalf. Poor people’s own voices recede further from view.

Claiming intimate knowledge of “the other” can also contribute to violence. After 9/11, Raphael Patai’s book “The Arab Mind”—a now-infamous account of Arab culture and psychology—furnished US military officials with ideas for torture at Abu Ghraib. Accessing other people’s psychic worlds became a technique of control and violence rather than understanding and sympathy. A torturer empathizes with her victims to determine what will be most humiliating to them. Empathy can thus become weaponized.

Even in more benign empathic narratives, the repeated mapping of the “empathizer” and “sufferer” onto social and political hierarchies reinforces inequality. Privileged (middle class, white, and/or Western) people cultivate their affective capacities and skills, but the less privileged (poor, non-white and/or non-Western) “other” remains simply the object of empathy—their own emotional complexities are never engaged.

An ad for Nike, which uses empathy research to understand—or create—the desires of their customers. Image courtesy of Brett Jordan/Flickr.

One way to gain deeper insights is to turn that usual hierarchy upside-down, focusing on expressions of empathy from those who are marginalized. You can see this at work in Jamaica Kincaid’s famous novella “A Small Place,” where the native Antiguan narrator inhabits the consciousness of a “white, Western tourist” who has travelled to Antigua for “four to ten days in the sun.” This exercise reveals how the privileged tourist’s very existence—her relaxation, pleasure and freedom—depends precisely on repressing knowledge of Antiguans’ suffering as well as the links between slavery, colonialism, and contemporary tourism in the Caribbean. Approaching empathy from the “other side” can expose the implicit power structures that surround us—leading to a more accurate, and possibly productive, empathy.

Empathy’s issues continue in the workplace, where its economic value does not accrue fairly to everyone. Better, more productive workers are those who seem to cultivate positive feelings (such as empathy and optimism) and subdue negative ones (such as anxiety and anger). But this improvement is not equally available to all. As critical management scholars have argued, those most able to capitalize on emotions in the workplace tend to be white, middle-class men. When men exercise empathy it is interpreted as a skill. Empathetic women are just seen as women. For them, empathy has no market value.

The rise of what is being called the “empathy economy,” meanwhile, focuses on using empathy to grant corporations more power over consumers. Better and more accurate empathy, one can argue, has allowed multinational companies like Nike and Microsoft to get inside the heads of potential customers—inferring (and in fact producing) their needs and desires before they even recognize these themselves.

By empathically entering the psyches of potential customers, companies can transform vulnerabilities into feelings of lack—to be remedied through buying a product or service. Empathy here is not promoting ethics or morality, but profits and growth.

Given the ever-increasing divides between rich and poor around the world, it would be ridiculous to assume any unproblematic link between empathic knowledge and social justice.

A sign at Occupy Wall Street. Photo courtesy of C-Monster/Flickr.

Better, perhaps, to follow the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that empathy is morally neutral. There is no guarantee that “seeing through the other’s eyes” is premised on, or likely to generate, relations of care or compassion. We should attend to empathy’s inherent unevenness.

When we do, we can judge more precisely our empathetic failures. What we interpret as empathic feeling may be projection, appropriation, or wishful thinking. If empathy depends on the ability to accurately infer the affective states of other beings, it may be much less common and more elusive than we assume.

In Aminatta Forna’s novel “The Memory of Love,” for instance, the protagonist Adrian Lockhart, a British clinical psychologist, travels to Sierra Leone convinced that he can help people heal following the nation’s 11-year civil war. His efforts are frustrated by unfamiliar emotional patterns and norms that alienate him from his patients and colleagues. The more he tries to master Sierra Leone’s complex culture, the worse things get. Adrian can help people only when he lets go of an empathy premised on knowledge of “the other” and instead opens himself up to being transformed by what he encounters. In allowing himself to become vulnerable, Adrian lays the groundwork for mutual forms of empathy and solidarity.

Finally, we might be able to acknowledge the limits of even the most developed and self-aware forms of empathy. “Feeling right” is not enough. Complex structural problems can never be overcome solely through the force of feeling. They require deep political work, including policy and legislation as well as social-movement building. Empathy alone cannot solve ingrained hierarchies of power because it is produced in and though those very hierarchies. When the structural conditions underlying persistent social and economic inequalities remain unaddressed, such cleavages become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation.

This is not to say that feeling—including empathy—has no role to play in addressing inequality and injustice. Though empathy is ambivalent and fallible, it points to our persistent longing for connection and reciprocity, which are necessary for the development of real solidarity across social, cultural and economic differences. But in a world where hope and opportunity are distributed unequally, we need to ask what kind of connections we want.

The post Is Our Culture of Empathy Perpetuating Inequality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Err, that’s not what the app is telling me to do.”

“Yes, but it’s faster this way. The app is taking you to the beltway. Traffic is terrible there!”

“Okay. I don’t know these roads.”

So went a conversation with an Uber driver in northern Virginia recently. But imagine it was a self-driving Uber. Would you even have that conversation, or would you be doomed to a frustrating 25 minutes on the beltway when you could have been home in 15?

And as your frustration mounts, will the AI driving the car recognize this—or appear to—and respond accordingly? Will customers prefer cars that seem to empathize?

Or imagine instead that you and your partner are arguing in the back seat over which route to take. How will you feel when your partner seems to be siding with the machine? Or the machine is siding with your partner?

Empathy is widely praised as a good thing. But it also has its dark sides: Empathy can be manipulated and it leads people to unthinkingly take sides in conflicts. Add robots to this mix, and the potential for things to go wrong multiplies. Give robots the capacity to appear empathetic, and the potential for trouble is even greater.

A traffic robot in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To know why this is a problem, it helps to understand how empathy works in our daily lives. Many of our interactions involve seeking empathy from others. People aim to elicit empathy because it’s taken as a proxy for rational support. For example, the guy in front of you at an auto repair shop tells the agent that he wants his money back: “The repair you did last month didn’t work out.” The agent replies: “I’m sorry, but this brake issue is an unrelated and new repair.” The argument continues, and the customer is getting angry. It seems like he might even punch the agent.

But instead, at this point, the customer and the agent might both look to you. Humans constantly recruit bystanders. Taking sides helps to settle things before they escalate. If it’s two against one, the one usually backs down. A lot of conflicts thereby get resolved without violence. (Compare chimpanzees, where fights often lead to serious injury.) Our tendency to make quick judgments and to take sides in conflicts among strangers is one of the key features of our species.

When we take sides, we assume the perspective of our chosen side—and from here it is a short step to develop emotional empathy. According to the three-person model of empathy introduced by Breithaupt, this is not entirely positive, because the dynamic of side-taking makes the first side we take stick, and we therefore assume that our side is right, and the other side is wrong. In this way, empathy accelerates divisions. Further, we typically view this empathy as an act of approval that extends to our consequent actions, including, for example, lashing back at the other side.

Now let’s imagine that the agent at the repair shop is a robot. The robot may appeal to you, a supposedly neutral third party, to help it to persuade the frustrated customer to accept the charge. It might say: “Please trust me, sir. I am a robot and programmed not to lie.”

Sounds harmless enough, does it? But suppose the robot has been programmed to learn about human interactions. It will pick up on social strategies that work for its purposes. It may become very good at bystander recruitment. It knows how to get you to agree with its perspective and against the other customer’s. The robot could even provide perfect cover for an unscrupulous garage owner who stands to make some extra money with unnecessary repairs.

You might be skeptical that humans would empathize with a robot. Social robotics has already begun to explore this question. And experiments suggest that children will side with robots against people when they perceive that the robots are being mistreated. In one study, a team of American and Japanese researchers carried out an experiment in which children played several rounds of a game with a robot. Later the game was interrupted by an overzealous confederate of the experimenters, who ordered the robot into a closet before the game was over. The robot complained and pleaded not to be sent into the closet before the game could be completed. The children indicated that they identified socially with the robot and against the experimenter.

We also know that when bystanders watch a robot and a person arguing, they may take the side of the robot and may start to develop something like empathy for the machine. We already have some anecdotal evidence for this effect from traffic-directing robots in Kinshasa. According to photojournalist Brian Sokol in The Guardian, “People on the streets apparently respect the robots … they don’t follow directions from human traffic cops.” Similarly, a study conducted at Harvard demonstrated that students were willing to help a robot enter secured residential areas simply because it asked to be let in, raising questions about the potential dangers posed by the human tendency to respect a request from a machine that needs help.

It is a relatively short step from robots that passively engage human empathy to robots that actively recruit bystanders. Robots will provoke empathy in situations of conflict. They will draw humans to their side and will learn to pick up on the signals that work. Bystander support will then mean that robots can accomplish what they are programmed to accomplish—whether that is calming down customers, or redirecting attention, or marketing products, or isolating competitors. Or selling propaganda and manipulating opinions.

It would be naive to think that AI corporations will not make us guinea pigs in their experiments with developing human empathy for robots. (Humans are already guinea pigs in experiments being run by the manufacturers of self-driving cars.) The robots will not shed tears, but may use various strategies to make the other (human) side appear overtly emotional and irrational. This may also include deliberately infuriating the other side. Humans will become unwitting participants in an apparatus increasingly controlled by AI with the capacity to manipulate empathy. And suddenly, we will have empathy with robots, and find ourselves taking their sides against fellow human beings.

When people imagine empathy by machines, they often think about selfless robot nurses and robot suicide helplines, or perhaps also robot sex. In all of these, machines seem to be in the service of the human. However, the hidden aspects of robot empathy are the commercial interests that will drive its development. Whose interests will dominate when learning machines can outwit not only their customers but also their owners?

Researchers now speculate about whether machines will learn genuine empathy. But that question is a distraction from the more immediate issue, which is that machines will not “feel” what humans feel, even if they get good at naming human emotions and responding to them. (At least for a while.) But in the near future, it doesn’t matter which emotions machines have. What is important is which emotions they can produce in humans, and how well they learn to master and manipulate these human responses. Instead of AI with empathy, we should be more concerned about humans having misplaced empathy with AI.

The post Why We Should Fear Emotionally Manipulative Robots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But in real life I have no place for an out-of-state puppy, and I’d rather save my gofundme donation for the friend of a friend who needs help recovering from a bike accident. And so I harden my heart and click on—to watch a cat consoling a crying baby, or Koko the Gorilla showing her distress about the death of Robin Williams.

So goes life in social media, which has become a marketplace for evoking, feeling, displaying, and profiting off the gooey human emotion of empathy. In this new zone, it’s not enough merely to support a cause; we literally become it—by remaking our own profile pictures with a rainbow to show support of gay rights or a purple filter to show solidarity with the sufferers of Lupus. Here there’s an implicit belief that more empathy will make the world a better place.

The only hitch in this scenario are the trolls, who make a great show of having no empathy. They attack those down on their luck with vicious glee. They make statements about which categories of people don’t deserve to live. They post photos that make me feel sad and powerless. Freeing themselves from the sticky bonds of empathy is a release, an entry into an upside-down world with political implications, appealing to hyper-individualist Ayn Rand acolytes and those who are just plain mean. Make fun of reporters with disabilities or women who resist your advances, and you’ll gain followers, even become president. Not-empathy suddenly appears to be a thing as real and ubiquitous as the original.

My Facebook feed—and to some extent my soft squishy heart—are a battleground between pro and anti-empathy forces. What is going on? Has empathy always seemed so crucial? Does it really make the world a better place? Does it do anything at all beyond making some of us feel good? What is it anyway?

Empathy’s history demonstrates its great and particular power. In the early 1700s, as old social structures like religion and aristocracy were faltering, Adam Smith, the great booster of the new system of capitalism, hoped that empathy for one another would be a virtue to temper the individualistic economy and culture that was taking shape. As historian Lynn Hunt explains, a craze for epistolary novels gripped educated Europeans and began a transformation of their interior sensibilities. By sympathizing so thoroughly with desperate heroines in the books they read, people began to sympathize with each other, too, and to recognize each other’s humanness. “What would provide the source of community in this new order that highlighted the rights of the individual?” Hunt asks. The answer turned out to be empathy.

Why are we all working so hard at empathy? Photo courtesy of Pleuntje/Flickr.

Recognition of others’ interior lives led to the idea of inalienable human rights. First granted mainly to white Christian males, rights were then extended to other races, women, and religions, and have more recently given gay people the right to marry and trans people the right to define themselves.

Empathy, history suggests, begets more empathy, and more rights. Where will it stop? Perhaps empathy is a bottomless natural resource. The human future, to the empathist, is one of ever more recognition, and ever more rights—for animals, trees, the whole planet.

But an emotion that powerful could not be left alone in the 20th century. Historian Susan Lanzoni tells the story of the English word’s invention—borrowed from German—in 1907, and its quick repurposing in the treatment of World War Two veterans, troubled marriages, and as a remedy for a history of racist policies by the 1970s. In true mid-century style, empathy was marketed heavily and itself became a staple trick of advertisers. Later, demonstrating empathy became an expectation, a skill of leadership, and a tool of the good salesman, culminating with Bill Clinton professing to “feel our pain.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s, with the discovery of mirror neurons, that empathy became something meatier than an emotion. Since then, the study of empathy has partly been driven by researchers trying to understand autism (where people have strong sympathies for others, but have a hard time cognitively understanding how others are feeling) as well as sociopathy (where people have strong cognitive sense of how others feel but do not feel empathy.) Using ever more sophisticated tools to figure out where empathy happens in the brain, and how, researchers stripped off the sentimental aspects of empathy and made it scientific. In doing more rigorous testing, some of our fondest beliefs have come in for scrutiny. The idea that reading novels can increase our empathy, for example, has not been born out in controlled tests by researcher Maria Eugenia Panero and others.

A careful look at the science of empathy reveals how little we know it. When researcher Sarah Konrath surveyed 100,000 people worldwide, she found that people from Ecuador and Saudi Arabia reported the highest levels of the feeling—but was their empathy the same felt by respondents in the United States, which came in at number seven? And why did some countries, like Finland, have such low scores? Were they really lacking in empathy, or just loath to talk about it? This apparently universally human feeling may not be as universal as we think.

The ubiquity of empathy has its downsides, too. As it has become better understood and somewhat commodified, empathy has become a tactic that large corporations use to get inside their customers’ heads in an effort to sell shoes, software, and ideas, says Carolyn Pedwell. Empathy, she argues, can reinforce power relationships as much as it improves them. And future technologies like robots and AI may go even further in exploiting the human capacity for sympathy for the gain of the powerful, argue Colin Allen and Fritz Breithaupt.

The weird empathy world of Facebook appears to be only the beginning of a larger process. Advertising, British researcher Andrew McStay concluded in a recent paper, will increasingly make use of both empathy and the web of machines and processors embedded in our lives. He writes that this raises serious “questions about the foundations of the ethics of advertising, i.e. whether it is about free choice of voluntary parties or not. Given the mining of intimate data, this is an important debate about civic health.” McStay, who consulted a wide range of experts, recommends figuring out how to regulate the use of emotional artificial intelligence both for privacy concerns and ethical ones.

I initially assumed that the existence of online trolls—those anti-empathizers—meant that not everyone was susceptible to the charms of emotionally savvy machines. But recently I came across a study that put the trolls in a new light. Psychological researchers Natalie Sest and Evita March surveyed online trolls, who are more likely to be male, and found that they understand empathy all too well. “Trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognizing the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions. Thus, trolls appear to be master manipulators of both cyber-settings and their victims’ emotions.”

In other words the trolls, the dog videos, and the gofundmes are all the same thing: a kind of manipulative empathy nightmare, an empathology. The internet has enabled the weaponization of empathy, for both good and ill.

And so the internet turns out to be a medium not unlike those novels of the 1700s, activating our empathy in profoundly new ways, with unpredictable social effects. And while Adam Smith once hoped it would give a highly individualistic society a sense of community, it now seems likely that, in the future, empathy could also tear us apart—in a painfully individualized fashion.

So I think it’s only reasonable to take empathy more seriously, not only as a soft persuasive power, but as one with serious consequences. Regulate its use in devices and games and advertising. Stop designing social media to explicitly exploit empathy and its pathologies. Stop staring into puppies’ eyes.

And more deeply, reconsider the assumption that empathy will save the world. Even with the best intentions, empathy has always been an untrustworthy moral compass. By prioritizing emotional interaction as more genuine than intellectual engagement, empathy seems to offer a shortcut to moral answers and significant understanding. But it can also be a shortcut to the opposite.

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