by Alan Alda
I would contaminate my experiment in meditation by including all the variables: While I meditated daily, I would also silently name the emotions of others, gaze into the eyes of the passing pooch, read the emotions of actors in dramas, and spend an occasional wrenching couple of hours with Madame Bovary at her most distressed, along with Proust and his memory cookies.
After six months of all this, I took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again. The first time I took it, I scored 33 out of 36. This time I got 36 out of 36. This proves nothing at all, of course, and ranks on a scale of reliable evidence just above wishing. But I was delighted anyway. Anything that makes me even feel that I have more empathy at my disposal is okay with me.
Since I’m convinced that empathy is at the heart of communication, I of course want more empathy. But that’s not because I think empathy will cure the ills of the world.
In fact, sometimes empathy worries me.
CHAPTER 14
Dark Empathy
At forty-nine, Bernard Hopkins was a boxer still trading punches in the ring and still winning fights. They say he did it partly by perpetually staying fit, but mostly, having studied Sun Tzu’s Art of War, he did it not by out-punching other boxers, but by defeating their strategies. He could anticipate what they had in mind and then frustrate them. Keeping an eye on his opponent’s front foot, looking for it to lift off the floor, he knew in advance what the other boxer was planning to do next.
In a profile in the New York Times Magazine, Carlo Rotella said of him, “Figuring out what the other guy wants to do and not letting him do it is a matter of policy for Hopkins.” He won matches not so much by knocking heads as by reading minds. Like a good communicator, he could read the body language of an opponent and know what he was thinking. He was able to attack an opponent’s strategy even before he had to attack his person. He did this by careful study.
His mentor, Sun Tzu, had the same idea. He wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
What Hopkins and Sun Tzu are doing here is using an awareness of another person’s mind against him—not using it to sympathize with him, but to defeat him.
Empathy and Theory of Mind are not the same as sympathy. Tuning in to another person’s thoughts and feelings is not necessarily a path to good behavior. There’s a dark side to empathy. While knowing what’s happening in other people’s minds can lead to bonding and caring about them, it doesn’t have to. It can be used to keep others submissive.
The stereotypical view of empathy is that it makes you soft, that you have to abandon it if you need to be tough. On the contrary, when you have to be tough—or even if you choose to be cruel—empathy can be a useful tool. It doesn’t necessarily make you a nice guy.
Bullies seem to know instinctively how to hurt you, how to make you feel defenseless and weak. They know what you’re feeling and they can play a sonata on your tender feelings as if you were a violin.
Even normally empathic people can be moved to deliver unusual punishment, and apparently it doesn’t take much effort. In a classic experiment conducted by Al Bandura in 1975, college students were told they were going to take part in a group task with students from another school. As part of the experiment, they were also told they’d be delivering electric shocks to the other students. One of the groups being studied heard an assistant calling the other students “animals” and another group heard an assistant referring to them as “nice.” That slight change in language led to students’ delivering higher levels of electrical shock to those they had heard referred to “animals.”
But we don’t have to go back to 1975 to see the misuse of empathy.
Reports have come out of Guantanamo that psychologists advised jailers there on how to make their prisoners feel helpless and out of control during “interrogation” sessions. In many cases, they did more than advise.
According to a U.S. Senate report, two psychologists were paid $81 million between 2006 and 2009 to devise and take part in a program that used theories of “learned helplessness” during what were regarded by many as torture sessions. According to the report, one of the psychologists running the program, James Mitchell (also known by the pseudonym “Grayson Swigert”), “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ in which individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events. He theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.”
In both overseeing and conducting the sessions, psychologists were using their understanding of the inner life of detainees to disable them emotionally. They weren’t just reading minds; they were breaking and entering.
Bullies and interrogators, maybe even psychologist/interrogators, might be expected to misuse empathy, but even large, trusted organizations have used empathy in an unethical way.
Merck and Company, the American pharmaceutical company, has a distinguished record of innovative research that has saved millions of lives. But for a time, its record of doing good was marred, and it was marred in part by how they misused empathy training.
In 2005, a U.S. congressional committee issued a memo describing the sales practices at Merck and Company. The company had stopped selling the drug Vioxx a year earlier after it became widely known that the drug was associated with strokes and heart attacks. But according to the memo, millions of prescriptions were written even as evidence mounted that the drug was unsafe. In fact, the company, with three thousand trained salespeople, “prohibited the representatives from discussing contrary studies (including those financed by Merck and Company) that showed increased risks from Vioxx.” What strikes me most about this report is the detailed account of the sales training that intentionally used techniques of empathy and trust-building to convince doctors to use the product.
Body language was addressed in minute detail. According to the congressional memo, “Merck [and Company] representatives were taught how long to shake physicians’ hands (three seconds), how to eat their bread when dining with physicians (‘one small bite-size piece at a time’), and how to use ‘verbal and non-verbal’ cues when addressing a physician to ‘subconsciously raise his/her level of trust.’ ”
In a course called “Captivating the Customer,” representatives were asked to become familiar with “nonverbal techniques involving the eyes, head, fingers and hands, legs, overall posture, facial expression, and mirroring.”
Mirroring. The very thing we teach as a basis of good communication, and which, used correctly, can help physicians care for their patients.
In notes for the leaders of the course, the concept of mirroring was explained this way: “Mirroring is the matching of patterns; verbal and nonverbal, with the intention of helping you enter the customer’s world. It’s positioning yourself to match the person talking. It subconsciously raises his/her level of trust by building a bridge of similarity.” This is not bad advice for selling something, but not so good when you have evidence that what you’re selling may be harmful.
Merck and Company paid a fine of $950 million. We can hope this is all behind them now and that the company has returned to its former laudable self. But, as the congressional committee showed, even trusted companies can slip, and their distinguished record can be crossed for a time by the shadow of Dark Empathy.
So, I don’t think of empathy as a cure-all. It’s a tool that can be used for good and for bad. Houses have been built with hammers and people have been murdered with them. Once radioactivity entered our lives over a hundred years ago, we had a tool that could diagnose and treat cancers, but, in time, could also annihilate whole cities.
Even when we think of empathy as a tool for good, it might not be a good idea to oversell its strengths, and we should remember that there will always be people who will use
it against others for their own benefit.
The psychologist Paul Bloom takes a pretty dim view of empathy, mainly because he doesn’t see it as leading inexorably to good behavior. He’s pointed out that as far back as Adam Smith, writing in 1859, we’ve been aware that, as Smith said, “persons of delicate fibres” seeing a beggar’s sores “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” In a way, he was describing neural mirroring.
But Adam Smith and Paul Bloom both take the position that even though we might have a similar sensation, we won’t necessarily act on our awareness of a stranger’s misfortune. We tend, instead, to let our empathic powers drive us to action mainly in favor of people we know and to whom we’re related. Bloom is pessimistic that increased empathy will lead to altruistic public policies or a good moral life, partly because identifying a single victim of a tragedy arouses us more than faceless multitudes do. We’ll be concerned by the plight of the girl trapped at the bottom of a well, but give far less thought to millions of children dying of hunger or caught up in genocide. For Bloom, empathy is harder to achieve than we realize, and it doesn’t lead to moral behavior or good policy as much as rationality does.
This may be true. But let’s not forget there’s a baby in the bathwater. Let’s not dump empathy because it can’t fix everything that’s wrong with everybody. Empathy can be a useful tool for communication without saddling it with the responsibility of being the golden road to the good life. In any case, empathy is not going away. It’s part of who we are.
As Bloom says, “Our hearts will always go out to the baby in the well; it’s a measure of our humanity. But empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.”
Maybe so.
It’s true that the baby-in-the-well phenomenon might divert us from rational policies that affect faceless millions. But it’s also the kind of focused, personal image that can help in communicating the very need for those policies.
A single human story can give flesh to numbers that are numbing.
Charities will put a personal face on hunger to bring attention to starving children in other countries. Instead of appealing to a rational interest in anonymous multitudes, they send us pictures of specific children, and if we contribute, sometimes it’s even arranged for us to get thank-you notes from the children. The suspicion that some of these thank-you notes might be churned out on an assembly line doesn’t seem to stem the flow of our empathy.
These appeals are directed to us as individuals, but it can go further. Specifying sorrow can capture the attention of whole nations.
In the summer of 2015, hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing from war. One family, having escaped from Syria, paid smugglers for a motorboat to take them from Turkey to Greece. But what the smugglers gave them instead was a rubber raft. With no other choice, they tried to use it. High waves spilled the family into the ocean, and the father tried desperately to hold his children’s heads above water long enough to keep them from drowning. But when he was washed ashore, he was the only member of his family alive. The body of his three-year-old son, Aylan, was lying facedown on the sand, the edge of the ocean that had killed him lapping gently on his cheek. A photographer shot a picture of Aylan and within hours it rocketed around the world on the Internet. Immigrants, suddenly, were no longer statistics. Aylan was their face.
Canada, where Aylan’s family had relatives ready to vouch for them and take them in, had refused them entry because of a missing paper establishing their immigrant status—a paper almost impossible to obtain in Syria. Now the phone lines and in-boxes of the Canadian authorities were flooded with demands for a more humane policy. In France, the day the picture appeared, President François Hollande announced that he had joined German chancellor Angela Merkel in proposing the European Union take in more refugees and distribute them among the twenty-eight member states. “Europe is a set of principles and values,” he said. “It is time to act.” He proposed taking in fourteen thousand migrants. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron, who had previously rejected Merkel’s call for a system of immigrant quotas among European countries, changed his mind the day after the picture hit the Internet. “As a father,” he said, “I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey. Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfill our moral responsibilities.” Britain was, of course, a moral nation before the picture appeared, but it took emotion and empathy to ignite that moral stance and turn it into thoughts of action. He proposed taking in twenty thousand people.
Pope Francis made the same distinction between numbers and personal imagery when he addressed Congress a month or so later, speaking about the refugees flooding Europe: “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.”
The promises to accept thousands of immigrants, made in emotional moments, weren’t always kept at the promised level. As weeks passed and the emotion died down, there was plenty of slippage. But the emotional response to that individual story did play a part in policy decisions that might not have been made otherwise.
Bloom acknowledges that it’s not merely a rational awareness of others’ needs that moves us to good behavior. As he says, “Some spark of fellow feeling is needed to convert intelligence into action.” I think he’s right about that.
There are times we know what the rational action should be, but don’t take it until we consider what the other person is feeling. I know, in my own life, I sometimes respond to a question with an answer that isn’t really helpful. “Have you seen the can opener?” is not fully answered by saying, “No, I haven’t seen it.” The other person is still at a loss. I know it seems obvious, but sometimes remembering what it feels like to be facing a can without an opener can produce a little spark of empathy. If I respond to that spark, I might add a few words: “Maybe it’s in that other drawer with the soup spoons.” Boom. I’m cooperating, and the spurt of reward hormones in my brain is a sign it’s been worth the effort.
But as good as those reward hormones feel, I’m not thinking, in this book, of empathy as the basis of good behavior or morality; I’m looking at it as a tool for communication. I think it’s an essential tool, and while it can be misused, it can help us make those important connections that lead to understanding.
The baby-in-the-well reaction is exactly the feeling we want the doctor to have for her patient (as long as she isn’t swamped by it) so that her patient knows she sees and hears her. It’s the way every communicator should relate to his audience: with attentiveness, focus, and total listening—sensing what the other person might be going through as he tells his story.
Relating is everything.
CHAPTER 15
Reading the Mind of the Reader
I know it sounds odd, but we’ve found that it’s possible to have an inkling of what’s going on in the mind of our audience even when they’re not actually in the room with us—like when we write.
IMPROV AND WRITING
Along with improvisation, we teach science students how to distill their message: to get to the point right away, to not get lost in the details, to keep it clear and vivid, to make us care.
But we noticed that if we taught our students improvisation before we worked on writing, the writing sessions went more smoothly. The students were better able to think about whether or not the reader was following what they had to say, because they had been trained to think about the other person’s state of mind—not just what they wanted to tell them.
So we took a cue from that and tried incorporating improv games into the writing classes themselves—and the classes went even better.
The more we reinforced our students’ ability to focus on the other person, the better able they were to express themselves with words that would land on the reader with clarity. Improv was, in a way, preparing them to read a person who wasn’t anywhere near them in time and space.
But without being able to observe the reader’s body language or tone of voice, a writer doesn’t seem to have much to go on—except for what George Gopen believes all readers have: expectations.
GEORGE GOPEN: EXPECTATIONS
Gopen is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Duke University. He says that when people read, they have some basic expectations that have to be met, or the reader will become confused and frustrated.
If he’s right, then being aware of when we violate those expectations could give us a window into the mind of the reader almost as effectively as if we were observing them. We could pay some attention to the other person, instead of focusing so much on what we want to pour into their head.
After I read a paper George Gopen wrote with Judith Swan, called “The Science of Scientific Writing,” I wrote Gopen a fan letter. I told him I’d be coming to Duke University soon to shoot a story for a science show and asked if we could find a few minutes to talk about his work.
He offered to pick me up at the Raleigh-Durham airport and, thanks to some terrible traffic, we spent two hours talking in his car. The conversation was stimulating. As we drove through the knotted traffic, he untangled the common sentence for me.
His idea is that the reader expects thoughts to be laid out in a certain order, and that affects how the reader reacts.
The Sentence: Expectations
The very beginning of the sentence, Gopen says, is where the reader expects to hear what the sentence is going to be about. If the writer doesn’t get around to that until somewhere in the middle of the sentence, the reader will have to go back to the beginning, trying to figure out what the writer is talking about. As Gopen says, “Readers expect [a sentence] to be a story about whoever shows up first.”
I’m an actor, so for me Gopen is describing a sentence as if it were a stage play: When the curtain goes up, the actor playing the leading part had better make an entrance pretty soon, or the play won’t seem to be about Hamlet—it’s liable to look like a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.