Our Percieved Empathy
Just like the title suggested, it’s about the discrepancy of empathy based on how things are told or seen. For example, why do we take the case of a plane crash so seriously and tragic if it includes only a few hundred people while we neglect and dismiss the case of a year's report of car crashes as normal? Both cases are tragic of course but the empathy levels we show are vastly different. That being said, it would not be wrong to say this is due to the feeling of self-control we have during a car versus the uncontrollable fate of an airplane but I think you get the rough meaning what I mean.
I got this topic today thanks to Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's debate back in 2018.
While it was released in 2018, I only listened to it in 2022. Of course, it’s still three years from now which is a long time but the reason I am writing this is because I found the concept remarkable back then as well today which is why I’m sharing it here.
The best to tell this is by paraphrasing Sam Harris in the debate: Empathy in humans can be strange since if we had a well-crafted story of a poor young child then we feel a strong emotional connection but if we suddenly brought in a younger sibling, the emotional connection weakens. Researchers seem to call this Compassion Fade.
It only weakens but it is interesting to note that we are numbed to the data if it’s hundred of thousands of people died during through a genocide. Such data often gets less empathy than even the well-crafted story.
Our empathy doesn’t scale well if it involves multiple people. Just because there are two people who suffer means suddenly we are going to exactly double the empathy or multiply by a hundred if it's a hundred people.
Our reaction to a million or a thousand people dying seems strangely the same.
What I fear is that we numb our empathy to a severe degree. Hundreds of people are already a lot but due to the media exposure, even millions of people dying overall seems lackluster. The numbers are thrown as they wish. Few even think hundreds of millions or tens of millions die every year or cannot fathom the vastness of a billion people.
Jordan Peterson also raises a good point (paraphrasing): If things weren’t this way, you’d be weeping constantly for the catastrophic fate of sentient beings on the earth but it’s obvious that you can’t handle it. You can barely handle your own suffering and maybe a bit of your family.
I think we are coming to a conclusion about this intuitively and it makes sense if you know a bit of evolutionary biology which Bret Weinstein (Moderator of the debate) talked about: “I think it’s an indication of exactly the problem of our evolved structures not matching the present because the point is they don’t match because we take care of our families but they don’t match because if you encountered the starving girl, that’s some sort of crude measure of suffering in your local environment [and] were you in the past now, you can encounter this girl on the television. It’s not clear what it should mean to you right now.”
Of course, there is more to this discussion and disagreements on the specifics but I personally found these particular snippets of the conversation useful.