Empathy requires mental gymnastics at the best of times. Empathy for whole categories of people requires Olympic-level skills
It is usually seen as a depressing paradox about human beings that we find it easier to sympathise with one person’s suffering than with that of thousands: Stalin probably never really said “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” – but he was right all the same. It’s not much of a paradox, though. It makes sense: each of us has access to only one set of thoughts and emotions – our own – so we’re obliged to relate to others by analogy, working on the assumption that they feel pain and joy like we do. (As philosophers enjoy pointing out, you can’t truly know that your family and friends aren’t just meaty robots, with no inner life at all.) And it’s obviously easier to draw an analogy between yourself and one other person, as opposed to “the population of Somalia” or “all victims of domestic violence”, let alone those killed in the future by global warming, who aren’t necessarily even born yet. Empathy requires mental gymnastics at the best of times. Empathy for whole categories of people requires Olympic-level skills, and most of us aren’t up to it.
But there’s an intriguingly easy way to induce compassion for groups, according to a new study by the psychologist Kurt Gray and colleagues, published in the Journal Of Experimental Psychology and reported by Vox. It makes a difference, they found, whether you say “a group of 50 refugees” (for example) versus “50 refugees in a group”. The first phrasing focuses on the group, not its members, with the result that we think of those members as less capable of rich inner experience – and less human, if we’re honest – than ourselves. The latter phrasing focuses on the members, rather than the group. That linguistic switch proved sufficient for participants in the study to treat them as fully human, and fully deserving of compassion.
Continue reading...
0 comments :
Post a Comment