New Orleans after Katrina…
Group selection in this manner is pretty much impossible, except in special cases with different genetics from humans. Any mutation with a fitness advantage to the individual overwhelms effects at a group level. See how the Wikipedia article sums it up with reference (9) therein.
Unless empathy evolved by chance as a side-effect of something else, it requires an adaptive account at the individual level.
The human evolutionary “niche” is one of intense cooperation in complex social groups, and this requires careful monitoring of the subtleties of the behavior of those around us to police cheating & freeloading. Humans have a notable capacity to rationalize our own actions - most likely this is because of our need to present a convincing persona to others. If we ourselves believe that we are good cooperative members of society, then no acting or dissembling is required in order to convince others.
I suspect that the most likely explanation is that empathy arose by a similar mechanism. If we really experience strong feelings for the suffering of our brethren, there is no need for us to pretend to care for others. Genuine strong emotions make it far easier to convince other people that we are good cooperating members of the community who are willing to help others.
The OP is kind of asking two questions without realizing it. “Why do humans have empathy?” and “Why should I care about being empathetic / why is it a good thing”?
In terms of why humans have empathy, we evolved it like our other instincts. We’re a social species that lived in groups much smaller than today, and it was beneficial to notice when other members of your tribe had a problem and do what you could. Your life depended on your group being healthy and safe. And of course in a smaller group reciprocity becomes a key feature.
Then in terms of why empathy in the modern world, well firstly bear in mind that most people do have some degree of empathy, even if they can’t consciously admit it, and doing good deeds now and then, and nothing overtly evil, means you can have a clean conscience and sleep at night. So even being purely selfish it can make sense to behave empathetically from time to time.
Plus of course most people would find it hard to turn off and on like a switch; suddenly behaving empathetically when in an environment where it might come back on them. It’s easier just to adjust one’s still of living a smidge.
And of course modern society encourages empathy, and wants us to treat everyone as members of our tribe, because it’s obviously necessary for large groups to function.
See my prior post - the general consensus in evolutionary biology is that the “group selection” aspect of what you describe does not happen - individual selection overwhelms group selection.
Cooperative reciprocity is the key, I think. Empathy can be seen as a part of altruism, for which we have solid evolutionary explanations based on individual selection, not group selection.
Hold on here. I think this thread may be confusing empathy with sympathy. The two are not the same, and empathy is powerful, but very limited. Sympathy is far more useful, even though it doesn’t “feel” as strong.
Empathy is when I feel your pain. But this does not inherently make me more likely to help unless I’m already emotionally close to you. It is most useful when I can already in a social situation where understanding is useful. Empathy lies in the guts, as were, and may not lead to anything useful. Sympathy is when I don’t feel your pain, but through the use of imagination I can understand why and how that’s an issue. Sympathy resides purely in the head, and is more likely to spark useful work to a resolution.
Why would you think that? It seems obvious to me that sharing a sense of a stranger’s pain as though it were your own would be a compelling motivation to help them.
And what’s your basis for such a strict empathy/sympathy distinction? My sense is that they are overlapping emotions, I don’t think the gut/head distinction accords with common usage.
Without society, who would you rip off?
Empathy is not advantageous. You don’t need empathy to follow laws. You don’t need empathy to help people. You don’t need empathy to live a good life.
Not likely that you avoided it. Just a simple item like looking at a parent or brother and thinking “Thats got to hurt!” when they got an injury told you about how to avoid the dangers they encountered and when and how to help your close relatives.
Unless you are a hermit, psychologists report that empathy allows the kind of connections that builds healthy, mutual relationships, it is an essential part of mental health.
But isn’t that just good sense? If someone gets hurt doing something, and then you decide not to do it, that’s empathy?
Sympathy also builds a relationship where you feel bad that someone got hurt, and you want to prevent that hurting.
Well I wasn’t really thinking of group selection. In small groups it helps the individual to help the group.
It is not possible to explain to somebody without empathy why empathy is important, because they are as incapable of understanding the concept as people who are not psychopaths are of truly understanding the psychopathic world view. We get to think that they’re sick, and they get to think that we’re saps. And yet, somehow, the world keeps on operating more or less functionally, only occasionally tipping over completely into being ruled by psychopaths.
If you’re trying to explain the evolution of empathy, that’s the definition of group selection. A fitness advantage for the group is not sufficient in an evolutionary account of how it arose - there must be a fitness advantage at the individual level.
Someone upthread gave what seems like a good running start: imagine a world where parents don’t care all that much about their offspring. And now imagine I’m the freak who cares deeply about securing blessings for my posterity, and so I work hard to make sure my kids have kids; and since my kids inherited their dad’s emotion-soaked ways, they (a) likewise look out for their kids, and (b) work together, succeeding as sibling teammates. So my kin get a whole ‘tribe’ thing going…
Every creature in nature has evolve a method of ensuring that their offspring reaches adulthood. How is that not group selection? After all, there’s generally no individual advantage to having kids.
The advantage is not conferred upon the individual, but upon the individual’s genes --half of which are shared by their offspring.
A gene which doesn’t get to copy itself into any progeny pretty soon becomes an ex-gene.
I think it would help to bring themselves to recognize that EMPATHY is not a “thing,” in and of itself.
That is, it isn’t an individual sense, nor is it an independent emotion. For that matter, when people refer to “empathizing,” they don’t always mean the same thing at all.
Most of the time, when we say “empathize,” we are referring to a situation where a person is doing several separate things at the same time:
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RECOGNIZING what the other person is experiencing either physically, or emotionally, or psychologically;
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experiencing a visceral MEMORY of how it feels to themselves, when they have the same experience;
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choosing an action in response to this personal knowledge.
Most people are NOT at the mercy of some force within themselves, just because another person appears to be in distress. Most parents, for example, can understand that their child is very unhappy about not getting something, but because they know that what the child is unhappy about not getting is actually dangerous for them, they don’t feel bad at all about denying it to them. The fact that a parent DOESN’T feel bad every time their child does, doesn’t mean they are partially sociopathic, or suffer from one of the other modern labels we apply to unresponsive people.
People who ARE unable to decide for themselves how to react to the recognition of pain or upset in others, are as handicapped as the people who are incapable of recognizing the pain or upset in the first place.
So, back to the opening question, if you ask what the value of EMPATHY is, and you are referring ONLY to the ability to recognize that someone else is suffering, there will be one answer. If you assume instead, that EMPATHIZING refers only to setting aside your own goals and desires in order to try to make that person feel better, then you will get a different answer.
Or, just ignore them and forget about it. Which is probably what most of us do most of the time. The problem is too big for us to deal with.
Take a group of men, let them chat for a while, and then put on some comedy videos which includes the following: some poor guy gets hammered right where it hurts most. Watch how many of them instinctively twinge. That’s Empathy.
Sympathy is donating money to a cause that you believe in, whether or not you know anything about having said problem.
No.
Group selection is: Groups with a higher proportion of members with Trait X will out-compete groups with a lower proportion of Trait X, and that’s how Trait X becomes more prevalent, possibly in spite of the trait not being beneficial to the individual. That’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying: An individual with Trait X benefits directly in strengthening their group and through reciprocation. Or, put it like this: The long-term gains of strengthening the group outweighs the short-term cost of helping other members, thereby making empathy a successful strategy for the individual.