Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on the Trobriand
Islands (1918 - source). Pro-social behavior seems to be a human universal, but is the
same true for full empathy?
What is empathy? It has at least three components:
- pro-social behavior, i.e., actions of compassion
to help others
- cognitive empathy, i.e., capacity to understand
another person's mental state
- affective or emotional empathy, i.e., capacity to
respond with the appropriate emotion to another person's mental state (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013)
In their review of the literature, Chakrabarti and
Baron-Cohen (2013) conclude that all three components are moderately to highly
heritable, although the affective component seems to show the highest
heritability (68%). This is in line with Davis et al. (1994), who found
significant heritability for the affective facets of empathy (empathic concern
and personal distress) but not for non-affective perspective taking.
All three components can vary from one individual to
another, although studies to date have focused on pathological variation:
For example, it is suggested that people with psychopathic personality disorder may have intact cognitive empathy (hence being able to deceive others), but impaired affective empathy (hence being able to hurt others), whilst people with autism may show the opposite profile (hence finding the social world confusing because of their deficit in cognitive empathy, but not being over-represented among criminal offenders, having no wish to hurt others, suggesting their affective empathy may be intact) (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013)
People with depression may suffer from too much
empathy, i.e., being too sensitive to the needs or distress of others (O'Connor et al., 2007). In short, these disorders seem to be the tail ends of a normal
distribution. By focusing on these extremes, we forget that most of the genetic
variability in empathy occurs among healthy individuals (Gillberg, 2007).
Using research findings on autism and Asperger syndrome,
Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen (2013) have identified nine candidate genes that
seem to promote empathy. They fall into three functional categories:
sex-steroid synthesis and metabolism; neural development and connectivity; and
social-emotional responsivity. The first category includes the degree to which
a fetus is androgenized or estrogenized before birth, as shown by digit ratio
(Frost, 2014).
Variation among
human populations
If the genes associated with empathy vary among
healthy individuals, do they also vary among human populations? This would be
expected because populations have differed in their needs for different
components of empathy, particularly since hunting and gathering gave way to
farming some 10,000 years ago—when genetic change speeded up over a
hundred-fold. At that time, humans were no longer adapting to new physical
environments. They were adapting to new cultural environments that differed in
social structure, in division of labor, in means of subsistence, in norms of
conduct, in future time orientation, in degree of sedentary living, and so on.
Our ancestors were now reshaping their environments, and these human-made
environments were now reshaping them—in other words, gene-culture co-evolution
(Hawks et al., 2007).
Humans have been transformed especially by the shift
from small bands of hunter-gatherers to larger and more complex groups of
farmers and townsfolk. With social relations expanding beyond the circle of
close kin, kinship obligations were no longer enough to ensure mutual
assistance and stop free riding. There was thus selection for pro-social
behavior, i.e., a spontaneous willingness to help not only kin but also
non-kin.
Pro-social behavior is attested across a wide range
of cultures. It is the subject of a recent book about the nature and limits of
empathy in Oceanic cultures. The Banabans of Fiji for instance express the idea
of pro-sociality through the term nanoanga,
which they normally translate into English by "compassion" or
"pity."
[...] compassion is the basis for their capacity to bond socially with others, even compassion to the point of readiness to take strangers into their community. Their empathy therefore relates causally to how they act socially toward others. Here compassion or pity embraces both understanding and fellow feeling: the islanders understand that the stranded mariner is at the end of his strength, which is why they succor him and treat him as one of their own. They understand him because he, like them, is a human being, a person. [...] Thus, for example, when someone passing by a house does not belong to the immediate family of those inside, it is customary to welcome the passer-by by calling out the words mai rin! (Come in!), which carry the implication that food and drink will not be found wanting inside. (Hermann, 2011, p. 31)
This desire to help non-kin is not unconditional.
The author notes that prior experiences with an individual in distress can
determine whether compassion will be given or withheld. Moreover, Barnabans can
"proceed strategically when deciding whether to extend trust to others or
to keep thoughts and feelings to themselves" (Hermann, 2011, p. 31). This
is not the affective empathy of entering another person's mind to feel his or
her pain.
When the Barnabans compare themselves with others, and when by their behavior toward the stranger they show that they understand him and feel with him, they do not, however, equate themselves fully and entirely with him. (Hermann, 2011, p. 32)
Another contributor to the same book writes
similarly about the inhabitants of Vanatinai, in the Trobriand Islands.
On the island of Vanatinai, when someone, including an ethnographer, privately asks a trusted confidant, "Why did she/he act like that?" "What was she/he thinking?" the common answer, often uttered in tones of puzzlement and despair, or anxiety and fear, expresses one of the islanders' core epistemological principles: "We cannot know their renuanga." Renuanga is a word that refers to a person's inner experiences, both and inseparably thought and emotion.
[...] And their psychic states, their inner thought and feelings, are inherently unknowable. It may never be clear why they were angry or sympathetic, and what caused them to act and influence an event in someone's life [...] (Lepowsky, 2011, p. 44)
In short, Oceanic cultures display hospitality but
not full empathy, which would be considered undesirable anyway:
The philosophical principle of personal opacity, the interiority of others' thoughts/feelings (renuanga), is closely bound to the islanders' fierce insistence on personal autonomy, both as cultural ideology and as daily social practice (Lepowsky, 2011, p. 47)
From
pro-sociality to full empathy
Whereas pro-sociality is attested across a wide
range of cultures, full cognitive/affective empathy is more localized. The
difference is like the one we see between shame and guilt. Most cultures
primarily use shame to enforce correct behavior, i.e., if other people see you
breaking a rule, you feel ashamed and this feeling is reinforced by social
disapproval. In contrast, only a minority of cultures—largely those of
Northwest Europe—rely primarily on guilt, which operates even when only you see
yourself breaking a rule or merely think about breaking a rule (Benedict, 1946;
Creighton, 1990).
Northwest Europeans have thus undergone two parallel
changes in behavioral control: 1) a shift from pro-sociality to full
cognitive/affective empathy; and 2) a shift from shame to guilt. Indeed, full
empathy and guilt may be two sides of the same coin. Both are the consequences
of a mental model that is used to simulate how another person thinks or feels
(an imaginary witness to a wrongful act, a person in distress) and to ensure
correct behavior by inducing the appropriate feelings (anguish, pity).
Finally, full empathy and guilt are most adaptive
where kinship ties are relatively weak and where rules of correct behavior
require a leveling of the playing field between kin and non-kin. This has long
been the case in Northwest Europe. There seems to be a longstanding pattern of
weak kinship ties west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, as
shown by several culture traits that are rare or absent elsewhere:
- relatively late marriage for men and women
- many people who never marry
- neolocality (children leave the family household
to form new households)
- high circulation of non-kin among different
households (typically young people sent out as servants) (Hajnal, 1965)
Commonly called the Western European Marriage
Pattern, this geographic zone of relatively weak kinship was thought to have
arisen after the Black Death of the 14th century. There is now good evidence
for its existence before the Black Death and fragmentary evidence going back to
9th century France and even earlier (Hallam, 1985; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94).
Historian Alan Macfarlane likewise sees an English tendency toward weaker
kinship ties before the 13th century and even during Anglo-Saxon times
(Macfarlane, 2012; Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174).
This weak kinship zone may have arisen in prehistory
along the coasts of the North Sea and the Baltic, which were once home to a
unique Mesolithic culture (Price, 1991). An abundance of marine resources
enabled hunter-fisher-gatherers to achieve high population densities by
congregating each year in large coastal agglomerations for fishing, sealing,
and shellfish collecting. Population densities were comparable in fact to those
of farming societies, but unlike the latter there was much "churning"
because these agglomerations formed and reformed on a yearly basis. Kinship
obligations would have been insufficient to resolve disputes peaceably, to
manage shared resources, and to ensure respect for social rules. Initially,
peer pressure was probably used to get people to see things from the other
person's perspective. Over time, however, the pressure of natural selection
would have favored individuals who more readily felt this equivalence of
perspectives, the result being a progressive hardwiring of compassion and shame
and their gradual transformation into empathy and guilt (Frost, 2013a; Frost, 2013b).
Empathy and guilt are brutally effective ways to
enforce social rules. If one disobeys these internal overseers, the result is
self-punishment that passes through three stages: anguish, depression and,
ultimately, suicidal ideation.
People suffering from depression are looking at both others and themselves with suspicion, often believing whatever they have was obtained by cheating, and that it is more than they deserve. Depressives, burdened by moralistic standards, are harsh evaluators of both themselves and others. The self-punishment meted out by depressives is a common if disturbing symptom; while thinking 'I deserve this', they may engage in altruistic punishment turned upon the self. Just as altruistic punishers experience a neuronally based reward from punishing defectors, despite material costs, depressed patients report a sense of relief upon inflicting self-punishment. Patients who are 'cutters', describe relief from tension after cutting and depressives with suicidal ideation may describe the relief they felt when on the verge of attempting a suicidal action. (O'Connor et al., 2007, p. 67)
This pathology is progressively less common in
populations farther south and east, not so much because each stage is less
common but rather because depression is much less likely to result from
empathic guilt and much less likely to lead to suicide (Stompe et al., 2001).
This 3-stage sequence does not seem to be a human universal, at least not to
the same extent as in Northwest Europeans, a reality that Frantz Fanon noted
when describing clinical depression in Algerians:
French psychiatrists in Algeria found themselves faced with a difficult problem. When treating a melancholic patient, they were accustomed to being afraid of suicide. The melancholic Algerian kills, however. This disease of the moral conscience that is always accompanied by self-accusation and self-destructive tendencies assumes hetero-destructive forms in the Algerian. The melancholic Algerian does not commit suicide. He kills. (Fanon, 1970, pp. 219-220)
References
Benedict, R. (1946 [2005]). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture,
First Mariner Books.
Chakrabarti, B. and S. Baron-Cohen. (2013).
Understanding the genetics of empathy and the autistic spectrum, in S.
Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, M. Lombardo. (eds). Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social
Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=eTdLAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA326&ots=fHpygaxaMQ&sig=_sJsVgdoe0hc-fFbzaW3GMEslZU#v=onepage&q&f=false
Creighton, M.R. (1990). Revisiting shame and guilt
cultures: A forty-year pilgrimage, Ethos,
18, 279-307.
http://sfprg.org/control_mastery/docs/revisitshameguilt.pdf
Davis, M.H., C. Luce, and S.J. Kraus. (1994). The
heritability of characteristics associated with dispositional empathy, Journal of Personality, 62, 369-391.
Fanon, F. (1970). Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspero.
Frost, P. (2013a). The origins of Northwest European
guilt culture, Evo and Proud,
December 7
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html
Frost, P. (2013b). Origins of Northwest European
guilt culture, Part II, Evo and Proud,
December 14
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html
Frost, P. (2014). A pathway to pro-social behavior, Evo and Proud, May 10.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/05/a-pathway-to-pro-social-behavior.html
Gillberg, C. (2007). Non-autism childhood
personality disorders, in: T.F.D. Farrow and P.W.R. Woodruff (eds). Empathy in Mental Illness, (pp.
111-125). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage pattern in
historical perspective. In D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley (eds). Population in History, Arnold, London.
Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age
at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478, Population Studies, 39,
55-69.
Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending,
& R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (USA), 104, 20753-20758.
http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/Documents/accel_pnas_submit.pdf
Hermann, E. (2011). Empathy, ethnicity, and the self
among the Barnabans in Fiji, in D.W. Hollan, C. J. Throop (eds).The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing
the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies, (pp. 25-42), New York: Berghahn.
Lepowsky, M. (2011). The boundaries of personhood,
the problem of empathy, and "the native's point of view" in the outer
islands, in D.W. Hollan, C. J. Throop (eds).The
Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies,
(pp. 43-68), New York: Berghahn.
Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.
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world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial
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and P.S. Crisostomo. (2007). Empathy and depression: the moral system in
overdrive, in: T.F.D. Farrow and P.W.R. Woodruff (eds). Empathy in Mental Illness, (pp. 49-75). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Price, T.D. (1991). The Mesolithic of Northern
Europe, Annual Review of Anthropology,
20, 211-233.
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Europe, London: Verso.
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36 comments:
Peter, this is slightly off topic, but a quick search tells me you haven't discussed blushing in the past. Maybe a topic for a future post since lightness of skin would make this signal more apparent.
Brilliant.
What peoples of present day Europe are included into this Nortwestern guilt culture?
Interesting, as always. Where would Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments fit into this. As I recall, not just sympathy, but also the desire for approbation was a controlling motivation. Is that a matter of shame or guilt or something else?
And then how do you explain something like this:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/10/toddler-struck-twice-by-hit-and-run-drivers-dozens-ignore-her/
What about Asians? How do they fit into this scheme.
A Chinese acquaintance tells me that his aged parents live in the ChinaTown portion of a big city and that his aged father has difficulty crossing the streets and will sometimes fall.
He says that only whites will rush to his father's help. Other Chinese will just ignore his father's plight.
hunter-fisher-gatherers
Isn't the genetic evidence looking more and more like these hippies being violently replaced by patriarchal, tribal Indo-European warriors who took kinship and lineages very seriously?
What about Asians? How do they fit into this scheme.
Well they're not Northwest Europeans. That's not really the question with respect to this scheme.
The real question would be where things like the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, colonial expansions, imperial rule, etc. which did not appear to involve universal empathy would fit in in this scheme. Of course these examples have been turned into such cliches by now by liberals that we don't even consider them anymore, but presumably they are facts that would have to fit in somehow with this scheme.
If we look at imperial history, for example, it's not clear that the Northwest Europeans demonstrated more universal empathy than the Latin or Southern Europeans, who tended to be more accommodating in many ways of the foreigners they encountered.
"The real question would be where things like the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, colonial expansions, imperial rule, etc. which did not appear to involve universal empathy would fit in in this scheme"
I'm sure the proponent of this theory can somehow explain them away.
"They're qualitatively different from these smaller-scale similar phenomena, you see."
Anthropology-as-joke.
"He says that only whites will rush to his father's help."
"The real question would be where things like the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, colonial expansions, imperial rule, etc. which did not appear to involve universal empathy would fit in in this scheme"
Percentages.
Percentages.
Percentages of what? Obviously we're not looking at percentages here and trying to even come up with percentages to compare could be difficult.
Why would pro social guilt based behavior increase in a in an out bred society with lots of non kin. This seem back to front in a more out bred society group selection would be less and genes for more selfish behavior would have the advantage. Surely you have the cause and effect back to front a population witch already has been bred for pro social behavior would allow a out bred culture to form. Such instincts would of presumably been bred in during a a close nit tribal stage when there was a combination of strong group selection and too many eyes and ears to get away with anything.
I have a different explanation for the relationship, outbreeding and empathy. When a population leave to marry within their families, there will be a greater internal genetic diversification. This begins to build individuals. Ie, people who consider themselves different, unique, compared to the other. Individuals unlike clans, know they are genetic lonely, unconsciously. As a result, they understand that they need to cooperate with others, who will also be a individuals. And they consider as such.
Pathological altruism of liberal Europeans, is the result of the individual's perspective. A world composed of individuals, made to individuals and where there is not foreigners, authority or boundaries. The man with no trace of his persona Animalia.
An example. Liberals are against authority of parents over their children's choices regarding love relationships. Why?
Because your children are individuals, just as they and empathy of liberal parents, makes them understand that their children are prevented from loving whomever they wish, it is an affront to the hyper-rationalist liberal mind. It is irrational to stop them to love who they want.
Every individual must cooperate because he is lonely without cooperation with others, regardless of their origins, after all, they are individuals, this feeling of loneliness will become real and extremely damaging.
Every individual is egocentric because it is considered as a single person (I read in neuropolitics that white liberals are more genetically diverse). Your empathy for others, is the result of their own self externalization in the skin of another.
I will not do what I would be done with me.
Perhaps two examples of gene-culture co-evolution.
1. Genetic genocide: How primitive porridge made Celts top Scots
The theory is that the G men's reliance on a diet of roots, fruits, berries and meat meant their infants - whose milk teeth would struggle to chew this material - had to be breastfed much longer. This reduced the rate at which the women could bear offspring.
In comparison, the R1b lineages were expert at growing cereal crops and knew how to mash dried oats and barley into a nutritious "primitive porridge" which could be spoon-fed to babies, weaning them much earlier.
2. In southern China, they feed rice gruel to their kids, also allowing mothers to get busy with having another child or work in the paddies etc.
So, in each case, and perhaps also with lactase persistence, more children survive allowing such populations to outbreed their competitors.
"Percentages of what? Obviously we're not looking at percentages here"
I think it's always about percentages. You don't get an entire population thinking one way and another entire population thinking a completely different way. It's a balance of percentages of different types of people with tipping points and the currently dominant group imposing their view with sanctions.
It doesn't have to be a majority either. You might get a ruling group with one dominant view and the majority with a different view. I'd say this is the case in the west currently. The upper middle class whites are far more liberal and universal minded than the rest but still dominate even though a minority.
For example the point made above about only white people going to help the Chinese guy get up. It won't be 100% of white people and 0% of Chinese but a) a large enough percentage of white people to notice the disparity and b) enough of a percentage of white people for doing it not to be seen as odd and c) a small enough percentage of Chinese for those naturally inclined to do it to stop because they don't want to look odd.
.
"and trying to even come up with percentages to compare could be difficult."
this is very true
@Stephen
"Why would pro social guilt based behavior increase in an out bred society with lots of non kin."
If you out breed from an initially homogenous but more inbred group the result aren't non-kin. In that context out breeding creates lots more but more loosely related kin.
example
option 1)
valley with 8 endogamous villages. everyone in each village is roughly 2nd cousin to everyone else in their village and 8th cousin to the people in the other villages.
option 2)
same valley with the 8 villages out breeding leading to everyone in the valley being on average 4th cousin to everyone else in the valley.
a different *pattern* of relatedness might change the optimal pattern of pro-social behavior.
.
ego =
2 brothers
8 1st cousins
32 2nd cousins
128 3rd cousins
etc
(I wonder if Dunbar's numbers are connected to this in some way?)
Whyvert,
I’ll touch on blushing in my next post (in relation to shame).
Juoni,
Guilt seems to be more important west of the Hajnal line. It’s probably best to think of Northwest European guilt culture as a clinal trait that diminishes progressively as one goes south and east.
Luke,
The desire for moral approbation is the flip side of shame, i.e., it’s mediated by what others think. Adam Smith understood that the free market economy required a high-trust environment where people respect each other and sympathize with each other. What he calls sympathy seems to correspond to empathy in modern English, i.e., a natural tendency to care about the well-being of others.
Adam Smith also considered this “sympathy” to be a natural tendency that exists even in "the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society.” In this, he was woefully naïve, but his naïveté seems to be the norm among free market libertarians.
As for the news item, empathy is clearly on the decline in modern America, just as the free market economy is on the decline. The desire for plunder is replacing the desire for honest trade.
Beyond Anon,
China is a “shame culture.” In China, people will help others for two main reasons: 1) a desire for a reciprocal helping relationship and 2) fear of shaming, if the person in need of help is a relative.
Anon,
No, Northwest Europeans are largely descended from Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers. The decline of haplogroup U was due to selection and not population replacement.
Anon,
“The real question would be where things like the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, colonial expansions, imperial rule, etc. which did not appear to involve universal empathy would fit in in this scheme”
Those “things” fit very nicely. Empathy does not mean unconditional love for everybody. If a person is perceived to be morally worthless (i.e., a free rider or a “rule breaker”), that person will be expelled from the group or even killed. This is something that empathic people enjoy doing. “Altruistic punishers experience a neuronally based reward from punishing defectors, despite material costs.” In the past, foreigners were routinely considered to be moral outsiders. They could not be full members of the moral community because they would pursue their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s.
Over the past century, we have seen a dramatic reversal of this rule that foreigners are moral outsiders. The rule itself has been deemed immoral, and people who support it are deemed to be moral outsiders. Indeed, the insult “dirty racist” has taken over the same mental space that was formerly reserved for racial/ethnic insults. This point has been made by Pierre-André Taguieff:
“… over the last thirty years of the 20th century, the word “racism” became an insult in everyday language (“racist!” “dirty racist!”), an insult derived from the racist insult par excellence (“dirty nigger!”, “dirty Jew!”), and given a symbolic illegitimating power as strong as the political insult “fascist!” or “dirty fascist!”. To say an individual is “racist” is to stigmatize him, to assign him to a heinous category, and to abuse him verbally […] The “racist” individual is thus expelled from the realm of common humanity and excluded from the circle of humans who are deemed respectable by virtue of their intrinsic worth. Through a symbolic act that antiracist sociologists denounce as a way of “racializing” the Other, the “racist” is in turn and in return categorized as an “unworthy” being, indeed as an “unworthy” being par excellence. For, as people say, what can be worse than racism?”
Stephen,
Because free riders eventually tend to overwhelm altruists. Empathy for non-kin can only arise in a society where social groups are continually forming and reforming, i.e., the haystack model.
Peter, I was watching Wimbledon yesterday and I was surprised to see that the crowd was overwhelmingly fair or brown/red haired. I don't think I've seen those sort of people en masse since before I discovered your work. And it struck me what an effective signalling system it is, and how, it relies on being many in number, for that effectiveness.
I wondered whether, despite the time factor, the secondary-sex signalling system was the first step on the way to empathy. In gene-culture evolution many traits evolve concurrently. Traits and their 'tectonics' are not necessarily directly inter-connected but surely each trait outcome has the potential to impact on other trait evolution?
Could the secondary-sex signalling system be the first step towards being able to identify other people by something other than clan membership? Could multi-variate hair and eye colour be a first step on the road to individualism?
Kate
"No, Northwest Europeans are largely descended from Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers. The decline of haplogroup U was due to selection and not population replacement."
Well, partially yes. As those people weren't entirely killed off. But hapblogroup ratios, ancient DNA analysis and archaeology tells us this is not true. Also ancient europeans were terrible and savage to each other as bronze-age death pits and roman and greek testimony reveal to us.
Obviously the decrease of social friction is much more recent, within the past 2,000 years.
Ancient europeans were just as savage and cruel as other humans.
No, Northwest Europeans are largely descended from Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers. The decline of haplogroup U was due to selection and not population replacement.
Well, I think Cochran thinks differently.
Nothing connects the different kinds of empathy to the exclusion of any other part of the human 'social brain's' workings during socialisation.
The construct of empathy ought to be scrapped as unsupportable.
B&B said "Nothing connects the different kinds of empathy to the exclusion of any other part of the human 'social brain's' "
Does that make empathy an emergent property?
Nothing to do with this topic but:
As fas as I'm concerned the average IQ of Arabs nowadays is somewhere around 90. How is it possible that they created and maintained such a high level of culture during the so-called Dark Ages?
Is it possible (or even likely) that their IQ has declined since? If so, what would be the cause?
"Is it possible (or even likely) that their IQ has declined since? If so, what would be the cause?"
slave trade
"- affective or emotional empathy, i.e., capacity to respond with the appropriate emotion to another person's mental state (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013)"
In psychotherapy a distinction is often drawn between empathy and sympathy.
Empathy is used to mean actually feeling the same emotions that the other is feeling, so if they are sad you are sad, if they are angry you are angry, if they are in pain then you feel the same pain. It's perhaps something like resonating together.
Sympathy is used more to refer to a particular range of your own feelings in response to what the other is feeling, thus I might feel sad that you are angry again, or I might feel worried about you.
Sympathy without evident empathy can be experienced as condescension, and it does not convey the same sort of emotional connection.
"Is it possible (or even likely) that their IQ has declined since? If so, what would be the cause?"
slave trade
The castrated their black slaves so I doubt it.
*They
"The castrated their black slaves so I doubt it."
The Arab slave trade in Africa was mostly young boys and *women*.
Anonymous,
No, it makes empathy an invalid construct. The usage of the word 'empathy' ought to be either restricted to emotional empathy or else abandoned.
"How is it possible that they [Arabs] created and maintained such a high level of culture during the so-called Dark Ages?"
They invaded rich lands with very high level of culture - that gave them very good start. It's not like they invented everything and created something from nothing. That then they were invaded from two sides, which created a cultural backslash, could be considered a factor.
slave trade
Arabs of the Levant have around about 6-7% African admixture.
That would, alone, drop "IQ" about 6-7% of one standard deviation, which in IQ terms would be 6/100*15 = 0.9 IQ points. Or if you reckon the gap with Africans is around 20 points, 1.2 points.
Pretty trivial compared to a small amount of natural selection.
Those “things” fit very nicely. Empathy does not mean unconditional love for everybody. If a person is perceived to be morally worthless (i.e., a free rider or a “rule breaker”), that person will be expelled from the group or even killed. This is something that empathic people enjoy doing. “Altruistic punishers experience a neuronally based reward from punishing defectors, despite material costs.” In the past, foreigners were routinely considered to be moral outsiders. They could not be full members of the moral community because they would pursue their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s.
Over the past century, we have seen a dramatic reversal of this rule that foreigners are moral outsiders. The rule itself has been deemed immoral, and people who support it are deemed to be moral outsiders.
I don't necessarily disagree with everything here.
However, ultimately it's not that foreigners would pursue their own interests that they weren't part of the moral community. Foreigners weren't part of the moral community because it was recognized that simply by being genetically foreign, they had fundamentally different interests, regardless of whether or not they would pursue them. Empathy was reserved for the in-group, and not universalized to out-groups.
We have not actually seen a dramatic reversal of this rule that foreigners are moral outsiders. What we have actually seen over the past century is people being indoctrinated to believe that foreigners effectively don't exist in the first place. People have been indoctrinated to believe that race, ethnicity, etc. don't exist and are merely social constructs, that 2 people of the same race are more genetically different than 2 people of different races, etc. Since there are no foreigners, there are no moral outsiders. People don't actually believe that foreigners aren't moral outsiders. What they've been led to believe is that they aren't really foreign, hence aren't moral outsiders. When formerly liberal whites who had been convinced by "science" that foreigners didn't really genetically exist read HBD or racialist literature and discover that genetic foreigners do indeed exist, they tend to revert to the older way of recognizing genetic foreigners, hence recognizing them as out-groups and thus as moral outsiders.
Those “things” fit very nicely. Empathy does not mean unconditional love for everybody. If a person is perceived to be morally worthless (i.e., a free rider or a “rule breaker”), that person will be expelled from the group or even killed. This is something that empathic people enjoy doing. “Altruistic punishers experience a neuronally based reward from punishing defectors, despite material costs.”
Yes, empathy doesn't mean unconditional love for everybody. But those "things" aren't examples of empathy towards in-group members or policing of in-group members by altruistic punishment, but of empathy not being extended towards out-groups.
This is interesting. Depressive and self-destructive people are kinder and more empathic than non-depressive ones. I think they're really common not only on NW Europe, but I think also in NE Asia. Usually, when scandals are involved, NE Asians usually resign and commit suicide, like the cases of Japanese politicians. They easily become depressed. Unlike the rest of Asians, where they become melodramatic, and sometimes bash or even kill their opponents, like the case of Filipino politicians. Sadly, only NE Asians and NW Europeans are more empathic, while the rest of the world are not.
Also, I find people with high affective empathy are babyface and more attractive, that's why I find NE Asians and NW Europeans very attractive more than the rest of the humans. (Disclaimer: I apologize if I sound racist.)
Very good & much great. You are successful because you share all the Knowledge you know with others.
https://blog.mindvalley.com/too-much-empathy/
In the big fat lie to use guilt bin
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