What does the research show is actually going on with empathy?
In the communications business, we spend a lot of time telling stories designed to elicit empathy in our audiences. Teachers rely on empathy to awaken the imaginations of their charges. And executives are rated highly if they show empathy for their employees, and maybe even as psychopaths if they don’t. But what is this quality, how does it work, and how do we know if we’re applying it correctly in these leadership roles?
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Empathy is an emotional state we mostly believe we have in the just the right amount – while everyone else has too little. It’s the capacity, simply put, to feel someone else’s suffering. We know everyone else has too little because, well, like a world full of Mrs. Gummidges, we ‘feel it more than most’. And we pride ourselves on being able to ‘feel your pain’, as President Bill Clinton famously said. But aside from these general truths, what does the research show us is actually going on with empathy?
First of all, the most empathetic people are highly educated women. Empathy decreases with age; that cliché of the ‘grumpy old grandpa’ is apparently spot on. This will come as a huge shock to their opposite numbers, but liberals and conservatives are equally empathetic; political affiliation is not a factor in determining empathy. The other strong association with empathy is the personality trait of agreeableness, one of the big five of psychology. If your boss is agreeable, she’s probably empathetic too. Go ahead and take that day off to care for your grumpy old parent.
Something that Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk taught us long ago also turns out to be measurably true: when you are thinking scientifically you are less able to be empathetic, and vice-versa. So it was a good thing that the two officers on the Enterprise generally kept separate perspectives. That way they could max out on both. Scientists (and teachers) in leadership positions take note. You might want to consciously put on your feeling hat at some meetings, and your scientific-logical hat at others.
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It does help your empathy if you are feeling guilty about something, but shame has the opposite effect. Your ability to read facial cues goes up with guilt, as well as your effort to try to save the relationship. Guilt is a powerful motivator, after all, and we probably underestimate its efficacy thanks to our tendency to try to live in a guilt-free world. Which explains why we feel less empathy for strangers than we do for those already on our team. But 15 minutes of working together was enough to create measurable empathy even for people who had just met each other.
The most fascinating study for me is one of a singular group of individuals, aphantasics, people who lack the ability to picture images in their mind. This group was only identified in 2015. They represent roughly 5% of the population. These individuals are less empathetic than others, in addition to not being able to picture “red” when they read the word, for example. And they typically don’t know that they have the condition. You don’t know what you’ve never missed, apparently.
In the end, 95 percent of us humans have empathy, and generally are pretty good (but not as good as we think we are) in experiencing and showing empathy for our audiences, students, and employees, especially if we’re feeling a tad guilty. If you’re an aphantasic, it might be good to know, and to over-index, as the consultants say, on your empathy.
References
Laura J. Speed, Lynn S. Eekhof, Marloes Mak. The role of visual imagery in story reading: Evidence from aphantasia, Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 118, 2024.
Habashi, M. M., Graziano, W. G., & Hoover, A. E. (2016). Searching for the Prosocial Personality: A Big Five Approach to Linking Personality and Prosocial Behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(9), 1177-1192. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216652859
Clutterbuck RA, Callan MJ, Shah P (2023) Socio-demographic and political predictors of Theory of Mind in adulthood. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0284960. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284960
Treeby MS, Prado C, Rice SM, Crowe SF. Shame, guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability. Cogn Emot. 2016 Dec;30(8):1504-1511. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1072497. Epub 2015 Aug 11. PMID: 26264817.
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Publish date : 2024-07-26 12:34:09
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