Maria
Walpole and her daughter Elisabeth Laura (1762), by Joshua Reynolds. Affective
empathy may have initially evolved to facilitate the mother-child relationship.
Empathy
is key to the functioning of high-trust cultures. If everyone is empathic
toward each other, there is no need to waste energy on self-protection or on
double-checking every single transaction. Just as importantly, you can make
transactions that would otherwise be uneconomical.
Empathy,
however, has to be reciprocated. Otherwise, it will divert your limited
resources to people who will never reciprocate and who will, in fact, bleed you
dry.
The
adaptiveness of empathy therefore depends on the cultural environment. Some
cultures will favor it but not others. Does it follow, then, that some human
populations have become more empathic than others? Can this mental trait
undergo gene-culture coevolution?
It
can, if three pre-conditions are met:
1.
The trait varies in adaptiveness from one culture to another.
2.
The trait is genetically heritable.
3.
The trait can easily evolve out of pre-existing traits, i.e., only a few genetic
changes are needed.
Evolutionary
psychologists will argue that modern humans have not existed long enough to
evolve new mental adaptations, particularly since their expansion out of Africa
and into new natural and cultural environments. There has only been fine-tuning
of existing adaptations (Tooby, Cosmides, and Barkow 1992). This argument is
debatable:
Even if 40 or 50 thousand years were too short a time for the evolutionary development of a truly new and highly complex mental adaptation, which is by no means certain, it is certainly long enough for some groups to lose such an adaptation, for some groups to develop a highly exaggerated version of an adaptation, or for changes in the triggers or timing of that adaptation to evolve. That is what we see in domesticated dogs, for example, who have entirely lost certain key behavioral adaptations of wolves such as paternal investment. Other wolf behaviors have been exaggerated or distorted. (Harpending and Cochran 2002)
Empathy can thus differ between human populations if the differences arise from simple changes to an existing mechanism.
So
does empathy meet the above preconditions?
Differences in
adaptiveness
All
cultures have rules of one sort or another. These rules are enforced by
external sanctions (shaming by the community, especially by family members) and
internal sanctions (feelings of guilt). Most cultures rely primarily on
shaming. Some cultures, particularly in Europe, rely much more on feelings of
guilt. Guilt is a subset of empathy. As the wrongdoer, you transfer to yourself
the feelings of the person you have wronged. You feel the pain you have inflicted,
and you will now mentally punish yourself.
The
anthropologist Ruth Benedict described the differences between shame and guilt:
True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people's criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case, it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man's fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honor means living up to one's own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man's feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin. (Benedict 1946, p. 223)
Shame seems to be evolutionarily older than guilt. Sigmund Freud speculated that feelings of guilt arose as a mechanism to punish misbehavior in larger communities where paternal authority is insufficient:
When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. [...]. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then [...] there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. (Freud 1962, pp. 79-80)
East Asians might seem to be an exception to this evolutionary trend. They generally live in large communities where paternal authority is insufficient to enforce social rules. This problem seems to have been resolved through a stronger sense of social duty, rather than a greater propensity for empathy and guilt.
We
see this in a study of young Chinese adults. The participants could see things
from another person's perspective and understand how that person felt, but they
did not seem to internalize those feelings and experience them vicariously. They
were motivated to obey social rules by a sense of duty, rather than by empathy
and feelings of guilt: "taking the views of others is an essential duty,
and the lack of consideration to others' perspectives is generally regarded as
a lack of virtue in the Chinese culture" (Siu and Shek 2005).
Heritability
First,
we should keep in mind that empathy is not a unitary construct. It has
different components:
Pro-social
behavior:
willingness to help others
Cognitive empathy: capacity to understand how others feel
Affective or
emotional empathy:
involuntary transference of another person's feelings to yourself, i.e.,
feeling that person's pain or joy.
The
last component is usually what we mean by empathy. Nonetheless, a person can be
low in affective empathy while being high in cognitive empathy; this is in fact
the hallmark of the sociopath, i.e., a person who understands how others feel
and knows how to exploit those feelings for personal gain. Of the three kinds
of empathy, pro-social behavior seems the most divergent and shares the least
mental circuitry with the other two. Cognitive and affective empathy share
circuits that specialize in representing another person's thoughts and
intensions; affective empathy seems to be an additional step where these representations
are relayed to brain regions that produce the corresponding emotional responses
(Carr et al. 2003; Krishnan et al. 2016).
The
latest review of the literature concluded that all three components of empathy
have moderate to high heritability (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen 2013). Since
then, an adult twin study has estimated the heritability of affective empathy
at 52-57% and that of cognitive empathy at 27%. The rest of the variance was
largely due to non-shared environment (Melchers et al. 2016).
These
findings are in line with those of a longitudinal twin study of children from 7
to 12 years of age. Genetic influences accounted for most of the variance in
callousness/unemotionality, and environmental influences were entirely
non-shared (Henry et al. 2018). Other studies have shown that the capacity for
affective empathy remains stable as a child develops, while cognitive empathy
progressively increases (Decety et al. 2017):
Finally,
men and women seem to differ in affective empathy but not in cognitive empathy:
“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). This sex difference has been confirmed by
recent studies, notably 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 sex
difference varied, however, being slight in the British and Argentinean studies,
large but not significant in the Italian study, and significant in the Chinese
study.
Evolution in Homo sapiens
Affective
empathy seems to be universal in our species. Differences do exist, however,
between individuals, and these differences are distributed along a Bell curve in
a human population (Baron-Cohen 2011; McGregor 2018). Any distinction between “normal
people” and “sociopaths” is therefore arbitrary. There is simply a continuum of
decreasing capacity for affective empathy.
Affective
empathy also differs between men and women, and this sex difference seems, in
turn, to differ from one population to another. This last point suggests an
evolutionary pathway. Affective empathy may have initially evolved in ancestral
humans as a means to facilitate the mother-child relationship. "Guilt
cultures" then favored extension of affective empathy to a wider range of
social interactions, as well as increased expression in men. One consequence
would be a smaller sex difference in this mental trait.
How do guilt cultures ensure that affective empathy is
reciprocated? They seem to resolve this problem by defining themselves much
more as moral communities than as communities of related individuals. Adherence
to social rules defines community membership, and these rules are perceived as
being universal and
absolute, as opposed to the situational morality of communities
defined solely by kinship. Guilt cultures are also highly ideological. Community
members monitor not only outward behavior for compliance but also inward
thoughts—and this monitoring can target not just the thoughts of other members
but also one’s own. Non-compliance can lead to a member being branded as
morally worthless and expelled from the community (Frost 2017).
The
current evidence is suggestive but not conclusive. As Baez et al. (2017) point
out, most of our evidence on sex differences in empathy comes from self-report,
i.e., questionnaires that men and women fill out. Many studies also fail to
distinguish between cognitive empathy (understanding what others feel) and
affective empathy (feeling what others feel). To measure affective empathy
objectively, especially when comparing people from different cultural
backgrounds, it would be best to use brain fMRIs (Krishnan et al. 2016).
To
be cont'd
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