Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The divided brain

From a reader:

This may or may not be of interest to you, but it did make me think of you so I thought I'd send it:







It is a new perspective by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on the significance of the anatomical division of the brain (i.e. left vs right hemisphere). He does not make reference to sociopathic behaviour but it would be difficult not to make some associations.


It struck a chord with me as I have always found the existence of sociopaths profoundly disembodied, ie living in their heads, in a concrete, abstract, explicit, decontextualised and heavily simplified world.


You might find it interesting.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The morality of libertarians

This will be interesting and relevant to many of you. A reader sent me this article about recent research performed on the moral leanings of libertarians, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology." As described by Reason:
When it comes to morality, libertarians are often typecast as immoral calculating rationalists who also have a somewhat unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research shows that libertarians are quite moral, just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are.
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[T]he study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales and much higher on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity scales. In this case, libertarians scored low on all five surveyed moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” notes the study. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on Harm and slightly above on Fairness. This suggests that libertarians “are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

The Schwartz Value scale measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on Hedonism, Self-Direction, and Stimulation than either liberals or conservatives and they put less value than either on Benevolence, Conformity, Security, and Tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on Power, but like conservatives they value Universalism less. Universalism is defined as “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and nature.” All three put high value on Achievement. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.”
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“Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.
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“Libertarians are high in Openness to Experience and seem to enjoy effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks. In combination with low levels of emotional reactivity, the highly rational nature of libertarians may lead them to a logical, rather than emotional, system of morality.”
Probably the most interesting part of this article, though, was the discussion of the Empathizer-Systematizer scale:

The scale measures the tendency to empathize, defined as "the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion," and to systemize, or "the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system." Libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing—and they scored a lot higher. The authors go on to suggest that systemizing is “characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.” They then add, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’”
Yes, tendency to systematize instead of empathize is something that libertarians, sociopaths, and autistics have in common.

Monday, May 24, 2010

An empathy exercise

A lot of the empathy-challenged have expressed an ability to "imagine" what it would feel like to be another person going through a particular situation. I was explaining this to someone and they asked -- isn't this empathy? If it is, then I guess I'm an empath too. But first let me describe what it feels like using an unusual analogy that I hope works.

Imagine that you are having sex with someone. Better yet, imagine that you are engaged in foreplay, attempting to stimulate a reluctant lover. This is your first time. You have been on an island, grown up there alone, and one day another island dweller like yourself appears. Your experience so far has been auto arousal. You are very familiar with the ins and outs of your own equipment but have had no other exposure to sex other than what you have seen in wildlife. As you attempt to elicit a reaction from your partner, you think of everything you like to do to yourself and try that first. The more similar your partner is to you, the more accurate and effective your actions will be. But what if your partner's equipment looks nothing like your own? In that situation, the best you could do is extrapolate from your own experiences to imagine what it might feel if you had equipment more like your partner's, and act accordingly.

The process may seem very artificial to you at first, like when you scratch a part of your skin that has been numbed by anesthesia and feel only the scratching, not the being scratched. But the more similar the situation is to something you have experienced yourself, the more you can rely on your own personal experiences. Even if the other person is rather different from you, if you have done a decent job data-mining them you should be able to come up with a relatively accurate picture of them. And just like with the sex analogy, you would be getting positive or negative feedback indicating whether you are on target. If you engage in this imaginative exercise enough you can get quite good at it, the same way a professional pianist is not born with the ability to play, but can make it seem like he was with the ease with which he manipulates the keys. As I tell my loved ones all the time -- I don't understand you, but I can predict you very well.

If this is empathy, then I feel empathy. If empathy involves some automatic response to the emotions of another, though, or vicariously experiencing the emotions of another, then probably not. I don't feel vicariously what another feels any more than I vicariously feel the pleasure that I give someone else. Or maybe empaths don't feel empathy either. Maybe they think they are feeling what another feels, but really they are just projecting their own emotions on another.

Rejoinders, empaths?

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Emptythy


I wanted to touch on empathy. Sociopaths don't feel empathy in the common definition of the word. Though there are many definitions of the word, the most common use comes from the ability to feel others emotions in order to help the other person. It is associated with sympathy and compassion. In this definition of the word, sociopaths have no capacity for empathy, since their focus is on benefiting themselves. However, a sociopath does have the ability to understand what others are feeling to the extent that they can trigger people's emotions in order to manipulate them in ways impossible to others. They are able to simulate emotional states in order to manipulate people's empathy. This can be to gain sympathy, compassion, belief, or any other state of consciousness they want people to have towards them. This act is very similiar to empathy, only the goal is not to put oneself in another's shoes in order to help them, but to help the sociopath. The common belief that a sociopath can't understand other people is false. How else would they have the uncanny ability to charm others? The ones who don't are not likely to achieve all the goals they want. To the real sociopaths out there: find out what other people are in need of emotionally and satisfy that need. Some people need direction. Some people need self esteem. Some people need the confidence that you carry. Once you understand the people around you power is truly in your hands.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Drugs, eating disorders, and burn victims

I regularly cull through photos of drug addicts, anorexics, and burn victims (let's be honest, bulimics, you're not horrifyingly skinny enough). My drug addict of choice is the crystal meth user and his rotting-out-of-his-face teeth. These pictures are the result of no one stepping up to help a drug addict, and it’s hard to look away.I think everyone likes to stare at the macabre, even empaths. They're all images of human destruction, of course: the drug addicts show the effects of a demon, the eating disordered show the effects of a mental weakness, and the burn victims reflect our own inhumanity back at us.

But I do feel like I get a unique pleasure from gazing upon them. I think I like the notion that I can easily understand how bad their lives are. If sociopaths like me can understand their pain, then they and the similarly afflicted may be the only people immune to a sociopath's exploits. They're so bad off even a sociopath can feel sorry for them, somewhat. At least they have that to cheer them up!


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