In other studies using the Good Samaritan situation, researchers find that those who do stop to help typically report that on seeing the other’s distress, they felt upset too—and an empathic sense of tenderness.3 Once one person noticed the other enough to feel empathy, the odds were very high that he would offer some help.
Just hearing about someone lending a helping hand can have a unique impact, inducing a warm sense of uplift. Psychologists use the term “elevation” for the glow stirred by witnessing someone else’s kindness. Elevation is the state reported repeatedly when people tell how they felt on seeing a spontaneous act of courage, tolerance, or compassion. Most people find themselves moved, even thrilled.
The acts most commonly named as stirring elevation are helping the poor or sick, or aiding someone in a difficult predicament. But these good deeds need not be as demanding as taking in an entire family, nor as selfless as Mother Teresa working among the poor in Calcutta. Simple thoughtfulness can elicit a bit of elevation. In a study in Japan, for instance, people readily came up with accounts of kandou, times when the heart is so moved—for example, by seeing a tough-looking gang member give up his seat on a train to an elderly man.4
Elevation, the research suggests, may be catching. When someone sees an act of kindness, it typically stirs in them the impulse to perform one, too. These social benefits may be one reason mythic tales worldwide are rife with figures who save others through their courageous deeds. Psychologists speculate that hearing a story about such kindness—when it is told vividly—has the same emotional impact as seeing the act itself.5 That elevation can be contagious suggests that it travels the low road.
FINE-TUNING
On a five-day visit to Brazil with my son, we noticed that the people we met seemed to get friendlier day by day. The change was striking.
At first we largely sensed aloofness or reserve from the Brazilians we met. But by the third day we encountered noticeably greater warmth.
On the fourth day it followed us wherever we went. And by our trip’s end we were hugging people good-bye at the airport.
Was it the people of Brazil who had changed? Certainly not. What had melted away was our own uptightness as gringos in an unfamiliar culture. Our defensive reserve had initially closed us off to the Brazilians’ open, friendly manner—and it may well have signaled them to keep their distance.
At the beginning of our trip—like a radio set to a slightly off-channel signal—we were too preoccupied to take in the friendliness of the people we encountered. As we relaxed and tuned in to those around us, it was as though we had zeroed in on the right station, the warmth that was there all along. While we are anxious or preoccupied, we fail to register the sparkle in someone’s eye, the hint of a smile, or the warm tones of voice—all prime channels for sending messages of friendliness.
A technical explanation for this dynamic spotlights the limits on attention itself. Working memory, or the amount of memory that we can hold in our attention at any one moment, resides in the prefrontal cortex, the citadel of the high road. This circuitry plays a major role in allocating our attention, by managing the backstage business of an interaction. For instance, it searches our memory for what to say and do, even while it attends to incoming signals and shifts our responses accordingly.
As the challenges thicken, those multiple demands increasingly tax our capacity for paying attention. Signals of worry from the amygdala flood key regions of the prefrontal cortex, manifesting as preoccupations that steal attention away from whatever else we are dealing with. Distress overtaxes attention: merely being an uptight gringo will do it.
Nature puts a premium on smooth communication among members of a given species, sculpting the brain for a better fit—sometimes on the spot. In certain fish, for instance, during courtship a female’s brain secretes hormones that temporarily reshape her auditory circuits to improve their attunement to the frequencies of the male’s call.6
Something similar can be seen in a two-month-old baby who detects his mother approaching: he will instinctively become still, quiet his breathing a bit, turn toward her and look at her face, focus on her eyes or mouth, and orient his ears toward any sounds coming from her, all while making an expression researchers call “knit-brow with jaw-drop.” Each of these moves enhances the perceptual ability of the baby to attune to what the mother says or does.7
The more sharply attentive we are, the more keenly we will sense another person’s inner state: we will do so more quickly and from subtler cues, in more ambiguous circumstances. Conversely, the greater our distress, the less accurately we will be able to empathize.
In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection—or compassionate action.
INSTINCTIVE COMPASSION
• A laboratory rat, suspended in the air by a harness, screeches and struggles. Catching sight of the imperiled rat, one of its cagemates becomes upset too and manages to come to the rescue by pressing a bar that lowers the victim safely to the ground.
• Six rhesus monkeys have been trained to pull chains to get food. At one point a seventh monkey, in full view of the others, gets a painful shock whenever one of them pulls for food. On seeing the pain of that shocked monkey, four of the original rhesus monkeys start pulling a different chain, one that delivers less food to them but that inflicts no shock on the other monkey. The fifth monkey stops pulling any chain at all for five days, and the sixth for twelve days—that is, both starve themselves to prevent shocking the seventh monkey.
• Virtually from birth, when babies see or hear another baby crying in distress, they start crying as though they too are distressed. But they rarely cry when they hear a recording of their own cries. After about fourteen months of age, babies not only cry when they hear another, but they also try to relieve the other baby’s suffering somehow. The older toddlers get, the less they cry and the more they try to help.
Lab rats, monkeys, and babies share an automatic impulse, one that rivets their attention on another’s suffering, triggers similar distressed feelings in themselves, and leads them to try to help. Why should the same response be found in very different species? Simple: Nature conserves, preserving whatever works to use again and again.
In the design of the brain, winning features are shared among various species. Human brains have vast tracts of well-proven neural architecture in common with other mammals, especially primates. The similarity across species in sympathetic distress, coupled with the impulse to help, strongly suggests a like set of underlying circuitry in the brain. In contrast to mammals, reptiles show not the least sign of empathy, even eating their own young.
Although people can also ignore someone in need, that coldheartedness seems to suppress a more primal, automatic impulse to aid another in distress. Scientific observations point to a response system that is hardwired in the human brain—no doubt involving mirror neurons—that acts when we see someone else suffering, making us instantly feel with them. The more we feel with them, the more we want to help them.
This instinct for compassion arguably offers benefits in evolutionary fitness—properly defined in terms of “reproductive success,” or how many of one’s offspring live to parent their own offspring. Over a century ago Charles Darwin proposed that empathy, the prelude to compassionate action, has been a powerful aid to survival in Nature’s toolkit.8 Empathy lubricates sociability, and we humans are the social animal par excellence. New thinking holds that our sociability has been the primary survival strategy of primate species, including our own.
The utility of friendliness can be seen today in the lives of primates in the wild, who inhabit a tooth-and-claw world akin to that of human prehistory, when relatively few infants survived to child-bearing age. Take the thousa
nd or so monkeys that inhabit Cayo Santiago, a remote island in the Caribbean; all descend from a single band transplanted from their native India in the 1950s. These rhesus macaques live in small groups. When they reach adolescence, the females stay, and the males leave to find their place in another group.
That transition holds real dangers: as the young males try to enter an unfamiliar troupe, up to 20 percent of them die in fights. Scientists have taken spinal fluid samples of one hundred teen macaques. They find that the most outgoing monkeys have the lowest levels of stress hormones and stronger immune function, and—most important—that they are best able to approach, befriend, or challenge monkeys in the new troupe. These more sociable young monkeys are the ones most likely to survive.9
Another primate data point comes from wild baboons living near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. For these baboons, infancy holds great perils: in a good year about 10 percent of infants die; in bad times up to 35 percent die. But when biologists observed the baboon mothers, they found that those who were most companionable—who spent the most time grooming or otherwise socializing with other female baboons—had the infants most likely to survive.
The biologists cite two reasons that a mother’s friendliness may help her infants survive. For one, they are members of a clubby group who can help one another defend their babies from harassment, or find better food and shelter. For another, the more grooming the mothers give and get, the more relaxed and healthy they tend to be. Sociable baboons make better mothers.10
Our natural pull toward others may trace back to the conditions of scarcity that shaped the human brain. We can readily surmise how membership in a group would make survival in dire times more likely—and how being a lone individual competing for scarce resources with a group could be a deadly disadvantage.
A trait with such powerful survival value can gradually fashion the very circuitry of the brain, since whatever proves most effective in spreading genes to future generations becomes increasingly pervasive in the genetic pool.
If sociability offered humans a winning strategy throughout prehistory, so have the brain systems through which social life operates.11 Small wonder our inclination toward empathy, the essential connector, has such potency.
AN ANGEL ON EARTH
A head-on collision had left her car crumpled like a piece of paper. With two bones broken in her right leg, pinned in the wreckage, she lay there in pain and shock, helpless and confused.
Then a passerby—she never found out his name—came over to her and knelt by her side. He held her hand, reassuring her while emergency workers tried to free her. Despite her pain and anxiety, he helped her stay calm.
“He was,” as she put it later, “my angel on earth.”12
We’ll never know exactly what feelings moved that “angel” to kneel at that woman’s side to reassure her. But such compassion depends on that crucial first step, empathy.
Empathy entails some degree of emotional sharing—a prerequisite to truly understanding anyone else’s inner world.13 Mirror neurons, as one neuroscientist puts it, are “what give you the richness of empathy, the fundamental mechanism that makes seeing someone hurt really hurt you.”14
Constantin Stanislavski, the Russian developer of the famed Method for stage training, saw that an actor “living” a part could call up his emotional memories from the past to evoke a powerful feeling in the present. But those memories, Stanislavski taught, need not be limited to our own experiences. An actor can as well draw on the emotions of others through a bit of empathy. As the legendary acting coach advised, “We must study other people and get as close to them emotionally as we can, until sympathy for them is transformed into feelings of our own.”15
Stanislavski’s advice was prescient. As it turns out, brain imaging studies reveal that when we answer the question, “How are you feeling?” we activate much of the same neural circuitry that lights up when we ask, “How is she feeling?” The brain acts almost identically when we sense our own feelings and those of another.16
When people are asked to imitate someone’s facial expression of happiness, fear, or disgust, this activates the same circuits involved when they simply observe the person (or when they spontaneously feel that emotion themselves). As Stanislavski understood, these circuits come even more alive when empathy becomes intentional.17 As we notice an emotion in another person, then, we literally feel together. The greater our effort or the more intense the feelings expressed, the stronger we feel them in ourselves.
Tellingly, the German word Einfühlung, which was first rendered into English in 1909 as the newly coined word “empathy,” more literally translates as “feeling into,” suggesting an inner imitation of the other person’s feelings.18 As Theodore Lipps, who imported the word “empathy” into English, put it, “When I observe a circus performer on a high wire, I feel I am inside him.” It’s as though we experience the other person’s emotions in our own body. And we do: neuroscientists say that the more active a person’s mirror neuron systems, the stronger her empathy.
In today’s psychology, the word “empathy” is used in three distinct senses: knowing another person’s feelings; feeling what that person feels; and responding compassionately to another’s distress. These three varieties of empathy seem to describe a 1-2-3 sequence: I notice you, I feel with you, and so I act to help you.
All three fit well with what neuroscience has learned about how the brain operates when we attune to another person, as Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal observe in a major theory linking interpersonal perception and action.19 These two scientists are uniquely suited to make the argument: Preston has pioneered using the methods of social neuroscience to study empathy in humans, and de Waal, director of Living Links at the Yerkes Primate Center, has for decades drawn lessons for human behavior from systematic observations of primates.
Preston and de Waal argue that in a moment of empathy, both our emotions and our thoughts are primed along the same lines as those of the other person. Hearing a frightened cry from someone else, we spontaneously think of what might be causing their fear. From a cognitive perspective, we share a mental “representation,” a set of images, associations, and thoughts about their predicament.
The movement from empathy to act traverses mirror neurons; empathy seems to have evolved from emotional contagion and so shares its neural mechanisms. Primal empathy relies on no specialized brain area but rather involves many, depending on what we are empathizing with. We slip into the other’s shoes to share what they experience.
Preston has found that if someone brings to mind one of the happiest moments of her life, then imagines a similar moment from the life of one of her closest friends, the brain activates virtually the identical circuitry for these two mental acts.20 In other words, to understand what someone else experiences—to empathize—we utilize the same brain wiring that is active during our own experience.21
All communication requires that what matters for the sender also matters for the receiver. By sharing thoughts as well as feelings, two brains deploy a shorthand that gets both people on the same page immediately, without having to waste time or words explaining more pointedly what matters are at hand.22
Mirroring occurs whenever our perception of someone automatically activates an image or a felt sense in our own brain for what they are doing and expressing.23 What’s on their mind occupies ours. We rely on these inner messages to sense what might be going on in the other person. After all, what does a smile or a wink, a stare or a frown, “mean,” except as a clue to what’s happening in the other person’s mind?
AN ANCIENT DEBATE
Today most people remember the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes for his assertion that life in our natural state—absent any strong government—is “nasty, brutish and short,” a war of all against all. Despite this tough, cynical view, however, Hobbes himself had a soft side.
One day as he walked through the streets of London, he came upon an old, sickly man who was
begging for alms. Hobbes, his heart touched, immediately gave the man a generous offering.
When asked by a friend if he would have done the same had there been no religious dictum or philosophical principle about helping the needy, Hobbes replied that he would. His explanation: he felt some pain himself when he saw the man’s misery, and so just as giving alms to the man would relieve some of the man’s suffering, it “doth also ease me.”24
This tale suggests that we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress.
Latter-day versions of this theory have tried to reduce acts of altruism to disguised acts of self-interest.25 In one version, compassion veils a “selfish gene” that tries to maximize its odds of being passed on by gathering obligations or by favoring the close relatives who carry it.26 Such explanations may suffice in special cases.
But another viewpoint offers a more immediate—and universal—explanation: as the Chinese sage Mengzi (or Mencius) wrote in the third century B.C.E., long before Hobbes, “All men have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others.”27
Neuroscience now supports Mengzi’s position, adding missing data to this centuries-old debate. When we see someone else in distress, similar circuits reverberate in our brain, a kind of hardwired empathic resonance that becomes the prelude to compassion. If an infant cries, her parents’ brains reverberate in much the same way, which in turn automatically moves them to do something to soothe their baby’s distress.
Our brain has been preset for kindness. We automatically go to the aid of a child who is screaming in terror; we automatically want to hug a smiling baby. Such emotional impulses are “prepotent”: they elicit reactions in us that are unpremeditated and instantaneous. That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence. To feel distress stirs an urge to help.
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