Affective empathy: a double-edged sword

March in Brooklyn (?) (Wikicommons - Amanda Hirsch). Can we learn to feel another person's pain or joy? Twin studies indicate that affective empathy is 52-57% heritable. The rest includes prenatal and postnatal influences that happen long before social learning begins.



In our species, a major problem has been to create high-trust societies that encompass large numbers of people who are not closely related and yet have to deal with each other regularly. This problem hasn’t been resolved in most human populations—for the most part, people trust only family and close kin. Consequently, a market economy cannot realize its full potential: a lot of economic activity never happens because the low level of trust makes it too costly. This point is repeatedly made in the book India Unbound by Gurcharan Das:

[…] the social life of Indians revolves around the family or caste. It does not encompass the whole community. Perhaps this is why our streets are dirty when our homes are spotlessly clean. (Das 2002, p. 81)

A striking characteristic of Indian business is that it is family-owned and family-managed. […] (Das 2002, p. 265)

Whether businesses here can create managerial capitalism depends partly on Indian society’s ability to build “social capital.” Where strangers spontaneously trust each other and cooperate with each other, there is high social capital. Indeed, Tocqueville regarded this “art of association” as an essential virtue of American society because it moderated the American tendency toward individualism. Trust and cooperation are necessary in all market activity. Social capital can help companies make the transition from small family units to large, professionally run enterprises. High trust can dramatically lower transaction costs, corruption, and bureaucracy. (Das 2002, pp. 267-268)

The "large society problem" has been fully resolved only in two culture areas: Northwest Europe and East Asia. In general, the solution has been to weaken the importance of kinship in social relations and to strengthen impersonal forms of sociality that can bring everyone together, and not just closely related people. To be specific, the focus of empathy has been extended beyond the circle of close kin, and people become more attuned to universal social rules that exist independently of kinship obligations.

Northwest Europeans have transcended the ties of kinship to an unusual extent. North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, kinship ties have been relatively weak for at least a millennium. Almost everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, and many stay single their entire lives. In addition, households often have non-kin members, and children normally leave the nuclear family to form new households. This weak-kinship environment is associated with an equally unusual pattern of behavior: greater individualism, less loyalty to kin, and more willingness to trust strangers.

This is not so with East Asians, who still have strong kinship ties and are actually less individualistic than humans in general. Whereas a greater sense of self has helped Northwest Europeans transcend the limitations of kinship to build larger societies, East Asians have relied on a lesser sense of self to strengthen impersonal sociality within and beyond their circle of close kin. There is more emphasis on holistic attention, on social happiness rather than personal happiness, and on suspension of self-interest. Conversely, there is less emphasis on self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (Kitayama et al. 2014).


Empathy: cognitive versus affective

Empathy seems especially key to strengthening social relations beyond one's circle of close kin. It has two components. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of another person, and affective (or emotional) empathy is the ability to internalize those feelings and actually feel that person's pain or joy. Affective empathy is 52-57% heritable, and cognitive empathy 27% heritable (Melchers et al. 2016). This is in line with longitudinal studies on children: affective empathy remains stable as a child develops, while cognitive empathy progressively increases, perhaps through learning (Decety et al. 2017). 

Affective empathy, but not cognitive empathy, is sexually dimorphic: 

[...] females do indeed appear to be more empathic than males [but] [t]hey do not appear to be more adept at assessing another person's affective, cognitive, or spatial perspective" (Hoffman 1977).

Women are faster in recognizing facial expression, emotional body language, more sensitive to baby voice, more experientially reactive to negative, but not positive, emotional pictures compared to men. Men, on the other hand, seem to show better skills in cognitive empathy while women performed better in emotional empathy (Uysal et al. 2020).

This difference between men and women has been confirmed by a British study (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright 2004), a largely Argentinean study (Baez et al. 2017), an Italian twin study (Toccaceli et al. 2018), and a Chinese study (Liu et al. 2018). The size of the difference varies, however, being slight in the British and Argentinean studies, large but not significant in the Italian study, and significant in the Chinese study. The sex difference in affective empathy largely accounts for the sex difference in aggression (Dryburgh and Vachon 2019). Women are also more likely to forgive, and this sex difference seems mediated by the sex difference in empathy (Witvliet et al. 2020).

Thus, affective empathy may have initially served to facilitate the relationship between a mother and her young children. This female adaptation may have a long evolutionary history among mammals: it has been shown that sensitivity to the pain of others is stronger in female mice than in male mice (Uysal et al. 2018).

As some human populations formed larger and more complex societies, natural selection may have gradually extended affective empathy to both sexes and to all social relationships. An analogy would be the gene-culture coevolution between lactose metabolism and dairy farming. The ability to digest lactose is lost after infancy by most humans but is lifelong in cultures where adults consume milk and other dairy products.


Northwest Europeans versus East Asians

Northwest Europeans and East Asians are similar in having high levels of empathy but differ in the relative importance of cognitive empathy versus affective empathy. Affective empathy is much more key to prosocial behavior among Northwest Europeans than among East Asians. This was the conclusion of Li et al. (2019):

Previous research has shown that affective empathy, rather than cognitive empathy, significantly predicts people's altruistic sharing behavior in economic games. However, most of these studies were conducted in Western populations. There might be cultural differences in the relations between empathy and altruism due to different levels of empathy between Western and Asian individuals. In this study, we measured different aspects of empathy in Chinese adults as well as their allocation offers in the dictator and ultimatum games. We found that cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, was a significant predictor of adults' altruistic sharing behavior in the two economic games.

Similarly, Siu and Shek (2005) found that Chinese subjects had trouble distinguishing between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. They concluded that "Chinese people might not perceive the items from the two dimensions as too different in nature."

One might think that cognitive empathy would be worse than affective empathy as a basis for prosocial behavior. For instance, sociopaths are usually high in cognitive empathy: they know how another person feels in a given situation, but they use this knowledge to exploit and control that person. Wouldn't their resulting success eventually destroy social order? East Asian societies may have avoided this outcome through their low level of individualism and their correspondingly high level of social conformity. Kitayama et al. (2014) makes this point when discussing certain alleles of a gene, DRD4, that are associated with risk seeking and heavy drinking in the United States but not in East Asia. These alleles seem to increase the desire to emulate one's peers, and such emulation is more likely to favor dysfunctional behavior in the United States than in East Asia:

It might be the case that the 7R and 2R alleles are associated with greater acquisition of culturally sanctioned social orientations under generally favorable conditions of socialization, such as careful guidance and scaffolding of norm-congruous behaviors by socialization agents (e.g., parents, relatives, neighbors), but with markedly different, deviant behaviors (e.g., delinquency and risk proneness) under unfavorable social conditions or adversity, which might "reward" externalization or risk taking. (Kitayama et al. 2014)

These alleles seem to explain the weaker individualism and stronger social conformity of East Asians. When Kitayama et al. (2014) compared a sample of Euro-Americans with a sample of East Asians born in China, Korea, or Japan, they found that the East Asians were less individualistic than the Euro-Americans on a social orientation test, but this difference was limited to carriers of DRD4 alleles that increase dopamine signalling, i.e., 7- or 2-repeat alleles. Non-carrier East Asians were just as individualistic as non-carrier Euro-Americans (Kitayama et al. 2014)

Finally, we should keep in mind a serious shortcoming of affective empathy: you may become so overcome by your emotion that you can no longer accurately assess the target of your empathy. This point is made by Atkins (2014) in a review of several experimental studies of empathy in British and East Asian subjects:

Thus, it is possible that being in a highly emotionally empathic state may cloud the ability to accurately infer the emotions of a target due to the heightened emotions experienced in response to the suffering of another. In line with this reasoning, East Asians' lower level of emotional involvement might have freed cognitive resources to allow them to more accurately infer the emotions of targets.

A review of the subject

Atkins (2014) comes to several conclusions in his comparative review:

- When viewing a person suffering physical pain, British subjects report greater negative affect than do East Asian subjects.

-  When viewing a person suffering social pain, British subjects show greater empathic concern but lower empathic accuracy than do East Asian subjects.

- British subjects report greater empathic concern, but lower empathic accuracy than do Chinese subjects. Emotional expressivity predicts British but not Chinese empathic concern.

- Empathic concern explains differences between the two groups in donating, a measure of prosocial behavior.

- American subjects, more so than Japanese subjects, feel more affective empathy for one friend over another when the two friends are engaged in an intense disagreement.

In sum, East Asians have resolved the "large society problem" through a different psychological and behavioral package that places less emphasis on emotional involvement and more on restoration of social harmony.


References

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