Is Empathy in Decline?

by Matilda Atkins

Bladerunner

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. But how does that work? Is empathy something good? Is it something useful?

After thinking about it, I would say that it is both. It is necessary for our survival and relationships with others, and it is a good thing in that it makes us less alone. As children especially but also as adults we learn how to act by watching the people around us and copying them. This means we are very receptive to how people are feeling from observing them and we find it easy to replicate their feelings in ourselves, so that we can emphasise with people. It follows that people with neglected childhoods might find it harder to feel empathy.

In psychology there are three types of empathy; cognitive, emotional and compassionate. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand how a person feels and what they might be thinking. It is a skill that we can learn. Emotions empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others. Compassionate empathy is caring about other people's feelings, it drives us to help them. So to be an empathetic person you have to understand and care about how someone is feeling. Psychologists measure empathy using the inter personality reactivity index. This is a series of questions. The results from surveys using this index were interesting, apparently people from hot countries show more empathy than those in cold ones. And there wasn’t a connection between the wealth of a country and its levels of empathy.

Neuroscientists researching empathy have found that the brain mirrors the perceived emotions of others. When we see someone doing something, mirror neurons are active in the areas that would be active if we were doing that thing. Empathy is generally understood in psychology as understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in the other person’s situation. This is therefore backed by scientific evidence.

Recently in philosophy society Mr Lemieux and the speaker disagreed because the speaker was saying that it was impossible to empathise with people from the past, in history, and Mr Lemieux was saying that it was. They were talking about the amount that you can relate to the experiences of someone else as being the major factor in empathy, and I wondered if that was the case. What was empathy? Is it about belief rather than reality, for example you believe that someone in history was feeling something and it wasn’t really real, and in that case is empathy real or is it just an illusion?

Even more recently in my philosophy lesson, we were answering questions about sex robots (just a normal day with Mrs Morgan) and one of them was can you fall in love with a sex robot. Without evaluating the meanings of the words too much, I thought you could say that love was the strongest form of empathy. And in answer to the question I said that you could project an image on somebody or something, regardless if there is any reality for it. For example, you can feel a connection with a person in a photograph or a painting, you can feel empathy and depth in an image when it isn’t necessarily real. Books and films that are character based wouldn’t be enjoyable if empathy wasn’t real.

That made me think of the connection in Blade Runner between the main character and the girl who was actually a robot. I’m sure everyone can think of anyone in their life who might as well be an intelligent robot and they wouldn’t know. Could that even be everyone in your life? On the other side, it also could be said that a robot wouldn’t be able to feel empathy, that it is a human thing, or a thing that only a conscious being can feel.

Apparently studies show that empathy is in decline. Why is that? It could have something to do with less real life human connections due to the internet. Decline in empathy is happening at the same time as a rise in mental health problems in young people.Higher pressure leads people to think more about themselves. Young people focused more on work, so less hobbies volunteering socialising etc. Studies have shown that empathy can be increased in many ways, for example by reading, doing art, or even just interacting and communicating with other people. Also the amount of information we are presented with today has meant that people’s attention spans are shorter, so maybe people don’t take the time to notice people’s behaviour, and therefore can’t emphasise with them.

In conclusion, empathy is a defining feature of conscious beings. You can feel empathy towards a robot, painting or TV character, but it can’t feel it back. I say conscious beings because I don’t know to what extent a dog for example can feel empathy and I’m not an expert. I wanted to write this article because one of the most difficult things about being human is that no one can ever feel the same, no-one can fully understand you because they can’t be in the same body as you, the same place and mind. However, I have realised that empathy allows us to connect with and understand other people despite the boundaries between us.