Lenny Moss - Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

This article from Professor Lenny Moss is in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review. This interesting article looks at how we "hard-wired" to be social creatures, dependent on others for our survival - but we are also fairly "tribal" (ethnocentric) and we often group ourselves into "us vs. them" perspectives.

It's a long and serious piece - this is only the first few paragraphs.

Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

Lenny Moss

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 15.1 (Spring 2013). 

The Hedgehog Review

An Ethos of Ambiguity

We are almost certainly on the threshold of a new understanding of our nature as social beings, which is being provoked and informed by developments in psychology, biology, and the social sciences. Just how we interpret and assimilate these new findings has become a topic of considerable controversy. Inasmuch as morality, however one defines it, has to do with how we treat each other, the stakes of this controversy are raised by its ostensibly moral and thereby also political implications. Less obvious, especially to the public, is the extent to which academic disciplinary statures and commitments are also hanging in the balance.

Our nature as social beings is ostensibly paradoxical. On the one hand, we are unquestionably social in nature. We are born dependent upon the care of others; we crave companionship and often go to great lengths to avoid loneliness. Short of death or physical torture, enforced solitary confinement is considered the most severe and hateful punishment that can be inflicted upon a human being. On the other hand, perceptions of individuality govern our life choices—we are seldom far from consulting our private interests when it comes to making decisions of any consequence. We find ourselves, as individuals, in an ongoing, pervasive, and often strenuous competition with the multitudes for status, recognition, and every good we seek and desire up to and including walking space on a busy urban sidewalk. We thus experience most of our fellow humans, most of the time, as potential impediments to outmaneuver and outdo in order to achieve our ends. The Enlightenment’s late-eighteenth-century “Sage of Königsburg,” Immanuel Kant, pithily referred to this seemingly contradictory state of affairs as our “unsocial sociability.”

How we understand our unsocial sociability, even if just implicitly, is of no small consequence. Those for whom social life is nothing but some minimally constrained expression of Hobbes’s “war of all against all” are prone to act accordingly. For Kant the very possibility of having rational hope for the future of humanity required a story to tell about the place of our unsocial sociability, and all of the historical sufferings and depredations wrought by it, within a framework of possible human “development.” More simply stated, we need a way of understanding “human nature” that allows us to make sense of the evils in human history without foreclosing the possibility of seeing ourselves as moving toward improvement in general, and more specifically toward something like global peace and general human wellbeing. Kant helped himself to a providential outlook but in the form of a theoretical teleology. Kant analogized the human species with an organism that, in effect, undergoes “growing pains” on its developmental path toward maturity. Just as the parts of an organism are always responding to the forces and factors of their immediate environment, and yet all told are contributing to the developmental ends of the organism, individual people live for the most part in their local world pursuing individual ends constitutive of a developmental trend in human history. Kant’s idea was that our unsocial sociability, our individualistic will to get ahead of each other, played out at the macro-level as an impetus for the further cultivation of the species, technologically, culturally, etc. The down side of course was that our unsocial sociability also resulted in massive amounts of human cruelty and immiseration. For Kant, these events, while morally uncondonable, were, as learning experiences, unavoidable parts of human self-development. Only by force of painful experience would humanity learn the value of peaceful co-existence. Sadly, the two-plus centuries since have not easily lent themselves to confidence in a steady, progressive, human learning curve.

Two of the key elements of Kant’s story—the idea that our social behavior is driven by inherent species proclivities and his providential/teleological assumption that we are invested with these proclivities for a reason—may not, on closer examination, look as foreign as one may initially have imagined. In place of talk about inherent proclivities, we now have talk about genes and chemical messengers. In place of a providential account of why (and to what end) we have the proclivities we do, we now have evolutionary arguments about why (and to what end) we have the genes and chemical messengers that we do. How to best interpret the significance of evolution, genetics, and neurochemistry for our understanding of human sociality, morality, and the implications for human conduct, however, is where present controversies first begin.

Read the whole article.

Ethan Watters: We Aren't the World - Cultural Differences in Values and Perceptions

In this excellent article by Ethan Watters in Pacific Standard, a variety of assumptions made by Western psychologists and economists about human behavior (based on studies of Western populations) are revealed to be misguided and false when other cultures are assessed.

The article is very long, and worth the time to read it, but I am only posting a section of it here (what would be considered the second section). Follow the title link below to read the whole interesting piece.

We Aren’t the World

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.

(ILLUSTRATION: MARK MCGINNIS)

February 25, 2013 • By Ethan Watters

* * * * *

A MODERN LIBERAL ARTS education gives lots of lip service to the idea of cultural diversity. It’s generally agreed that all of us see the world in ways that are sometimes socially and culturally constructed, that pluralism is good, and that ethnocentrism is bad. But beyond that the ideas get muddy. That we should welcome and celebrate people of all backgrounds seems obvious, but the implied corollary—that people from different ethno-cultural origins have particular attributes that add spice to the body politic—becomes more problematic. To avoid stereotyping, it is rarely stated bluntly just exactly what those culturally derived qualities might be. Challenge liberal arts graduates on their appreciation of cultural diversity and you’ll often find them retreating to the anodyne notion that under the skin everyone is really alike.

If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of cultural imperialism.

Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.

Some of that research went back a generation. It was in the 1960s, for instance, that researchers discovered that aspects of visual perception were different from place to place. One of the classics of the literature, theMüller-Lyer illusion, showed that where you grew up would determine to what degree you would fall prey to the illusion that these two lines are different in length:

Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (B) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (A). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length. Subjects from more than a dozen cultures were tested, and Americans were at the far end of the distribution—seeing the illusion more dramatically than all others.

More recently psychologists had challenged the universality of research done in the 1950s by pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch had discovered that test subjects were often willing to make incorrect judgments on simple perception tests to conform with group pressure. When the test was performed across 17 societies, however, it turned out that group pressure had a range of influence. Americans were again at the far end of the scale, in this case showing the least tendency to conform to group belief.

As Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich furthered their search, they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies. When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way (with a lawsuit, a call to the Better Business Bureau, or a bad Yelp review) when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had a different history, their gut feeling about what was fair was distinctly their own. In the small-scale societies with a strong culture of gift-giving, yet another conception of fairness prevailed. There, generous financial offers were turned down because people’s minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations. Our economies hadn’t been shaped by our sense of fairness; it was the other way around.

The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind’s capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do—the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like—but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception.

For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.

When unconsciously translated in three dimensions, the line with the outward-feathered ends (C) appears farther away and the brain therefore judges it to be longer. The more time one spends in natural environments, where there are no carpentered corners, the less one sees the illusion.

As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?”(pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

Read the whole article.

Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation with Richard Sennett

UCSD recently hosted New York University sociologist and historian Richard Sennett for a discussion on why people form in-group/out-group divisions, even in large population centers, resulting in small tribal populations within metropolitan cities.




Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation with Richard Sennett

New York University sociologist and historian Richard Sennett addresses the phenomenon of why people tend to avoid engaging with others who are different, leading to a modern politics of the tribe rather than the city. In this thought-provoking talk, Sennett offers ideas on what might be done to encourage people to live with others who are racially, ethnically, religiously or economically unlike themselves. [3/2012]

Yara Tercero-Parker - Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy

This is a cool article on the failure of empathy between groups - it points to a tendency to feel more empathy for our own in-group and less (or none) for any or all out-groups. Seems to me, however, that this reflects the developmental stage of the subject. What it look like if they included ego development stages in their assessments and broke out the different levels of empathy based on stage? Probably going to look a lot different.

Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy

• Posted by Yara Tercero-Parker, BEI Intern
• June 24, 2011

[Princeton]- APS-A loved one loses a parent to cancer; on television, a football player breaks his leg in a tackle; in the newspaper, a mother on the other side of the world cradles the body of her injured child. How do people react when others are in distress? Much of the time, we feel pain or sadness in response to another’s suffering. A key component of this response is the suite of cognitive and affective capacities called empathy (Batson, 2009): people recognize emotional experiences in others, experience matched sensations and emotions, and are motivated to alleviate those others’ suffering, frequently resulting in helping behaviors.

Often, though, we are likely to feel no pain, no sadness, and no motivation to help. Failures of empathy are especially likely if a sufferer is socially distant—for example, a member of a different social or cultural group. We often fail to detect such outgroup members’ emotional experiences or perceive them in substantially distorted ways, and we are only weakly, if at all, motivated to reduce their suffering. In fact, depending on the victim, we may feel secretly pleased about his or her misfortunes. To examine failures of empathy at the intergroup level is particularly important, because intergroup conflicts engender significantly more aggression than do interpersonal interactions (Meier & Hinsz, 2004). Although interpersonal morality prohibits people from harming others, engaging in violence on behalf of the ingroup is accepted in times of group conflict (Cohen, Montoya, & Insko, 2006). Dampened or absent empathic responses may lead to indifference toward outgroup suffering and may even facilitate further harm against outgrips.

Here we take an interdisciplinary look at intergroup empathic failures—including affective, behavioral, physiological, and neural data. We incorporate recent investigations of the neurobiological mechanisms of dampened and disrupted empathy, because these mechanisms are both a proximate cause of pro- and antisocial behaviors and a potential future target of interventions. In the second section, we consider potential negative alternatives to empathy (i.e., schadenfreude) in the context of intergroup competition. Because feeling pleasure in response to others’ pain is often socially unacceptable, people may feel uncomfortable or be unable to respond naturally in experimental settings. Using indirect measures such as facial electromyography and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) helps to circumvent some of the hurdles associated with measuring socially undesirable emotions and behaviors.

Finally, we discuss some of the recent literature on intergroup- conflict interventions that aim to increase intergroup empathy. While increased empathy can facilitate positive attitudes and prosocial behavior toward outgroups, there are circumstances in which empathy can backfire—making it important to understand when and why intergroup empathy breaks down.

Dampened and Disrupted Empathy for Outgroups

Empathy is generally recognized as a central component of the human condition; because it promotes prosocial behavior, it is an essential aspect of human social life. Beginning in infancy, people are affected by others’ suffering: They ‘‘step into the other person’s shoes,’’ ‘‘feel their pain,’’ and are motivated to help (Batson, 2009). One popular theory suggests that (in the absence of pathology) empathic responses arise out of an automatic, universal mechanism in the human brain that detects another person’s experience and activates a matching experience in the observer (Preston & de Waal, 2002). In this view, shared neural circuits provide a direct functional bridge between first- and second-person experiences (Decety & Ickes, 2009). Seeing another human being in pain, observers feel that other’s pain.

We know, however, that adults with normal empathic capacity also frequently fail to respond to another’s suffering. This may be because people are less likely to detect and attend to another’s suffering when the victim is distant in space, time, or kinship or belongs to a different racial, political, or social group (Batson & Ahmad, 2009). Empathy is even fragile between minimal groups—groups in which the boundary is arbitrary—such that children randomly assigned to groups (e.g., the ‘‘red team’’ or the ‘‘blue team’’) show greater empathy for ingroup members than for outgroup members who are socially rejected (Masten, Gillen-O’Neel, & Brown, 2010).

Recent studies are beginning to unpack the physiological and neural underpinnings of these empathic failures. In general, people show dampened or even absent ‘‘matching’’ neural and physiological responses when witnessing an outgroup member in physical pain. For example, Black and White participants show ‘‘empathic resonance’’ (i.e., sensorimotor contagion, indexed by modulation of motor evoked potentials in matched hand muscles) when watching an ingroup member’s hand (or even an artificially colored, purple hand) being pricked by a pin, but this response is absent when the hand belongs to an outgroup member. Reduced empathic resonance in response to outgroup pain is correlated with higher implicit racial bias (Avenanti, Sirigu, & Aglioti, 2010). Similarly, in White and Asian participants, the shared neural circuit for pain—anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), supplementary motor area (SMA), and insula—is more active when viewing same-race as compared to other-race faces being pricked with a needle (Xu, Zuo, Wang, & Han, 2009).

Future research should extend these paradigms beyond racially defined groups to arbitrary minimal groups (e.g., Masten et al., 2010) and distinguish ‘‘extraordinary’’ empathy for the ingroup from failures of empathy for the outgroup (e.g., Mathur, Harada, Lipke, & Chiao, 2010). Another target variable for future research is asymmetry in power or minority status between groups. Historic differences in power and status are likely to affect the source of intergroup dampening of empathy. For example, Black and White American participants show ‘‘matching’’ responses to pain in White and Black targets (in the ACC and insula), but only Black participants show addi- tional activity in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in response to ingroup suffering (Mathur et al., 2010). Black American participants’ empathy for Black individuals’ suffering is likely affected by their minority status.

Thus, outgroup members—merely by virtue of who they are and not anything they have done—reliably elicit diminished perceptions of suffering and fail to elicit equivalent physiological and affective empathic responses. More concerning is that these dampened empathic responses are related to less helping. For example, people who attributed fewer uniquely human emotions (e.g., anguish, mourning) to opposite-race Hurricane Katrina victims were also less willing to volunteer for relief efforts to help those victims (Cuddy, Rock, & Norton, 2007). In contrast, greater mPFC activity in response to in-group suffering predicts participants’ willingness to donate time and money to help ingroup members (Mathur et al., 2010).
Competition and Schadenfreude

Social identity—‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’—is most salient when groups are set in direct competition. Not surprisingly, inter- group competition strongly modulates empathic responding: Distressed ingroup members typically elicit empathy (Batson & Ahmad, 2009), whereas competitive rivals’ pain may even elicit pleasure, sometimes referred to as schadenfreude (Smith, Powell, Combs, & Schurtz, 2009). For male participants, brain regions associated with experiencing ‘‘reward’’ (i.e., left ventral striatum including nucleus accumbens) show positive activation when a competitor receives a painful electric shock (Singer et al., 2006). Both male and female participants exhibit reward-related activation (i.e., bilateral ventral striatum) when a socially competitive target experiences misfortunes (e.g., has rumors spread about him or her; Takahashi et al., 2009). Thus these reward-related regions respond to competitors’ physical and emotional suffering.

Similar effects occur when the sufferer is not a direct competitor but a member of a competitive group. Competitive outgroups may become targets of schadenfreude following failures in intergroup competition, particularly if participants are reminded of their own group’s inferiority prior to the outgroup’s failure (Leach & Spears, 2009). In the context of a real-world sports rivalry, Red Sox and Yankees fans reported feeling pleasure and showed activity in reward-related brain regions (i.e., right ventral striatum including nucleus accumbens) when they watch their rival fail to score against their favored team and also against a less competitive team in the same league (i.e., the Orioles). Attaching positive value to outgroup members’ suffering may provide motivation for inflicting suffering: People who show more reward-related activity when watching the rival team fail also report being more likely to actively harm the rival team’s fans (Cikara, Botvinick, & Fiske, 2011). These findings extend to situations in which the rival fans themselves are in physical pain: Soccer fans exhibited reward-related activity (again, in the right ventral striatum) when watching a rival team’s fan receive a painful electric shock; the magnitude of this activity predicted participants’ later unwillingness to relieve the rival’s pain by receiving half of the electric shock themselves (Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson, & Singer, 2010).

Competitive groups may also become targets of schaden- freude simply by virtue of the stereotypes associated with their group. While people report feeling neutral watching a high- status, competitive stranger (e.g., an investment banker) sit in gum on a park bench, they also smile (i.e., cheek muscle engagement, measured by facial electromyography), indicating the presence of positive affect (i.e., schadenfreude), not just the absence of negative affect (i.e., feeling neutral; Cikara & Fiske, 2011). On a positive note, manipulating status and competition-relevant information can attenuate this reaction: People exhibit a more empathic response when the unfortunate target is perceived as having lower status or as being cooperative (Cikara & Fiske, 2011).

Schadenfreude is thus a powerful and common alternative to empathy, offering positive emotions and self-affirmation in the face of a competitive threat (Leach & Spears, 2009). The lure of schadenfreude can even overpower self-interest: People feel pleasure at rivals’ misfortunes, even when the misfortunes have negative implications for themselves and society more broadly. For example, Democrats, especially those who strongly identified with their political party, reported considerable scha- denfreude after reading an article describing a mild economic downturn that occurred during a Republican administration (Combs, Powell, Schurtz, & Smith, 2009). Schadenfreude may function as a signal of ingroup cohesion in opposition to competitors. Demonstrating pleasure instead of empathy in response to someone’s misfortune is a clear sign to both ingroup and outgroup members that one’s interests are not aligned with those of the victim (Leach & Spears, 2009).

People with the most empathy for members of their ingroup may thus experience the most schadenfreude toward a threatening outgroup. When an outgroup is perceived as antagonistic, people respond less empathically to outgroup members but also more empathically to ingroup members (Dovidio et al., 2010; see, however, Xu et al., 2009 for a positive correlation between ingroup and outgroup empathic resonance). Agent-based simulations suggest that the motivation to help ingroup members and hostility toward people from other ethnic or racial groups may have co-evolved in humans: Group survival is more likely when many members are willing to fight in intergroup wars and even sacrifice themselves to protect others in their group (Choi & Bowles, 2007). The most dramatic incidents of intergroup violence are consistent with these suggestions: Most suicide bombers are not psychopaths but rather may experience particularly high empathy selectively for their own group’s suffering (Ginges & Atran, 2009).

Interventions

Social distance and group boundaries reduce people’s motiva- tion to alleviate victims’ suffering. Conflict-resolution and prejudice-reduction programs aim to turn this situation around using several procedures to increase empathy: perspective- taking, role playing, simulation, and positive intergroup contact. The general hypothesis of these programs is that increasing empathy for specific outgroup members can increase tolerance and willingness to help (and decrease willingness to harm) other outgroup members (Batson & Ahmad, 2009). For example, in an impressive large-scale field study, a radio drama in Rwanda depicting positive intergroup interac- tions increased empathy of Hutus toward Tutsis (Paluck, 2009). In some cases, positive effects of intergroup contact can occur rapidly: An online video-based interaction between Israelis and Palestinians temporarily increased positive attitudes and empathy toward the outgroup, even after only 20 minutes (Bruneau & Saxe, 2011). In some cases, the positive effects of interaction can be long-lasting: Relative to control groups, Sri Lankan Singhalese participants in a 4-day intergroup workshop expressed enhanced empathy toward Tamils even a year after participating in the program (Malhotra & Liyanage, 2005). Increased empathy can in turn lead to improved attitudes toward and willingness to help outgroups (Batson & Ahmad, 2009). For example, increasing empathy increased donations to an out- group charity (Malhotra & Liyanage, 2005) and forgiveness for past atrocities (Cehajic, Brown, & Castano, 2008).

While success is possible, interventions are not always beneficial: Empathy, positive attitudes, and helpful intentions toward an outgroup can also decrease following perspective taking. For example, metastereotypes—thoughts about how one (as a majority group member) may be evaluated by an out- group member—are activated when individuals empathize with an outgroup member in the context of an intergroup inter- action. These thoughts have the deleterious effect of interrupting other-focused empathic responses that are required for prejudice reduction. Moreover, among relatively high- prejudice participants, empathy induction can elicit overtly negative reactions to a nearby outgroup member (Vorauer & Sasaki, 2009).

A key variable, again, is the historical asymmetries of status and power between groups. For example, intergroup interventions have asymmetric effects for majority/empowered and minority/disempowered group members when the interventions are based on intergroup contact (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), when they involve focused assimilation versus integration (Dovidio et al., 2005), and when they require perspective taking versus ‘‘perspective giving’’ (speaking and being heard by a member of the other group; Bruneau & Saxe, 2011).

Understanding the causes and contexts of intergroup interventions is critical. Unfortunately, well-controlled empirical studies of prejudice-reduction and conflict-resolution programs remain rare, and relevant data are scarce (Paluck & Green, 2009). Since well-intended programs sometimes have no effect or even negative effects, it is particularly important that empirical evaluations of these programs match the pace of their creation.

Conclusion

People often empathize and feel emotional pain in response to the misfortunes of others. Empathy is, however, a highly flexible, context-dependent response. If an individual is a member of an outgroup, they are more likely to fail to arouse our empathy and could even be targets of schadenfreude in competitive contexts. Failures of empathy matter because they are related to diminished helping responses. While people are capable of incredible feats of cooperation and empathy, they are also capable of callousness, finding pleasure in others’ pain; better understanding the social, cognitive, and neural mechanisms underlying empathy and schadenfreude may help to alleviate humanity’s deepest tragedies and facilitate its greatest triumphs.

Tags: Psychology, empathy, community, ethnocentrism, ingroup, outgroup, inter-group, Yara Tercero-Parker, Us and Them, Inter-group, Failures of Empathy, socially distant

Todd Kashdan - Confronting Death with an Open, Mindful Attitude

Cool article from Todd Kashdan, writing at Huffington Post. He begins the post with a riff on Six Feet Under, an excellent former cable TV show about a family in the undertaker business. He mentions studies that show people become more ethnocentric and focused on their in-group when reminded of death, that death is impending.

Confronting Death with an Open, Mindful Attitude

Todd Kashdan - Professor of psychology, George Mason University
Posted: March 2, 2011

For three straight months, with the kids asleep, my wife and I snuck downstairs to watch at least one episode of "Six Feet Under." From 2001-2005, "Six Feet Under" was the first show to delve into the muddy, painful issues surrounding death. In the very first scene of the pilot, the father of the main characters dies in a car wreck and every subsequent episode begins with the story of a random person's death. Sometimes they are bizarre (a man slowly backs his car out of the driveway, sticks his hand out the door to grab the newspaper and falls out while the car continues descending, driving over his neck). Sometimes they are morbidly playful (a woman drinks heavily with friends in a limo, opens the sun roof and with screams of joy, outstretched hands, and closed eyes is decapitated by a low hanging traffic light). Besides being provocative, the show sought to change the way viewers confront death. When it comes to sex, drugs and violence, we are a society of exhibitionists. When it comes to death, we are repressed. My daily dose of "Six Feet Under"was therapeutic, helping me develop a cozier relationship with a prior enemy.

Death can be terrifying. Recognizing that death is inescapable and unpredictable makes us incredibly vulnerable. This disrupts our instinct to remain a living, breathing organism. So what do we do? We try to manage this terror. Generally, when reminded of our mortality, when the potential to experience existential anxiety is heightened, we are extremely defensive. Like little kids who nearly suffocate under blanket protection to fend off the monster in the closet, the first thing we try to do is purge any death-related thoughts or feelings from our mind. We try to think about something else, stuff our face with Cheez Doodles, anything to gain some composure. Only one problem. Ever try to ignore a cockroach that skittered across the bedroom and return to sleep? Doesn't work so well.

Because avoiding the issue is rather ineffective, our death-related thoughts continue to infect us. But unfortunately, we don't know that there is a mental virus pushing and pulling us around in all sorts of strange ways. On the fringes of conscious awareness, we try another attempt to ward off death anxiety. We violently defend beliefs and practices that provide a sense of stability and meaning in our lives. It might be patriotic fervor for our country, connection to people of a similar gender or racial group, or faith in God. Thinking about these beliefs, and the people that share them, allows us to feel accepted and meaningful. By viewing ourselves as valuable members of similar-minded groups, we connect ourselves to a permanent reality that will persist long after we die. We will die before our gender, race, or religious group does (give or take a nuclear holocaust). Clinging to our "culture worldview" gives us a sense of symbolic immortality! I know this sounds weird, but by defending the groups that we identify with, we have a second strategy to manage the fear of death (when attempts at suppressing and avoiding thoughts of death fails). But there is an ugly side effect to this psychological suture.

A common way in which we defend our cultural worldview is to praise people with similar beliefs and act aggressive toward people from different groups with different beliefs. Essentially, we become intolerant and abusive. There are hundreds of scientific experiments to demonstrate this phenomena. When people are reminded that death is impending, White people asked to read about a crime committed by another person give harsher penalties for Black compared with White defendants. Being reminded of their mortality increases racist tendencies. Right now you should be thinking of a number of alternative explanations. Please know that researchers continue to show that these defensive, hostile reactions toward people with different worldviews can't be explained by how distressed we feel about thinking about death, our self-esteem, our political attitudes, etcetera.

As someone who studies psychological strengths and well-being, I wasn't content knowing how evil humans can become when confronting death. My colleagues and I wondered what might prevent these defensive, intolerant reactions from occurring. We stumbled upon the idea that mindfulness might provide a form of psychological immunity. Mindfulness can be defined as gently focusing attention on what is happening in the present moment with a receptive, open attitude. Mindfulness is a sexy topic and there is no shortage of Tibetian monks gracing the covers of major magazines (and even funkier, more interesting monks). We wanted to study what happens when mindfulness and the terror of death collide. A grudge match between humanity and death. If mindful people are more willing to explore whatever happens in the present, even if it uncomfortable, will they show less defensiveness when their sense of self is threatened by a confrontation with their own mortality?

Based on the results of seven different experiments, the answer appears to be yes. When reminded about their death and asked to write about what will happen when their bodies decompose (in grisly detail), less mindful people showed an intense dislike for foreigners that mention what's wrong with the United States (pro-U.S. bias), greater prejudice against Black managers who discriminated against a White employee in a promotion decision (pro-White bias), and harsher penalties for social transgressions such as prostitution, marital infidelities, and drug use by physicians that led to surgical mishaps. Across these various situations, mindful people showed a lack of defensiveness toward people that didn't share their worldview. For instance, mindful people did not show preferential treatment for foreigners that had positive comments about the United States (focusing on the quality of ideas, not the birthplace of writers), or people of the same race (White racists were treated the same as Black racists). Mindful people were diplomatic and tolerant regardless of whether they were prompted to think about their slow, systematic decline toward obliteration.

So what do mindful people do that allows them to confront death in a non-defensive manner? What we found was that when asked to deeply contemplate their death, mindful people spent more time writing (as opposed to avoiding) and used more death-related words when reflecting on the experience. This suggests that a greater openness to processing the threat of death allows compassion and fairness to reign. In this laboratory staged battle, mindfulness alters the power that death holds over us. Pretty cool.

When we are unable to confront death, it's amazing how we become hateful and aggressive without any awareness into our actions. Think about who you despised after watching the planes crash into the twin towers (people that didn't look like you? think like you?). Who would have thought that being mindfully aware and curious could help us gain control over our own brain. In these unpredictable, uncertain times with too much hatred and violence what the world needs now are some open, curious people. For starters, let's get the 63 episodes of "Six Feet Under" to as many people as possible. I know quite a few politicians, judges, and journalists who could use a refesher course on biases...

(I have no financial stake in HBO or "Six Feet Under," just a huge, huge fan.)

Resources:

Niemiec, C.P., Brown, K.W., Kashdan, T.B., Cozzolino, P.J., Breen, W., Levesque, C., & Ryan, R.M. (2010). Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 344-365.

Kashdan, T.B., Afram, A., Brown, K.W., Birnbeck, M., & Drvoshanov, M., (in press). Curiosity enhances the role of mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to existential threat. Personality and Individual Differences

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Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, "Designing Positive Psychology." For more about his public speaking and research go to www.toddkashdan.com or the Laboratory for the Study of Social Anxiety, Character Strengths, and Related Phenomena

Tags: Todd Kashdan, Confronting Death, Open, Mindful, Attitude, Six Feet Under, death, dying, ethnocentrism, Huffington Post, Bereavement, Confronting Death, Dealing With Death, Existential, Anxiety, Fear Of Death, Fear Of Dying, Grief, psychology, mindfulness

Germany's Failed Multiculturalism? What's Next?

There are about seven million foreign residents living in Germany.
Some 4.3 million of these are Muslim and there are more than 3,000 mosques across Germany.

Has multiculturalism really failed in Germany (and by extension, much of Western Europe), or is Germany's conservative Christian government no longer willing to pretend it is tolerant?

Why am I reminded of the cliche, "Those who do not remember the past . . . ." A poll suggests that 13% of Germans would welcome a new Fuhrer.

And why does this remind of the immigration issues we face in this country? In Europe they have allowed immigration with an open boarder policy, and we have not. Either way, when things get tough, we blame the immigrants, not the politicians who created the mess.

First, a report from The Daily Mail (UK) - a couple of her most alarming comments are in bold, then an interview with Slavoj Žižek from Democracy Now!

Mrs Merkel said the so-called ‘multikulti’ concept – ‘that we are now living side by side and are happy about it’ – does not work. ‘This approach has failed, utterly,’ she said just days after a poll showed a third of all Germans viewed immigrants as nothing more than welfare cheats.

Addressing fears of ‘German-ness’ being lost amid new mosques, headscarves in classrooms and Turkish ghettos in cities like Berlin, she added: ‘We feel bound to the Christian image of humanity – that is what defines us. Those who do not accept this are in the wrong place here.’

Mrs Merkel joined leading political and business leaders who have questioned immigration policies in recent months.

Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin recently moved the debate centre-stage when he wrote a book that said the country’s four million Muslims were ‘dumbing down’ society and that the national Christian identity of Germans was in danger of being lost.

A poll taken after his book was published showed that one fifth of all Germans would vote for a party headed by Mr Sarrazin if he chose to form one.

Against that backdrop, Mrs Merkel – with her own and her CDU conservative party ratings in the gutter – has chosen finally to speak out.

Until now, mindful of the German legacy of World War II and atonement for racial policies responsible for the deaths of millions, German politicians since 1945 have tended only to speak in broad positive terms of the ‘multikulti’ society.

Germany began to evolve into a country of immigration in the 1960s when Turks and others arrived to fill the labour vacuum left by the nation’s war dead.

Mrs Merkel addressed this in her speech saying: ‘At the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: “They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone.” But this isn’t reality.’

She tempered her comments by insisting that Germany still welcomed immigrants – particularly the skilled ones it needs for its export-driven economy – and echoed recent comments made by the country’s president that Islam was ‘part of Germany’, like Christianity and Judaism.

But Mrs Merkel also added that those who did come must adapt, and learn German ‘as quickly as possible’.

The ratcheting up in the political tone, allied as it is with the fears of the population about unemployment and loss of identity, triggered a sharp warning from Jewish leaders in Germany that democracy is under threat.

Stephan Kramer, of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said yesterday that the current debate on immigration was making people feel ‘uneasy and scared’.

He also referred to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which showed that more than a third of those surveyed thought Germany was being ‘over-run by foreigners’ and that more than one in ten called for a ‘fuehrer’ to run the country ‘with a strong hand’.

I don't think I'm misreading this in hearing her say: Learn to speak German and live by our (my) Christian values or leave Germany, now.

Ethnocentric much?

I understand that they are dealing with some serious economic and cultural issues, but is it ALWAYS the "other" who gets blamed? OK, that's a rhetorical question. When human beings face crisis they fall back to older, safer positions. However, with German history as a guide, the world community needs to keep an eye on this.

One of the people keeping any eye on this issue is the rock-star philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

Zizek recently wrote for the Guardian UK:

Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face. Across Europe, the politics of the far right is infecting us all with the need for a 'reasonable' anti-immigration policy.
___

Recent electoral results in the west as well as in the east signal the gradual emergence of a different polarity. There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups. The best example of this is Poland where, after the disappearance of the ex-communists, the main parties are the "anti-ideological" centrist liberal party of the prime minister Donald Tusk and the conservative Christian Law and Justice party of the Kaczynski brothers. Similar tendencies are discernible in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Hungary. How did we get here?

He has a unique and controversial perspective. He considers himself a liberal/leftist, which is not something Americans have much experience with.

Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe

We turn now to Europe, where many are concerned about the growing acceptability of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Far from just being expressed by the extreme right wing, the anti-immigrant trend has entered the mainstream. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party this weekend that multiculturalism has utterly failed. A recent German poll found 13 percent of Germans would welcome the arrival of a new "Führer," and more than a third of Germans feel the country is "overrun by foreigners." We speak to the world-renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who has the been called "the Elvis of cultural theory." [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. He is author of dozens of books, his latest one from Verso Books is called Living in the End Times.

Rush Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Europe, where many are concerned about the growing acceptability of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Far from just being expressed by the extreme right, the anti-immigrant trend has entered the mainstream. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party this weekend that multiculturalism has utterly failed.

CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL: [translated] In Frankfurt, on the main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background. We are a country which, at the beginning of the 1960s, actually brought guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us, and we lied to ourselves for a while, saying that they won’t stay and that they will disappear one day. That’s not the reality. This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other, this approach has failed, utterly failed.

AMY GOODMAN: The German chancellor later added immigrants were welcome in Germany and that Islam is a part of the nation’s modern-day culture. Her comments are seen as part of a rightward shift and come just days after a study by the center-left Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that more than 30 percent of people believe Germany is, quote, "overrun by foreigners." A similar number believed immigrants had come to Germany for its social benefits and, quote, "should be sent home when jobs are scarce." Earlier this year, a book by an influential bank executive in Germany created an uproar, because it blamed the decline of German nationhood on the alleged failure of many immigrants to integrate.

As the debates rage on in Europe, I’m joined here in New York by a controversial public intellectual who’s been called "the Elvis of cultural theory." Yes, I’m talking about the Slovenian philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek. He’s the author of over thirty books. His latest, from Verso, is just out, and it’s called Living in the End Times. In a recent piece for The Guardian newspaper of London, he argues that "across Europe, the politics of the far right is infecting [everyone] with the need for a 'reasonable' anti-immigration policy."

Well, Slavoj Žižek, welcome to Democracy Now!

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Glad to be here. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Put everything together for us, from Angela Merkel talking about the end of multiculturalism—even what that means, "multiculturalism"—to the mass protests that are taking place in France and beyond.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I really think that usually we Europeans are a little bit arrogant, like we are the model of tolerance and so on. Now something horrible has happened, and what is really worrying is that it’s not only the countries, the parts of Europe, that we usually associate with intolerance, like southeastern Europe, Romania, Hungary and so on, it’s even the very models of tolerance—Netherlands, Norway and so on.

What really worries me is—I will say something very simple, almost commonsensical, that, you know, for me, I’m here always for censorship. Through democracy, tolerance, in an authentic sense, means that you simply cannot say certain things publicly. You are considered—you know, like if you say publicly an anti-Semitic, sexist joke, it’s unacceptable. Things which were unacceptable ten, fifteen years ago are now acceptable. And what I really am worried about is how the far right, what was twenty years ago the domain of the far right, is setting—even if they are a minority, they are setting the general agenda.

The typical rhetorical trick here is in two moves. First, you of course condemn the far right—"no place in our developed democracy." But then you add, "But they are addressing the real worries of the people," and so on and so on. So, in precisely—that’s the dirty sophistic trick—in order to prevent hatred outbursts, we have to control the situation. You know what is significant about Sarrazin, the banker, that you mentioned? You know that he was politically close to social democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Which means?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Which means that they—really, the extreme right imposed their topic onto everyone. But let me tell you now something which may surprise you. I, of course, don’t accept this horrible logic—we have to do it more modestly to prevent real outbursts—but I think there is a failure in this standard, liberal, multicultural vision, which means every ethnic group, whatever, to itself, all we need is a neutral legal framework guaranteeing the coexistence of groups. Sorry if I shock someone, but I think we do need what Germans call Leitkultur, leading culture. Just it shouldn’t be nationally defined. We should fight for that. Yes, I agree with right-wingers. We need a set of values accepted by all. But what will these values be, my god? We neglected this a little bit. You know that it’s not just this abstract liberal model: you have your world, I have my world, we just need a neutral legal network—how we will politely ignore each other.

My second point would have been that it’s absolutely crucial how this anti-immigrant explosion is linked to the withdrawal of leftist politics, especially in the matters of economy and so on. It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that "No, no, no, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism" and so on. They don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. Do you know, the horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants? So you see, we, the leftists, we have no right, absolutely no right, to take this arrogant view of offended tolerant people who are horrored—no, we should ask the question, how we enabled what is going on.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about this Christian Science Monitor poll that showed 13 percent of Germans would welcome the arrival of a new Führer. More than a third of Germans feel the country is "overrun by foreigners." Roughly 60 percent would restrict the practice of Islam, and 17 percent believe Jews have too much influence. Thirteen percent would welcome the arrival of a new Führer.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I think—now again, I will maybe shock you, but, you know, don’t exaggerate the meaning of this. No, no, I think that—OK, my first thesis, that Germany—and this makes it all the more tragic—from my personal experience, Germany is, for example, far more effectively, in everyday life, tolerant than France, for example, I claim with all responsibility. It’s not as general as it may appear. Go to mixed part of ex-West Berlin and so on, you will still see wonderful collaboration. Don’t worry about this. What I’m just saying is that we shouldn’t get too fascinated by these details.

We should ask more fundamental questions, like this is, for me, only part of a general shift, which I mention in the text you kindly referred to, how the whole political mapping of Europe is changing in a horrible way. To cut a long story short, very briefly, 'til now, we had the standard situation that you also have it up ’til now here: one big left-of-center party, one big right-of-center party—they are the only two parties which address the entire population—and then small fringe parties. Now, more and more in Europe, another polarity is emerging: a big liberal capitalist party, which can even be in social matters like abortion, women's rights, relatively progressive—pure, let’s call it, capitalist party—and the only serious opposition is the immigrant—anti-immigrant nationalists. It’s something horrible that has happened. The anti-immigrants are establishing themselves as the only authentic—of course, they are not authentic politically, but in the sense of really experienced as authentic—voice of protest. If you want to protest, the only way to do it effectively in Europe is this. So I think it’s a matter of life and death for a slightly more radical left to emerge.

You know what? Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt School fellow [inaudible], he said something which we should always bear in mind today. He said, "Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution." It goes, more than ever, for us. Like, take—let’s take your own country, Kansas, which is now the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. As Thomas Frank demonstrated in his book, my god, 'til twenty, thirty years ago, Kansas was the breeding ground of all radical socialist, and so on, mass movements. The same in Europe. This should worry us, not this arrogant—which always has a negative class connotation. When people attack common people's racism, it’s always like we upper-middle-class liberals dismissing ordinary people. We should start asking ourselves what we did wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: And as you come here to the United States, your assessment of the Tea Party movement?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It’s a perfect example of what I was talking about. I had almost—I use the terms a little bit ironically, but nonetheless—a kind of epiphany moment when, a year ago or so, when they organized, grassroot Republicans, all those—the first wake of tea parties against spending so much money for banks. You know what I was doing? I was sitting in a hotel room, jumping between two channels on TV. One was Fox News—you must know the enemy to fight it. The other one was PBS. On Fox News, it was a live transmission of a tea party in Texas where a singer, kind of a fake folk singer, was singing anti-Washington, anti-state-expenditure song. On PBS, there was a documentary on the great leftist icon Pete Seeger. I was shocked at how the words, although the political meanings of it, were almost the same. Both were singing about we small, ordinary people are exploited; big bad guys, bankers in Washington, and so on, Wall Street, and so on. This is the tragedy. This is the tragedy at its purest.

You must know better than me. I don’t know whether—as far as I can judge the situation, it was after Carter, with Reagan, when this grassroots movement and so on were more taken over by the right, like, no, the time of left, leftist, radical mass mobilization has passed now. When somebody tells you, "Oh, tea party, oh, out of a local grassroot protest," your first assessation is, are right-wingers again doing it, or what? This is a very sad moment. But no reasons—I hope I made it clear—for traditional European America bashing. And this is, I think, part of a global process of what I call the disappearance of the—what philosophers like Kant called the public use of reason.

I listened with amazement and great pleasure to the report about how here in the States the universities, which are financed by taxpayers’ money, are more and more used by companies. In Europe, we are even worse. I’ll tell you why. Because they stated clearly the program in Europe. It’s not only this concrete problem—big companies controlling, through money donations, universities. It’s something more fundamental going on. It’s a well-organized, all-European campaign to turn us scientists, human or natural, into experts. The idea is, we have a problem—let’s say oil spill in Louisiana—oh, we need experts to tell us how to contain it. We have a public disorder, demonstrations; we need psychologists and so on. This is not thinking. What universities should do is not serve as experts to those in power who define the problems. We should redefine and question the problems themselves. Is this the right perception of the problem? Is this really the problem? We should ask much more fundamental questions.

Here, it may surprise you, but I still have sympathy for Obama. But in my view, one of his greatest failures is not Afghanistan. There, the situation is very complex. I don’t know what I would have done. It’s how he reacted to the oil spill. You know why? Because he played this legal, moralistic game, as if the—you know, like, I will kick—we know where—BP, they will make—sorry, but in a tragedy of these proportions, you cannot play this legalistic game who is guilty and so on. You should start asking more general questions. BP is evil, but are we aware that it may have happened also to another company? So the problem is not BP. The problems are much more general—the structure of our economy, why are we living like this, our way of life, and so on and so on. I think that this is the problem today. I’m saying this ironically as a leftist. We have maybe even too much anti-capitalism, but in this overload of anti-capitalism, but always in this legal, moralistic sense: ooh, that company is using child slave labor; ooh, that company is polluting; ooh, that company is—that company, whatever, is exploiting our universities. No, no, the problem is more fundamental. It’s about how the whole system works to make the companies do this. Don’t moralize the problem, because if you moralize it, you can say in the States whatever you want. Already in the movies like Pelican Brief, you remember, no problem, big company, even the president of the United States, can be corrupted. No, this excess of anti-capitalism is a false excess. We should start asking more fundamental questions.

AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, your latest book, why did you call it Living in the End Times?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Of course, the point is to ironically refer or evoke this metaphor of doom, whatever, in 2012, we are approaching the end of times. And, of course, my point is not—I am not this kind of believer—oh, we have two years to live, then whatever will happen. But nonetheless, I think that at the whole—at different levels, we are approaching slowly—no panic yet—a kind of a zero point. In the sense of—let’s look at ecology. It is clear that when people tell me, "Oh, but you are utopian," I tell them, "No, the only true utopia is that things can go on like they do now indefinitely." And it’s very strange how we behave. On the one hand, we don’t really believe there will be a catastrophe. We are split. We know it. We admit it rationally. But then you go out, there is sun, the grass is green, can anything happen. At the same time—this is ideology of everyday life—to make our conscience clear, did you notice how we are blackmailed at this everyday level? "Oh, you threw that newspaper away. No, you should take—"

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah. So, what I’m claiming is that we are approaching a certain zero point. We have to act. If not, I don’t want to live in a society which will be here in twenty years, let us say.

AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, I want to thank you for being with us, Slovenian philosopher, author of many books. His latest is just coming out now from Verso Books. It’s called Living in the End Times.

Tags: Slavoj Zizek, Far Right, Anti-Immigrant, Politicians, Europe, Germany, Islam, Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman, The Daily Mail, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, conservative, Christian Democratic Union party, CDU, Muslims, multiculturalism, culture, ethnocentrism, Politics, economics, postmodernism, Friedrich Ebert Foundation

Neural responses indicate our willingness to help

Our brains respond differently to the suffering of someone from our in-group (empathy circuits) than from someone outside, or from an out-group (reward circuits). We are more likely to help the person from our own group.

It's easy to read this as proof of our ethnocentrism, but I want to know where the subjects were situated developmentally. Considering that these were soccer fans in the study, probably European, and that the "victims" of suffering were soccer players, I suspect that the study is measuring responses from the kinship and ego drive stages of development.

I wonder what the outcome would be if the situation were different, say 33 Chilean miners trapped in a mine for more than two months. One billion people around the world watched the rescue - and most those people would be considered out-group members (there not Chilean or miners).

I also suspect that as we development into greater levels of complexity and compassion, we become less attached to any specific in-group, which we generally refer to as a worldcentric perspective,

Neural responses indicate our willingness to help

Posted On: October 7, 2010 - 4:40pm

Witnessing a person from our own group or an outsider suffer pain causes neural responses in two very different regions of the brain. And, the specific region activated reveals whether or not we will help the person in need. Researchers at the University of Zurich studied the brain responses of soccer fans and now have neurobiological evidence for why we are most willing to help members of our own group.

Our reactions to shocking news clips on television demonstrate that human beings can remain remarkably cool in the face of other peoples' suffering. And yet, we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves for others, even if no tangible reward awaits. Why such a difference? Social psychology has proven that our propensity to help is modulated by social factors. Little, however, was known about the underlying neural processes and how they are influenced by group affiliation. Now, research in neuroscience at the University of Zurich has documented that the brain regions activated when witnessing people suffer vary according to whether those suffering are perceived as group members. "And most importantly, the differences in neural responses indicate whether the observer will help the suffering person later on," as neuroscientist Grit Hein confirmed.

Grit Hein, Tania Singer (now director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) and social psychologist C. Daniel Batson (University of Kansas, USA) measured the neural responses of soccer fans: Test subjects watched either a member of their own group (ingroup) or someone from a rival team (outgroup) be subjected to painful shocks through electrodes attached to the back of their hands. The test subjects could then decide whether or not to help an ingroup or outgroup member by receiving a portion of the pain themselves. Helping had a high cost as it was inherently linked to personal physical pain. Test persons also had the option to simply watch the other person receive the shocks or to distract themselves from the unpleasant scene by watching a soccer video.

The scientific journal Neuron has published the revealing results of the study: Should a person from an ingroup suffer pain, brain regions associated with empathy for others' pain are activated. A greater degree of activation in these regions correlates with a greater willingness to help. If, however, test subjects saw a member of an outgroup subjected to pain, brain regions motivated by reward were activated. A high degree of reward-related activation corresponds to a negative perception of the person belonging to the rival team, and the willingness to help decreases as brain activation rises.

Measuring neural responses also proves to be a more accurate prediction tool than questionnaires when trying to determine how willing people are to help people outside of their group affiliation. "After all, who is going to admit they'd help a friend in need but let an outsider suffer?" observed Grit Hein.

Source: University of Zurich

Tags: Psychology, brain, empathy, ethnocentrism, in-group, out-group, Neural responses indicate our willingness to help, Science Codex, neurobiology, neuroscience, Grit Hein, Tania Singer, C. Daniel Batson, Neuron