Group items tagged

Empathy (the “em” means “into”) barged in from the German in the 20th century and gained popularity through its usage in fields like philosophy, aesthetics and psychology. According to my benighted 1989 edition of Webster’s Unabridged, empathy was the more self-centered emotion, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.”

in more updated lexicons, it’s as if the two words had reversed. Sympathy now implies a hierarchy whereas empathy is the more egalitarian sentiment.

Sympathy, the session’s leader explained to school staff members, was seeing someone in a hole and saying, “Too bad you’re in a hole,” whereas empathy meant getting in the hole, too.

“Empathy is a choice and it’s a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling,”

Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.

In short, no matter how much an empath you may be, unless you have actually been in someone’s place, with all its experiences and limitations, you cannot understand where that person is coming from. The object of your empathy may find it presumptuous of you to think that you “get it.”

Bloom asks us to imagine what empathy demands should a friend’s child drown. “A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain,” he writes. “In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.”

Bloom argues for a more rational, modulated, compassionate response. Something that sounds a little more like our old friend sympathy.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does … If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that’s empathy in the sense that I’m interested in here.

For example, donating to foreign charities ups our dopamine intake—we feel better because we’re making a difference (which, of course, can make it more about how we feel than who we’re helping).

Yet it’s not in our biological inheritance to offer unchecked empathy. Bloom points to our tribal nature as evidence. We’re going to care more for those closest to us, such as family and friends, then Cambodian orphans.

Anyone who thinks that it’s important for a therapist to feel depressed or anxious while dealing with depressed or anxious people is missing the point of therapy.

Bloom then discusses the difference between what Binghamton professor and Asian Studies scholar Charles Goodman describes as “sentimental compassion” and “great compassion.” The first is similar to empathy, which leads to imbalances in relationships and one’s own psychological state. Simply put, it’s exhausting.

Empathy is going to be a buzzword for some time to come. It feeds into our social nature, which Bloom sees nothing wrong with.

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

“These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.

empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness.

These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them

It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.

We were led to wonder whether a broken robot can break a child.

Kids are central to the sociable-robot project, because its agenda is to make people more comfortable with robots in roles normally reserved for humans, and robotics companies know that children are vulnerable consumers who can bring the whole family along.

In October, Mattel scrapped plans for Aristotle — a kind of Alexa for the nursery, designed to accompany children as they progress from lullabies and bedtime stories through high school homework — after lawmakers and child advocacy groups argued that the data the device collected about children could be misused by Mattel, marketers, hackers and other third parties. I was part of that campaign: There is something deeply unsettling about encouraging children to confide in machines that are in turn sharing their conversations with countless others.

Recently, I opened my MIT mail and found a “call for subjects” for a study involving sociable robots that will engage children in conversation to “elicit empathy.” What will these children be empathizing with, exactly? Empathy is a capacity that allows us to put ourselves in the place of others, to know what they are feeling. Robots, however, have no emotions to share

What they can do is push our buttons. When they make eye contact and gesture toward us, they predispose us to view them as thinking and caring. They are designed to be cute, to provoke a nurturing response. And when it comes to sociable AI, nurturance is the killer app: We nurture what we love, and we love what we nurture. If a computational object or robot asks for our help, asks us to teach it or tend to it, we attach. That is our human vulnerability.

digital companions don’t understand our emotional lives. They present themselves as empathy machines, but they are missing the essential equipment: They have not known the arc of a life. They have not been born; they don’t know pain, or mortality, or fear. Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.

Breazeal’s position is this: People have relationships with many classes of things. They have relationships with children and with adults, with animals and with machines. People, even very little people, are good at this. Now, we are going to add robots to the list of things with which we can have relationships. More powerful than with pets. Less powerful than with people. We’ll figure it out.

The nature of the attachments to dolls and sociable machines is different. When children play with dolls, they project thoughts and emotions onto them. A girl who has broken her mother’s crystal will put her Barbies into detention and use them to work on her feelings of guilt. The dolls take the role she needs them to take.

Sociable machines, by contrast, have their own agenda. Playing with robots is not about the psychology of projection but the psychology of engagement. Children try to meet the robot’s needs, to understand the robot’s unique nature and wants. There is an attempt to build a mutual relationship.

Some people might consider that a good thing: encouraging children to think beyond their own needs and goals. Except the whole commercial program is an exercise in emotional deception.

when we offer these robots as pretend friends to our children, it’s not so clear they can wink with us. We embark on an experiment in which our children are the human subjects.

it is hard to imagine what those “right types” of ties might be. These robots can’t be in a two-way relationship with a child. They are machines whose art is to put children in a position of pretend empathy. And if we put our children in that position, we shouldn’t expect them to understand what empathy is. If we give them pretend relationships, we shouldn’t expect them to learn how real relationships — messy relationships — work. On the contrary. They will learn something superficial and inauthentic, but mistake it for real connection.

In the process, we can forget what is most central to our humanity: truly understanding each other.

For so long, we dreamed of artificial intelligence offering us not only instrumental help but the simple salvations of conversation and care. But now that our fantasy is becoming reality, it is time to confront the emotional downside of living with the robots of our dreams.

But revealingly, when it came to seeing the superior three-star players having the needle injection, the participants' AI and aMCC were eerily quiet. In other words, their brain's automatic empathic response was apparently dampened.

Moreover, when viewing inferior players' suffering, but not the suffering of superior players, the participants' brains showed increased communication between the AI and other regions involved in empathy and perspective-taking

putting themselves mentally and emotionally in the position of the inferior players, but not the superior.

The researchers didn't find any neural evidence that their participants enjoyed watching three-star players' suffering. However, the results do suggest that the automatic simulation of others' pain that normally goes on in our brains was dampened when participants saw a superior player suffering.

It just goes to show how competitive we are by nature and how quick we are to measure ourselves in relation to others

The researchers think the reduced neural empathy we show toward superior people is somehow linked to the way they make us feel bad about ourselves

Of course, it's worth bearing in mind that, like most social neuroscience research, this study involves making a lot of assumptions about the meaning of people's brain-activity patterns. It certainly seems as if the participants were overstating the empathy they felt for the superior players, and that their brains gave away their true feelings. But this is just one interpretation of the results.

It's also a shame, from a methodological point of view, that there wasn't a condition in which the participants looked at equal-status players in pain.

These issues aside, the new results are consistent with, and add to, past research that's shown people's neural empathic responses are diminished when witnessing pain endured by someone they dislike, or someone from a different social group.

We can strive to be good people, but sadly it seems our brains often reveal the darker side of human nature.

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.

"Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."

As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without

When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."

Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation

He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream

some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things

While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.

in December 2021 I paid Brendan a visit

What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.

Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.

If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.

A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.

When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money

At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.

About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"

Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.

It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on

I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."

Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change

"I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."

Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone

He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."

it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says

Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense

Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups

In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")

According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things

Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.

In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics

This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."

That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures

As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."

Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."

"If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"

if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."

In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings

"I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,

"But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."

Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US

he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."

DJ: Of the basic values of French liberalism—liberty, equality, and fraternity—the last, fraternity, always seems to get short shrift. Your book, by contrast, argues that religious tolerance and liberalism in general can only flourish if people cultivate active respect, civility, and civic friendship with their fellow citizens. If this is so crucial, why do traditional liberals fail to make it more central to their program?

MN: I think liberals associate the cultivation of public emotion with fascism and other illiberal ideologies. But if they study history more closely they will find many instances in which emotions are deliberately cultivated in the service of liberal ideals. My next book, Political Emotions, will study all of this in great detail. Any political principles that ask people to go beyond their own self-interest for the sake of justice requires the cultivation of emotion.

we should confront sexism by argument and persuasion, and that to render all practices that objectify women illegal would be both too difficult (who would judge?) and too tyrannical.

critics of the burqa typically look at the practices of others and find sexism and “objectification” of women there, while failing to look at the practices of the dominant culture, which are certainly suffused with sexism and objectification. I was one of the feminist philosophers who wrote about objectification as a fundamental problem, and what we were talking about was the portrayal of women as commodities for male use and control in violent pornography, in a great deal of our media culture, and in other cultural practices, such as plastic surgery. I would say that this type of objectification is not on the retreat but may even be growing. Go to a high school dance—even at a high-brow school such as the John Dewey Laboratory School on our campus [at the University of Chicago]—and you will see highly individual and intelligent teenage girls marketing themselves for male consumption in indistinguishable microskirts, prior to engaging in a form of group dancing that mimes sex, and effaces their individuality. (Boys wear regular and not particularly sexy clothing.)

Lots of bad things are and will remain legal: unkindness, emotional blackmail, selfishness. And though I think the culture of pornographic objectification does great damage to personal relations, I don’t think that legal bans are the answer.

In the history of philosophy this was well understood, and figures as diverse as [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau, [Johann Gottfried von] Herder, [Giuseppe] Mazzini, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls had a lot to say about the issue. In Mill’s case, he set about solving the problem posed by the confluence of liberalism and emotion: how can a society that cultivates emotion to support its political principles also preserve enough space for dissent, critique, and experimentation? My own proposal in the forthcoming book follows the lead of Mill—and, in India, of Rabindranath Tagore—and tries to show how a public culture of emotions, supporting the stability of good political principles, can also be liberal and protective of dissent. Some of the historical figures I study in this regard are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Nehru.

the Palin reaction was a whole lot better than the standard reaction in Europe, which is that we should just ban things that we fear. It is really unbelievable, having just lectured on this topic here in Germany: my views, which are pretty mainstream in America, are found “extreme” and even “offensive” in Germany, and all sorts of quite refined people think that Islam poses a unique problem and that the law should be dragged in to protect the culture.

The problem with these Europeans is that they don’t want to ban platform shoes or spike heels either; they just want to ban practices of others which they have never tried to understand.

But the students also described a sense of loss.

A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

One teacher observed that the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.

At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

we have put this virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be solved with technology.

People sometimes say to me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of being together.

But this way of dividing things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need these skills to be fully present in conversation.

One start toward reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.

Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that vulnerability into account.

We can choose not to carry our phones all the time. We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation and solitude.

Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at dinner, in the kitchen and in the car.

Engineers are ready with more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do a task and then release us? What if the communications industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers spend on them but by whether it is time well spent?

The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.

This attitude can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools

here is a first step: To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too: Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.

We have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky and face to face.

Likewise, the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans give significantly less to charity as a fraction of income (1.4 percent) than the poorest 20 percent do (3.5 percent), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Such work would also help address the broader question of how family interventions aimed at promoting positive developmental outcomes during childhood can benefit from focusing on relationships between siblings.

One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.

areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.

The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.

these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.

just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.

In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.

This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.

By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.

real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.

it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.

research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap.

redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own. Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,”

Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century.

Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes.

Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.

Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.

Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.

Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.

maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)

Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence

Who fits the stereotype of the rich and powerful described in this research? Mitt Romney. Empathy: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Compassion: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Sympathy for the disadvantaged: My wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Willingness to lie in negotiations: “I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

48 percent described the Democratic Party as “weak,” compared to 28 percent who described the Republican Party that way. Conversely, 50 percent said the Republican Party is “cold hearted,” compared to 30 percent who said that was true of the Democrats.

This is the war that is raging throughout America. It is between conservatives, who emphasize personal responsibility and achievement, against liberals, who say the government must take from the wealthy and give to the poor. So it will be interesting this week to see if President Obama can rally the country to support his vision of a strong social compact. He has compassion on his side. Few Americans want to see their fellow citizens suffer. But the president does have that fiscal responsibility issue haunting him because the country remains in dire trouble.

For power holders, the world is viewed through an instrumental lens, and approach is directed toward those individuals who populate the useful parts of the landscape. Our results suggest that power not only channels its possessor’s energy toward goal completion but also targets and attempts to harness the energy of useful others. Thus, power appears to be a great facilitator of goal pursuit through a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. The nature of the power holder’s goals and interpersonal relationships ultimately determine how power is harnessed and what is accomplished in the end.

Republicans recognize the political usefulness of objectification, capitalizing on “compassion fatigue,” or the exhaustion of empathy, among large swathes of the electorate who are already stressed by the economic collapse of 2008, high levels of unemployment, an epidemic of foreclosures, stagnant wages and a hyper-competitive business arena.

. Republican debates provided further evidence of compassion fatigue when audiences cheered the record-setting use of the death penalty in Texas and applauded the prospect of a gravely ill pauper who, unable to pay medical fees, was allowed to die.Even Rick Santorum, who has been described by the National Review as holding “unstinting devotion to human dignity” and as fluent in “the struggles of the working class,” wants to slash aid to the poor. At a Feb. 21 gathering of 500 voters in Maricopa County, Ariz., Santorum brought the audience to its feet as he declared:We need to take everything from food stamps to Medicaid to the housing programs to education and training programs, we need to cut them, cap them, freeze them, send them to the states, say that there has to be a time limit and a work requirement, and be able to give them the flexibility to do those programs here at the state level.

President Obama has a substantial advantage this year because he does not have a primary challenger, which frees him from the need to emphasize his advocacy for the disempowered — increasing benefits or raising wages for the poor. This allows him to pick and chose the issues he wants to address.At the same time, compassion fatigue may make it easier for the Republican nominee to overcome the liabilities stemming from his own primary rhetoric, to reach beyond the core of the party to white centrist voters less openly drawn to hard-edged conservatism. With their capacity for empathy frayed by a pervasive sense of diminishing opportunity and encroaching shortfall, will these voters once again become dependable Republicans in 2012?

also suggests an intriguing mechanism behind the regulation of empathy

the faceless communication social media creates, the linked distances between people, both provokes and mitigates the inherent capacity for monstrosity.

The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”

The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years.

The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face.

For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.

“Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates.

it’s also no mere technical error on the part of Twitter; faceless rage is inherent to its technology.

Without a face, the self can form only with the rejection of all otherness, with a generalized, all-purpose contempt — a contempt that is so vacuous because it is so vague, and so ferocious because it is so vacuous. A world stripped of faces is a world stripped, not merely of ethics, but of the biological and cultural foundations of ethics.

The spirit of facelessness is coming to define the 21st. Facelessness is not a trend; it is a social phase we are entering that we have not yet figured out how to navigate.

the flight back to the face takes on new urgency. Google recently reported that on Android alone, which has more than a billion active users, people take 93 million selfies a day

Emojis are an explicit attempt to replicate the emotional context that facial expression provides. Intriguingly, emojis express emotion, often negative emotions, but you cannot troll with them.

But all these attempts to provide a digital face run counter to the main current of our era’s essential facelessness. The volume of digital threats appears to be too large for police forces to adequately deal with.

The more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage. Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that demand confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in everyday digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a vampire with your own blood,”

There is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion

we need a new art of conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.”

The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology.

Dwell on those positive thoughts for a little bit. Then extend that same feeling toward yourself. Ruminate on that for a little while. Then expand that feeling out to others. Maybe think of someone you aren't as close to and think tenderly about them.

You also become more accepting of your own failings. That's what a 2014 study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found. In this experiment, there were three small groups of women who were subjected to videos of distressing images. One group got empathy training. Another got compassion training.

The people with the compassion training still felt these negative emotions, like those with empathy training did, but the part of their brain connected with reward and positive effect also lit up.

Compassion prompts your brain to have a wider sense of what's going on and it gives you access to more ideas on how to act. When your brain feels threatened like it does with pain, even someone else's, it focuses on the pain only to make it go away, and shuts down those other avenues that incentivize you to help.

Soldiers who took compassion training recovered faster from stressful situations, such as basic training. Their heart and breathing rates return to normal much quicker than those soldiers who don't get the training.

School children who did a short eight-week compassion training program functioned better overall, a study showed. After the training, even students who struggled with mental challenges such as ADHD had better attendance and behavior records, and their grades improved.

"Developing compassion, sets a foundation for the stability of the mind," Jha said. "And developing intrinsic compassion, a concern for the suffering of others and for oneself, that can be very powerful ... for all involved."