What mechanism(s) drive(s) empathy?

 If you have a tuned guitar in a room and you sing, or otherwise produce, a note on the same pitch that one of strings is tuned to, that string will begin vibrating. This isn’t just true of guitars. Lots of pitched instruments will do it. Any stringed instrument, or tuning fork, for example, is capable of this.  (If you’re curious about the phenomenon, go to YouTube and search “sympathetic vibration”.) 

I think some people who place a lot of value on empathy, or who call themselves “empaths”, imagine something like this happening. A person over there has an emotion and they feel the same emotion. Some people have even go so far as to invent a technical language to describe this. “Somatic empathy” is one such term and it’s a telling one as “somatic” means “of the body”. Just like sympathetic vibration, the response is imagined as physical. It’s a reasonable hypothesis but I am not aware of any credible research supporting the existence of somatic empathy.

Otherwise, there has to be some sort of judgment for empathy to work. I judge that Cathy is unhappy and I respond to that. That judgment can be either conscious or unconscious. In the invented technical language of empathy, that is called affective empathy. And it’s important to note that there is an assumed criterion here. I have to feel the correct emotion in response. If I see that Cathy is sad and I respond by cruelly teasing her, that is not empathy.

But notice that my judgment of the other person’s feelings is assumed to be correct in both instances; that is I correctly judge what the emotion is and I respond appropriately What is ‘incorrect” when I tease is the emotion I feel in response to the correct judgment of what Cathy is feeling. There is a moral assumption hiding here that could be spelled out as, “Anyone who sees a sad person, will respond with the appropriate emotion.” 

What is the appropriate emotion? Well, that’s a bit tricky. It can’t be sympathy because we already have that word. To justify a new word, we need empathy to be something different. I think the issue here is that “empathy” is a synonym for “sympathy” but so is “pity”. That is to say, they don’t mean exactly the same thing but they are close. To feel sympathy or pity, you have to set yourself above the person you are responding. You feel sorry they are hurt but you don’t necessarily identify with them. Empathy requires that you be connected with the person you feel it for, which is why it worked with inanimate objects like paintings. 

I could feel sympathy for Cathy because her heart is broken following the failure of her latest relationship while simultaneously believing that is her own bad habits that have gotten into this plight. I might think, “When is she going to realize that she keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.” Empathy seems to require that I not only feel for Cathy but that I also feel for her plight.

I take it that the moral and political implications of this are obvious. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. Where there is a problem is when it is obvious that it’s the morality or the politics driving the empathy and not the other way around. The person who feels no empathy with people they disagree with is a fraud. 

Let’s return to the issue of the judgments associated with empathy. I said above that it is not empathy if I correctly judge another person’s emotions but respond by being cruel to them. That’s, well, that’s interesting because it suggests that a person could be really good at assessing other people’s feelings without responding to them in the way that seems “natural” to us. And there are people capable of reading others’ emotions very accurately but who don’t feel any kinship with others. The most conspicuous example being psychopaths.

But that raises another issue. Is the opposite mistake possible? Can someone incorrectly judge another person to be suffering and then respond in a way that is deemed appropriate to that imagined suffering? Well, yes and this happens regularly. We’re actually pretty good at judging other people’s emotions but we’re not 100 percent accurate at it. We’ve all had the experience of expressing support for someone else only to find out they’re just fine.

(We’ve all also had the experience of having someone offer support when there has been nothing wrong. And that’s worth mediating on. I don’t like that experience. Sometimes I think it’s just an honest mistake but other times I have had the distinct impression that someone has tried to diminish me by claiming I must be sad, bitter, angry, jealous … .)

One reason we get it wrong is that judging an emotion is not only a matter of judging what a person is doing. It requires us to judge the response in a particular context. The facial expressions that go with orgasm and extreme pain are indistinguishable. It’s the fact that your partner is having ex with you when their face contorts that justifies your concluding that it’s pleasure. (You can still be wrong and you could, for example, be busy congratulating yourself on being a good lover only to be humbled when they announce they’ve just had a muscle cramp.)

Empathy is like any other emotional response. It should be always open to questioning and criticism.  I can be angry and be justified. I can be angry for no good reason. I can lack in anger, letting people abuse me. I can also be justifiably angry but overreact and assault someone. Empathy, to the extent that it is useful, requires secondary judgments. 

It’s worth noting in passing, by the way, that the most common reason we judge others’ emotions incorrectly is that we want to know what they think of us and it is very often the case that other people aren’t thinking about us or particularly interested in us. Jack sees that his wife is unhappy and wonders if he has done or said something to upset her. She, meanwhile, is wishing she’d handled an issue at work differently.