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THREEEmpathy Maps

The world is in a race, Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization. On the “good” team are all the forces pressing each of us to feel empathy for all other people—and indeed all living creatures—on earth.¹ On the “bad” team are the forces that accelerate global warming and destabilize the ecosystem on which earthly life depends, causing strife, fear, and a search for enemies. Which team gets to the goal line first, he notes, is up to those alive today.

The market economy is a player in this race on both teams. On one hand, by setting up vast global networks of makers, sellers, and buyers, market growth encourages the development of a wide, thin layer of empathy—at least enough to ensure peace—in order to conduct business and increase wealth.² In this way, the market is on the “good” empathy-enhancing team. On the other hand, economic overdevelopment—with its gas-belching industrial smoke stacks, toxic waste, and accumulation of discarded goods—proceeds headlong, heedless of the welfare of future generations.³ The market also creates gross inequalities both within nations and between them, inciting a sense of injustice, envy, and conflict.⁴ In these ways, the market is also on the “bad” team.

How could we win this race? By extending lines of empathy between American industrialists and the worried residents of sinking Maldivian islands in the rising tide of global warming. By drawing links between the prosperous London businessman and the impoverished Soweto street vendor. By encouraging a mother to stand in the shoes of her children on the upper east side of Manhattan and also in the shoes of her Mexican nanny’s children, left behind in Mexico when their mother left to work abroad. Empathy needs to go global, and perhaps even harder, it has to go local—three zip codes down the street, up or down the class ladder. It must cross the barriers of class, race, and gender.

HIDDEN EVIDENCE OF EMPATHY

To ground such sweeping talk of empathy in the daily lives of real people, though, we need to wonder about its complexity and explore the intricate hidden patterns it fits. We need to look at maps. But how?

Clues to patterns of empathy can be surprisingly indirect. For decades, researchers had been finding that more women than men said they were depressed, and two researchers, Ronald Kessler and Jane McLeod, wondered why.⁵ The prevailing theory in the 1980s was that women were more “vulnerable to life-event effects” because of their poor “coping strategies.”⁶ But if this were the case, the researchers wondered, why would women cope better than men—as they do—with financial bad news, a spouse’s death, or, after an initial period, with separation and divorce?⁷

Then the researchers found that when exposed to the same disturbing events in the lives of immediate family and friends—death, accident, illness, divorce or separation, or losses in love—women more than men talked about and responded strongly to these events. Although the men were just as aware of these events as the women, the researchers surmised, they did not discuss them as much or respond as strongly to them.

Women also participated in wider circles of support. More unhappy, lost, or ill people came to women than to men, and the women invited them to do so. When the respondents were asked to describe “who helped them during the last period in their life when they needed help with a serious problem . . . women [were] between 30 and 50 percent more likely than men to be mentioned as helpers.”⁸ More often than men, women reached out to others for support—usually to other women. So as friends and family sought out more women than men as confidants, especially in times of crisis, the women came to hold—to remain mindful of—more stories of distress.⁹ To some people, holding a story of distress signals a readiness to help, I think, while for others, sharing painful news was itself the help.

Men were as upset as women by such events as death, accidents, or illnesses that occurred to their spouses and children. Yet when such events occurred to those beyond spouse and children, men reported less distress.¹⁰ So women in this study of Americans of the 1980s were not just feeling down about their own bad news, or even their own husband’s and children’s bad news, but about the bad news of others in their larger circle of family and friends. There, they were the designated empathizers—the ones others relied on to stay tuned in.¹¹ They held in mind the sad news of these others. They charted larger family-and-friend empathy maps.

But why did the news of others depress women? Maybe it is because people have a greater need to share bad news than good, and bad news is harder to hold, so women who get more of it, feel more blue because of it. Or maybe women’s depression has nothing to do with their wider circle of concern but with other matters—such as the possibility that everyone needs to feel mothered, and that many women feel less mothered by men than men feel by women. But whatever is going on with depression, the key discovery here is something else: the different shapes of men’s and women’s empathy maps.

A 2002 study of over 1,000 people—part of the General Social Survey, a large, nationally representative U.S. survey—casts a broader light on such maps. Compared with men, women more often described themselves as “soft-hearted,” and reported themselves feeling touched by events that they saw happen. They found themselves feeling “tender, concerned feelings” for people less fortunate than they.¹² They also held more altruistic values than men, agreeing more strongly, for example, that “people should be willing to help others who are less fortunate.” Studies show that in close personal situations, women are much more likely to focus on emotion, to offer and seek emotional support, and to use “highly person-centered comforting messages” to help people feel better.¹³ The same was found in studies of young girls and boys.¹⁴ Women make up some three-quarters of caregivers for older relatives and friends, and two-thirds of those caring for grandchildren. Women are somewhat more likely than men to donate their kidneys (58 percent of living donors versus men’s 42 percent).¹⁵ The Yad Vashem archive of data on non-Jews honored for rescuing Jews shows that although men and women helped in equal numbers, among unmarried people, more women helped.¹⁶ At work, women predominate in the caring professions: they make up 98 percent of kindergarten teachers, 79 percent of social workers, and 92 percent of registered nurses.¹⁷ Maybe because women can have babies, evolution gives them an empathy advantage, or maybe it is because the culture encourages empathy more in girls than boys, or maybe both.

But that does not mean men do not help other people. In fact, many other studies concluded that, without being asked, men perform more public altruistic acts than women.¹⁸ They offer directions to the lost, give up their seats in the bus, and give money to strangers for the subway. Men received 91 percent of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awards given between 1904 and 2008, and 87 percent of the Medal of Bravery awards given out by the Canadian government.¹⁹ So while men are not the biggest empathizers, they often save the day.

WORDS, MEANINGS, CAUSES OF EMPATHY

We say we “stand in another’s shoes,” but what are we doing, feeling, and thinking when we stand this way? We see through another’s eyes. We feel interested. We come to feel as they do. We say to ourselves, “What has happened to you could happen to me.” And as we imagine this, we are often doing such things as looking someone in the eyes and listening closely. We feel curious. Or we come to feel empathy for certain categories of stranger that we learn about by word of mouth or by newspaper, television, a film, a play, or a book.

Empathy differs from feeling, or being held as, responsible for another.²⁰ A nephew might pay a dutiful visit to a grumpy uncle but lack empathy for him. In All Our Kin, Carol Stack describes “kinscription,” whereby some members of poor black families were delegated to care for others.²¹ The child of an ill parent may be sent to live with a childless aunt. A neighborhood orphan is taken in by his grandmother’s friend from church. A family looks after a lonely neighbor. One accepts the continual possibility of a kin assignment and empathy is expected to follow.

But empathy does not always follow, nor does it always lead to, rescue or care. A 27-year-old, single photographer I interviewed described his feelings upon learning that his dear friend had received a diagnosis of cancer. He was grief-stricken but did not feel it was his role to help. “I wasn’t the first person Steven called,” the photographer remembered. “That was his sister, and then a female friend of his, and then the two women competed over who could take the best care of him, and called on their families to help. I wasn’t part of that.” Maybe he would have done something if others had not, but as things stood he felt empathy, but no call to action.

So empathy is related to doing things, but it is not the doing of those things. We console a bereaved colleague. We talk over the day with a partner. We pet a dog tied up outside a coffee shop. We leave coins in a homeless man’s cup. We pray for others. These are acts of kindness that usually go with empathy, but empathy itself is an act of feeling for another person.²² Our hearts can go out to Sudanese war orphans or Congolese rape victims, but we may do nothing to help them. As the philosopher Joan Tronto points out, caring about a person differs from caring for a person (such as arranging for care of an elderly parent), which differs from taking care of a person (feeding and dressing the parent).²³

How do we distinguish empathy from other things like “understanding,” “projection,” or “identification"? Empathy is less purely cognitive than understanding, because it requires imagining what another is feeling. We also sometimes project the idea of ourselves onto another person, mistaking the one for the other. A recently bereaved widow, for example, recounted a friend’s well-meaning attempt to comfort her:

I knew Adrianne loved me and wanted to comfort me. But I knew my loss reminded her of her loss. In the living room that afternoon, I felt the presence of my husband and was trying to absorb all the marvelous recollections friends had shared of him. But Adrianne began rubbing my hand back and forth as if she were sanding it, and told me she knew how upset I must be feeling. But that was her upset, not mine.

The good side of projection, of course, is that we take flight from ourselves; we do not remain aloof or uncaring.²⁴ The bad side of it is that we mistake ourselves for the other person. We see the other as like our generous mother, depressed sister, or judgmental colleague, when he or she is not any of these. Projection distorts empathy. Again, we may identify with another person and, over a long period of time, gradually incorporate him into our personality. (We say, the young boy laughs just like his dad.) Empathy does not have to stick like that.²⁵

This is because empathy is an art. It is the art of the surveyor, the draftsman and the reader of the empathy map.²⁶ A surveyor gauges the height of the mountain, depth of a sea, expanse of the desert. She discovers a reality that exists in places where, generally, she is not. By means of aerial, radar and sonar testing the surveyor gathers information about where things are, climates, and the possibilities of life. She needs a steady hand to hold her surveying instruments. As the surveyor of an empathy map, one learns to hold “a steady hand”—that is, to manage to some degree the anxiety, outrage, grief, or other emotion that the misfortune of another might evoke, so that the empathizer stays tuned into what the other is feeling.

A draftsman carefully draws a map based on the surveyor’s report, and the reader reads the draftsman’s map. So all told, the empathizer develops the skill of noticing, remembering, and imaginatively reproducing the feelings of another, and accepts in her—or his—own heart the feelings evoked by all that was seen. Empathy maps are not given to us: we develop the art of making them.

Some maps are mere sketches. A recovering alcoholic I talked to explained the simple suggestion of empathy she received from a “buddy” through Alcoholics Anonymous. “They assigned me a buddy who had been through the same struggle that I face. He called me every day and told me a short story. I responded with a story. No questions were asked. I didn’t get to know him really well, but he reminded me that I wasn’t alone.” Other maps can offer rich details of the topography of another person’s self.

When we draw a map, we draw boundaries around high-empathy, low-empathy, and no-empathy zones. We feel deeply for the people within a high-empathy zone, and refuse empathy to those in the no-go zone. We imagine individuals or categories of people as eligible for empathy and others, not. To widen the criteria for entrance into an empathy zone, we try out empathy on a wide variety of people. So we come to know how it feels to be an abandoned baby, a prize-winning student, a heartless murderer. We know these things because we have cultivated the art of imagining ourselves into other people’s minds.

Cultivating this art is to open channels and keep them open. We can feel spontaneous empathy for a person or even a group, as we shall see, and in such cases the art lies in countering the forces which would—also spontaneously—inhibit empathy.

FEELING RULES AND ZONES OF EMPATHY

For in empathizing with another, we are guided by various tacit moral rules governing our idea of the “right” sort of person to be—the standalone individual or the helper-cooperator. To some, it is shameful to depend “too much” on others; so at the slightest sign of dependency, one is quickly disparaged as “a clinging vine,” “a perpetual child,” or “a welfare bum.” The moral rule carries with it a feeling rule: Do not feel sorry. Do not empathize.²⁷ Others hold different ideas about needs, feeling that it is natural to have them and good to seek help from others. So for them, the feeling rule is: Feel compassion. Empathize. Which moral rule we hold dear determines who we feel empathy for, and how hard we try to feel it.

Our social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural beliefs—and thus our experience—greatly alter our map. I began to think this over in light of interviews I conducted for The Outsourced Self.²⁸ For example, a personal assistant working for an immensely wealthy employer was trying to help her partner work off $50,000 worth of graduate student debt and to pay for a caregiver for her dying mother who lived 500 miles away. “Every time I walked by his million dollar awful art collection, I thought about my partner’s school debt. I’d look at the ugliest piece and say to myself, ‘That piece would buy my mother excellent care, and that piece over there would cancel my partner’s debt.’ I had a hard time empathizing with them over their malfunctioning hot tub, you know?”

Some moral rules get in the way of empathy. In the pre-Emancipation South, for example, black slaves were held to be private property, and it was deemed wrong to steal or free them. To be sure, Quakers, free blacks, some indentured servants in similar circumstances, and sympathizers such as those who ran the underground railroad proved to be exceptions. But at that time, the idea of racial equality was largely absent, a point central to Mark Twain’s classic 1885 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn^.29

Twain famously juxtaposes the rule against theft and Huck’s great empathy for his beloved friend, Jim, a runaway slave. After a long raft trip down the Mississippi with Jim—“we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing”—Huck wonders whether to abide by the values he was brought up to believe in by the Widow Douglas and return Jim to his owner “like I should,” or protect Jim and “go to hell"?³⁰ Huck struggles with himself:

Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that no way. . . . [I felt] bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong.³¹

Holding the deed of ownership of Jim in his hand, Huck said, “I studied a minute . . . then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.”³² Huck brought himself to trust his affection for Jim and tear up his society’s empathy map.

In his searing account of his horrific torture at the hands of Japanese prisoner-of-war camp commanders during World War II in Kanburi, Thailand, Eric Lomax faced a more difficult challenge: trying to empathize with someone he hated. In his book The Railway Man, he describes a change of heart about the Japanese interpreter who had helped those who mercilessly tortured him.³³ Captured in Thailand, Lomax, a British Royal Signals officer specializing in railways, was found to have a forbidden map detailing the stations along the Thai-Burma rails. He was severely beaten, then locked into an oven-like cell with both arms broken. He was left thirsty and hungry, and as ants crawled over him he was forbidden to wash or visit a latrine. Later, water was forced into his nose and mouth until his belly swelled, and he was certain he would die.

Given all this, how could Lomax forgive the Japanese interpreter, a man named Nagase, who witnessed and aided his torturers with a mechanical voice “with almost no inflection of interest"?³⁴ As Lomax recalls,

Then [the non-commissioned officer (NCO)] picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. . . . I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body and the branch smashed onto them again and again. . . . The interpreter was at my shoulder, “Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.”³⁵

Fifty years later, having survived his ordeal and retired from the army, Lomax was overwhelmed by fury at his torturers. He received psychotherapy and married a highly sympathetic woman. He also discovered a book describing his ordeal written by Nagase, the Japanese interpreter, who was now a devout Buddhist pacifist and antiwar activist. Lomax’s wife wrote to Nagase, who responded to her: “I will try to find out the way I can meet him if he agrees to see me. . . . The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.”³⁶

The two men met in Kanburi, Thailand, the very site of Lomax’s torture. “He was kind enough to say that compared to my suffering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too,” Lomax respects. “In all the time I spent in Japan [as a guest of Nagase] I never felt a flash of the anger I had harbored against Nagase all those years. . . . As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history.”³⁷

At the end of his visit, Lomax asked to sit alone with Nagase one last time, a plan that frightened Nagase’s wife, who feared Lomax might finally seek revenge. But that was not to be. Sitting quietly alone with Nagase, Lomax “gave [him] the forgiveness he desired. . . . I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanburi in 1943,” Lomax recalled, “I assured him of my total forgiveness. He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking . . . without haste.”³⁸

Huck Finn empathized with Jim. He came to trust his empathy and muster the courage to act on it. Eric Lomax first prepared the way (through psychiatry, a sympathetic wife, and the passage of time) before coming to empathize with the transformed Mr. Nagase. Huck had Jim on his map; his challenge was to follow it. Lomax came to recognize Nagase as worthy of his empathy, and to redraw his map. Huck wanted to act on his love, Eric Lomax wanted to transcend his hatred.

GETTING THERE

So how do we expand the empathy zones on our maps? One way is via an unexpected personalizing gesture. Perhaps the most astonishing example is the famous World War I “Christmas truce” of 1914 on the Western Front. Huddled in deep trenches hundreds of yards—sometimes only fifty yards—apart, were British and German soldiers who had each undergone strict military training to despise and kill one another, and shared little by way of language or culture. But in the early hours of Christmas day, each side raised white flags of truce, climbed out of their trenches, exchanged cigarettes and other gifts, played football, and alternately sang Christmas songs. Some from each side even danced together. For this day, the truce extended along some half of the front line on the Western front and included a few officers up through lieutenant colonels. When generals on each side discovered this shocking breach of discipline, the practice was immediately stopped. But such a brave act of trust was based on some sense that “you guys must be feeling like we’re feeling.” Perhaps it was the daily touch with death; 9 million soldiers died in World War I, and many must have felt “What do we have to lose?” What had transpired, though, was a surprise attack of empathy.

Many also extend their empathy more gradually through the logic of the exceptional person. Some whites have one black friend about whom they say “he’s not like the rest of them.” Some Christians have one Muslim friend about whom they say “he’s an exception.” Some straight people have one gay friend, and so on. Such connections cross boundaries, but they also re-create them. For each person says to himself, in effect, “I can empathize with my friend because he’s so different from others of his kind whom I can’t empathize with.” But in other cases, empathy for one person becomes a pathway to empathy for others within a forbidden social category.

We can also expand empathy by establishing some practical common ground with people we have been taught to disdain. Summertime “Children Create Peace” camps have brought together 8- to 12-year-old Israeli, Palestinian, and Christian children to share an interest in animals.³⁹ Coming from areas such as Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, and Jericho, where residents are ever prepared for gun or missile fire, these children learn to share a fascination with giraffes and extend empathy to each other. Other versions of this experiment exist in different forms in many public schools and colleges. Focusing on children from kindergarten to eighth grade, Mary Gordon established in 1996 the “Roots of Empathy” program, a nonprofit organization with twelve sites in Canada and three in the United States. In it, a parent and baby pay a series of visits to a classroom (twenty-seven visits in all), and a trained empathy instructor helps the children recognize what the baby is feeling.⁴⁰ Even such time-limited exposures can lead many to begin to redraft their maps.

By whatever means we find to alter them, the maps themselves seem to vary according to our membership in given social categories—gender, race, national origin, and social class. Again the clues can be indirect. A series of studies show that the poor give more to others than the rich. Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization that researches charitable giving, reported that “poorer households ($25,000 and below annual income) gave away 4.2 percent of their incomes while richer ones ($75,000 and above) gave away 2.7 percent.⁴¹ In another study, the social psychologist Paul K. Piff and his colleagues found that low-income people were more “generous, charitable . . . and helpful to others” than were the wealthy.⁴² The rich who live in neighborhoods with many other wealthy people give away an even smaller share of their income than do rich people living in more economically diverse communities.⁴³ The vast majority of income the rich do give away, another study found, is not directed toward the poor but to such things as the opera, museums, and their alma maters, institutions that largely benefit people like themselves.⁴⁴

So what is the link between a person’s empathy and their generosity? In an experiment, Piff’s group discovered that if higher-income people were shown a sympathy-eliciting video and instructed to imagine themselves as poor, they became more willing to help the poor. But the reverse was also true: when lower-income people were instructed to think of themselves as rich, they became less charitable.⁴⁵ Notwithstanding generous-hearted rich men such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, the desire to protect wealth can get in the way of empathizing with those who don’t have it.

Ideas about our placement in the world alter the maps we draw. Among American college students, ideas conducive to empathy seem to be losing, not gaining, hold. In a meta-analysis of 13,737 students—some who entered college in the late 1970s to early 1980s, some in the 1990s, and some in the 2000s—a team of psychologists discovered a decline in what they called “empathic concern.”⁴⁶ (This was indicated by answers to questions such as how well statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” described the student.) Maybe students today are more preoccupied with their own uncertain futures than earlier students were. But if, as the national gap widens between the very rich and very poor, the young express less empathy than those their age used to, we may be heading for serious trouble.⁴⁷

In the end, the world may indeed be in a race, with a “good” team pressing for more empathy with our fellow creatures on the earth and the “bad” team pressing against it. But to increase the odds for the good team, we will need to discover far more about the making of maps. How can circumstances—such as those of the surprising battlefront Christmas dance, or the summer camp for children of warring states—enable us to empathize better and more than we do? In empathy, women have taken the lead. But so too have many men, such as the great fictional Huck Finn and the extraordinary, forgiving Eric Lomax. By itself, more empathy will not solve all the world’s problems; but more empathy would make it an entirely different world.