Now Mocking: The Article "Barack Obama and the 'empathy deficit'"

[guardians_song]

From here.

In 2011, researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a simple experiment to ascertain whether a rat would release another rat from a cage without being given a reward.
An IMMEDIATE reward. Has it occurred to these genius researchers that not all behaviors are aimed towards instant-gratification?
The answer was yes. After several sessions, the rats learned intentionally and quickly to open the restrainer and release the caged rats. The rats also repeated the behaviour even when they were denied the reward of reunion.
Immediate reunion.
Even more astonishing, when the rats were presented with two cages, one containing a rat, the other chocolate, they chose to open both cages and "typically shared the chocolate".

For the researchers, the conclusion was inescapable: the rats were displaying empathy. Announcing the results in Science, the lead researcher, Peggy Mason, explained: "There is nothing in it except whatever feeling they get from helping another individual."
No, geniuses. In the wild, which is where their instincts evolved, they wouldn't immediately be returned to new cages, and what they did would matter to the other rat. And, perhaps, the other rat would help them in the future. That would count as networking and getting favors, not empathy. Psychopaths are perfectly capable of planning how to use people WITHOUT feeling the slightest smidgen of empathy for them, you know.

I'm not sure how you would test for empathy in rats, but this ain't it.

Neuroscientists are not the only ones to see empathy – or its absence – everywhere these days.
Nope! They share this trait with people who hold long conversations with brick walls, fire hydrants, and coffee tables!
According to Barack Obama, the "empathy deficit" is a more pressing political problem for America than the federal deficit
Obama said in an interview with Jay Leno that he started having trouble with math in the seventh grade.

Regardless of what one thinks of Obama or one's personal skills at math, this is perhaps a sign that he is no more qualified to comment on numerical issues than George W. Bush is qualified to comment on eloquence and coherency in American political communication.
and holds the key to the success of his second term as he seeks to build bridges with Republicans and tackle the wave of horrific shootings that last year disfigured American communities from Colorado to Connecticut. On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, George Osborne's enthusiasm for welfare cuts is explained by the coalition cabinet's "lack of empathy" for the poor.

But can the solution to violence, cruelty and the divide between liberals and conservatives
Very funny. Make your point without trying to draw snide analogies where you think the readers won't notice it, please.
really be a matter of promoting a trait that we appear to share with rats?
The ability to say "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"? Yes, I hear that is an excellent way to promote "bipartisanship". >:B
And are scientists and politicians talking about the same thing when they invoke empathy in these different experimental and social contexts?
Yep. It's not the same thing most people mean by "empathy", but it certainly is what THEY mean!

One of the problems with using the same word to describe the pro-social behaviour of rats
THAT is an accurate description. Pro-social =/= empathy.
and similar behaviour observed in humans is that people are infinitely more complex and reflective than rodents.
However, rodents are not infinitely less complex and reflective than Mary-Sues. *ducks rotten tomatoes*
It also confuses the different psychological and philosophical meanings of empathy.

Thus modern-day neuroscientists and social psychologists, drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith's notion of a "moral sentiment", have come to regard empathy as intrinsically pro-social.
But pro-social behaviors are not intrinsically empathic.
When we empathise, they argue, we mirror the distress of an "other"
Or we analyze the situation and come to the conclusion that someone else is in distress, and this is a Bad Thing.
and, unless our brains are damaged or we are developmentally abnormal, we are moved to alleviate their suffering.
Or we can conclude that, though we want to help, there is nothing we can do to help.

Or we conclude that, though we want to help and could help, helping the person now would cause greater suffering to them in the long run. (Such as: a person on a diet desperately wanting to stuff his face with cake, a child on time-out being unhappy at being unable to play a game, etc.)

Or we are sick and tired of somebody alternately laughingly dismissing our distress and expecting pity whenever anything bad happens to them, and are moved to tell them exactly what they can do with themselves.

Or we are desperately worn-out at that moment and have to work on alleviating our own distress and suffering before we can do anything for others.

...People who pride themselves on their ~empathy~ oversimplify the world so much.

The result is that, like other modern moral sentiments such as trust and altruism,
Trust is modern?
empathy is increasingly seen as a "social glue" and the evolutionary basis of human co-operation.
Funny, tribal societies tend to be based on rigid adherence to traditions, dominance-and-submission behaviors, and general pack-like behavior. And please, read Roman and Greek histories and tell me that Rome and Sparta were based on empathy. Come on, tell me. Just try it.
But what if this notion reflects nothing more than the current vogue for connectedness that permeates the post-Darwinian sciences and our internet-obsessed times?
*bursts out laughing* Yes, writer! Please, tell me what an EMPATHIC place the internet is! Please! I'd LOVE to hear about THAT one!
What if, instead of empathy being the basis of modern social life, it is merely a product of changing scientific fashions?
Yes, because empathy is an entirely modern notion. "Love thy neighbor as thyself"? "Do unto others as others would do unto you"? “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy"? Nope, definitely not quotes over 2000 years old, nope! They must have been written yesterday!

Although empathy has become something of a political buzzword, it is surprisingly difficult to define.
Which is exactly how the politicians like it.
Moreover, a survey of the scientific and historical literature reveals that its meaning has shifted significantly over time.

The word first appeared, misspelled as enpathy, in a 1909 lecture by the Cornell psychologist Edward B Titchener, and in a translation credited to the Cambridge philosopher and psychologist James Ward the same year. Inspired by the German aesthetic term Einfühlung, meaning "feeling into", Titchener compared empathy to an enlivening process whereby an art object evoked actual or incipient bodily movements and accompanying emotions in the viewer.
This makes that quote from Kaworu Nagisa in Neon Genesis Evangelion about "[You, Shinji, are] worth earning my empathy" inadvertently hilarious.

This made it very different from the far older term sympathy, or Victorian notions of the "sympathetic imagination", which novelists such as George Eliot considered a cognitive act in which readers learned to extend themselves into the experiences, motives and emotions of fictional characters.

For empathy to become more like sympathy, it first had to transit from aesthetics to interpersonal psychology and the new brain sciences. The key shift came in 1992 when a group of Italian researchers observed neurons in macaque monkeys that fired both when they picked up a raisin and when they saw a person pick up a raisin.
Uh... and you don't explain why that triggered the transition.
A few years later, similar "mirror neurons" were identified in humans.

Since then, neuroscience has greatly expanded our understanding of the "empathy circuit". The key brain regions appear to be the amygdala, which is involved in the regulation of emotional learning and the reading of emotional expressions, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which activates when people experience their own pain or observe others in pain. Another important area is the anterior insula (AI), which lights up in response both to one's own pain and a loved one's pain, as well as to other emotional elicitors, such as disgusting tastes and images.

But perhaps the most important region of all is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), also known as the prefrontal lobe. A "hub" for social information processing, the MPC modulates self-awareness and our awareness of other people's thoughts and feelings. It also appears to play an important role in "marking" certain emotional experiences so as to provide us with emotional shortcuts to actions that are positive and therefore likely to be rewarding.
Yeah. 'This is going to lead to good stuff for me' =/= empathy. Nor, as will be claimed in a minute, does it equal morality. Idiot.

The neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio have shown that patients with damage to the ventromedial part of the MPC – the section closely associated with self-awareness – typically have great trouble learning from previous emotional experiences or making decisions, seeing equal merit in every course of action.
Oh, is THAT what's behind people who preach that ~everything is relative~ and ~one must not be judgmental~ and all that rubbish? Good to know.
Such patients also show less of a change in their heartbeat and other autonomic responses when shown distressing images. In this respect, their response mirrors that of sociopaths who may have suffered no medical trauma.

For some writers, these discoveries show that empathy is hard-wired and that we are primed for morality,
No, figuring out what's going to lead to benefits is NEITHER empathic nor moral. At least not in the way this writer means it.
hence the writer Jeremy Rifkin's claim that these circuits are the source of humanity's desire for "intimate participation and companionship".

However, as Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism spectrum disorders,
In case you don't know who that is, he's someone who claims that mathematical skill and rational thinking are traits of the ~extreme male brain~. Women, in contrast, are good at ~words~ and ~feelings~.

I have an extremely low opinion of the rationality of his male brain, but of course, I'm female. Obviously, those are just my feelings.
has shown, this is frequently not the case. Psychopaths, for instance, tend to be very good at reading other people's emotions while remaining emotionally unmoved themselves.
EXACTLY.

The premise of this article's definition of "empathy" just fell apart, goodnight.

...Confound it, it's still going?
Adolescents with a history of violence and diagnoses of "conduct disorder" exhibit similar traits.

By contrast, people with autism and Asperger's syndrome are very poor at reading non-verbal emotional signals and other social clues, but, once they become aware of how others are feeling, they are capable of sharing those emotions intensely. The result is that, while both psychopaths and people with Asperger's could both be characterised as having "zero degrees of empathyQUOTATION MARK!,
No, you said NOTHING about defining empathy in terms of being able to read social cues earlier. Can you remember your own definitions, please?

...I could make snide comments, based upon observation, about certain issues with empathy that frequently crop up in people with Asperger's traits, but "being unable to read cues" isn't one of them.
only psychopaths are capable of extreme cruelty.

Where Baron-Cohen and others run into difficulty is in accounting for emotions such as schadenfreude. Far from being a form of counter-empathy, schadenfreude appears to involve empathically mirroring another person's distress and taking pleasure in that distress at the same time.
That's right, it's difficult to account for people feeling pain and pleasure at the same time, folks.

Masochists, go home. You don't exist. Prominent neurologists say so, and we all know that prominent scientists are always right~
Indeed, in role-playing games involving "altruistic punishment",
Would you kindly explain what that means rather than rambling on about definitions of empathy that you yourself admit are flawed?
brain researchers have found that both the ACC and the dorsal striatum – the brain's pleasure/reward centre – are activated.

Neuroscientific approaches also tend to give too little weight to the cognitive dimensions of empathy. A horrific illustration of this was the cold-blooded shooting of 69 Norwegian Labour activists by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011. At his trial, Breivik argued that he was fully capable of empathy but had used a "meditation technique" to override his feelings. "If you are going to be capable of executing such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind, your psyche, for years," he explained.

As the German historian of emotions Ute Frevert puts it: "The fact that human beings are naturally equipped to feel what others feel does not mean that they always do so. They might just turn away and act indifferent."
Yes. Now will you stop slobbering over how empathy is the be-all and end-all of human society, and start thinking about morality and rational consideration of the rights of others?

So how can we make it less likely that people such as Breivik or Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old responsible for the horrific shooting in December in Newtown, Connecticut, commit acts of mass murder in future?
Apparently not.

The most common answer is by fostering greater perspective-taking. Decades of scientific research show that people are kinder to those they view as human beings.
ALSO, BEARS DEFECATE IN THE WOODS! THE POPE IS CATHOLIC! AND DUMBLEDORE IS GAY!
The reason is that,
Well, for MOST people, the reason is that we treat people slightly differently than we treat coffee tables. For one, people suffer, and coffee tables don't. For another, one doesn't communicate, forge friendships, or otherwise emotionally interact with coffee tables. For yet another, if a person is damaged, you can't just call in a repairman or buy a new one. For a really cynical one, if you hurt a coffee table, it doesn't seek to get back at you. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is really not something about which one needs to devise fancy explanations. There are so many reasons human beings are not like coffee tables that it's a true Captain Obvious remark to say 'People treat things they view as human beings differently than how they treat things they view as objects!'.

And it makes me want to both cry with laughter and shake scientists by the shoulders that it took decades of scientific research to show this. Really? Does it also take these geniuses decades to prove that water is wet, humans perceive cloudless skies as blue during the daytime, and healthy grass is usually green?
when we make the imaginative effort to step into the shoes of another person and see things from their perspective, we become less capable of ignoring their suffering. Indeed, brain imaging studies of Buddhists who use meditation exercises to contemplate compassion on a daily basis show increased activation of the amygdala and other parts of the brain's empathy circuit.

Novels, television OXFORD COMMA! and the internet can also foster greater empathy
O RLY?
by exposing us to the perspectives of people whose lives we would not otherwise consider. This is particularly the case when empathy is married with "humanitarian reason" – the force that Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker credits for the steady decline in levels of societal violence since the Enlightenment.
Yeah. Humanitarian reason is RATHER IMPORTANT.

You know why? Because working off emotions alone is a one-way ticket to black-and-white thinking. Either you like people, in which case you're all fluffy and nice, or you dislike them, in which case you treat them like scum. With reason, one at least grits one's teeth and admits that those they dislike can have good points and those they like can be flawed. Without reason? Hahaha, hope you enjoy naked lunacy.

I have a grudge against the worship of emotion-sans-reason. I admit this. But I believe myself to have some very good reasons.

However, as the response last year to Invisible Children's video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony showed, this sort of empathy can be short-lived. Yes, nearly 100 million people shared Invisible Children's video on YouTube, but the outcry against Kony was temporary and people quickly found new objects for their indignation.
Yeah, that was because it came out that Invisible Children had its own agenda, that they had portrayed the Ugandans inaccurately and in a paternalistic manner, and that the Ugandans themselves said BUTT OUT. It was NOT a binary, oh-people-were-so-uncaring-and-shallow-not-to-drop-everything-to-focus-upon-this-right-away issue.

Moreover, far from being a guide to what is right, empathy often leads us astray,
YES. VERY MUCH SO.
as when judges go easier on white-collar criminals who share their social background, which is why we frequently invoke other values and principles to balance such tendencies. This is precisely the argument made by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt maintains that empathy, or what he labels the "harm/care" module, is just one of several emotional dispositions that undergird our moral outlook, the others being fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and purity/sanctity. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that, while liberals focus almost entirely on care and fairness,
And social liberty. Do remember that.
conservatives tend to give equal weight to all six dispositions.

In theory, this should be good news for Osborne as he seeks to counter perceptions that his austerity measures are "uncaring",
No, that is NOT the counter-argument. The argument given by that standpoint is that the austerity measures may be uncaring, but more things are important than whether they're "caring". You can debate as to whether or not that argument is correct, but first, you need to debate about the correct argument.

Reading comprehension, do you have it?
and even better news for Republicans, especially as something like 42% of the American electorate self-identify as conservative. However, as Obama's response to Mitt Romney's unfortunate remarks about the "47%" underlined, the perceived absence of empathy is a powerful weapon with which to browbeat a political opponent.
The perceived absence of empathy is a powerful weapon with which to browbeat anyone. Has this author ever interacted with other people? Like, any other people?
Perhaps this is why, rather than defending his comments about the 47% on traditional conservative grounds, Romney spent the closing weeks of last year's campaign desperately trying to persuade voters that he was just as compassionate as Obama.
Some say that was a terminal error on his part...

Even before hurricane Sandy upset the candidates' campaign plans, however, that was not an argument that carried much weight with the undecideds and, following the pictures of Obama embracing the victims of the storm damage in New Jersey, it was pretty much game, set OXFORD COMMA! and match to the incumbent.

Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the 2012 presidential election, it is that empathy is here to stay and that where candidates once talked about "the economy, stupid" they would now be well-advised to use a different E-word.
Ha. Actually, politics entirely aside, it's never a good idea to counter the empathy card with "No, I'm more empathic!". The person pulling it will continue to claim that you have ~NO SOOOOOOUL~ until you either agree with them completely, you throw your hands up
and walk away (losing the argument), or they guilt-trip you into submission. Once you've conceded that it's a battle of the emotions, it's only a matter of who can be more emotional. And if you were at all open to being hit by the empathy card, then you obviously lost that battle from the start.

Putting on a shit-eating grin, agreeing that you have no soul, and charging on with your side of the argument anyway may not be pleasant, but it's the only way I've found to 'win' arguments like that. To put it in the most charitable way possible, emotional thinkers often do poorly when confronted when someone who doesn't immediately cave to emotional appeals.

And I know that makes me sound unpleasant, but I've been in situations where the choice was to be unpleasant or be an emotional punching bag. As people may have guessed, I don't choose "punching bag". :P

Point being, Romney was an idiot. Next.

---

Altruistic punishers: when it feels good to act cruelly

It took you THIS long to define it?!
Empathy is not the only "moral emotion" that is enjoying a renaissance thanks to social neuroscience. Scientists have also been probing the biological processes involved in trust and altruism.

One theory is that when we empathise oxytocin and other chemicals flood the brain's pleasure centres, resulting in a "warm glow" effect. Similar surges occur when people are asked to play economic exchange games designed to elicit trust.

According to neuroeconomists such as Paul Zak, this suggests that empathy and trust are two sides of the same adaptive response – the idea being that our brains have evolved so that it literally feels good to empathise and to trust people.
It feels good to trust people because you don't have to spend emotional effort being careful around them and rational effort working our how to be careful around them. Hello? Have you dealt with human beings, writer?

Primatologists such as Frans de Waal believe that altruism may be the result of similar selection pressures. Spontaneous assistance has long been observed in apes, hence the adoption of orphans by wild male chimpanzees who may devote years of costly care to unrelated juveniles.
Ah-ah-ah, but were they completely unrelated, or were they from the same pack? Or nephews/nieces/cousins? Not all genetic success is based upon the success of the direct line, you know.
And, as the Chicago experiment illustrates, rats also exhibit similar altruistic behaviour without their altruism being repaid.
Being IMMEDIATELY repaid. Being IMMEDIATELY repaid.

I somehow suspect that if you repeated the experiment enough times with no repayment over a sufficiently long interval, they would eventually stop trying. But nobody screams "I FED UP WITH THIS WIRRRLD" and runs off in anguish over just a few instances of altruistic behavior not being repaid.

In the case of humans, altruism is more complicated as COMMA! over the course of a lifetime COMMA! we will co-operate with thousands of genetically unrelated strangers with whom we are unlikely to interact again. In such societies, the advantages of forming a good reputation are minimal.
Ahahaha WHAT THE ****?!

That reputation can spread to other "genetically unrelated strangers", you IDIOT! My GAD! Have! You! EVER! Interacted! With! Other! Human! Beings!?
At the same time, it is easy for unscrupulous individuals, known as "free-riders", to exploit the "trusting" instincts of the majority.
And it gets easier and easier as the society grows larger. Just commenting.

To explains this, neuroeconomists posit that a unique form of co-operation has evolved in human societies in which social norms are learned, co-operators are altruistically rewarded OXFORD COMMA! and free-riders are altruistically punished.
*convenient omission of how it's not just the free-riders that are punished, it's also the free-thinkers*

One of the purposes of social norms is to instill moral behavior, yes. But social norms themselves are amoral. The process described here is the evolutionary advantage of groupthink. Groupthink can encourage or discourage altruistic/self-centered, selfless/selfish, and sociopathic/empathic behavior.

I REALLY DO NOT LIKE the pushing of groupthink as inherently empathic. Anyone with knowledge of history should start scenting smoke and blood at the glorification of groupthink, because groupthink is the gospel of the mob. And there is no creature less empathic and more brutal than the mob.

Feel free to disagree with me. Differing opinions are a great thing. But, as far as I'm concerned, if you want to be empathic, be empathic because you believe it to be right, not because society tells you so.

Because if you're empathic because society tells you so, then you will shoot your neighbor in the face when society tells you so.

This theory is supported by studies of economic role-playing games in which punishment is used to motivate two players to co-operate and a failure to show and reciprocate altruism leaves both players worse off.

However, such games also pose a problem for the notion that humans are hard-wired for pro-sociality and morality as brain scans of altruisitic punishers show that they both empathise with the free-rider and take an active pleasure in his or her punishment. In other words, as anyone who has experienced schadenfreude knows, sometimes it feels good to act cruelly.
And morality NEVER involves punishment, folks! You heard it from a news writer, it MUST be true!

(Oh, and by the way, if you've ever said to yourself 'I deserved that' or otherwise taken bitter pleasure in your own pain - you're obviously sadistic, or antisocial and amoral, or something. 'Cos a news writer said so, and so it MUST be true!)

Anyway, that's that. I'm just in an irritable mood this week, I suppose. :P