Empathy and Compassion
References
Empathy and Its Discontents (2016), by Bloom, P.
Against Empathy (2017), by Bloom, P.
The Moral Psychology of Compassion (2018), by Caouette, J. and Price, C.
Empirical claims
What is the paradigm?
Which experiments test the paradigm?
Four kinds of empathy (Bloom, 2016)
cognitive empathy
is theory of mind at work: it is understanding
what someone is feeling without experiencing it
for oneself
emotional contagion
emotional empathy
compassion
is when one mirrors the inferred feelings of others
is empathy that spreads through crowds;
it is feeling anxious when everyone else
is feeling anxious, or joy when everyone
is feeling joyful
is positive affect from the well-being
of others
to establish the proposed
categories of empathy...
"Consider also the experiments of Singer and her colleagues in which people were give neither empathy training (instructions to try to feel what others were feeling) or compassion training (in which the goal is to feel positive and warm thoughts toward others without vicariously experiencing their suffering). There was a neural difference, with different brain areas becoming active during the two sorts of training."
(Bloom, 2016)
The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise (2012), by Zaki, J. and Ochsner, K. N.
Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct? (2016), by Jordan, M. R., Amir, D., and Bloom, P.
Factor analysis of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)
and of the Empathy Index (EI) suggests at least three clusters
of behaviour regarding empathic questions. (Jordan et al, 2016)
Some examples of the questions
which appear in both scales
If I see a video of a baby smiling, I find myself smiling. (Behavioral Contagion)
If I see someone fidgeting, I’ll start feeling anxious too. (Empathy)
In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill-at-ease. (Personal Distress)
When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don’t feel very much pity for them. (Empathic Concern)
When I watch a good movie, I can very easily put myself in the place of a leading character. (Fantasy)
Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place. (Perspective Taking)
I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the “other guy’s” point of view. (Perspective Taking)
x-axis: Contagion factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
y-axis: Other-regarding factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
Cluster # 1 (0, 0.7)
Perspective Taking, Concern
Cluster # 2 (0.4, 0.4)
Fantasy
Cluster # 3 (0, 0.7)
Empathy, Behavioural Contagion, Personal Distress
Major facets of empathy (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
Experience sharing
Mentalizing
Prosocial concern
empathic motivation
sympathy
empathic concern
affective empathy
shared self-other representations
emotional contagion
cognitive empathy
perspective taking
theory of mind
Brain regions activated by empathic tasks (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
first-person experience (self condition)
third-person experience (other condition)
neural resonance (both self and other conditions)
tempoparietal junction
temporal ole
precuneus
medial prefrontal cortex
(omitted in paper)
inferior parietal lobule
premotor cortex
posterior superior temporal sulcus
anterior cingulate cortex
What are the limitations of these experiments?
isolated social cues used to probe highly context-dependent behaviour
"Notably, models that focus on single empathic subprocesses while remaining agnostic about the role of others or excluding them altogether run the risk of reflecting historical quirks in the field’s choice of methods instead of deeper insights about the structure of empathy. This is because until a few years ago neuroscientific studies of empathy almost always used highly simplified cues and tasks designed to isolate one type of empathic subprocess and its associated neural systems."
(Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
In other words, empathic responses are
established in isolated, bite-sized pieces
in the literature, but how we behave when
those pieces are put together is less clear.
absence of brain-behaviour relationships
We have not done the legwork to
connect psychology to neuroscience.
Why does the activation of Brain Region X
show Psychological Construct Y?
nonlinearity of cognitive function
vs neural activation
simplified models producing
interpretational difficulties
That is, you can't combine activations in
Brain Regions X, Y, Z to produce a
complex behavior. The brain is difficult
to reduce to components.
E.g. stimuli used in studies could be
sensorimotor or social cues. Is the resulting
difference in neural activation due to different
kinds of empathy at play or due to the difference
in stimuli used?
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Effective Altruism
Objections to effective altruism as a normative claim
"How can I do the most good, given what others are likely to do?"
There seem to be many cases in which, even if we each do the most good we can individually, we do less good than we collectively could have done. Well-known coordination problems can give rise to such cases
(Gibbard 1965).
One might object to effective altruism on epistemic grounds, claiming that we are utterly clueless about what activities will, in the indefinitely long run, do the most good.
(Lenman,2000)
Agent - Centered Restrictions
One might claim that we are morally obligated not to always try to promote as much good as possible.
Agent-Centered Options
It might be objected that it is morally permissible not to always try to promote as much good as possible
Virtue Ethics
"We should do the most good we can"
Impartiality
Cost Effectiveness
Cause Prioritization
Normative Aspects of Empathy
Using the knowledge gained from empathy
"How the person ought to handle information gained from empathic understanding of other individuals is. Once we've approved of their state and undergone our own “transformative” experience of the other, we are left with information that to some may seem morally difficult to handle. We are not always moral.The problem with empathy is the feeling of immediacy that sometimes accompanies it".
(Hrincu,2017)
Being the prima facie of a target's emotions.
*Prima facie -based on the first impression; accepted as correct until proved otherwise
"During the initial process of empathy, where the person empathizing finds the state of the target intelligible. One can understand why the other feels, acts, or reacts as they do. Intelligibility means one approves of or accepts the other’s emotions prima facie"
(Oxley,2011)
Expansive empathy : normative and descriptive considerations for the cultivation of empathy (2017).Hrincu, V.