Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Empathy is an emotional reaction to the pain of others. But when does empathy actually lead us to help, and who does it benefit?

One basis of empathy is sensorimotor contagion: Watch someone’s finger get pricked, and the sensory cortex region associated with your own finger activates as we imagine the sensory experience. This recalls Sapolsky’s discussion of the basic brain functions that lead to empathy in early childhood cognitive development in Chapter 7. We also experience emotive contagion: involuntary transference of strong emotional states, such as laughter when someone else laughs or anger when someone else is yelling at you. This recalls Sapolsky’s discussion of the evolutionary bases of conformity: We do some things automatically, because other people are doing them.

Animals also experience emotional contagion with states of high arousal in one animal spilling over to another observing animal. Increasing the amount of pain delivered to one mouse in a lab setting causes the other to be more sensitive to pain but only if the two mice were previous cage-mates. Many species also exhibit fundamentals of compassion in engaging conciliative behavior after conflict. Many mammals also work to rescue or comfort stressed members of their groups. In a book full of studies demonstrating the essential similarities of animals and humans, perhaps the studies Sapolsky covers here make us question our current treatment of animals (including for science) the most. Just like us, they feel.

As discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, the sophistication of our empathy grows as we develop from infancy to adulthood. This begins with empathy only for physical pain, triggered in the periaqueductal gray (PAG). This progresses to empathy for emotional states, which are triggered in the vmPFC and limbic structures. Then moral indignation emerges, coupling the amygdala and insula into this circuit. This is all coupled with ToM when perspective-taking emerges.

All empathy passes through the ACC. The ACC’s roles are processing interoception (awareness of bodily states) and monitoring discrepancies between our expectations and events. Unexpected pain is at the intersection of these two roles. The ACC receives interoceptive inputs and sends them to the sensorimotor cortex—the function of this brain region is to tell us where pain is coming from. The ACC also processes emotional pain from social exclusion, embarrassment, etc. The ACC as such is concerned with ensuring our wellbeing via processing pain signals. Its role in empathy suggests that feeling someone else’s pain is a way for us to learn to avoid similar painful events ourselves through formulating an expectation. In Chapter 7, Sapolsky suggests empathy is a confluence of several different brain functions. In Chapter 10, he gives us the definition of a spandrel: a trait that has evolved not for its own purposes but as a byproduct of another. Here, he suggests empathy may be one such state: Feeling someone else’s pain is really just a byproduct of learning to avoid that behavior combined with emotional contagion. Of course, someone who favors a neo-group selectionist (multilevel selectionist) perspective on evolution might not share this belief (see Chapter 10). They would argue empathy within groups makes both individuals and groups more successful.

Other cognitive brain regions (PFC, dlPFC, and ToM networks) also get involved in empathy, where they work to attribute others’ degree of responsibility for their pain and distribute emotional response accordingly. The dlPFC also activates more for less overt pain in others, or types of pain in others we do not have personal experience with since more cognitive work is needed to understand such pain.

Predictably, empathy comes easier for the brain when the person we are empathizing with is a relative or member of our group. This recalls Sapolsky’s work on Us/Theming, which indicates we are less inclined to see outgroup members as human and less inclined to help them since it makes less sense for us evolutionarily. Empathy becomes particularly difficult when we dislike someone or find them morally repugnant. Cognitive load decreases empathy, potentially explaining why it is easier to be charitable, compassionate, or empathic toward individuals over masses of individuals because the cognitive task of perspective taking is lighter. This also recalls Sapolsky’s demonstrations in Chapter 12 that increasing the cognitive load on someone tends to make them more conservative when answering political questions.

Too often, feeling empathy is confused for compassion, but compassion requires using empathy as a catalyst for action. This requires a more other-oriented perspective, as those with an internally-oriented perspective are liable to experience too much distress when feeling your pain and end up serving only themselves. Compassion requires a degree of detachment, in other words, a non-emotional, logical response. Brain imaging studies of Buddhist monks show exactly such a phenomenon. Instructing someone to feel empathy for distress triggers standard emotional response circuitry, leading to reports of emotional exhaustion. When instructed to focus on thoughts of the nature and necessity of compassion in a Buddhist meditational framework, images of emotional distress trigger not the amygdala but the dopamine system, which is associated with reports of a positive state and strong prosocial urge. Mindfulness meditation, in other words, is one way we can train our brain to be less automatic in the ways that don’t help us and more automatic in the ways that do.

There are many self-centered reasons to do good, such as improvements in mood, improvements in prospects for future cooperation, and reputation reward. The purest and probably rarest charity is thus the one in which both giver and receiver are anonymous.

Since very few altruistic acts are purely altruistic, it is important to not get tripped up in our own self-analysis and stop ourselves from the most important thing, which is actually taking compassionate action. This is challenged by the fact that for most reading Behave, the ones that most need their compassion are distant geographically, culturally, and experientially—all factors predicting decrease in empathy. We must also avoid being so emotionally wrapped up in the pain of others that we do not act. However, we cannot do this by thinking too logically on compassion either—we will just logic ourselves away from doing anything. We must instead create cultures and individuals in which compassion is implicit and automatic based on learning. In a book about so much of our worst behavior—abuse, aggression, racism, conformity—this chapter on empathy is a refreshing perspective of human’s automatic capacities to do good. But, if we want this to be an empathy that doesn’t just serve us or people who look like us, we must be informed by what we have already learned about the brain. Without teaching ourselves to transform empathy into compassion, we are liable to do more harm than good.