Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Empathy Works

Episode Date: October 2, 2021

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 this classic episode to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, yeah, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, good Saturday to you. Chuck Bryant here, podcaster, cohost, stuff you should know. To introduce the Saturday Selects episode, my pick this week, everybody, is empathy. We all need a little empathy in our

lives. And I remember this being a pretty good episode. This is from April 6, 2017. Listen close and take heed how empathy works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck, lean on 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? Yes, it's 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 Fourth 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 smile. 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 really good, Chuck. Yeah. If you can, I highly recommend it. If you can get in, you got to know somebody. You got to 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. All righty. 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. 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 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 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 how 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 has 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. And I don't forget where I'm from, man. And my family has long roots in Tennessee and Mississippi. You know this by reading my Wikipedia page. Right. 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 quadruple 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. You know, 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, and 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 nomenclature. So that to me, Chuck, is a huge red flag that the field is not nearly as established as people like to think. Yeah. 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 is, 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, you know, here's a check for $500. Get some groceries with it. Who knows what you're going to do. But I think to me, compassion is the act, like the action, the end goal of empathy, whether it's cognitive or

or effective. That's that's what I think. And you know what, this field is so unestablished that I can just say that stuff. Yeah. 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. Right. So, you know, to put giving 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, you know, your, your uncle passed away. I'm really sorry to hear that. And I feel terribly for you. But if,

if you were, you know, 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? It's like, 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, 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 was, I thought he made a lot of good points and some of them I don't quite agree with either. But he's great. He's, he's really good at poking holes in the concept of empathy. But he points out that, that I guess it's probably good if

somebody's something, 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, you're doing a disservice, right? Yes. So in some, in some ways, well, I'll just say Paul Bloom's whole basic, his 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, 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 like, you know, 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, yeah, 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, your daughter, you're going to empathize a lot. Sure. 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 his, 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. I mean, like, and that study does, I didn't have a big problem with that study because

it does kind of prove that out. Right. That was Tilia Koga and Ilana Ritov, their psychologist. 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 the 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, you know, 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 in that a chimpanzee might really like put, like hug a victim of an attack, but it's got to be another

chimp. Like 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. Like 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. And it seems like based on Franz de Waal's studies and other studies about the evolution of in-group and out-group behavior, like 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?

It 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. And that's what 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. 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 S O S, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, hey. That's me. Yeah. We know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Another one, kids relationships. Life in general can get messy. you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah 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 podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atkutur and to be honest I don't believe in astrology but from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get second hand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams cancelled marriages k-pop but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about

astrology my whole world came crashing down situation doesn't look good there is risk to father and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too listen to skyline drive and the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your 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 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

and 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 had they showed more signs of distress like they started to sweat a little more sure their hearts are to beat a little faster yeah that's where I think mirror neurons might come into play right um right yeah that's what like it's brain wiring 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 and then or the the stroke of a headline like 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 as a conclusion everybody's like shut up 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 involve self-reporting right so I think what they're doing is they're saying oh well uh subject 1329 um their heart really started beating and look at this on this questionnaire they filled out they really consider themselves an empathetic person ipso 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 and actually tell you the truth as far as correlating with self-reports um that does tend to be a pretty good um control yeah the truth well they didn't mention that because apparently all people respond to that one huh isn't that interesting yeah it is actually um there is something going on there though I mean we're not like discounting that because they have done studies that show that minorities um maybe don't get uh pain medication like they should compared to white people uh and I don't know it seems like a racial empathy gap is a pretty decent explanation for that for sure uh or in the criminal justice system which we've talked a lot about uh or maybe just in empathy altogether between races so yeah so if you're

if you're a judge though and you're 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 yeah you're not following the law you're following your own bias you're a piece of garbage well I mean nothing to do with you being an empathetic person or not what about that judge who uh remember the guy the swimmer who raped the girl by the dumpster it was obvious that judge was kind of like oh look at this kid like 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 it was clearly bias and empathy going on because he was like him right and there's no way if that would

have been some black kid that he wouldn't have ruled differently I just there's no no one can convince me that that that's not the truth right and I think that there's like there's another distinction that's eventually going to be hammered out too like I don't think he was empathizing with that swimmer kid if he was like it could be wrong who knows but I think he was um at the very least exhibiting a bias that yes yeah he let the kid off off the hook um because he looked like him because I think he might have been sympathizing with him though sure yeah because he even flat out said like this could ruin his life right yeah he was definitely sympathizing at least for sure boy uh so um going back a bit to uh philosopher Adam Smith way back in the day

sure uh I think was clearly talking about mirror neurons even though he didn't know that was a thing at the time when he wrote that persons of delicate fibers who notice a beggar 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 it's the reason why and this is the you know the easiest way to explain it like if you see

like in a football game someone's leg gets broken and you literally feel like pain shoot through your body that's those are mirror neurons did you see there was a simpsons recently where Kirk Van Houten is back in college and he goes to like high five he's like a lacrosse player 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 makes you faint yeah because your brain's like I can't see anymore speaking of the brain Chuck um let's talk a little bit about the brain right all right so um one of the 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 yeah but then the other part of it's like well just leave it to neuroscience but 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 um looking at pictures of boobs this is the boob region right and this is like the level that that neurology is is at as far as behavioral studies goes right you put these two together this is the state of the art with 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 um so there's a there's there's good evidence that this this does have to do with say empathizing or whatever

but it's still it's just a very rude it's a rudimentary understanding at this point I think compared to say like 50 years from now right so what what what they've what they think they've figured out is that there's a part of the brain and I love parts of the brain the effective 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 yeah and actually those came from a monash university research paper that that looked at the concentration of gray matter the density of gray matter and that's like the neurons whereas white matters

like the connecting material right yeah and so they're saying people who have really effective empathy have denser insular cortexes cortices and then people who have really serious cognitive empathy have dense mid-singulate cortices right that's where it's at right now yeah they did a pretty interesting test um this uh Tanya uh 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 um he's like please call me met you met you uh we would like you to engage in some different types of compassion

and uh meditate and direct that meditation toward people who are suffering and then they they hooked them up to the to the brain scan magic machine and they they found that the meditative states um it was actually surprising to them it did not activate parts of the brain that are usually activated by non-meditators uh when they think about pain but he said you know it was 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 um and I guess he's able to turn that on like a switch right he's like watch this yeah exactly like blood just comes out of his nose yeah in different parts of the brain lit up and he said

this empathetic sharing uh 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 gonna drive you insane oh yeah well you'll 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 they won't they want maybe someone who has some sympathy but patients are more likely to feel better what I was just imagining a doctor coming in and just falling to pieces

at your at your condition doctors are coming yeah well you don't yeah like you said you don't want a doctor like no they feel better if their doctor is kind of clinical and reassuring and really seems like they have it together right which makes sense yeah and you don't want somebody who's like frankly I could care less whether you live or die you want somewhere in between those two yes which which is where oh my god you're gonna die like you don't want that out of your doctor no but it seems like the middle of that those two spec that those two ends of the spectrum is where cognitive empathy comes in yeah well chuck how about we uh take a break here second break that sounds good and we'll come back we promise

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 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 kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah 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 podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts I'm Mangeh Shatikler and to be honest I don't believe in astrology but from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crash down situation doesn't look good there is risk to father

and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too listen to skyline drive and the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts all right man what do you want to talk about Sasha Baron Cohen I still have never actually looked up whether that's his brother or cousin or what I don't know they're related yeah psychologist Simon Baron 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 and he

has a ranking system an empathy curve from zero to six and zero is no empathy basically you're a sociopath and six is 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 you 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 heartbreak 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 you're just gonna be like I thought I had a bad but and 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 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 believes in very strict gun control was waiting for was new new was gonna happen sooner later and thought this is gonna 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 stuffed yeah and lots of thoughts and prayers and if you ever have seen you know Anthony Jeselnick yeah he's he 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 send it to other people and everyone said no shut up this

is 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 in any real substantial way yeah I think that kind of underlies or betrays what 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 to feel better yeah 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 new town is voted right out of office right that would be cognitive empathy you're empathizing with the 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 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 yeah that's interesting and I another thing that kind of jumped out to me was these psychologist 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 and they thought you know they said you know what I think it's because women are more empathetic and you know emotionally empathetic

and they take this on and they said that there's propensity for what they called unmitigated communion which is in a quote an excessive concern with others and placing others needs before one's own end quote and they you know gave people and this is one of those like a nine item questionnaire how much can you really learn right 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 with evolution too with uh you know women having to care for their babies right out of the gate right which is took

tooks wife at you know although took took we know never took a wife right um took took got around you got around but the women that took took would would knock up right they would immediately be in charge of those babies and that's what um that primatologists talked about too was you know this is kind of straight up evolution uh or natural selection is right out of the gate we have this empathy because we have to care for young right and then um 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 um but the the idea that women are more prone to experience say effective empathy uh or just even empathy in general

that's actually got a has a biological basis to tell you the truth too chuck um in 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 yeah they take a little vacation yeah and they say no oh you feel bad they become jerks you're about to feel worse because I'm gonna give you a swirly yeah I don't know what a swirly is but it's uh it's where you stick someone's head in the toilet and flush oh swirly never heard of that fortunately I had only heard of it never witnessed it or uh had it done to me we did noogies and uh 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 uh like they'll use it against them well yeah yeah they they they used cognitive empathy to calculate the the best most effective way to hurt somebody and then um they turn off any potential like effective empathy um when they're actually carrying out their active bullying yeah and with the teenagers too they they say that if you develop effective and cognitive empathy um that you're going to be happier you're gonna argue less with your parents and you're gonna have more healthy relationships which you know kind of all makes sense sure and they also were saying too and we will we'll get into how to increase your own empathy if you think that

kind of thing's a good idea um but that babies learn empathy out of the out of the gate by being empathized with by being treated warmly by their parents and other adults yeah 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 yeah um who's in distress boy that's why when I hear about neglect like baby and infant neglect it's just oh 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 I mean 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 sure on interpersonal communication right but as far as like changing the world on a massive scale for 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 you're gonna 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 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 it's not taking that into consideration and then there's a 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 out groups 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 wow 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 uh so we'll finish up here with a bit on uh people with autism because there's this stereotype um 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 every 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 um which I really respected so uh they said you know what I think it might be going on here there's this other um condition called uh alexa themia and alexa themia

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 percent of people have it in the regular population about 50 percent of people with autism have alexa themia right they're not the same thing no and these guys actually found that um people with autism who do not have alexa themia 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 huh oh yeah boy remember when that was the most controversial thing going in politics yeah oh man binders full of empathy uh yeah like they had

they scored you know uh very strong when it came to measuring empathy uh and what they did was they you know that makes sense the way they did it's very I really like this study they had four groups uh individuals with autism and alexa themia uh individuals with autism without it uh individuals with alexa themia 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 alexa themia 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 these guys came up with that yeah and did you see that other study that um from Goldsmiths University of London about the facial

expressions yeah I thought that was pretty interesting too yeah that they they investigated that um 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 um calling that correctly than faces yeah 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 um 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 you know people with autism aren't empathetic yeah I don't I don't know why either just makes

sense yeah that yeah um we need to do an entire episode on autism yeah maybe alexithemia 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 is it 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 right 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 right um 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 um that empathy also the different kinds of empathy also get divided among the uh 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 right 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 um 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 gonna 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 a biological imperative one way or another I think if you decide to make a a choice or a change in the way you approach situations that has nothing to do with gender so right I just wanted to point that out yeah and as far as teaching empathy like there's been a little bit of poo-pooing of emotional empathy but I think it's 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 and that's how they learn yeah exactly you don't learn it on your own I think it has to be imparted by good parents agreed and um again the the 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 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 loosey goosey episode also known as what paul bloom says thank you paul bloom yeah big big ups to paul bloom uh and since I said big ups to paul

bloom that means it's time for listener mail chuck um I'm gonna call this uh hook worms nice um hello from the sunny south united states uh southerners aren't lazy and dumb they just had hook worm great title by the way josh thank you uh brought back a childhood memory and I finally had to write in guys grew up in florida so we spent most of the summer with our shoes off uh and I remember my mother uh distinctly reminding me to wear shoes uh 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 uh 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 uh explained to her what I'd learned during the

podcast about hook worms and how they affected the body when I mentioned how they cause severe anemia and caused the body to be more susceptible to illness she remembered a story about my father's cousin uh 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 hook worm and bingo as my mother said she was full of them she had a high worm burden she did uh 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 and 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 uh this cousin is actually still alive and in her early 90s so uh this would have been in the 1940s I hope she doesn't listen to this show uh hook worm 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 had it was a roller coaster ride there was a cousin who had worms coming out of her mouth yep a laugh I cried there was a mom all sorts of great stuff an old mom and an old uh 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 uh 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 syskpodcast or you can hang out with us on facebook at facebook.com slash w should know or facebook.com slash Charles w chuck Bryant uh send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and join us as always at our home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows 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

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