Authors: Paul Bloom
Empathy is also influenced by what one thinks of the other person. In one study, male participants engaged in a financial interaction with a stranger in which they were either rewarded or double-crossed. Then they watched that stranger get a mild electrical shock. If the stranger who was nice got shocked, the participants showed a neural response consistent with empathy—indeed the same part of their brain lit up at the sight as when they themselves got shocked. But when the stranger who was nasty got shocked, there was no empathy; parts of the brain associated with reward and pleasure lit up instead. (Women, on the other hand, were less discriminating, or just plain kinder—they showed an empathetic response regardless of how the stranger had treated them.)
Second, empathy is not needed to motivate compassion. To see this, consider
an example from the philosopher Peter Singer of an obviously good act. You are walking past a lake and see a small child struggling in the water. The lake is just a few feet deep, but she is drowning. Her parents are nowhere to be seen. If you are like most people, you would wade in, even if you ruined your shoes in the process, and pull the child out. (Philosophers seem to be fond of examples with drowning children: about two thousand years ago,
the Chinese scholar Mencius wrote, “No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others.… Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the
verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion.”)
It is conceivable, I suppose, that empathy could lead to compassion, followed by action: you see that the girl is terrified and gasping for air, you feel the same way, you want to make your own experience of drowning go away, and this motivates you to rescue her. But this is not what normally happens. Most likely, you would splash in without ever vicariously experiencing the terror of drowning. As the psychologist
Steven Pinker points out, “If a child has been frightened by a barking dog and is howling in terror, my sympathetic response is not to howl in terror with her, but to comfort and protect her.”
Third, just as you can have compassion without empathy, you can have empathy without compassion. You might feel the person’s pain and wish to stop feeling it—but choose to solve the problem by distancing yourself from that person instead of alleviating his or her suffering. You might walk away from the lake.
A real-world case, described by the philosopher Jonathan Glover, was the response of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and bore witness to prisoners taking several hours to die after being shot. She was sufficiently upset to write a letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.”
She was empathetic enough that it hurt her to see these
people being murdered. And she wasn’t entirely insensitive to the savagery of these acts, describing them as “outrages” and “inhuman deeds.” But still, she could live with these murders taking place, so long as they were being done out of sight. This is an extreme case, but it shouldn’t be that incomprehensible to us. Even otherwise good people sometimes turn away when faced with depictions of pain and suffering in faraway lands, or when passing a homeless person on a city street.
In other cases, you feel the pain of another person—empathy is at full steam—but instead of compassion, it stirs a feeling that has no single word in English but a perfect one in German:
schadenfreude.
You enjoy the suffering of others and want it to keep on going or to get worse. Sadism is an extreme example of this, but some schadenfreude is normal. I might delight at the thought of my rival getting his comeuppance, imagining what he is feeling and enjoying the experience.
I’ve talked so far about how empathy and compassion are different; it’s clear as well that compassion is not the same as
morality.
Imagine a criminal who begs a police officer to release him. The officer may feel compassion but shouldn’t succumb, because there are other moral principles that should be honored. As a less dramatic example, a failing student might approach me and plead for a better grade. I might feel compassion for the student, but it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the class for me to acquiesce.
We can see the occasional clash between compassion and morality in the lab.
Experiments by the psychologist C.
Daniel Batson and his colleagues find that being asked to adopt someone else’s perspective makes participants more likely to favor that person over others. For example, they are more prone to move a suffering girl ahead of everyone else on a waiting list for a lifesaving procedure. This is compassionate, but it’s not moral, since this sort of decision should be based on objective and fair procedures, not on who inspires the most intense emotional reaction. Part of being a good person, then, involves overriding one’s compassion, not cultivating it.
W
HILE
compassion isn’t the same as morality and sometimes clashes with it, still, it’s necessary. There would be no morality if we didn’t care for others.
From the first moments of life, we relate to other people. No baby is an island.
Even newborns respond to other people’s expressions: if an experimenter sticks out his tongue at a baby, the baby tends to razz him back. Since the baby has never looked in a mirror, she has to know instinctively that the adult’s tongue corresponds to that thing in her own mouth that she has never seen. This mimicry may exist to create a bond between the baby and the surrounding adults, so that their feelings become tethered to one another. Indeed,
parents and babies frequently mirror one another’s expressions, often unconsciously.
Babies also respond to the pain of others. Remember how young William Darwin showed “sympathy” at six months of age, making a “melancholy face” when his nurse pretended to cry. Even a few days after birth,
the sound of
crying is unpleasant for babies; it tends to make them cry themselves. This isn’t a dumb response to noise.
Babies cry more at the sound of another baby’s cry than their own, and they don’t cry as much when they hear a computergenerated noise at the same volume, or when they hear the cries of a chimpanzee infant. Other creatures also find it unpleasant when members of their species are in distress.
Hungry rhesus monkeys avoid pulling a lever to get food if doing so will give another monkey a painful electric shock.
Rats will press a bar to lower another rat that is suspended in midair or to release a rat that is trapped in a tank full of water; and, like monkeys, they will stop pressing a bar that provides food if that action shocks another rat.
These behaviors might reflect compassion. But a more cynical explanation is that monkeys and rats—and perhaps humans as well—have evolved to find the distress of others unpleasant, without feeling anything like genuine concern for the individuals who are suffering. They experience empathy, perhaps, but not compassion.
Still, when we look at how babies and young children act, we see something more. They don’t just turn away from the person in pain. They try to make the other person feel better. Developmental psychologists have long observed that
one-year-olds will pat and stroke others in distress.
The psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and her colleagues found that when young children see the people around them acting as if they are in pain (such as the child’s mother banging her knee, or an experimenter getting her finger caught in a clipboard), they often respond by
soothing.
Girls are more likely to soothe than boys, which meshes with a broader body of
research suggesting greater empathy and compassion, on average, in females. And
you can see similar behavior in other primates; according to the primatologist Frans de Waal, a chimpanzee—but not a monkey—will put its arm around the victim of an attack and pat her or groom her.
Now, babies’ and toddlers’ attempts at soothing are far from perfect. They are not as frequent as they could be—toddlers soothe less than older children, who soothe less than adults. And toddlers sometimes respond to the pain of others by getting upset and soothing
themselves
, not the individual in pain. Empathetic suffering is unpleasant, and sometimes this unpleasantness is overwhelming. This is true for rats as well.
In one study where rats had the chance to press a bar to stop another rat from experiencing painful electric shocks, many of the rats didn’t press the bar but instead “retreated to the corner of their box farthest from the distressed, squeaking, and dancing animal and crouched there, motionless.”
Toddlers also sometimes respond egocentrically to others’ pain, meaning that their behavior reflects how they themselves would wish to be treated. For instance, the psychologist Martin Hoffman describes a fourteen-month-old bringing a crying friend over to his own mother, not the friend’s mother. Hoffman argues that this confusion arises because children haven’t developed the cognitive sophistication needed to take another’s perspective. But actually people of all ages can be self-centered when responding to
others’ distress. While I was sitting next to my wife in a restaurant the other day, she mentioned how thirsty she was. I politely handed over my beer. She looked at me. After a moment, I figured it out. She hates beer.
I
like beer.
A
DIFFERENT
manifestation of compassion that shows up in toddlers is helping. Over the last several decades there have been many
anecdotes and studies showing spontaneous helping. In 1942, a researcher said of his son: “Very thoughtful nowadays. When I came in this morning, he said,
‘Daddy want slippers’ and ran off to get them.” In 1966,
a psychologist wrote about an eighteen-month-old who “works alongside me in the garden, manages to rake or use a trowel fairly well.… In the house, she helps push the vacuum or mop … [and] anticipates her father’s needs in dressing or in building a fire in the fireplace.”
And another psychologist working in the early eighties described turning her lab into a messy home, with a table that needed to be set, an unmade bed, books and cards on the floor, laundry that needed to be folded, and so on. The majority of children (between eighteen and thirty months old) that she brought into the lab enthusiastically helped her clean, saying things like: “I help you, I hold that little lightbulb.”
More recently, as mentioned in the last chapter,
psychologists have found that toddlers help adults who are struggling to pick up an object that is out of reach or to open a door while their arms are full. The toddlers do so without any prompting from the adults, not even eye contact.
This behavior is impressive, because helping—like
soothing—poses certain challenges. The toddler has to figure out that something is wrong, know what to do to make it better, and be motivated to actually go to the effort of helping.
Now, a skeptic will point out that we don’t know
why
this helping occurs. After all, adults often help without being motivated by compassion. Someone stumbles toward a closed door, arms full of books, and you leap up to open it before they say something. This might be motivated not by kindness so much as by habit, like automatically saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. Or perhaps toddlers just enjoy the act of helping without caring about the person being helped. If an adult is reaching for something beyond her reach, and the child hands it over, the motivation might be the rewarding click of a problem being solved.
Or perhaps their helpful acts are performed not in pursuit of the adults’ happiness but for the adults’ approval. When children try to help, we find them adorable. Maybe this is the point—maybe their helping is an adaptive behavior designed to endear them to their caretakers, analogous to their physical charms such as big eyes and round cheeks.
But researchers have evidence that suggests that helping—at least by older children—really is motivated by genuine care for others. My colleagues
Alia Martin and Kristina Olson conducted an experiment in which an adult played with a three-year-old and asked him or her to hand over certain objects for certain tasks. For example, the adult had a pitcher of water next to her and asked the child, “Can you hand me the cup so that I can pour the water?” When
the object requested was suitable—an unbroken cup, for example—children usually handed it over. But sometimes the object requested was unsuited for the task, such as a cup with a crack in it. Martin and Olson found that children often ignored the requested item and reached for a suitable one, such as an intact cup in another part of the room. So the children weren’t just dumbly complying with the adult; they wanted to actually help her complete the task.
Also, if children are really helping with the interests of someone else in mind, then they should be choosy about whom to help. The psychologist Amrisha Vaish and her colleagues found that
three-year-olds were more likely to help someone who had previously helped someone else and less likely to help someone who had been cruel to another person. The psychologists
Kristen Dunfield and Valerie Kuhlmeier got similar results when they conducted a study with twenty-one-month-olds. The toddlers sat across from two experimenters, each of whom held out a toy, seemingly offering to hand it over. Neither toy got to the toddler, however, because one of the experimenters was teasing and refused to release it, while the other experimenter tried to give it to the child but dropped it. Later on, when toddlers got their own toy to hand over to an experimenter, they tended to give it to the one who had made an effort, not the one who had teased them.
S
HARING
is a further manifestation of compassion and altruism.
Children begin to spontaneously share in the second half of their first year of life, and the degree of sharing
shoots up in the year that follows. They share with family and friends, hardly at all with strangers.
Some scientists, and some parents, worry that children don’t share enough and wonder if this reflects some moral immaturity on their part. But this might be unfair. When a two-year-old is uncomfortable handing over his toys to a child he has just met in a psychologist’s laboratory, is this really so different from an adult’s unwillingness to hand over her car keys to a stranger?