There is general agreement that empathy is a central aspect of our humanity. Indeed, empathy plays a vital role in our interpersonal life, from bonding between parents and child, to enhancing affiliation among conspecifics, to understanding others’ subjective psychological states. Empathy motivates various kinds of prosocial behaviors, such as comforting and helping. It can also, in certain contexts, inhibit interpersonal aggression. Empathy increases trust, rapport, and affinity. There is a functional relation between empathy and guilt. Empathy can promote collective action by enhancing other-regarding motives and reducing self-regarding concerns, thus fostering cohesiveness and cooperation within human societies. However, contrary to what is commonly assumed, empathy is not always a driver of moral behavior. Here, morality is viewed as a set of biological and cultural adaptations, including values, norms, and practices, that evolved to regulate selfishness and facilitate cooperation (Curry, Reference Curry, Shackelford and Hansen2016).
The wealth of empirical findings from behavioral and social sciences demonstrates a complex relationship between morality and empathy (Decety & Cowell, Reference Decety and Cowell2014). Indeed, at times, empathy can interfere with morality by introducing partiality toward an individual, countering the moral principle of justice for all. Empathy is less likely to be felt for groups than for identifiable victims (Västfjäll et al., Reference Västfjäll, Slovic, Mayorga and Peters2014). It gives higher priority to friends than strangers. Empathy is parochial, favoring in-group over out-group members (Bruneau et al., Reference Bruneau, Cikara and Saxe2017). However, empathy can provide the emotional fire and the impetus to relieve a victim’s suffering. It can counter rationalization and derogation (Decety & Cowell, Reference Decety and Cowell2015). All of these examples, whether they are drawn from laboratory experiments or from real-world situations, reveal a complex functional relationship between affect, cognition, empathy, and moral decision making.
Empathy is costly, in that it draws upon attentional and emotional resources, but it is also beneficial in maintaining social relationships and serving the needs of others (DeSteno, Reference DeSteno2015). The empathy that we experience as a balance of these costs and benefits is not always under our control. It involves unconscious mechanisms to tune its responsiveness. While we may deliberately choose whether or not to feel empathy for a stranger, caring for our kin, close friends, and folks we associate with is unavoidable, almost like an impulse (Hodges & Klein, Reference Hodges and Klein2001). However, some have argued that being empathetic can also result from motivated choices to prioritize and balance competing goals within specific social contexts (Cameron, Reference Cameron2018).
In this chapter, I propose that empathy is a dynamic interpersonal phenomenon that encompasses three interacting functional components:
(1) Emotional contagion (affect sharing or emotional empathy), which is a quasi-instantaneous way to acquire and share social information. Such transmission of information between individuals is an adaptive evolutionary mechanism for individuals in danger;
(2) Empathic concern (sympathy or compassion), which piggybacks on the caring motivation, a specific biological adaptation that is both narrow in scope and yet highly flexible; and
(3) Perspective taking, the capacity to make inferences about and represent one’s own and others’ intentions, emotions, beliefs, and motives.
I draw on evolutionary theory, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to demonstrate that emotional contagion is unconsciously socially modulated. Empathic concern, by contrast, is relatively selective with regards to the input to which it responds and particularly sensitive to stimuli that have been important in the evolutionary past. As a corollary, the degree to which we experience empathy is partly constrained by information-processing biases that channel certain kinds of environmental input selected by the ecological pressures tied to our evolutionary history. These limits express themselves in unconscious, rapid, almost automatic tendencies to care more for some people but less for others, or for one person and not for many. Understanding the ultimate causes and proximate mechanisms of empathy allows characterizing the kind of information that gets prioritized as input and the kinds of behaviors they prompt as output. It also contributes to identification of its limits and which situational factors exacerbate empathic failure, which is essential if we want to mitigate our cognitive biases. Together, this knowledge is useful at a theoretical level as well as at a practical level: It provides information about how to reframe situations to activate alternative evolved systems in ways that promote normative moral conduct compatible with our current societal aspirations.
As a first step, I first describe the architecture of empathy and how it serves a motivational function to value others’ welfare.
11.1 The Architecture of Empathy
The word “empathy” has been used as an umbrella under which definitions vary enormously. This makes it difficult to determine which psychological function empathy relates to and which role it plays in morality (Batson, Reference Batson, Decety and Ickes2009). Differentiating conceptualizations is therefore necessary because they reflect distinct psychological processes that vary widely in their phenomenology, functions, and evolved biological mechanisms. Moreover, inconsistent definitions of empathy have a negative impact on both research and practice, especially in the domains of law, medicine, education, and decision making (Decety, Reference Decety2020).
Phenomenologically, the notion of empathy reflects an ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, often combined with a motivation to care about their well-being. This definition, although useful in interpersonal communication, remains vague in the specification of the underlying psychological mechanisms and their biological instantiation. Progress carried out over the past decades in social neuroscience has greatly contributed to clarifying the functions of empathy and their underlying component processes. This discipline is based on a resolutely interdisciplinary enterprise including evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, neurobiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and behavioral economics, and on the vertical integration of multiple levels of analysis, from the molecular to the socio-cultural context (Cacioppo & Decety, Reference Cacioppo and Decety2011).
Theoretical and empirical work from social neuroscience converge to characterize empathy as a multidimensional phenomenon reflecting a capacity to share, understand, and respond to others’ emotions. Empathy comprises several evolved functional components that are emotional (sharing affect with another), cognitive (understanding the other’s subjective state), and motivational (feeling concerned for another) (Decety & Jackson, Reference Decety and Jackson2004). These components flexibly interact with one another and operate by way of automatic (bottom-up) and controlled (top-down) processes. Yet they can be dissociated, as they rely on partially separable information-processing neural systems in the brain and underlie different psychological functions (Shdo et al., Reference Shdo, Ranasinghe, Gola, Mielke, Sukhanov, Miller and Rankin2018). This model of empathy combines both representational aspects and processes involved in decision making.
11.2 The Adaptive Value of Empathy
To properly understand empathy and its contribution to moral decision making, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Ultimate explanations are concerned with the fitness consequences of a trait or behavior – the why question. Proximate explanations address the way in which that functionality is achieved – the how question. Proximate causes are important, but they only tell part of the story. Ultimate explanations go below the surface, focusing on evolutionary functions. Ultimate and proximate explanations are not the opposite ends of a continuum, and we should not choose between them (Scott-Phillips et al., Reference Scott-Phillips, Dickins and West2011); though distinct from one another, they are complementary.
An important aspect to keep in mind is that adaptations must be understood in terms of survival and reproduction in the historical environments and ecological constraints in which they were selected. Many of our cognitive biases are heuristics – that is, simple, approximate, efficient rules or algorithms, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Our decision biases, errors, and misjudgments are not necessarily flaws. Rather, they are design features with which natural selection has equipped Homo sapiens to make decisions in ways that consistently enhanced our hominid ancestors’ inclusive fitness (Kenrick & Griskevicius, Reference Kenrick and Griskevicius2013). While these heuristics generally promote utility, they are fallible in predictable ways, and they can misfire in our contemporary socio-ecological context.
The essence of empathy, and its primary form across many species, is the communication of an emotional state from one individual to another. Affective signaling and communication between conspecifics contribute to inclusive fitness by facilitating coordination and cohesion, increasing defense against predators, and bonding individuals to one another within a social group. It is a widespread phenomenon in a great many species (Mendl et al., Reference Mendl, Burman and Paul2010). Discriminating and communicating emotions to conspecifics (at least on the main dimensions of valence and intensity) allows the facilitation and the regulation of social interactions. When emotions are transmitted from one individual to the next by vocal, facial, or chemical channels, it leads to information transfer and accelerated coordination between group members, and it facilitates decision making (Briefer, Reference Briefer2018). This spontaneous transfer of internal states is fundamental for survival, and social group cohesion. However, affect sharing does not lead to one single kind of decision making when it comes to moral judgment or conduct (Loewenstein & Small, Reference Loewenstein and Small2007).
Moreover, our capacity to experience affect, important in guiding our judgments, decisions, and driving our behavior, is limited. Many situations do not induce much distress in the observer. Some of the failures to experience empathy to others in distress or in need could be a result of not cognitively representing their situation and suffering in a meaningful way (Slovic, Reference Slovic2007). The capacity for perspective taking, which may be unique to our species, can expand the scope of affect sharing. Importantly, attention seems to be a necessary requirement for empathic feelings. One study placed participants in a position of reacting empathically to children in need of help and manipulated their ability to visually attend to a single victim or being distracted by several others (Dickert & Slovic, Reference Dickert and Slovic2009). Empathy responses were lower and reaction times were longer when the photo of a child was presented with distractor photos. When information about children is processed in a way that fosters vivid representations, affective reactions are stronger than when this information is processed in a detached, abstract, or intangible way.
Behavioral economics studies have shown that people donate much more after reading the story of one victim than a story about many victims (Small et al., Reference Small, Loewenstein and Slovic2007). Identified, single victims arouse empathy and personal distress to a greater extent than statistical victims. This effect has been suggested to account for the failure to bring meaning to abstractly represented large numbers or statistical victims, as compared to identifiable victims, and may explain why disasters that cost a large number of lives seem to evoke less of a helping response than disasters that befall an individual (Fetherstonhaugh et al., Reference Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson and Friedrich1997; Västfjäll et al., Reference Västfjäll, Slovic, Mayorga and Peters2014).
Affective information influences decision processes and subsequent costly behavioral responses. For example, Kogut and Ritov (Reference Kogut and Ritov2005) asked participants how much money they would give to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child or eight children. They found that participants were willing to donate the same amount. But, when the single child’s name, age, and picture were shown, the donations dramatically increased for the single child, and this effect was mediated by the participants’ reported empathy. Showing the photo of a young child has a great impact in evoking strong emotions. On September 2, 2015, the photo of a Syrian child lying face-down on a Turkish beach filled social media and the front pages of newspapers worldwide. This photo of a single child had more impact than statistical reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths of Syrians fleeing the civil war, including on donations to the Red Cross (Slovic et al., Reference Slovic, Västfjäll, Erlandsson and Gregory2017). It is as if people who had been unmoved by the rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after seeing this photograph.
11.3 Proximate Mechanisms of Affect Sharing
Emotional contagion that leads to affect sharing is an important determinant of prosocial behavior. However, it can produce different decisions, depending on intra- and interpersonal factors, and social context. Resultant motivations can even lead to a lack of response to be of assistance. In highly arousing situations, people who are oversensitive may become upset and distressed. Emotional distress may result in withdrawing from the stressor, resulting in decreasing prosocial behavior or in helping the other merely to reduce one’s own discomfort (Tice et al., Reference Tice, Bratslavsky and Baumeister2001). The reduction of personal distress can be a form of emotional regulation by motivating actions that make oneself feel better. Thus, how emotional contagion can elicit either an egoistic or an altruistic motivation remains an important question but is difficult to distinguish. This is an ongoing debate in social psychology (see Cialdini et al., Reference Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce and Neuberg1997 vs. Batson et al., Reference Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley and Birch1981).
The neurobiological mechanisms of emotional contagion in nonhuman animals, and in humans, are not entirely understood, with the exception of the contagion of stress and pain. The former results in the activation of the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis (Engert et al., Reference Engert, Linz and Grant2019). In rodents, perceiving a conspecific in physical distress can facilitate social approach and helping behavior (Langford et al., Reference Langford, Tuttle, Brown, Deschenes, Fischer, Mutso, Root, Sotocinal, Stern, Mogil and Sternberg2010). Rats help cage mates escape from a transparent restrainer, and the helping rat engages in such prosocial behavior even if it does not gain any social reward from it (Bartal et al., Reference Bartal, Decety and Mason2011). Blocking emotional contagion with an anxiolytic agent in these rats inhibits their helping behavior, which demonstrates the importance of some level of vicarious distress to prompt the prosocial response (Ben-Ami Bartal et al., Reference Ben-Ami Bartal, Shan, Molasky, Murray, Williams, Decety and Mason2016). Another series of experiments involved a pool of water in which one rat was made to swim for its life, while another rat was in a cage adjacent to it (Sato et al., Reference Sato, Tan, Tate and Okada2015). The results showed that rats quickly learned to open the door to rescue their cage mates from the pool of water. Importantly, the rats did not open the door when the cage mate was not in distress. Overall, these results indicate that the decision to open the door to liberate the cage mate was elicited by processing distress cues.
Prairie voles match their anxiety-related behavior and corticosterone response of the stressed cage mate (Burkett et al., Reference Burkett, Andari, Johnson, Curry, de Waal and Young2016). In that study, exposure to a stressed familiar cage mate increased activity in neurons located in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the observer animal and led to grooming and licking behavior directed toward that conspecific. The ACC contains multisensory neurons that respond both when a rodent experiences pain and while witnessing another conspecific experiencing pain. Deactivating this region with muscimol microinjections impairs the social transmission of distress and impedes prosocial approach behavior (Carrillo et al., Reference Carrillo, Han, Migliorati, Liu, Gazzola and Keysers2019). Infusing an oxytocin receptor antagonist into this region also eliminates the partner-directed prosocial response (Burkett et al., Reference Burkett, Andari, Johnson, Curry, de Waal and Young2016). Oxytocin is a neuropeptide mainly produced in the hypothalamus. It makes social information more salient by connecting brain areas involved in processing social information and helps link those areas to the reward system. Importantly, consoling behavior occurred only between those voles who were familiar with each other but not strangers. This suggests that the behavior is not simply a reaction to aversive cues but modulated by social cues of familiarity.
In humans too, and in accordance with evolutionary theory, perceived similarity or closeness between people increases the degree to which emotional contagion takes place and leads to prosociality. The perceived overlap between self and other is an important predictor of helping behavior and motivates empathic concern (Cialdini et al., Reference Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce and Neuberg1997). People display higher levels of prosocial behavior toward others who are similar to them, are members of their group, share their political attitudes, or favor one individual in need rather than many, and they do so because they experience higher levels of empathetic concern under these conditions (Dovidio & Banfield, Reference Dovidio, Banfield and Wright2015).
Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated that empathy relies on overlapping processing of personal and vicarious experience, or shared neural representations (Decety & Sommerville, Reference Decety and Sommerville2003; Lockwood, Reference Lockwood2016). In particular, the perception and even imagination of another person suffering leads to an increase in neuro-hemodynamic activity in a restricted network of brain regions that are also involved in the first-hand experience of pain (Figure 11.1). These regions include the periaqueductal gray (PAG), insula, and ACC. This latter region contains multisensory neurons and belongs to the medial pain system that processes the affective aspects of nociceptive information (Lamm et al., Reference Lamm, Decety and Singer2011). It is important to note that there is no complete overlap between neural representations engaged in pain processing and those engaged in the vicarious experience of pain (Krishnan et al., Reference Krishnan, Woo, Chang, Ruzic, Gu, López-Solà, Jackson, Pujol, Fan and Wager2016). The same is true for vicarious neural representations of pleasure and reward. A meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of rewarding outcomes in social contexts found that both vicarious and personal rewards activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and amygdala, and the latter also engage the nucleus accumbens and regions involved in theory of mind (Morelli et al., Reference Morelli, Sacchet and Zaki2015). The implication of both shared and nonshared neural representations in vicarious experience is not surprising, given the different sensory inputs during personal and vicarious experience (Lockwood, Reference Lockwood2016).
Figure 11.1 Brain circuits associated with different functional components of empathy
11.4 Affect Sharing Is Socially Modulated
The vicarious experience and neural response to others’ joys and sorrows is not automatic. Rather, it is modulated by beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and group coalitions. Imagining a loved one in physical pain is associated with greater signal increase in the insula and ACC than imagining a stranger in pain (Cheng et al., Reference Cheng, Chen, Lin, Chou and Decety2010). Witnessing a rival’s failure triggers a subjective feeling of pleasure parametrically reflected by neural activity in the rewards system (Cikara & Fiske, Reference Cikara and Fiske2013). Stronger emotional reactions and associated neural responses are elicited when witnessing the pain of someone from one’s own ethnic group than when observing pain from an out-group member (Contreras-Huerta et al., Reference Contreras-Huerta, Baker, Reynolds, Batalha and Cunnington2013; Xu et al., Reference Xu, Zuo, Wang and Han2009). This bias to the pain expressed by other-race individuals changes over time and is mitigated by familiarity of contact with people of the out-group. One such study recruited Chinese students who had first arrived in Australia within the past six months to five years and assessed their level of contact with other ethnic groups across various contexts (Cao et al., Reference Cao, Contreras-Huerta, McFadyen and Cunnington2015). During fMRI scanning, participants were shown videos of own-race/other-race individuals, as well as own-group/other-group individuals, expressing pain. The typical group bias in neural responses to observed pain was evident, whereby neural activation was greater for pain in own-race compared to other-race people. Critically, the response increased significantly with the level of contact participants reported with people of the other ethnic groups.
The perception of another person in distress or pain is modulated by competitive social contexts. For instance, in a competitive interaction, a competitor’s pain leads to positive emotions in oneself, whereas perceiving of the competitor’s joy results in distress (Lanzetta & Englis, Reference Lanzetta and Englis1989). This effect occurs very early during the perception of emotional expression, as demonstrated by a study using event-related potentials (ERPs) and a card game (Yamada et al., Reference Yamada, Lamm and Decety2011). In that experiment, participants played a card game under the belief that they were doing so jointly with another player who sat in an adjoining room and whose smiles and frowns in response to winning or losing in the game could be observed on a computer screen. Depending upon the experimental condition, the other player’s facial expressions conveyed one of two opposing values to the participant. In the empathic condition, her emotional expressions were congruent with the participant’s outcome (win or loss), whereas in the counter-empathic one, they signaled incongruent outcomes. Results revealed that counter-empathic responses are associated with modulation of early sensory processing (~170 ms after stimulus onset) of emotional cues.
In a neuroeconomics study, participants were engaged in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma game with confederate individuals who were playing the game either fairly or unfairly (Singer et al., Reference Singer, Seymour, O’Doherty, Stephan, Dolan and Frith2006). Following this behavioral manipulation, participants were scanned while watching fair and unfair players in pain. Compared to the observation of fair players, participants’ observation of unfair players in pain led to significantly reduced activation in brain areas coding the affective components of pain. Another study showed that the failures of an in-group member, like a fellow Red Sox fan, are experienced as painful and are associated with increased neural response in the ACC and insula, whereas failures of a rival out-group member, like a fellow Yankees fan, give a sense of pleasure, which is associated with reward-related signal augmentation in the striatum (Cikara et al., Reference Cikara, Botvinick and Fiske2011).
This absence of vicarious experience for rivals’ pain should not be understood as an empathic failure. Rather, this reflects an adaptive response in competitive situations and social coalitions. Humans are spontaneously tribal. The tendency to favor in-group over out-group, especially when resources are scarce, has been observed in children before their second birthday (Jin & Baillargeon, Reference Jin and Baillargeon2017).
Mathematical modeling of social evolution as well as anthropological observations indicate that intragroup motivation to be invested in their own members’ welfare coevolved with intergroup competition over valuable resources. An optimal condition under which genetically encoded hyperprosociality can propagate is, paradoxically, when groups are in conflict. In line with cultural group selection theory (Richerson et al., Reference Richerson, Boyd and Henrich2010), it has been proposed that, during the late Pleistocene, groups with higher numbers of prosocial individuals cooperated more effectively and thus outcompeted others (Marean, Reference Marean2015). This synergy between cooperation and competition, which shapes our prosocial preferences, can be observed in both laboratory experiments and in the workplace (Francois et al., Reference Francois, Fujiwara and Van Ypersele2018).
Affect sharing is moderated by attitudes and prejudices toward people. For instance, one fMRI study demonstrated that the vicarious response is intensified or reduced by a priori attitudes toward individuals on video clips expressing the same pain intensity (Decety et al., Reference Decety, Echols and Correll2010). Study participants were more sensitive to the facial expressions of pain of individuals who were described as infected with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) as the result of a blood transfusion (thus clearly victims of a lack of medical foresight) than to the pain of individuals who were described to have contracted AIDS as the result of their illicit drug addiction and the sharing of needles (people often seen as responsible for their behavior). Moreover, controlling for both explicit and implicit AIDS biases, the more participants blamed these individuals, the less subjective pain they attributed to them as compared with healthy controls.
People easily distinguish between in-group members and outsiders. Social identity formation drives people to adopt arbitrary markers to signal their group membership. It can thus be expected that knowing the religious affiliation of someone suffering affects the vicarious response in the observer. One study recruited Christian and atheist participants who were all Han Chinese in Beijing and thus were highly similar in terms of facial features (Huang & Han, Reference Huang and Han2014). Event-related potentials, small voltages generated in neurons in response to specific events or stimuli, were recorded while participants viewed pain and neutral expressions of Chinese faces that were marked (with a symbol on a necklace) as Christians or atheist. The religious/irreligious identifications significantly modulated the ERPs’ amplitudes (200 ms after stimulus onset) to pain expressions, with larger amplitudes when an observer and a target shared religious (or irreligious) beliefs. Similarly, a simple difference in a single-word text label on a hand in pain, indicating the person’s religious affiliation (Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, or atheist), seems sufficient to modulate neural activity in the observer and can be predicted by the observer’s own religion (Vaughn et al., Reference Vaughn, Savjani, Cohen and Eagleman2018). In that study, the brain response was larger when participants viewed a painful event occurring to a hand labeled with their own religion (in-group) than to a hand labeled with a different religion (out-group). Importantly, the size of this bias correlated positively with the magnitude of participants’ dispositional empathy. Group biases have evolved for their adaptive functional roles. They encourage us to be kind to in-group members, who are likely to reciprocate, and at times to be hostile to out-group members, especially when resources are scarce. However, such biases are also the source of prejudice that conflict with our current social and political environment, and particularly the principle of justice for all.
Vicarious neural responses to others’ suffering are thus highly flexible and are dependent on sociomoral values (shared beliefs). Moral values exert a powerful motivational force that varies both in direction and intensity, guide the differentiation of just from unjust courses of action, and direct behavior toward desirable outcomes (Higgins, Reference Higgins, Brosch and Sander2015). For instance, people who are sensitive to animal suffering and become vegetarian for ethical reasons show a greater neural response when exposed to photos depicting animals suffering compared to omnivore participants (Filippi et al., Reference Filippi, Riccitelli, Falini, Di Salle, Vuilleumier, Comi and Rocca2010). Notably, vegan and vegetarian participants have greater neural activation while looking at photos of animals suffering than photos of humans suffering.
While affect sharing or emotional empathy is often portrayed as facilitating prosociality, affiliation, rapport, and linking, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it promotes morality. As discussed earlier in this chapter, it is unconsciously and rapidly modulated by various social factors that are evolutionarily advantageous, such as similarity of many kinds, including kinship, group memberships, and shared political attitudes or religious beliefs. The social context, the nature of the situation, and the characteristics of the person in need not only affect assessments of costs and rewards and the decisions about whether to engage in prosocial behavior but also shape empathic experiences (Dovidio & Banfield, Reference Dovidio, Banfield and Wright2015).
11.5 Empathic Concern
Empathic concern, also known as sympathy or compassion, is interwoven yet distinct from affect sharing, although the latter can elicit the former. Generalized parental nurturance seems the most likely evolutionary basis of empathic concern. In humans, the motivation for parental care is far more flexible and future-oriented than in any other mammalian species (Batson, Reference Batson and Decety2014; Zahn-Waxler et al., Reference Zahn-Waxler, Schoen, Decety, Roughley and Schramme2018).
At the ultimate level, caring for offspring is a biological necessity. Our survival as a species would be strongly compromised without it. Kin selection is the main force driving the evolution of parental care (Hamilton, Reference Hamilton1964). Both natural and sexual selection have led to the emergence of a motivation state that leads individuals to care for and promote the welfare of offspring. Without sufficiently close genetic relatedness and an appropriate ratio of benefits to costs, caretaking and other cooperative propensities that do not directly increase the helper’s own reproductive success would not have evolved.
Compared to other primates, human offspring are born more prematurely and more dependent, requiring exceptional care. This has been possible because Homo sapiens ancestors were cooperative breeders, also known as alloparenting. Caring for individuals other than one’s biological offspring seems to be a universal behavior among humans (Kenkel et al., Reference Kenkel, Perkeybile and Carter2017). In other apes, once youngsters are weaned, they are basically nutritionally independent. But in the case of early hominids, alloparental care and provisioning set the stage for infants to develop in new ways. Alloparental assistance allows mothers to conserve energetical resources, remain safer from predators, and live longer (Hrdy, Reference Hrdy, Decety and Christen2014). This pressure to care for vulnerable offspring gave rise to several adaptations such as powerful responses to distress vocalizations, neotenous traits, and classes of attachment-related behaviors between caregiver and offspring, including empathic concern (Goetz et al., Reference Goetz, Keltner and Simon-Thomas2010). Empathic concern has emerged as the affective component of a caregiving system, selected to raise vulnerable offspring to the age of viability, thus ensuring that genes are more likely to be passed on (Goetz et al., Reference Goetz, Keltner and Simon-Thomas2010). This motivational component of empathy relies on subcortical circuits that originally evolved to support parental caregiving and can be engaged for vulnerable and distressed others more generally (Vekaria et al., Reference Vekaria, O’Connell, Rhoads, Brethel-Haurwitz, Cardinale, Robertson, Walitt, VanMeter and Marsh2020).
At the proximate level, the caring motivation arises from a set of biological mechanisms located in the brainstem, hypothalamus, ventral pallidum, dorsal raphe nucleus, vmPFC, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (Kenkel et al., Reference Kenkel, Perkeybile and Carter2017). The caring motivation triggers oxytocin release that counteracts the effects of stress and encourages us to approach others and tend to their needs, and also the dopaminergic reward system, which mediates feelings of subjective pleasure when nurturing and helping. That is why it feels good to help and care. Neural activity in the mesolimbic reward circuit predicts donations to orphans depicted in photographs (Genevsky et al., Reference Genevsky, Västfjäll, Slovic and Knutson2013). In one fMRI study, even when subjects were forced to pay a tax to a local food bank, these reward pathways were activated – albeit not as much as when subjects chose to donate voluntarily some of their cash to the food bank (Harbaugh et al., Reference Harbaugh, Mayr and Burghart2007).
Valuing offspring is a highly positive experience in nonhuman animals (Ferris, Reference Ferris, Decety and Christen2014). In humans too, infant cues such as smiling or crying expressions are powerful motivators of parental behavior, activating dopamine-associated brain reward circuits. Increased activation of the mesolimbic reward pathway, including the nucleus accumbens (Strathearn et al., Reference Strathearn, Fonagy, Amico and Montague2009), and higher levels of oxytocin (Gordon et al., Reference Gordon, Zagoory-Sharon, Leckman and Feldman2010) are found in mothers and fathers in response to their infants’ cues.
It has long been known, since Konrad Lorenz’s notion of “Kindchenschema,” that neotenous characteristics, such as babyish faces, a big head, small nose, and big eyes, elicit social approach and caretaking behavior. These infantile physical characteristics, also known as neotenous cues, signal vulnerability and were favored by natural selection to facilitate provision of care. Adults with baby faces are perceived to have childlike traits – to be naïve, weak, warm, and honest. These neotenous cues inspire caretaking, protection, and compassion. These characteristics can also sway criminal sentencing and imprisonment decisions. Johnson and King (Reference Johnson and King2017) conducted an analysis of a random sample of 1,200 men who had been convicted of felony crimes in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area in 2009, including their booking photos. The results showed that baby-faced individuals were significantly less likely to be incarcerated, even after controlling for other relevant case characteristics. It is thus not all that surprising that the convicted terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose action killed 3 people and injured 260 during the Boston Marathon in 2013, has received a striking amount of sympathy (Rosin, Reference Rosin2013). Thus, caution should be in order regarding the role of empathy in criminal justice.
The proximate neural mechanisms of empathic concern are partially distinct from the mechanisms of affect sharing. In one fMRI study, participants listened to true biographies describing a range of human suffering such as children born with congenital disease, adults struggling with cancer, experiences of homelessness and other hardships (Ashar et al., Reference Ashar, Andrews-Hanna, Dimidjian and Wager2017). Participants were asked to provide moment-by-moment ratings of empathic concern and emotional distress while listening to these biographies. Empathic concern was associated with neural response in the striatum and vmPFC, whereas emotional distress was related with neural response in the insula and the somatosensory cortex. Another neuroimaging study reported that individuals with high dispositional empathic concern are more likely to engage in altruistic behavior, and this relationship was mediated by neural activity in the vmPFC and ventral striatum, regions involved in the reward anticipation circuit and the subjective valuation process (FeldmanHall et al., Reference FeldmanHall, Dalgleish, Evans and Mobbs2015).
The neurophysiological circuits for caring first evolved in the context of mother–infant relationships and subsequently became extended to others in groups of closely related individuals. A variety of kin-recognition mechanisms or heuristics have evolved to facilitate behavioral tendency to care and help (Neyer & Lang, Reference Neyer and Lang2003). Kin recognition is characterized by highly automatic, heuristic cue-based processes, such as familiarity or proximity, that are sometimes fallible. The fact that humans possess additional, more cognitive means of assessing kinship does not rule out the role of these earliest adaptations. The evolution of increasingly complex psychological mechanisms occurs by adding to, rather than replacing, previous mechanisms and this without any guarantee of optimality (Jacob, Reference Jacob1977). Behavioral genetics studies demonstrate that highly related people are more similar to each other on a variety of attitudes, values, and personality characteristics, and such similarities are used as kinship cues (Park et al., Reference Park, Schaller and Van Vugt2008). Thus, one can expect that empathic concern is more readily triggered when cues of similarity between self and other are salient. These cues are not limited to physical appearance and familiarity such as ethnicity, language, and accent; they include many dimensions of human social categorization and social identity, such as values, opinions, attitudes, and personality traits. Of course, this does not mean that empathic concern is solely a product of perceived similarity of the other to the self. Humans can feel empathic concern for a wide range of others in need, even dissimilar others, as long as they value their welfare (Batson et al., Reference Batson, Lishner, Cook and Sawyer2005). Furthermore, the neotenous characteristics that elicit attention, social approach, and caregiving do so regardless of kinship.
Empathic concern is a powerful motivator of costly prosocial behaviors (Batson, Reference Batson, Decety and Ickes2009), especially for members of one’s own social group. People tend to display more empathic concern toward in-group members and are more sensitive to perceived harmful behaviors committed by out-group members. Across cultural contexts (e.g., Americans vs. Arabs), research indicates that parochial empathy is a strong predictor of altruism and passive harm toward out-groups (Bruneau et al., Reference Bruneau, Cikara and Saxe2017). For example, individuals respond with more empathic concern when they perceive interpersonal harm perpetrated by someone from their own university as compared with when the perpetrator is from a different university, within the same country (Australia), and this reaction was associated with a neural response in the vmPFC (Molenberghs et al., Reference Molenberghs, Gapp, Wang, Louis and Decety2016). A recent study using a large national sample documented that high levels of dispositional empathic concern were predictive of social polarization (Simas et al., Reference Simas, Clifford and Kirkland2020). The authors also showed that individuals high in empathic concern disposition expressed greater partisan bias in evaluating contentious political events.
Taken together, empathic concern accounts for a positive emotional state associated with a motivation to care for the welfare of others. However, empathic concern is unconsciously influenced by various signals such as neotenous cues, interpersonal factors, and intergroup contexts, and may in certain situations motivate out-group hostility.
11.6 Perspective Taking
The capacity for perspective taking is the ability to put oneself in the place of someone else while recognizing their point of view, experiences, and beliefs. It is often invoked as a remedy for some of the empathy biases that, as I have discussed, influence moral decision making. In general, perspective taking often refers to understanding that another person has a different mental state than the observer, a construct that largely overlaps with theory of mind. Being exposed to narrative fiction spontaneously triggers perspective taking. Several studies with children and adults have demonstrated that reading stories fosters an understanding of other people, using implicit perspective taking, and correlates with better empathy and theory of mind (Mar, Reference Mar2018; Mumper & Gerrig, Reference Mumper and Gerrig2017).
Two ways people understand another’s subjective perspective are 1) using situational and dispositional factors to model the other’s perspective and 2) projecting themselves into the other (Ames, Reference Ames2004). Thus, perspective taking as a mental simulation requires executive functions, including attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. The related projection-and-correction account of simulation (Gordon, Reference Gordon, Gilead and Ochsner2021) is comparable to the anchoring and adjustment heuristic proposed by Epley et al. (Reference Epley, Keysar, Van Boven and Gilovich2004). These authors proposed that “individuals adopt others’ perspectives by initially anchoring on their own perspective, and then subsequently, and effortfully accounting for differences between themselves and others until a plausible estimate is reached” (Epley et al., Reference Epley, Keysar, Van Boven and Gilovich2004, p. 328).
There is evidence from cognitive neuroscience in support of the simulation theory, in that understanding what others experience partly relies on our own projections of what we would think and feel in similar situations (Steinbeis, Reference Steinbeis2016). While this process relies on shared neural representations between self and other, the perceiver must also maintain a self–other distinction (Decety & Sommerville, Reference Decety and Sommerville2003). Results from brain imaging and lesion studies in neurological patients converge in a number of regions and circuits implicated in perspective taking. For instance, Ruby and Decety (Reference Ruby and Decety2004) presented participants with short sentences depicting real-life situations that induce social emotions such as guilt, envy, pride, or embarrassment (e.g., someone opens the bathroom door that you have forgotten to lock), as well as emotionally neutral situations. They asked participants to imagine how they would feel in those situations and how their mother would feel in those situations. Regions involved in emotional processing were similarly activated in the conditions that included emotionally laden situations for both self and other perspectives, including the amygdala and the temporal poles. Importantly, adopting the other’s perspective led to a specific neural response in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) as well as the vmPFC. The TPJ plays a key role the sense of agency (Ruby & Decety, Reference Ruby and Decety2001) and computations in the social domain that require self–other distinction. The right TPJ is activated when participants mentally simulate actions from someone else’s perspective but not from their own (Ruby & Decety, Reference Ruby and Decety2001) or imagine painful experiences (Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff and Decety2006; Lamm et al., Reference Lamm, Batson and Decety2007) but not when they imagined these situations for themselves. The TPJ, because of its anatomical characteristics and connectivity, plays a pivotal role in self–other processing. Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies indicates that the TPJ is systematically associated with perspective-taking tasks, theory of mind, and detection of intentional agents in the environment (Carter & Huettel, Reference Carter and Huettel2013; Decety & Lamm, Reference Decety and Lamm2007). More recent work, using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, demonstrates that the TPJ is causally involved in the spontaneous attribution of mental states (Bardi et al., Reference Bardi, Six and Brass2017). Its temporary inhibition disrupts the updating of internally (self) and externally (other) generated representations.
There are two distinct ways in which people can take the perspective of suffering others. One form is thinking about how a suffering other feels, or “imagine-other” perspective taking; the other form is imagining oneself in the suffering other’s shoes, or “imagine-self” perspective taking (Buffone et al., Reference Buffone, Poulin, DeLury, Ministero, Morrisson and Scalco2017). Research in social psychology (e.g., Batson et al., Reference Batson, Lishner, Carpenter, Dulin, Harjusola-Webb, Stocks, Gale, Hassan and Sampat2003) has documented this distinction by showing that the imagine-other perspective evokes empathic concern or compassion, whereas imagine-self perspective taking induces both empathic concern and personal distress (i.e., a self-oriented aversive emotional response). In participants asked to either adopt an imagine-self or an imagine-other perspective while watching people experiencing somatic pain, neural response was detected in neural circuits involved in the first-hand experience of pain (Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff and Decety2006, Lamm et al., Reference Lamm, Batson and Decety2007), except in individuals with psychopathy, who have a profound lack of empathy (Decety et al., Reference Decety, Chen, Harenski and Kiehl2013). However, the imagine-self perspective led to higher activity in brain areas involved in the affective response to threat and pain, including the amygdala and ACC. Consistently, the imagine-self perspective led to a potentially debilitating physiological state of threat, compared to an imagine-other perspective during active pursuit of a helping goal (Buffone et al., Reference Buffone, Poulin, DeLury, Ministero, Morrisson and Scalco2017). In addition, this effect was mediated by perceiving the helping task as more demanding, suggesting that imagining self may increase the perceived difficulty of providing help.
Though it may be mentally taxing and energy costly, perspective taking has several positive consequences for downstream inter-group relations. For instance, adopting the perspective of an out-group member leads to a decrease in the use of explicit and implicit stereotypes for that individual and to more positive evaluations of that group as a whole (Galinsky & Moskowitz, Reference Galinsky and Moskowitz2000). Feelings of empathic concern induced by perspective taking can lead to valuing the welfare of an out-group target. This is what Oliner and Oliner (Reference Oliner and Oliner1988) found from interviewing 436 individuals who were involved in rescue activity of Jews in Nazi Europe, at great risk to themselves. Most of them frequently began with concern for a specific individual for whom compassion was felt – often individuals known previously. Importantly, while 37 percent were characteristically empathetic – centered on the needs of others, with emotions of compassion and sympathy, 52 percent were primarily normocentric – having strong feelings of obligation to a social reference group that imposed normative standards and social values on their behavior. Another 11 percent acted largely from autonomously derived moral principles (Allison, Reference Allison1990).
Perspective taking can boost empathic concern and influence how we value the welfare of a person. Thus, one can use empathic concern to increase valuing another and elicit prosocial behavior. While this can be a very good thing, it can also create problems for the moral principle of justice. For example, in one experiment, college students were told about a 10-year-old girl named Sheri Summers who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for treatment that would relieve her pain (Batson et al., Reference Batson, Klein, Highberger and Shaw1995). Participants learned that they could move her to the front of the waiting list. When simply asked what to do, most participants acknowledged that she had to wait because other more needy children were ahead of her. But if the participants were first asked to imagine what Sheri felt, they tended to choose to move her up, putting her ahead of children who were presumably more deserving. Here, empathy was more powerful than fairness, leading to a decision that most of us would see as unfair. Empathy triggered by perspective taking can produce myopia in the same way as egoistic self-interest.
The idea that perspective taking boosts empathic concern has recently been challenged by a meta-analysis examining whether individuals who received instructions to imagine the feelings of a distressed person experience more empathic concern than do individuals who receive no instructions or who receive instructions to remain objective (McAuliffe et al., Reference McAuliffe, Carter, Berhane, Snihur and McCullough2020). The authors found that empathy was greater when people were told to imagine the feelings of the needy person when compared to the condition where people were told to remain objective and detached. However, and more surprisingly, the study also found that individuals who were deliberately instructed to imagine how a suffering individual is feeling did not experience more empathic concern than subjects who received no instructions at all. Overall, this meta-analysis does not support the view that one can increase empathic concern by imagining what the other person is experiencing. However, the fact that people seem better at suppressing their empathy than they are at amplifying it (Zaki, Reference Zaki2014) suggests that we are walking around with naturally high amounts of empathy already.
11.7 Empathy Cannot Replace Reasoning in Moral Judgment
Empathy is a complex, multifaceted construct that encompasses affect sharing, perspective taking, and a motivated concern for others’ well-being. These functional components often work in concert, yet each is implemented in specific brain circuits. This has important implications for moral reasoning and decision making.
At the most basic level, emotions are attention-getting and supplement the information provided by rational belief and inference. Perspective taking can be used to adopt the subjective viewpoint of others, and this can facilitate the extent to which an observer understands that a victim experiences harm or distress. Conversely, affect sharing in reaction to the plight of another may be foundational for motivating prosocial behaviors and moral condemnation (Patil et al., Reference Patil, Calò, Fornasier, Cushman and Silani2017). Yet affect sharing, elicited by emotional contagion or by perspective taking, may also lead to personal distress, the aversive affect arising in response to others’ suffering, which does not necessarily lead to prosocial behavior and may even cloud our moral judgment.
The aversion to harming others is an integral part of the moral sense, underlying deeply rooted moral intuitions across societies (Haidt & Joseph, Reference Haidt and Joseph2004). Asking individuals to simulate harmful actions such as discharging a gun into someone else is sufficient to generate an aversive response accompanied with autonomic nervous system changes (Cushman et al., Reference Cushman, Gray, Gaffey and Mendes2012). Such a reaction emerges very early in development and is considered as a necessary foundation of morality (Decety & Cowell, Reference Decety and Cowell2018). Experiencing an aversive emotional reaction to the anticipation of harming someone plays a critical role in moral judgment. This aversion can partially stem from the bad outcome due to empathic concern for the victim’s suffering, which causes personal distress in the observer or elicits feelings of guilt. Some studies have documented that low dispositional levels in empathic concern reduce harm aversion, which leads to an increased propensity to endorse utilitarian moral judgments in sacrificial-harm dilemmas (Gleichgerrcht & Young, Reference Gleichgerrcht and Young2013).
It is also reasoning that guides moral progress and abstract principles, such as the idea that all humans are worthy of dignity and respect. The My Lai massacre in March 1968 provides a pertinent illustration of the powerful impact of moral principles. It was one of the most horrific incidents of violence committed against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. A company of American soldiers brutally killed 500 women, children, and old men in the village of My Lai. US Army officers covered up the carnage for a year before it was reported in the American press, thanks to helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, sparking a firestorm of international outrage. In this incident, according to Blader and Tyler (Reference Blader, Tyler, Ross and Miller2002, p. 242), “most soldiers involved did not feel an emotional connection to the civilians, whom they regarded as being, or at least aiding, the enemy.” But not all soldiers participated. What, therefore, stopped some soldiers from killing civilians? One important factor was the soldiers’ view that killing civilians was a morally inappropriate behavior in which they should not engage (Blader & Tyler, Reference Blader, Tyler, Ross and Miller2002). Those soldiers who held these abstract moral values about what is just were less likely to engage in killing civilians, irrespective of whether they knew, liked, or empathized with the particular civilians they encountered.
11.8 What We Have Learned
Understanding the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of empathy elucidates the information that is prioritized as input and the behaviors prompted as output. Knowing our cognitive biases and their evolutionary origins is critical if we want to make better moral decisions. Explaining human behavior does not equate to justifying it or defending it. But if we want to improve our society, we need an accurate understanding of human nature rather than a denial of it. Moral decision making guided by empathy alone is not optimal, especially when dealing with large groups or when individuals are engaged in competition. However, empathy can create a strong motivation to act. Empathy and morality are neither systematically opposed to one another, nor inevitably complementary. Empathy alone is powerless in the face of rationalization and denial. Our saving grace is our ability to generalize and to direct our empathy through the use of reason and deliberation, as well as our capacity to cooperate with other people, create coalitions, and organize ourselves around any reliable sign, value, or idea that is our saving grace.
