#like that one image that goes “monkey sees action - neuron activation”

[justskyla-art]

a couple of og homestuck doodles cuz i didn't know what else to draw ! lol !

[fierceawakening]

Against empathy Liveblog 18

“Batson and his colleagues put subjects in a situation where they have the opportunity to do something nice—such as donating money, taking over an unpleasant task from someone else, or cooperating with someone at a cost. Some of the subjects are told nothing or are told to take an objective point of view. But others are encouraged to feel empathy—they might be told: “Try to take the other person’s perspective” or “Put yourself in that person’s shoes.”

Over and over again, Batson finds that these empathy prompts make subjects more likely to do good—to give money, take over a task, and cooperate. Empathy makes them kind.

Batson finds these effects even when helping is anonymous, when there is a justification for not helping, and when it’s easy to say no. He concludes from his work that these effects cannot be explained by a desire to enhance one’s reputation or a wish to avoid embarrassment or anything like that. Rather, empathy elicits a genuine desire to make another person’s life better.”

I’m VERY interested in how this is so bad you recommend people stop.

“Even among psychologists who should know better, images derived from PET or fMRI scans are seen as reflecting something more scientific—more real—than anything else a psychologist could discover. There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.”

Bruh.

Bruh.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you’re making very strong versions of your claims. Please acknowledge that.

“If you’re one of those people who doesn’t believe something is real unless you see it in the brain, you’ll be relieved to hear that empathy actually does exist. It really does light up the brain. Actually, at first blush, empathy looks as if it’s everywhere in the brain. One scholar describes at length what he calls “an empathy circuit in the brain,” but this “circuit” contains ten major brain areas, some of them big chunks of brain stuff, larger than a baby’s finger, like the medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala—all of which are also engaged in actions and experiences that have nothing to do with empathy.”

Interesting. Yay data!

“It turns out, though, that this the-whole-brain-does-it conclusion arises because neuroscientists—along with psychologists and philosophers—are often sloppy in their use of the term empathy. Some investigators look at what I see as empathy proper—what happens in the brain when someone feels the same thing they believe another person is feeling. Others look at what happens when we try to understand other people, usually called “social cognition” or “theory of mind” but sometimes called “cognitive empathy.” Others look at quite specific instantiations of empathy (such as what happens when you watch someone’s face contort in disgust), and still others study what goes on in the brain when a person decides to do something nice for another person, which is sometimes called “prosocial concern” but which one normally thinks of as niceness or kindness. Once you start pulling these different phenomena apart, which I’ll do below, things get more interesting, and you see how these different capacities relate to one another.”

Fair—I can see how people might looks at a whole brain going FWEEEEEE and assume the thing is super important, only to miss that they’ve over defined the thing.

Still not sure you haven’t under defined it, let’s see what you have to say

“The first finding is that an empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience. So “I feel your pain” isn’t just a gooey metaphor; it can be made neurologically literal: Other people’s pain really does activate the same brain area as your own pain, and more generally, there is neural evidence for a correspondence between self and other.”

For the people who think “how can you feel MY pain? Is that magic, NTs? Lolol.” What we mean!

“As you might be able to tell from the title of his book, Hickok is critical of the claims that have been made about mirror neurons, and many scholars would agree that they have been overhyped. One strong objection to the view that they explain capacities such as morality, empathy, and language is that most of the findings about mirror neurons come from macaque monkeys—and monkeys don’t have much morality, empathy, or language. Mirror neurons cannot be sufficient for these capacities, then—though they might help out with them. Nevertheless, the more general finding of shared representations—the discovery that there exist neural systems that treat the experiences and actions of others the same way they treat the experiences and actions of the self—really is an important discovery about mental life.”

Caveat.

“You can see this overlap between self and other as a clever evolutionary trick. To thrive as a social being, one has to make sense of the internal lives of other individuals, to accurately guess what other people are thinking, wanting, and feeling. Since we’re not telepathic, we have to infer this from information we get from our senses.”

Ding ding! It’s a perceptual apparatus, like eyes or ears. It’s not wizardry.

Now... while I concede there are times when covering my ears or eyes make it MORE easy for me to perceive something important. It doesn’t follow that I should pluck out my eyes or eardrums.

Yet in a previous chapter you said “if you’re considering what to do and trying to feel someone’s pain, you should stop.” Implying T the very least that I should have my eye mask at hand at all times.

Seems odd. I get that disabilities aren’t death sentences but this is parsing like “blind yourself so you can truly hear.” Nah?’

“But there’s an alternative. We can take advantage of the fact that we have minds ourselves, and we can use our own minds as a laboratory to bring ourselves up to speed on how others will behave and think.”

Porquenolosdos.gif

“We can do the same for subjective experiences. Which would hurt a stranger more: stubbing her toe or slamming her hand in a car door? You could try to figure this out from scratch, like a scientist looking at the biological workings of a novel species, but a better way is to assess memories of your own pain (or just to imagine yourself in those situations) and assume that the other person will feel the same way you do.”

Which is why I say ditch the eye mask and remember you’re capable of both.

“Our occasional success at understanding individuals who are different from ourselves shows that simulation can’t be the whole story in understanding other people. Hickok points out that we can often successfully read the minds of dogs and cats, figure out what they mean when they bark or purr, wag their tails, put their tails up high, and so on, but surely we’re not simulating them. Those who are quadriplegic from birth can have a rich understanding of other people, figuring out their mental states based on their movement—she has loudly slammed the door, she must be angry—even though these quadriplegics are not in any sense simulating the actions.”

Is anyone arguing against this?

“And, of course, there has to be a brain difference between self and other because there is a psychological difference. Watching someone getting slapped in the face doesn’t really make your cheek burn, and watching someone get a back rub doesn’t make your aches go away. We may feel the pain of someone else, in a limited sense, but in another sense we really don’t. Relative to real experience, empathic resonance is pallid and weak.”

But thinking about it in a detached way isn’t? How do you know?

“Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in.

It turns out, for instance, that you feel more empathy for someone who treats you fairly than for someone who has cheated you. And you feel more empathy for someone who is cooperating with you than for someone you are in competition with.”

Fair. But that’s why I said don’t rely on empathy alone, except maybe when you need to make a very quick decision or when interacting with people you know.

“People said that they felt less empathy for the person who became infected through drug use—and their neural activation told the same story: When they viewed this individual, they had less activation in brain areas associated with pain, such as, again, the anterior cingulate cortex. And the more subjects explicitly blamed the drug users for their fate, the less empathy they said they had and the less brain activation there was.”

Does rational compassion suffer from a similar problem? (Still not sure what it is exactly.) That is, are we sure this goes away when we appeal to something other than empathy?

Do professed rational actors, for example, reason that addicts deserve less help because they put themselves at risk doing something they don’t have to do, like someone getting a transfusion has to?

“Empathy is also influenced by the group to which the other individual belongs—whether the person you are looking at or thinking about is one of Us or one of Them.”

Fair, which is what o was trying to say with the stories help post—stories help us make Them into Us. Real stories are better but imagined can work, which is why I was okay with them too, anon.

“Subjects found these pictures to be disgusting and showed correspondingly reduced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a chunk of the brain involved in social reasoning. Although this study didn’t directly look at empathy, the findings do suggest that we shut off our social understanding when dealing with certain people: We dehumanize them.”

Fair.

But I still want to see whether this changes when you see pictures of people you find disgusting stubbing their toe or having a birthday party. Do you savor their pain and feel disgusted by their pleasure, or do you relate to them in spite of yourself? Does it vary? When?

“I’ve been using the term empathy in the sense of Adam Smith’s sympathy—feeling what another feels. But one can ask how this sharing of feelings relates to the ability to understand people’s psychological states. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that we sometimes call this empathy as well—“cognitive empathy”—and one might wonder whether they are one and the same.

If they were, it would call into question my argument against empathy. You can’t make it through life without some capacity to understand the minds of others. So if feeling the pain of others arises from the same neural system that underlies everyday social understanding—if you can’t have one without the other—then giving up on emotional empathy would be giving up too much.”

Fair

“One system involves sharing the experience of others, what we’ve called empathy; the other involves inferences about the mental states of others—mentalizing or mind reading. While they can both be active at once, and often are, they occupy different parts of the brain. For instance, the medial prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is involved in mentalizing, while the anterior cingulate cortex, sitting right behind that, is involved in empathy.”

Do they tend to go on at the same time, or different times? Can doing one cause doing the other?

“One recent scientific article struggles with the question of whether these troubling individuals are high in empathy or low in empathy. For the authors, the evidence suggests both: “Psychopathic criminals can be charming and attuned while seducing a victim, thereby suggesting empathy, and later callous while raping a victim, thereby suggesting impaired empathy.” So which is it?

The authors try to resolve this apparent paradox in terms of a distinction between ability (one’s capacity to deploy empathy) and propensity (one’s willingness to do so). They suggest that these criminal psychopaths have normal empathic ability but adjust it like the dial of a radio—turn it up when you want to listen to the lyrics, turn it down if you want to focus on passing a slow truck on the I-95.”

That’s what I’d heard, maybe from the same article?

No... maybe not. The one I read said empathy by default is “on” in neurotypical people and has to be “turned off” by fatigue or encouraging callousness, but “off” by default in psychopaths. So if you want them to care how their actions hurt others, you have to call attention to it and “flip the switch.”

“So criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.”

Fair. But that makes it sound like affective empathy is good? And something that people should use, and might be bad if they dont?

So far anyway.

“None of this is to deny that understanding and feeling are related. Smell, vision, and taste are separate, but they come together in the appreciation of a meal, and it might be that the act of adopting someone’s perspective in a cold-blooded way makes you more likely to vicariously experience what they are feeling and vice versa. But these are nonetheless different processes, and this is important to keep in mind when we think about the pros and cons of empathy.”

Hey! I might be right!!

“Why would empathy make us nicer? The obvious answer—the one that comes to mind immediately for many people—is that empathy allows our selfish motivations to extend to others. The clearest case of this is when someone else’s pain is experienced as your own pain. The idea is that you will help because this will make your own pain go away.”

Yep. And you soothe yourself AND somebody else! It’s win-win!

“It’s not clear, though, that selfishness can explain the good acts that empathy leads to. When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape.”

That’s what I think we need reason for, but I don’t see why we should throw affective empathy out.

“People often cross the street to avoid encountering suffering people who are begging for money. It’s not that they don’t care (if they didn’t care, they would just walk by), it’s that they are bothered by the suffering and would rather not encounter it.”

Fair. I do this. But is that the whole story? For some it surely is. For me, I’m sure it’s part of the story, but part of it is that i feel that what I do in my job is more likely to substantially help homeless people more than giving money. I think I’d feel more guilt about letting my anxiousness around contagion and dirt make me move if I didn’t have another way to help that triggers my disgust less.

“I favor Batson’s own analysis that empathy’s power lies in its capacity to make the experience of others observable and salient, therefore harder to ignore. If I love my baby, and she’s in anguish, empathy with her pain will make me pick her up and try to make her pain go away. This is not because doing so makes me feel better—it does, but if I just wanted my vicarious suffering to go away, I’d leave the crying baby and go for a walk. Rather, my empathy lets me know that someone I love is suffering, and since I love her, I’ll try to make her feel better.”

Seeems fair.

“It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient.”

Then what makes people kind?