Stuff You Should Know - How Empathy Works

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

Empathy can often be confused with sympathy and regular old compassion. But it's not exactly either one of those. Some say a lack of empathy can indicate sociopathic tendencies, but that's not always true either. So what is empathy and what makes someone prone to empathize? Listen in to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, you may have noticed this past Saturday, you got an extra episode of Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, that's why SK selects. That's right, it was not a mistake, what we decided to do here after nine plus years is,

you know, maybe you don't know that we have 900 plus episodes. So we're gonna start throwing out a, well I don't wanna call it a rerun. Well no, it's a hand selected, curated episode by us. Yeah, a classic if you will, that Josh will pick one out, I'll pick one out. Might be Newsy, it might just be one of our favorites

and we're gonna run those on Saturday. If you haven't heard it, check it out. If you have, we'd love for you to listen again. Sure, so check it out in your podcast feed. It's as simple as that. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Music

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck, Lena, my shoulder, Bryant. And Jerry, how about a hug, Roland? No, actually, I'm sorry, Jerry's here in spirit. Our guest producer today is Noel. Noel, my beard heals all brown. Yes.

Everybody knows it's Noel Brown. Are you using your empathy voice? Yeah, is it working? You ain't fooling nobody. Oh really? It's the beady eyes that say I cut you for $10. Oh, how are you, sir? I'm feeling empathetic.

Good. I'm doing good. I have some very strong opinions on empathy, and not just empathy, but empathy research in particular, as I'm sure you're not at all surprised to hear. I'm not at all surprised to hear. Did you come to the same or similar conclusions as I did? I don't know yet, because we don't talk about this stuff beforehand.

That's true. That's the magic. Go in blind. Did you know that there's like an Atlanta magic thing now? What do you mean, like a society? Something. I just saw a sign for it in Old Forth Ward, but there's like a, seems to be a legitimate magician's,

what's that castle in LA? Oh, the magic castle. It's not that, but it's probably something that, the people who do the Atlanta thing are, I'm sure, aware of the magic castle. Probably. And then you did a double take at the sign, and it disappeared in a poof of smoke.

That'd be great. I went to the magic castle once. Lucky. Yeah, it's awesome. I think we had this conversation, because I asked you if you'd seen that documentary about the kids' competition at the magic castle. Yeah, I have not, but...

It's a really good joke. Yeah, if you can, I highly recommend it. If you can get in, you gotta know somebody. You gotta know Ben Stiller. Oh, really? No, there was a movie that he was in that took place in the magic castle, and he was like the bad guy, I think. I don't remember what it was.

Maybe it was that documentary. Well, let's talk empathy, Chuck. Alrighty. Wait, hold on. I have an intro. I have an intro. Oh, okay. Are you familiar with Frank Rich, the left-leaning or lefty as heck essayist? I don't think so.

He's good. He's about as good an essayist as you'll find on the left. Okay. He's a consultant on Veep. He's hilarious, and he knows his stuff. Great. He usually writes for Harper's, but he's also got a regular gig in New York Magazine.

And in New York Magazine recently, he published a column, I think, this week. Well, this week as of when we're recording this. And I think it was called, like, No Sympathy for the Hillbilly or something like that. And it was basically, and this is really astounding coming from him, but it was basically him saying, you know what, I know that on the left,

people tend to be bleeding heart liberals and want to empathize with everybody and feel everyone else's pain and understand where people are coming from. But I believe that if you voted for Trump and you're angry, or I believe if you're angry at the people who voted for Trump or angry that Trump is president, you should be angry at the people who voted him

into office as well. And he basically is beating a drum, which I also started to see in other places as well, where it's like, no, you don't have to understand people who voted for Trump. You don't have to love your enemy. Let's just go to war with these people. And it's legitimate.

He's totally serious too. And it amounts to basically a call to go to the dark side, to resist everything that, you know, the left has traditionally prided itself on and just go full bore like culture war against the right. And it just seems like a really bad idea to me. But one of the things that stuck out to me about it the most, was that it was so contrary to the ethos,

the prevailing thought of the time, or at least what made up the Obama administration, which was we need to be more empathetic. We need to understand people's plight more. And even after Hillary lost, people, one of the big postmortems was, Hillary didn't connect with blue collar workers who were out of work.

She was totally out of touch with that. She couldn't empathize with them. Well, I think a further postmortem has been like, Hillary could empathize with those people all day, but they hated her and they were never going to vote for her. And now Frank Rich is saying, so hate them back is the thing. Again, I disagree with that, but it really points out

what a fragile turning point we're at right now. This path in history on America, are we going to stay and just keep trying to be empathetic? Or are we, again, just going to go full bore to the dark side and just everybody's going to hate everybody who's not like them? Wow. Quite an intro. Thank you.

For a coastal elite. Oh, I'm not a coastal elite. I'm just kidding. I just like that phrase. I hope I'm not, man. I really don't think I am and I hope people don't think I am. I do stick my pinky in the air when I take sips of water and that water's been strained through a Franciscan monk's mouth first. I don't think it's the only water I'll drink.

I don't think you can be a coastal elite if you have your roots in Toledo. Right, exactly. I don't forget where I'm from, man. My family has long roots in Tennessee and Mississippi if you know this by reading my Wikipedia page. Does it say that you're part Choctaw on there yet? I'm sure it will soon. All right, so we're talking empathy here.

A lot of this sounded familiar, so much so that I quadrupled checked that we had not done this. And I think we've just talked about it a lot, and namely in our Mirror Neurons episode. Yeah. And I thought about that one a lot when I was researching this. Well, I think it's definitely a component of empathy, but it's not to be confused with empathy.

It's like part of it, I think, is the impression I have. Agreed. So empathy, if you look at our, not so great article. They do define it. Everyone kind of knows what it is, but just to be clear, it's not sympathy. You can feel and share someone else's emotions is empathy, which is different than sympathy,

in that you're not feeling it, but you do care about it. Right, right. It's like you can understand why someone would be feeling like they're feeling is intellectual. Yeah. Like, sympathy is from the brain, and empathy is from, say, the heart. Yeah, and a lot of these words, when we get into the definitions

of empathy and versus compassion, it gets a little, I don't know, sometimes I feel like people are kind of splitting hairs with the diamond plagiar. So that, to me, Chuck, is a huge red flag that the field is not nearly as established as people like to think. Like, if there's still confusion on basic terms, like empathy and sympathy,

and they're used interchangeably, it just means that no one is doing the right kind of hardcore research or publishing the right kind of hardcore papers that say, this is what it is, or this is what it isn't. Yeah, agreed. Thomas just said, this is what it not is. This is what it ain't. No coastal elite.

But there was an original German word, Einfüllung, which means feeling into, and that's where empathy comes from. And if you talk to an expert or a researcher, these days they're going to talk about a couple of types of empathy, effective or maybe emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. And the distinction, as it turns out, is pretty important. And to me, well, to me,

this is where a little bit of the splitting hairs comes in, because as far as talking about effective empathy versus compassion, like is it the same thing, or I'm sorry, cognitive empathy would be more like compassion, because you're not really taking on someone else's pain. So compassion, I think, is even like a third word. So this is what I came up with. You've got cognitive empathy, which is sympathy, right?

You can understand why someone would be feeling a certain way. Then you've got effective empathy. Or emotional empathy, which this one dude calls it. Okay, which is like you're really putting yourself in that person's shoes and you're feeling how they're feeling right then. But then compassion, it seems to me, is the end goal of this. That's where you actually move to act. That's where you do something about it.

That's where you put your hand on someone's shoulder and say, it's going to be all right. Or here's a check for $500. Get some groceries with it. Who knows what you're going to do. Compassion is the act, like the action, the end goal of empathy, whether it's cognitive or effective. That's what I think.

And you know what? This field is so unestablished that I can just say that stuff. And it's probably right. Let's just say that. That's true. No one can really come along and say definitively that you're not right. So to give you an example of what that might mean, effective or emotional empathy,

if you have a friend or family member going through a very hard time and they're distraught and then you are also distraught, just like they are, then that is definitely effective empathy. Whereas you're not just like, oh man, your uncle passed away. I'm really sorry to hear that. And I feel terribly for you. But if you are actively taking that on to the point where you're crying to

and you didn't know the uncle, because that would be the differentiation, right? I think so. You don't have a personal stake in it, but you're still taking it on as if it is your own. Yes. And then depending on your view of things, and we'll talk a lot about this,

there's this really great psychologist named Paul Bloom, who has basically dedicated a lot of his life to shooting down ideas of how great empathy is. Yeah, I thought he made a lot of good points and some of them quite agree with either. He's great. He's really good at poking holes in the concept of empathy, but he points out that I guess it's probably good

if someone's in a great mood and you're empathetic and sharing in that great mood and amplifying it. But on the flip side of the coin, if somebody is in a horrifically, tragically sad mood and you're sitting there amplifying that by joining in part and parcel with it, then you're doing a disservice, right? So in some ways, well, I'll just say Paul Bloom's whole thesis, and I subscribe to it as well,

is that cognitive is far and away the superior of the two types of empathy as far as the ultimate goal, which again, to me is compassion. Yes. Do you want to just pepper in some of his stuff as we go? Sure. Does that make sense? Yeah. Because here's a great spot too.

And this is one of the studies I imagine, well, I don't know if you had a problem with it, but I had a problem with a lot of these studies. Yeah, me too. But there was a study, at least one, where psychologists said, how much money will you donate to develop a drug that would save one child's life? And then another group was asked, how much would you donate to develop a drug that would save eight kids?

And it was about the same answer. Where things changed was when they asked a third group about the one child, but they showed a picture of the kid and said, this is this little Joey. He's 14 years old. And this is his sad little face. And then donations really shot up. And this is where, what was his name? Paul Bloom.

Paul Bloom, the psychologist. Yeah, this is where Paul Bloom says that this emotional empathy is for the birds, because A, it's narrow. And B, it's very like people tend to want to help people that are like them. So it's, I mean, bias. Is that the right word? Super biased. Yeah.

And it makes no sense. Not only does it not scale upward as the number of people affect by, say, like a tragedy increase, it actually goes the other way, where the more people that are affected by something, the less empathetic a person tends to be. Whereas if, say, it's one person and you know that person's name and you see that person's picture on the news, and yeah, they look like you or your neighbor or your daughter,

you're going to empathize a lot. But at the same time, there could be, you know, the same thing could be happening to 50,000 other people. And if you'll just vote a certain way, you can alleviate their suffering, you wouldn't lift a finger to do it, especially if it meant slightly higher taxes for you. So in that sense, empathy makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, he even quoted Mother Teresa in this essay,

which is, quote, if I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will. So he's going with the heavy hitters there. You know, when you bring Mother Teresa in there to kind of make a point. She's talking smack. Yeah. But you know, he makes a good point. Oh, yeah.

Like, and that study does, I didn't have a big problem with that study because it does kind of prove that out. Tilia Koga and Ilana Ritov, their psychologists, and then Ritov and another co-author conducted another study where that kind of pointed out one of the problems with empathy, which was, they said, okay, two different groups of people heard this, that a vaccine maker cost a child her life. Right.

They killed a child because of the vaccine. Now, should the vaccine maker be fined? And then one group was told that the fine would probably make the vaccine maker follow guidelines even more strictly and would probably prevent accidents. And then the other further accidents and then the other group was told that this fine would probably make the vaccine maker get out of the business and more people would die because they couldn't get the vaccine. And both groups said that, yes, the vaccine maker should be punished with the highest fine possible.

Right, with extreme prejudice. Right. So the upshot of all of this is that especially with effective empathy, as we understand it, it doesn't follow any kind of rational guidelines and the basis of rationality being that two is more important than one. Right. And empathy just doesn't go in that direction. Yeah, but interestingly, while you can train yourself to be more empathetic,

it definitely to me feels like something that you are sort of born with to a certain degree or maybe in the formative years you might gain. But in Bloom's article, he talks about babies. And as soon as a baby can get up and start getting around, they're going to try and comfort, like if you go into a preschool and there's another baby crying. You will probably see another little baby walking over there and patting the little baby and stroking the baby.

There's nothing more adorable than that. It's pretty adorable. And it happens in the animal kingdom. Although they did note this Franz de Waal, the primatologist, notes that it kind of follows humans in a way and that a chimpanzee might really hug a victim of an attack, but it's got to be another chimp. They will smash the brains out of another kind of monkey maybe if it wanders into their little village.

Right. That to me kind of underscores this whole thing. When we look at empathy, the first question that people have is like, why don't we have more empathy or why don't we have empathy for everybody? We're all humans. Right. And it seems like based on Franz de Waal's studies and other studies about the evolution of in-group and out-group behavior,

we evolved over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, I guess more than that if you're also looking at the great apes, right? Sure. To see other groups that aren't like us as threatening, right? That makes sense in an evolutionary speaking way. Right. And it's only in like the last 10, 11,000 years that we settled down and started forming cities, but even then there was in-group and out-group people you didn't recognize

were coming to kill you for your crops, so you needed to fight those people. You didn't need to empathize with them that, oh, you're hungry, so you're going to take my life. I understand, right? That didn't jive with natural selection. Right. But then you add jets into the mix and then TV and then the Internet and all of a sudden we're exposed to more in-groups and out-groups

and are expected to get along more civilly than ever before, but our evolution hasn't caught up quite enough, right? Yeah. So now we're faced with this point where it's like, okay, we just need to figure out how to empathize more and this last vestige that's holding back a completely civil global society will fade away. And Franz DeWall put it pretty well. He said, this is the challenge of our time, globalization by a tribal species.

Yeah. We're facing right now and right now it feels like at least in the United States, we're backsliding. Yeah. Well, that's a good place to take a break, I think. Yeah. All right, well, we're going to come back in just a minute and talk a little bit about something called the racial empathy gap right after this.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

We have a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So I promised some talk about race and there's something called the racial empathy gap. Studies have kind of, I mean, if you walk around as a living, breathing human being, you can probably tell that that's something. But they have done studies on it. And a lot of these studies are a little hinky to me, but in one, they showed video clips

of a needle going into someone's skin, notably a white person's skin at first. And what they found was white people reacted more or with more empathy when the needle went into white skin than when it went into dark skin. Right. Or they showed more signs of distress, like they started to sweat a little more. Sure. Or their hearts started to beat a little faster. Yeah, that's where I think mirror neurons might come into play.

Right. Right? Yeah, that's what they're... Like it's brainwiring? That's a huge problem with reading about empathy in the popular media. There are huge jumps from mirror neurons to full-on effective empathy with just the switch of a sentence. Yeah.

Or the stroke of a headline. And so people are not talking about the same thing. And I'm sure there's plenty of empathy researchers out there that are just like, guys, guys, this is not... Like you're making huge jumps to the conclusion. Everybody's like, shut up. It doesn't matter. We're selling clicks.

Right. You know? Yeah, sure. But so yes, that's... So it is surely setting off mirror neurons. I don't understand how it's being translated into empathy aside from, I think, a lot of the empathy studies involved self-reporting. Right.

So I think what they're doing is they're saying, oh, well, subject 1329, their heart really started beating. And look at this. On this questionnaire they filled out, they really consider themselves an empathetic person. If so, facto, an empathetic person is responding very empathetically right now to seeing this needle. Yeah. Like what if they showed painted someone's skin green?

Well, they have. They've done violet tinted. They've actually... Oh, really? ...to tell you the truth as far as correlating with self-reports. That does tend to be a pretty good control to tell you the truth. Yeah. Well, they didn't mention that.

Because apparently all people respond to that one. Huh. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it is actually. There is something going on there, though. I mean, we're not, like, discounting that because they have done studies that show that minorities maybe don't get pain medication like they should compared to white people. And I don't know.

It seems like a racial empathy gap is a pretty decent explanation for that. For sure. Or in the criminal justice system, which we've talked a lot about. Or maybe just in empathy altogether between races. Yeah. So, if you're a judge, though, and you're not following sentencing guidelines, you're just using your own personal biases to hand out sentences, and you have people's lives and futures in your hands, you're not following the law, you're following your own bias, you're

a piece of garbage. That has nothing to do with you being an empathetic person or not. What about that judge who, remember the guy, the swimmer who raped the girl by the dumpster? It was obvious that judge was kind of like, well, look at this kid. Oh, I don't want to ruin his future. Yeah, I don't want to ruin his future. Like, that could have been my son, you know? He looks kind of like me.

But it was clearly bias and empathy going on because he was like him. And there's no way, if that would have been some black kid, that he wouldn't have ruled differently. There's no one can convince me that that's not the truth. Right. And I think that there's another distinction that's eventually going to be hammered out too. I don't think he was empathizing with that swimmer kid.

If he was, I could be wrong, who knows. But I think he was, at the very least, exhibiting a bias that, yes, he let the kid off the hook because he looked like him. I think he might have been sympathizing with him, though. Sure. Yeah, I could see that. Because even flat-out said, like, this could ruin his life. Right.

Yeah, he was definitely sympathizing, at least for sure. Boy. So, going back a bit to philosopher Adam Smith way back in the day, I think was clearly talking about mirror neurons, even though he didn't know that was the thing at the time, when he wrote that persons of delicate fibers who notice a beggar's sores and ulcers are apt to feel an itching or an easy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies. I mean, that's absolutely mirror neurons firing off. Yeah.

And we've been saying that a lot. If you don't know what we're talking about, listen to our great... Can you feel someone else's pain? Yeah. Can you feel someone else's pain? It was from a few years ago. But it was one of my favorites we've ever done, just because it's so fascinating. It really is, man.

The brain is wired like that. And it's the reason why, and this is the easiest way to explain it. If you see, in a football game, someone's leg gets broken and you literally feel like pain shoot through your body, those are mirror neurons. Did you see there was a Simpsons recently where Kirk Van Houten is back in college and he goes to high five, he's like a lacrosse player, and he goes to high five, the college mascot, which is like a guy in a suit of armor, and he breaks his wrist in like 50 places and they show they cut to the sideline and Joe Thysman takes his hat off and throws up

into it. Man, I remember that Thysman thing. I think we talked about that in that episode. Yeah. I still... I don't think I still have ever seen it. You don't need to. I think I do though.

Like, how can I be walking and talking through life and not having seen Joe Thysman break his leg? Well, it's one of those things when you see a body get bent in a very unnatural like direction. It's just... Yeah, your brain is hardwired to not accept that. I know. It's pretty interesting. It makes you faint because your brain's like, I can't see anymore.

Speaking of the brain, Chuck, let's talk a little bit about the brain, right? So we've already kind of touched on one of the issues that I think we both have with empathy research is that the designs of the studies are just so shoddy, it's mind boggling. But then the other part of it's like, well, just leave it to neuroscience. And neuroscience is still using the same old MRIs that it was before. And again, all it's showing is that's where more oxygen is in the part of the brain right then. So we're going to correlate that to that part of the brain being lit up.

So that means that this part of the brain has to do with looking at pictures of boobs. This is the boob region, right? And this is like the level that neurology is at as far as behavioral studies goes, right? And put these two together, this is the state of the art with empathy research. But with the brain, as far as that goes, they have kind of isolated a few different parts. And again, this is kind of like, we think that this has to do with this process just because in trial after trial, the same circuit has been followed or the same region is lit up when we've applied this stimulus to different people.

So there's good evidence that this does have to do with say, empathizing or whatever. But it's still, it's just a very, it's a rudimentary understanding at this point, I think compared to say like 50 years from now, right? So what they think they figured out is that there's a part of the brain, and I love parts of the brain, the effective empathy part of the brain is called the insular cortex. That's where they think that the effective region or part of the effective region lies. Yeah, the anterior insular cortex. And then the cognitive empathy is thought to reside or originate in the mid-singulate

cortex. And actually, those came from a Monash University research paper that looked at the concentration of gray matter, the density of gray matter, and that's like the neurons, whereas white matter is like the connecting material, right? And so they're saying people who have really effective empathy have denser insular cortexes and then people who have really serious cognitive empathy have dense mid-singulate cortices. That's where it's at right now. Yeah, they did a pretty interesting test.

This Tanya Tania singer and this dude named Matthew Ricard, he's a Buddhist monk. And I get the idea that they picked this guy because he can very much control his brains and emotion. Right. So what they did was he's a Buddhist monk. They did some FMRI brain scanning on this guy, and they said, all right, sir, Mr. Ricard. He's like, please call me Matthew. Matthew, we would like you to engage in some different types of compassion and meditate

and direct that meditation toward people who are suffering. And then they hooked them up to the brain scan magic machine. And they found that the meditative states, it was actually surprising to them, it did not activate parts of the brain that are usually activated by non-meditators when they think about pain. But he said, you know, it was good for me basically. It was a warm, positive state. And he said, all right, now put yourself in this what, you know, they would call the emotional

empathetic state. And I guess he's able to turn that on like a switch. Right. He's like, watch this. Yeah, exactly. And blood just comes out of his nose. Yeah. And different parts of the brain lit up.

And he said, this empathetic sharing very quickly became intolerable to me. I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burnt out. So that's one of the big arguments against this emotional or effective empathy is that you can't take on everyone else's pain like this. Let's say you're a social worker or you're a nurse or a doctor, like it's going to drive you insane. Oh yeah, you'll burn out. It's called empathy distress.

Yeah. And when they've talked to patients like hospital patients, they don't want that either. Well, they want maybe someone who has some sympathy, but patients are more likely to feel better. I was just imagining a doctor coming in and just falling to pieces at your condition. Doctors aren't like that. Yeah. Well, you don't want, yeah, like you said, you don't want a doctor like that.

No, they feel better if their doctor is kind of clinical and reassuring and really seems like they have it together, which makes sense. Yeah. You want somebody who's like, frankly, I could care less whether you live or die. You want somewhere in between those two, which is where- Oh my God, you're going to die. You don't want that out of your doctor. No.

But it seems like the middle of those two ends of the spectrum is where cognitive empathy comes in. Yeah. Well, Chuck, how about we take a break here, second break? That sounds good. And we'll come back. We promise. Yeah.

Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy.

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I still have never actually looked up whether that's his brother or cousin or what. Simon. I know they're related. Yeah. Simon Cohen wrote a book in 2011 called The Science of Evil and he's, he's way down with empathy. Yeah. Big time.

Yeah. And I guess that they describe him as a thoughtful defender is what Bloom describes him as of empathy. Right. Um, and he has a ranking system, an empathy curve from zero to six and zero is no empathy, basically your sociopath. And six is you, you, I guess the most hardcore of emotional empaths. Yeah.

You're in a, you call it a constant state of hyper arousal. Right. And he had this one woman that he used in his little example named Hannah who was a therapist. It's probably a great job for her, but she's just one of these people that by all accounts is just wired that way, like her friends and her family and her patients, like she just really feels for them all. Right. Like it's not just her job.

Which is in, in some ways that probably helps some people, but in other ways it's really probably number one off-putting. And even if everybody liked it, it's bad for her in the end. Like we're not, we're not designed to carry everybody's problems and issues with us all the time. Yeah. And that's kind of the main point Bloom is making is that people like Hannah are headed for, headed toward burnout.

She's headed for hyper. And he also does make the point that friends and family don't like, they need a certain amount of that empathy, but you don't want someone that's always like in that state. Like you also want someone that's like, all right, let's turn that frown upside down and let's go out and take a walk. You know, like you don't want someone that's always cries when you cry, you know. Right. And you're just going to be like, I thought I heard a bed, but and you can extend that

also to the way that people react in some ways to say like a mass tragedy or something like that. Right. Like look, look at Newtown, right? The Sandy Hook shooting 20 small kids were killed. Six adults were also killed at the elementary school. It was the most horrific tragedy I think that ever took place in the United States. It was basically the one that everyone who it believes in very strict gun control was

waiting for was new, new was going to happen sooner or later and thought this is going to be the tipping point and it didn't happen. Right. What people reacted to with was outpourings of donations. Yeah. Lots of stuffed animals. Apparently there were three for every resident of the town were sent stuff. Yeah.

And lots of thoughts and prayers. And if you ever have seen, you know, Anthony Jeselnick, yeah, he's yeah, he has a Netflix special. I think it's still on called thoughts and prayers and you watch that and he explains to you just how valuable your thoughts and prayers are, especially on Twitter. Yeah. But Paul Bloom points out is like, this actually proved to be this outpouring proved to be an additional burden on this town, which is already suffering tremendously.

But like they had to, there was something like 800 volunteers who were tasked with handling all the donations, whether it was stuffed animals or money. And they apparently had to get a warehouse to put all the stuffed animals in. And I think even some of the public officials were like, please stop sending us stuff. Send stuff, but send it to other people. We've got everything we need. Right. Send it to other people.

And everyone said, no, shut up. It's about us, not you. And I think that that's part of effective empathy, that outpouring of stuff that seems like a nice gesture that makes you feel better, but doesn't actually help in any real substantial way. Yeah. I think that kind of underlies or betrays what effective empathy is all about and why we are moved to do something with effective empathy because we're feeling something right

then and writing a check or sending a teddy bear is a good way to feel better for us to feel better. Whereas cognitive empathy would be like, I'm going to see to it that every senator who blocked the gun control bill following Newtown is voted right out of office. That would be cognitive empathy. You're empathizing with the parents. You're empathizing with future kids who haven't been killed yet and you're going to do what you can to make sure it doesn't happen rather than writing a check or sending a teddy bear.

Those to me are the real distinctions between cognitive and effective empathy as far as that ultimate goal is concerned, which is again, compassion. But compassion is doing what you can to improve the outcome for the greater good. Yeah. That's interesting. Another thing that kind of jumped out to me was these psychologists, Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz, they were researching why women are more likely, I think twice as likely as men to get depressed and experience depression.

I saw that too. They said, you know what, I think it's because women are more empathetic and emotionally empathetic and they take this on and they said that there's propensity for what they call unmitigated communion, which is an quote, an excessive concern with others and placing others' needs before one's own end quote. And they gave people, and this is one of those, like a nine item questionnaire, how much can you really learn. But some of the statements agree or disagree with were like, for me to be happy, I need

others to be happy. I can't say no when someone asks for help, often worry about others' problems and kind of across the board, women score higher than men do on this. And you know, I think a lot of that probably has to do with evolution too, with women having to care for their babies right out of the gate. So it took took's wife, although it took took, we know, never took a wife. Right. It took took got around.

You got around. But the women that took took would knock up. They would immediately be in charge of those babies. And that's what that primatologist talked about too was, you know, this is kind of straight up evolution, our natural selection is right out of the gate. We have this empathy because we have to care for young, right. And then I think we already mentioned too, and then that definitely evolves into protect the tribe.

Right. Because we're better off if the people around us are healthy and happy and ready to ward off attacks. Yeah. The idea that women are more prone to experience, say, effective empathy, or just even empathy in general, it's actually got a has a biological basis to tell you the truth to Chuck. In adolescence or puberty, apparently girls have they score high for effective empathy throughout their entire adolescence, where between about ages 13 and 16 boys, effective

empathy declines. They take a little vacation. Yeah. And they say, oh, oh, oh, you feel bad. It becomes jerks. You're about to feel worse because I'm going to give you a swirly. Yeah. I don't know what a swirly is, but it's a it's where you stick someone's head in the

toilet and flush. Oh, no. Swirly. Never heard of that. Fortunately, I had only heard of it. Never witnessed it or had it done to me. We did noogies and was it wedgies when you did the underwear? Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. They're terrible. They are terrible. And that's bullying behavior. And there are some theories about bullies, too, that they actually use empathy to manipulate people like they'll use it against them. Well, yeah.

They used cognitive empathy to calculate the best, most effective way to hurt somebody. And then they turn off any potential, like effective empathy when they're actually carrying out their active bullying. Yeah. And with the teenagers, too, they say that if you develop effective and cognitive empathy, that you're going to be happier, you're going to argue less with your parents, you're going to have more healthy relationships, which, you know, kind of all makes sense. Sure.

And also, we're saying, too, and we'll get into how to increase your own empathy if you think that kind of thing's a good idea, but that babies learn empathy out of the gate by being empathized with, by being treated warmly by their parents and other adults, being responded to in a warm manner, that that actually is the beginning of empathy. And it's like you said, you can see a little kid in a preschool go over and comfort or console another little kid who's in distress. Boy, that's why when I hear about neglect, like baby and infant neglect, it's just, ugh, man, that's like the most heartbreaking thing you can imagine.

It's like a baby just like left in a room to cry and cry and cry forever. Plus, also, when we were talking about the breastfeeding episode, that body-to-body contact of being held shows or has been shown to affect their development if they don't have it enough. Yeah, it's just all sorts of terrible things that happen to you when you're neglected as a baby. Yeah, it's terrible. So Chuck, there are plenty of people who say, well, we need to empathize more.

So just get out there and learn how to empathize, and there's plenty of people out there who will teach you techniques on empathizing with people more, and they may be worth trying. Like I found them very helpful in a lot of cases, especially on interpersonal communication. But as far as changing the world on a massive scale for the better, is it a good idea to go out and just empathize, empathize, empathize? Because there's a big question mark with that. Who exactly are you supposed to empathize with? Like with just about every problem, there's a group that's being helped by something and

a group that's being harmed by something, especially when it comes to public policy, right? Yeah. So which group are you going to empathize with? If you empathize with the current victims and you change public policy to help them, well, then you're leaving the people who are currently benefiting out in the cold, right? So there's a big question of who you should empathize with at any given point in time, which makes this whole behavioral science nudge politics BS that is ultimately behind

this whole push to empathize more. That's not taking that into consideration. And then there's kind of a second facet to that, which is studies have found that when you increase empathy in people, they tend to empathize more with their own group, but it also in kind increases hostility in those people toward outgroups. Oh, wow. You know what I'm saying? Like they see their friend who's being hurt as more of a victim and how could you do this

to them? And now I want to get you back because one of the sour sides of empathy is that it frequently comes with a taste for retribution too, I think is how Paul Bloom put it. So the dark side of empathy. So just, yeah, there is a dark side. There's a dark side to everything in there. Yeah. Except you.

I'm all dark side. You're all light. So we'll finish up here with a bit on people with autism because there's this stereotype that if you everyone's probably heard it that you know what people with autism lack empathy and they don't understand emotions. And if you know anybody who either has autism or is a parent of a child with autism, they will dispel that myth pretty straight up just from their own lives. But these people did some studying and some research because they were like, that's not

good enough for me and it's not good enough to just say that like, you know, autism is different for everyone. Right. So some people have empathy or some people with autism show empathy. So, but everyone's different. So who cares about investigating that? Yeah. So I really love the approach they took here.

They were kind of really wanted to keep digging, which I really respected. So they said, you know what, I think it might be going on here. There's this other condition called alexithemia and alexithemia means you have a difficult time understanding your own emotions. So you might, you know, you might have a feeling that you're experiencing an emotion, but you just don't know what it is. And about 10% of people have it in the regular population, about 50% of people with autism have alexithemia.

Right. They're not the same thing. No. But these guys actually found that people with autism who do not have alexithemia tend to display empathy. Yeah. And even, you know, lots of empathy. Right.

Lots of empathy. Yeah. Empathy. They got binders full of empathy. Binders full of empathy. That's a callback. Oh yeah. Boy, remember when that was the most controversial thing going in politics?

Oh man. Finders full of empathy. Yeah, like they had, they scored, you know, very strong when it came to measuring empathy. And what they did was they, you know, that makes sense the way they did it. It's very, I really like this study. They had four groups, individuals with autism and alexithemia. Individuals with autism without it. Individuals with alexithemia but not autism and then people that didn't have either one.

And it basically seems to kind of prove that, yeah, it's just not true that people with autism don't have empathy. It's really alexithemia is what's going on. Right. Which is, I think, a novel finding or a novel hypothesis. I don't think this is part of a larger field. I think these guys came up with that. Yeah.

And did you see that other study from Goldsmiths University of London about the facial expressions? Yeah. I thought that was pretty interesting too. Yeah. They investigated that if you expose people with autism to the sounds of people's voices and ask them to rate what emotion that person is experiencing, they're far better at calling that correctly than faces. And apparently it's because people with autism tend to spend much less time studying faces.

Not because they can't empathize. They just aren't using cues that people without autism use to conclude what emotions people are experiencing. Yeah. Really interesting stuff. And I don't know why this didn't get more play because it still seems like people are kind of banging that drum that people with autism aren't empathetic. Yeah.

I don't know why either. It just makes sense. We need to do an entire episode on autism. Yeah. I've never heard of that. We also need to do one on psychopaths too, which is another group that tends to be pointed to as kind of incorrectly as far as empathy goes, where if you're lacking empathy, you're a psychopath.

What actually turns out that if you have what's called a shallow affect, meaning like you're across the board emotionally, you're pretty stunted and shallow or superficial, that's what really qualifies you as a psychopath, not just missing empathy. But yet again, it's another popular misconception that's being allowed to persist. I'm just irritated, Chuck. I know. I've got a great quote though from Paul Bloom. And I also want to say that I think that empathy also, the different kinds of empathy also

get divided among the genders as well. And we even said, we even talked about that study that concluded that women tend to suffer from depression because they're more empathetic. I think that maybe that's the case and there is a biological basis for it in adolescence. But one thing that seems to persist everywhere is that different types of empathy or different techniques for empathy to produce empathy can be learned. They can be taught. Yeah.

And I think if you just say like, well, wait a minute, I really want to solve this problem. I'm not going to fly off the handle or I'm not going to lose my marbles. I'm going to like really put some thought into it and I can still be compassionate, but I don't have to completely experience someone else's pain. I don't think that that's a biological imperative one way or another. I think if you decide to make a choice or a change in the way you approach situations, that has nothing to do with gender. So I just wanted to point that out.

Yeah. And as far as teaching empathy, like there's been a little bit of pooping of emotional empathy, but I think it's definitely like a pretty good thing to do as a parent to try and teach your child to like, hey, you know, how would you feel if someone was doing this to you? Yeah. How do they learn? Yeah.

Exactly. You don't learn it on your own. I think it has to be imparted by good parents. Agreed. And again, the goal, and this is a Paul Bloom quote, the goal isn't to love every single person like you love the people closest to you, but to value other people just for the very fact that they're human beings, right? That's the goal that everybody's looking for with empathy.

And he says, quote, our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family. That's impossible. It lies instead in an appreciation of the fact that even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love. That's the key. Very interesting. Yeah.

Good stuff. Good stuff. We should subtitle this one, empathy, a Lucy Goosey episode also known as what Paul Bloom says. Thank you, Paul Bloom. Yeah. Big ups to Paul Bloom. And since I said big ups to Paul Bloom, that means it's time for listener mail, Chuck.

I'm going to call this Hookworms. Hello from the sunny South United States. Southerners aren't lazy and dumb. They just had Hookworm. Great title, by the way, Josh. Thank you. It's like a childhood memory and I finally had to write in, guys. I grew up in Florida, so we spent most of the summer with our shoes off.

And I remember my mother distinctly reminding me to wear shoes so I wouldn't get the ground itch. This never happened. I called my mom, who is now 88 years old, to verify a few facts. And about when I was a little girl, I believe around five to seven or eight years before school started, my mother would give me a worm treatment on my feet. I explained to her what I'd learned during the podcast about Hookworms and how they affected the body.

When I mentioned how they caused severe anemia and caused the body to be more susceptible to illness, she remembered a story about my father's cousin. Apparently, the cousin was so and became so incredibly ill, she was very close to dying. They took her to the hospital and found out she was severely anemic and before they began any other diagnostics, they decided to test her for Hookworm and bingo. As my mother said, she was full of them. She had a high worm burden. She did.

Mom said it took three treatments to get rid of the worms. The story was, she was so infested, they literally came out of her mouth when she was being treated. Oh my God. Wow, that is the best story I've heard in a while. She put in parentheses. I know, right? Because I think she anticipated that reaction.

That's why you don't want to be a 6.0 effective empathetic person. Yeah, that's right. This cousin is actually still alive and in her early 90s, so this would have been in the 1940s. I hope she doesn't listen to this show. Hookworm and Fancy Free in Florida, that is from Terry Brunson of Panama City. Nice. Thanks a lot, Terry.

That was a great email. It had everything. It was a roller coaster ride. There was a cousin who had worms coming out of her mouth. Yep. A laugh. A cry. There was a mom.

Also an old mom and an old cousin. I'd like to know what the worm treatment consisted of. I'll bet there was dead cat in there somewhere. Oh my God. If you want to tell us about your family's weird remedies, we want to know the ingredients. You can tweet them to us at SYSK Podcast or hit me up at Josh underscore um underscore Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at facebook.com slash wshadow or facebook.com slash Charles

W. Chuck Bryant. Send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and join us as always at our home on the web at stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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