Can rats teach politicians lessons about kindness? The Empathy/Sympathy Problem (Training Tip)

Over the last few weeks I've been keeping my eyes open for news about empathy and cognition as I updated some seminar materials on that topic. Now, after reading the morning papers, I'm asking myself: Is it possible that students in the seminar could learn some empathy lessons from rats?

Psychologists have long recognized that empathic listening and interviewing skills are a critical ingredient of emotional intelligence in the workplace.

• It's safe to say that most people can improve their empathic skills through training and practice.
•  The more they learn and practice, the better they become in making accurate judgments about people and developing rapport.
• That said, we have to acknowledge that personality predispositions and individual differences in psychological development might place a ceiling on a person's final level of achievement. 

For efficiency in learning, students are urged to do something that is not common in everyday discourse or even in most technical discourse: Make a sharp distinction between sympathy and empathy!

In brief, sympathy occurs when the emotional state of one person triggers off a similar emotional state in the other so that they both might be said to share the same feelings and values. Empathy involves perspective-taking and is more of a cognitive state rather than an emotional one. Empathizing thus involves seeing things from someone else's frame of reference and sharing that frame of reference without necessarily experiencing the same emotions or values.

This sharp distinction between sympathy and empathy facilitates learning because it enables students to disentangle and consciously recognize their own mental operations as they sometimes experience emotional "contagion" and then carry on more explicitly cognitive activities like framing. A sharp distinction helps them master the interviewing skills faster.

It's okay if, after the seminar, they later learn that their distinction is more problematic than it might have first appeared. The emotional and cognitive roots of sympathy and empathy are subjects of continual investigation among cognitive scientists (see this short review of The Age of Empathy) but it's clear from this research that empathy training materials need to be updated to at least briefly incorporate reference to developments in neuroscience. Once the students master the sharp distinction, they can more easily refine their understanding  as needed.

Now, back to the rats mentioned in the first paragraph. William Mullen (Chicago Tribune) reports about a new study which expands knowledge of how empathy might be hard-wired into mammals. The story raises implicit questions about the relationship between empathy and morality and also illustrates how the distinction between empathy and sympathy fares in popular discourse:

As charges of greed and self-interest fly in these hyper-partisan political times, humans might do well to look to rats for lessons in kindness and caring.

A University of Chicago experiment to determine how much empathy rats have for each other had some surprising results, which are being published Friday in the research journal Science.

In laboratory studies, a rat was restrained in a small cage that could be opened only from the outside. A second rat, seeing the predicament of the trapped rat, immediately began tirelessly trying to find a way to free it.

Eventually, the second rat taught itself to open the cage door, freeing the restrained rat, leading to what strongly resembled a triumphal celebration between the two. Even when faced with an alternative choice of chocolate chips, the free rat would not be deterred from helping its caged fellow rat...

Previously, scientists thought that empathy and pro-social behavior to help others were unique to humans, said Jeffrey Mogil, a researcher at McGill University in Canada who has done similar studies on mice.

"This study shows the roots of human empathy didn't just appear, but evolved," said Mogil, who was not connected with the University of Chicago study. "It is very impressive, showing really robust and conclusive evidence that rats show pro-social (helping) behavior. You can argue why the rats are doing it, but you can't argue anymore that the rats are doing it."

The experiment is the work of U. of C. doctoral student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, her adviser, Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry who studies human empathy, and Peggy Mason, a neurobiology professor who studies pain modulation and relief...

Mason said she thinks the tireless behavior the rats showed in helping out another rat in distress is something humans should pay attention to, showing that empathy is somewhat hard-wired into our mammalian brain.

"I would suggest that helping is what we are biologically programmed to do. You have to suppress that biological tendency to not help. If we owned up to our biological inheritance a little bit more than we do, we would be better off."

Well said!