October 13, 2010
Sympathy and Threshholds
Ben Goldacre recently highlighted the worrying finding that the greater the number of victims resulting from a crime, the less intense the feelings of disapprobation or concern onlookers felt. This was mirrored in legal punishment: paradoxically, the more victims some perpetrators hurt, the lower their sentence tended to be.
Why might this be? Goldacre points somewhat inconclusively to some failure of “empathy”. But a subtly different explanation may be more illuminating.
My answer – you may not be surprised to hear – lies in 18th Century Scottish philosophy. Specifically, in the principle of “sympathy” introduced by David Hume, and developed with great care by his friend Adam Smith. Although their concepts of sympathy are far too technical to be properly expound here (especially in the case of Smith, who differs from Hume in some crucial and highly detailed respects), a brief and basic exposition may be fruitful.
We begin to “sympathise” with others when we represent their feelings or mental states to our own minds. This can be done by conscious reflection, or automatically without stopping to think at all (e.g. the difference between actively “thinking yourself into somebody else’s shoes” and spontaneously wincing at the mere sight of them being hit by a stick). The crucial development is that after we have represented the feelings (or mental states) of another to ourselves, we then have a subsequent reaction: we feel ourselves to some degree reproducing that person’s feeling (or mental state), and experience a fainter version of it ourselves.
Thus, if I see you being hit with a stick I represent this action in my mind (possibly reflectively, but probably automatically) and imagine feeling the pain you are feeling. As the stick rises against you, I may even reflexively move my leg away such is the extent to which I “sympathise” with the experience you are undergoing. Similarly, if I know that you are currently in a state of extreme psychological anxiety, I may represent your feelings to myself and come to feel a fainter impression of anxiety myself.
Hume and Smith thought this tendency of humans to sympathise with the experiences – both good and bad – of their fellow creatures constituted a crucial plank of shared morality, and ensured the ability to live socially without constant recourse to self-interest. They also thought that as human knowledge developed, further discoveries would expand and enrich their hypotheses about the functioning (and importance) of sympathy.
The cases Goldacre illustrates may do something just like that. This is because there is a problem to explain here: why is it that we apparently “sympathise” (in the Humean/Smithean sense) with a few victims, but not so easily with larger numbers (and correspondingly, feel strong disapprobation to perpetrators in the former but not the latter case)?
Hume and Smith were keen to emphasise the extent to which “nature” has “fitted” us with the right mental equipment to navigate the world and survive extremely competently. But as pre-Darwinians they were somewhat at a loss to explain how “nature” does this. We may fare a little better.
Consider: creatures that are able to “sympathise” with large numbers of sufferers will have to represent the suffering of that large number to their mind, and then feel corresponding impressions of copied suffering themselves, on a scale reflecting the large amount of suffering taking place. To put it bluntly, that may end up being a lot of suffering to represent, and in turn feel. Yet creatures so-representing large amounts of suffering to themselves would surely be most likely to experience debilitating psychological breakdown, as other (vital) functions are crowded out.
By contrast, creatures who only represent to themselves the sufferings of relatively limited numbers will be able to “block out” large-scale suffering that might otherwise debilitate them. Yet such creatures will nonetheless possess enough “sympathy” to be able to form common bonds with their nearest and dearest, overcoming brute self-interest, benefiting all their lives accordingly.
From a Darwinian perspective it’s obvious which sorts of creatures will be most likely to survive (or rather, evolve in the first place). Put slightly differently: the collective evolutionary benefits of being able to “sympathise” with your friend being stalked by the saber-toothed tiger are considerable; of sympathising with several thousand victims of a natural disaster far less so. “Nature” has “fitted” us to sympathise with others – but only below a certain threshhold.*
Thus 18th century Scottish philosophy, with a helpful splash of Darwin, may go a long way to solving what might otherwise look like a tricky modern puzzle. What a shame, once more, that the great Scots have fallen so far from favour in recent times.
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*Proximity and familiarity of victims will also be important factors – but let’s leave that to another day.
Tim Worstall said,
October 13, 2010 at 8:38 am
It was a slightly different part of Smith that popped into my mind when I read that Goldacre column. The “we have a lot of concern when we damage our finger but none for the news of a million Chinee dead in an earthquake ” (yes, of course I’ve mangled that reference). Which speaks perhaps more to the distance part.
I’ve also though Smith remarkably prescient with his “sympathy” (what we might call empathy now) argument, particularly the part where we twist and turn with the acrobat upon a wire (umm, a tightrope walker, isn’t it?). Modern physiology gives us the mechanism by which we think this happens: mirror neurons. Not just, as you say, “monkey see, monkey do” but “monkey see, monkey feel”, even “monkey see, monkey react as if it happening to monkey”.
The Darwinian part of the explanation also explains huge amounts of the modern world: why when there is a disaster, just as an example, we only really switch on when it is personalised for us. Those floods back in Mozambique a decade or so ago, the charity coffers only really began filling when the story of that girl giving birth in a tree above the floodwaters broke *and there are any number of similar examples which is why newsrooms go all out to try and personalise such events).
There’s even a political implication, perhaps more tenuous. I’m fairly sure that large scale redistribution and public services are more “efficient”, but I’m also fairly sure that people will endure more redistribution and tax to pay for such and public services if it’s small scale. Coughing up to pay for the needy or worthy in the few hundred or few thousand that make up “my tribe” is more appealing than being asked to do so for the tens of millions in that mythical being, “the nation”.
My example here would be that the Danish national income tax rate is 3.76%, with a top rate of 15%. It’s the 25-30% local income tax rate, imposed at the level of the commune (perhaps as small as 10,000 people) which pays for the welfare state. No, of course, this isn’t exactly the same as the Hume/Smith cersion of sympathy, but I do think it’s playing to hte same basic instinct.
Ste For Sure said,
October 13, 2010 at 2:03 pm
“My answer – you may not be surprised to hear – lies in 18th Century Scottish philosophy.”
this should be the tagline underneath where it says bad conscience.
Sorry I havent done you your piece yet. I was ill last week, and now this week I am working about 60 odd hours and I’ve had a car crash! basically Im up the wall. boss
Ste For Sure said,
October 13, 2010 at 2:14 pm
I once spoke online with someone who was diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder (basically what the medical profession now calls psychopaths). He was fascinated by the way that people were somehow ‘magically’ connected with each other in a way that he was not. The way we know what each other feel and almost feel each others feelings as well as our own. When asked if he would like to be ‘like everybody else’ he replied that he imagined it would be a nightmare trying to deal with everybody elses emotions and thoughts as well as his own when navigating social situations and that he imagined his head would explode from the pressure of this.
Free from sympathy however, moral rules to him felt arbitrary and strange, and often simply hard to even *remember*. He said the main thing he got out of his weekly therapy was a regular reminder of what things he shouldn’t do to others and why. Knowing this kept him out of trouble, and meant he could get on with his job and education etc.
I haven’t really got a point, I just thought that this anecdote was interesting and relevant in that it ties in with, and lends credibility the Hume/Smith hypothesis that sympathy as a naturally occuring psychological phenomenon is a large part of the foundation of practical morality.
Paul Sagar said,
October 13, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Ste,
That’s really interesting, thanks. I think cases like the one you describe are actually pretty damn important: what’s the point in claiming that morality is founded in appeals to reason and rationally-revealed imperatives, if it’s empirically evident that certain human beings lacking certain ordinary brain functions cannot engage (naturally) in the moral game.
To those who reply: because morality must be binding on people a given by some (quasi-)external source, not simply be a product of contingent sentiment!, I reply: but it clearly *is* a product of contingent sentiment as we see from those who are mentally handicapped. Wouldn’t we do better to accept that and see where it takes us, rather than fight it with futility?
john malpas said,
October 14, 2010 at 5:17 am
Is it possible that nationalism is the feeling for the many. The sense of righteous war engulfs great numbers.
It is not always for plunder. I doubt if the IRA was in it for the cash.
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