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Empathizing Just Got Easier

When I started watching Ross and Matt Duffer’s Stranger Things, one episode resonated with me. There’s a scene in “Chapter 4: The Body” where Will (played by Noah Schnapp), the missing boy trapped in an alternate universe, tries desperately to connect with his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder). In an attempt to reach her son, she aggressively rips away wallpaper, exposing a barrier that connects the two dimensions. The characters are in the same place at the same time, but separated by their existence in the world; close enough to hear each other, but unable to touch.

I couldn’t help getting drawn into the narrative, expecting the tropes of the mystery genre, and trying to guess what happens next, but maybe this is unimportant. Of course, television entertains, but art makes us think. Why did this scene resonate with me? Why did it make me feel so acutely? I thought it would be difficult to imagine what it would be like to be in Joyce’s or Will’s shoes at this moment, but then I realized that (in some ways) I already am. And, I think, we all are.

Do you remember being a kid and running so fast you felt like you could race the cars driving past you? Wind blowing in your face, eyes watering, the tips of your ears become so cold they burn. But I bet you haven’t felt as happy since those days you achieved supersonic speed. Those days when you were free to feel what you wanted and to say how you felt without thinking twice. Yeah, I know the exact feeling.

Why is it now that we’re older, seemingly more “rational”, do we get so worked up about the way we feel? It’s empathy, or I should say, a lack thereof. As technology continually progresses at an exponential rate, as it becomes a larger part of our existence, what does this mean for the human race? I believe the more advanced technology becomes, the less we are capable of showing empathy.

In a 2015 study about the effects of online activity on empathy levels, psychologists concluded that “just being ‘behind a screen’ does not eliminate empathy among technology users”, and in fact “spending time online that results in or increases the chances of [face to face] encounters actually contributes positively to real-world empathy” (Carrier). Science is rooting against me here, and many would agree that new technologies are leading us to a more empathetic society. However, in the same study, “online activities that are not associated with increased [face to face] time” (Carrier 47) show a negative impact on empathy. This relates to a growing debate around Virtual Reality (VR) and its capabilities of generating empathy.

Chris Milk, an American director, has created a documentary film in VR about a young Syrian refugee living in Jordan entitled Clouds over Sidra. In his TedTalk he claims that through VR “what [he] was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine” (3:15). Milk states that VR is “a machine, but through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, we become more connected, and ultimately we become more human” (10:15). Academics, techies, and social media experts agree with Milk, while others believe that Virtual Reality and other technological advancements are detrimental to our ability to empathize.

Maria Konnikova, a writer for The Atlantic, discusses the benefits of Virtual Reality in her article “Virtual Reality Gets Real”. Konnikova claims,

“Virtual reality changes behavior… if your avatar is taller than you are in real life, you become more confident. If you have a particularly attractive avatar, you become friendlier. If you’re young and you have an avatar that is a senior citizen, you save more money. These changes last even after you leave the virtual realm.”

But these experiences are prolonged activities — you are immersed in this virtual world on a regular basis. You have the time to create an ideology, to practice a behaviour, to literally live someone else’s life. Konnikova claims “our brains are easily fooled”. Most of us don’t have an immersive opportunity like this, and even if we did, do we even want to? When would you have the time to live in the real world? To go to work, have a family, eat and survive. Living in a virtual world, escaping the lives we currently lead, may seem tempting at times, but how many of us would want to give into it completely? Have we learned nothing from Mark Waters’ Freaky Friday or Christopher Nolan’s Inception? What these films show us is that we should not mess with identity or reality, and however easy it becomes to escape from reality, the destination is never palm trees and white sand beaches. Though it may help to open one’s eyes to another’s situation, VR can be detrimental to our sense of reality.

Konnikova goes on to say that “[VR] could also be used to build empathy. What if you could step inside a documentary, rather than just watching it on a screen — almost literally walking in someone else’s shoes?” For those watching Chris Milk’s documentary, they are only immersed in this virtual world for a couple hours, not every day. In Paul Bloom’s article “It’s Ridiculous to Use Virtual Reality to Empathize with Refugees” he states:

“It’s not hard to try out certain short-term experiences… But you can’t extrapolate from these to learn what it’s like to be a single parent, a prisoner in solitary confinement, or a famous movie star. You can’t take an event of minutes and hours and generalize to months and years.”

Even if you were to watch Milk’s documentary daily, the experience wouldn’t change and eventually you would become callous to the emotions you felt the first time you experienced the film. Even if one had the immersive opportunity that Konnikova discusses, Bloom says “Safety and control transform unpleasant experiences into loads of fun”, so the duration may affect your general outlook on life to a degree, but you cannot experience the same threat and fear that a refugee has felt. You are bound to the knowledge that you are safe — a luxury that people living in the real world (that is, those who are not living in a virtual reality) do not get to experience. There’s always a distance between the self and the other, and although that isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to empathy, it still is not the kind of empathy that Milk preaches Virtual Reality creates: “It’s a very experiential medium. You feel your way inside of it. It’s a machine, but it feels like real life. It feels like truth” (5:53), but the thing is that it’s not truth. Milk is more concerned with the physical response of his audience than the emotional intelligence people gain from watching his films: “I saw people having an even more visceral reaction to this work than the previous one” (4:52). Yet, Bloom points out that

“The problem is that these experiences aren’t fundamentally about the immediate physical environments. The awfulness of the refugee experience isn’t about the sights and sounds of a refugee camp; it has more to do with the fear and anxiety of having to escape your country and relocate yourself in a strange land.”

This kind of prolonged fear cannot be understood in such a short time, so if “nobody thinks that going downtown without your wallet will make you appreciate poverty — why should these simulations do any better?” (Bloom). Again, the problem stems from the fundamental knowledge that when you engage in Virtual Reality, you will be safe in your real life. For many people, this is their real life and for them there’s no escape. Yet, who knows what the future holds for this technology? Konnikova predicts that by 2115 “Virtual reality [will] incorporate haptic sensations, enabling users to ‘touch’ what they see.”

Related to VR, Amanda Petrusich claims that the internet “teaches us to conflate a curated identity with a real one, and, moreover, to work on perfecting our systems of curating rather than our actual selves.” This sounds oddly familiar to Konnikova’s notion that VR plays tricks on our minds. As Petrusich suggests, social media exhibits similar effects by confusing who we are and who we appear to be. This contributes to how we empathize over the internet.

Sarah Larson argues in her article “Zuckerberg, How About an Oof Button?” that although ‘buttonizing’ empathy over social media is difficult, it’s not impossible, and in fact, it’s been done with Facebook’s “love” feature. Giving a “love” is different from giving a “like” in that, as Larson argues, it’s sending your love and support rather than simply showing an interest in what someone posts. She goes on to suggest a new button — an “oof” button “for everyday empathy situations”. Larson thinks that articulating empathy through a button is useful because “it feels your pain without getting maudlin about it”. But is this not the same as using Virtual Reality to empathize with refugees? It saves us the trouble of actually feeling and experiencing a situation by enforcing the security of distance. If someone posts about the passing of a grandparent, and they get 50 “loves” on their post, does that mean that they shouldn’t be mourning? How does one decipher how many “loves” are enough to feel empathy? Shouldn’t we be allowed to get a little “maudlin” about some things? And why should we cover up how we feel by reducing our emotions to buttons?

In her article “Making a More Empathetic Facebook” Megan Anderle claims,

“Facebook’s compassion department, a unit within the company that makes suggestions to the engineers about ways to help users use the site with greater emotional intelligence [has] … grappled with the idea of introducing a ‘Dislike’ button, a frequent request for users who wanted to show sympathy for friends who posted about difficult times”.

Sympathy is the key word here. Sympathy and empathy are often conflated terms, but they are incredibly different. I define sympathy as surface — reacting to a situation by the standards set out by society. In this sense sympathy is an explicit response that is well-thought-out and performed for the sake of coming across as a good person. In Batson and Thompson’s experiment, which examines why people don’t always act morally, they claim,

“It is often assumed that moral individuals want to be moral, to display moral integrity. But our research suggests that at least some individuals want to appear moral while, if possible, avoiding the cost of actually being moral. We call this motive moral hypocrisy.”

In these cases it can be difficult to know how sincere someone is being, and (to me) this indicates a form of sympathy. People can be sincerely sympathetic in the same way they can be sincerely moral, but as Batson and Thompson suggest, it comes down to what their motives are. But, this is not necessarily a bad thing (I mean, most of us have exhibited “moral hypocrisy” before). The point is that showing sympathy is not the same as showing empathy, particularly in the way Anderle means it. When she says, “Ending relationships got easier, for example. ‘Hide’ and ‘unfollow’ options made it easier for people to remove objectionable content from their feeds” this does not show an empathetic response for someone who could be devastated by a breakup. Rather, this shows how we’ve become accustomed to following the herd (“trends”) rather than getting personal with one another. Furthermore, these trends are dangerous because they protect us from something that we cannot always escape: the real world. They allow us to “Hide” and “unfollow” the emotions we don’t want to feel, and when it comes time to truly feel them, we don’t know what to do; we don’t know how to handle it. Facebook and other social media shield us from ever having to feel uncomfortable, from ever having to be fully aware of what another person may truly be going through, from ever having to face our own doubts, fears, and grief. This is not to say that sympathy is only superficial, it often comes from a good place, but for my purposes, sympathy and empathy have more dichotomous than congruent meanings. It is for this reason that Anderle has made a grave mistake with her word choice. It’s not about making a more “empathetic” Facebook (getting deep, personal, and honest), rather it’s about a sympathetic Facebook (hiding away from anything that might make you or others uncomfortable, even if it’s at the expense of someone else’s, or even your own emotions to seem good and / or pious).

So, what exactly is empathy? As Om Malik claims in The New Yorker, “Empathy is not a buzzword but something to be practiced.” If empathy can be practiced, it must also be learned. In this way, empathy is a sort of skill, and perhaps it’s one that we are losing. If the current generation is unable to teach the next generation how to empathize, and that generation is unable to teach the next, and so on, we will lose our ability to empathize. How this will affect humanity is unpredictable, but my guess is that we won’t notice the change until it’s already gone. Malik continues to say, “It is not just Facebook… as technology finds its way into our daily existence in new and previously unimagined ways, we need to learn about those who are threatened by it.” So, if Malik is right and empathy needs to be practiced in order to protect “those who are threatened” by advances in technology, how exactly do we practice it? Malik thinks that we should “start by not raging on our Facebook feeds but, instead, taking a trip to parts of America where five-dollar lattes and freshly pressed juices are not perks but a reminder of haves and have-nots.” Well, this is great, but what good will it do to have these experiences if you don’t know how to show your empathy toward them? The issue is not necessarily about empathizing with those in other parts of the world, it’s about learning to empathize in the first place, and with the people closest to you. Yet, getting off of Facebook and refraining from using new and exciting technologies (such as VR) doesn’t necessarily mean that you will become a better empathizer. As mentioned, studies have shown that going online doesn’t necessarily diminish one’s ability to empathize. It comes down to how we use these technologies that allows us to learn and practice empathy. Rebecca Rosen believes that “people crave for their computers and phones to fulfill this need for connection, but they manage to do so only superficially. As a result, people feel increasingly estranged and alone despite being connected all the time.”

Many argue that a way to practice empathy is to make more time for face to face interaction. A recent study shows that “people are less influential than they think over email” (Roghanizad and Bohns). Psychologists equate this to an inability to empathize over a screen (Roghanizad and Bohns), but maybe it has something to do with how we empathize in general. Petrusich says, “Our present cultural climate discourages empathy — a stay-in-your-lane policing has been afoot for a while now — and demands the performance of absolute authority.” The way we are socialized contributes to our ability to empathize, and according to Petrusich this “stay-in-your-lane” mentality is deeply ingrained in our culture. To a degree, even face to face interaction cannot combat our implicit desire to keep to ourselves. There must be something else we can do to learn how to empathize before we practice it.

Well, maybe there is. Paul Bloom speaks about this amazing “device” which surpasses all the capabilities of VR:

“Fortunately, there is a better version of VR… Affordable, durable, and small enough to hold in one hand, these devices allow you to simulate not only the physical environment of individuals, but also their psychological experiences, and can do this for multiple people, moving forward and backward in time. They enable you to experience the most private experiences of others, both by triggering your own memories and by extending your imagination in radical ways.”

The devices that Bloom is referring to are books! Although not new, or innovative (words he does not use, but, in some ways, alludes to), books are a source of genuine empathy for Bloom. David Wagner would concur as he discusses “A new study led by P. Matthijs Bal of VU University in the Netherlands [which] finds that readers who emotionally immerse themselves with written fiction for week long periods can help boost their empathetic skills.” Fiction readers are able to learn empathy and combat the societal structures that enforce individualism by working through problems, cases, and stories. The study also “found that the fiction readers got more of an emotional workout than the nonfiction readers.” This likely explains the amount of thoughtful creativity it takes to empathize with a fictional character — knowing parts of their story and thoughts, and having access to an entire fictional world by imagining it through your own experiences. Even Chris Milk (an advocate for the capabilities of new technologies to help us empathize) believes that “film is an incredible medium. It allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us in a world completely foreign from our own.”

Books are great! I mean, Rebecca Rosen (a writer for The Atlantic) believes books can do more than teach us empathy, they can help us design technologies in a way that doesn’t threaten our humanity. Inventors of new and evolving technologies must have a creative spark. Rosen thinks they can find that spark in science fiction: “These authors do more than merely prophesy modern technologies — they also consider the consequences of their fictional inventions in great detail.” Rosen claims, “[Science fiction] speculates on the consequences of these trends, both good and bad, if they continue unchecked. In a way, these works are concerned with today’s reality far more than the future.” So for anyone who is concerned about robots taking over the world, Rosen thinks that as long as the techies who are designing these technologies read more science fiction, we can be assured that they at least thought about the consequences of their designs.

Of course, books are great for that! It’s all about imagination. But what if there’s something else we can do to practice using our imaginations while learning to empathize? I’m proposing another way to learn and practice empathy, one that doesn’t require any devices at all! Most of us wouldn’t think of it this way, but you can approach the people in your life with the same imaginative force that comes with reading fiction. Take your reading skills outside of the pages and approach life as a series of scenarios. Learn and practice empathy by reading the people who are closest to you and analyzing their stories (their situations) the same way you would a fictional text — by imagining it relative to your own experiences. Even if you have not experienced the same thing or anything remotely close to what another person has gone through, you can retrospectively connect it to your thoughts and emotions, and react according to your imagination, but also be aware of what the situation needs. Does it ask for calmness? Does it ask for excitement? Anger? Revulsion? The only thing you need to understand is an awareness (the ability to critically read a situation). Be sensitive to each situation you come across (and not necessarily sensitive in an emotional way, but in an acute way). Most importantly, be sure to take action. Sometimes it can be something as simple as a literal pat on the back or giving a smile. Calling your mom occaisionally to check in. Actually listening to your partner for once. These small actions have deeper impact. No matter how you slice it, critical reading is an important skill and one that can teach empathy as well as help you practice it through imagination and memory.

Like Will and Joyce from Stranger Things, we are all living on different planes of existence, separated by the walls we put up on our social media pages. We are unable to connect because we don’t exist within the same capacity of here and now, time and space, presence and absence. We are all desperately wanting to break through that wall, not even to understand what it’s like on the other side, but to see with clarity that we are not alone in the world. When we are reading and reacting appropriately to a situation we are learning and practicing empathy, breaking through that wall and into another dimension. But these empathetic skills rely on how present you are in a given situation because empathy requires us to exist together, not apart — not on cell phones, not on social media, not through fiction, but not necessarily without these things either. As long as you are aware of those around you, and you are present with them, it doesn’t matter what kind of technology you use. Empathy requires us to be lively! I’ve got to say that Radiohead is right in feeling “that we are all forgetting how to know each other, and how to be properly alive” (Petrusich), because when it comes to empathising, it’s not just about existing, it’s about living.

R​eferences

Anderle, Megan. “Making a More Empathetic Facebook.” The Atlantic Mar 15, 2016. Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/facebooks-anti-bullying-efforts/473871/>.

Batson, C. Daniel, and Elizabeth R. Thompson. “Why Don’t Moral People Act Morally? Motivational Considerations.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 10.2 (2001): 54–7. Web. Oct 1, 2017.

Bloom, Paul. “It’s Ridiculous to use Virtual Reality to Empathize with Refugees.” The Atlantic Feb 3, 2017. Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/virtual-reality-wont-make-you-more-empathetic/515511/>.

Carrier, L. Mark, et al. “Virtual Empathy: Positive and Negative Impacts of Going Online upon Empathy in Young Adults.” Computers in Human Behavior 52. Supplement C (2015): 39–48. Web. Oct 1, 2017.

Konnikova, Maria. “Virtual Reality Gets Real.” The Atlantic October Issue 2015Web. Oct 18, 2017<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/virtual-reality-gets-real/403225/>.

Larson, Sarah. “Zuckerberg, How About an Oof Button?” The New Yorker -09–16T20:30:52.000Z 2015Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/zuckerberg-how-about-an-oof-button>.

Malik, Om. “Silicon Valley has an Empathy Vacuum.” The New Yorker -11–28T12:00:23.000Z 2016Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-has-an-empathy-vacuum>.

Petrusich, Amanda. “Radiohead Thinks the Internet is Turning Us all into Creeps.” The New Yorker -05–05T17:17:22.000Z 2016Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/radioheads-humanistic-revolution>.

Roghanizad, M. Mahdi, and Vanessa K. Bohns. “Ask in Person: You’Re Less Persuasive than You Think Over Email.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 69. Supplement C (2017): 223–6. Web. Oct 1, 2017.

Rosen, Rebecca J. “Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction.” The Atlantic Sep 20, 2013Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/why-todays-inventors-need-to-read-more-science-fiction/279793/>.

Wagner, David. “Reading Fiction can make You More Empathetic.” The Atlantic Feb 22, 2013Web. Oct 18, 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/reading-fiction-can-make-you-more-empathetic/318050/>.

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