In deepest empathy

June 15, 2011 by · 7 Comments
Filed under: Social brain, The RSA 

Look, this rubbish joke thing is going to go on until you tell me to stop. I will only desist if a majority of my readers say so, which means an e-petition comprising at least five names. Until then…….

I have a friend who suffers from a compulsion to purchase large white teddy bears. His doctor thinks he might have buy polar disorder.

Last night the Great Room was packed (as always) for a lecture by Simon Baron-Cohen on the subject of his new book ‘zero degrees of empathy’. This is what I took from Simon’s argument:

(a) we should see empathy as core to human nature and behaviour

(b) it is now possible to measure people’s empathy quotient quite accurately

(c) many types of psychiatric disorder and associated pathological behaviour can be traced to a lack of empathic capacity

(d) individual empathy levels are the consequence of a combination of genes and upbringing

(e) understanding and enhancing empathy is the key to tackling many psychiatric disorders and promoting a more humane and cooperative society.     

As chair of the event, I felt ambivalent. On the one hand I absolutely accept the importance of empathy as a core human capability and also one which we need to grow in the 21st century. On the other hand, I was concerned that the issue of zero empathy in those with mental illness and of the overall levels of empathy in society are very different.

As I said last night, there is no reason to believe that Germans in the 1930s or Rwandan Hutus in 1994 behaved as they did because of their genes or individual upbringings (although the critical theorist Adorno did, I think, arguethat Germans had a distinct personality type which predisposed them to Nazism).   Equally the sudden decline in hostility towards gay people in the 80s and 90s wasn’t down to individual factors.

While I think assessing and treating people with zero empathy is primarilly about understanding the individual factors which shape their personalities, the task of shifting the average empathy level of people in a society – and of widening the zone of empathy to include people different to ourselves – are much more matters of social and cultural change (and I’m not just saying this to defend myself from the allegation of neurological reductionism which Ray Tallis will be directing at me here at the RSA in a couple of weeks).

I asked one other slightly flippant question. Could it be that people with lower levels of empathy are more effective in relation to certain tasks and situations.  I couldn’t resist recalling the episode of Star Trek (appropriately called ‘the enmy within’) in which, in a bizarre transporter accident, Captain Kirk gets divided into a gentle, empathic Kirk who is incapable of making decisions and providing leadership, and a brutal, sex-crazed Kirk who makes everyone follow his orders (I always remember this episode because it contains the immortal line, uttered by the Captain after the two Kirks are miraculously re-merged:   ‘I’ve seen a part of myself no man should ever see’).

Then, by sheer coincidence, I find this morning that RSA Chairman, Luke Johnson, has made the subject of his FT column a discussion of whether entrepreneurs are – on the whole – slightly deranged.  Luke doesn’t refer to empathy but some of the very successful people he describes were clearly pretty close to zero in their allocation.

Perhaps the answer is to create working groups of people with different amounts of empathy. The low empathy ones can make decisions and drive change and the high empathy ones can be in charge of communications and making sure that change processes don’t neglect the human dimension.  What a great way to start a meeting: ‘welcome everyone, now before we all get down to business,l I wonder if you’d just fill in this empathy questionnaire …’

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The ‘don’t trust the boss’ gene?

March 11, 2010 by · 6 Comments
Filed under: Social brain 

Another in my series ‘pop evolutionary psychology for scientific imbeciles’. Or as someone put it to me the other day ’the charming thing about your blog, Matthew, is that while other people use theirs to display their knowledge, you use yours to parade your ignorance’.

There is a lot of research out there on how we are shaped by social norms. Take for example Mark Earls’ book ‘Herd’ which shows how following the crowd explains most human behaviour. It isn’t a surprise we’re like this. After all, other species do the same. Birds flock, bees swarm, when one sheep starts running they all do.

But human beings seem to have another, opposite, instinct. There appears to be a part of the brain which responds to the message; ‘don’t trust the boss’. It’s the part which lights up when – during a meeting discussing a plan from central Government, the council or company head office – someone stands up and alleges that the truth isn’t being told, or the decision has already been made, or ‘the secret plan is…’. It’s the part that makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories, despite the tenuous nature of the evidence underpinning them.

The reasons most frequently offered for this suspicion of authority are political and sociological: It represents a loss of trust or legitimacy and it is connected to a long term decline in deference and tradition in society. We also know that attitudes to authority are to some extent innate, with people having a more or less ‘authoritarian’ personality. 

When we are deciding whether to follow or to rebel we try to base our response on rational judgment. But, it is often impracticable for us to find out enough to make an evidence-based judgment (think of how many of us now feel about climate change science) and both the compliance and resistance instincts have a strong emotional power.  But while we have the compliance response in common with the rest of the animal kingdom, the resistance/suspicion reaction seems uniquely human.

It could be argued that it is entirely a cultural phenomenon. Sociologists, like Anthony Giddens, argue that the decline in deference is a key characteristic of modernity. But doesn’t the attraction of ‘don’t trust the boss’ feel like it has a deeper, more visceral, basis?. Like many other ‘natural’ instincts it can lead to bad judgement, eccentricity or madness if we have an excess. Paranoia can be a pathological version of ‘don’t trust the boss’.

Could it be that the possession of a certain level of natural suspicion towards authority – albeit unevenly distributed through the population – has played a vital evolutionary role? After all, in the hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution – when there weren’t many human beings around and our future flourishing was far from certain – there must have been plenty of leaders who were mad and dangerous: the kind of person who would lead their tribe to disaster or say God had demanded a mass suicide pact. Has the survival and evolution of the species rested on our innate ability to be suspicious of authority?

Of course, it will be argued that at some times in recent human history – think of the Third Reich – human beings seem to have abandoned this instinct. True enough but – as the theory predicts -  this has led to disaster and, also, this is why authoritarian regimes adopt totalitarian methods: they know any dissenting voice will be likely to strike an emotional chord.

Of course, I am not quite so stupid as not to know that the question of authority and obedience has been the subject of much brilliant analysis from historians, philosophers, social psychologists, sociologists and political scientists (Hobbes, Adorno, Diamond, Arendt, Milgram to name just a few different perspectives) but what about the genetic/evolutionary account? Can someone refer me to the book (or, even better, the easily digestible article) I need to read?

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