Empathy is a social skill, not an instinct. It is trained in people so strongly that it may feel innate, but it is not. We all have the capacity for it, of course, but we also have the capacity to kill, or love certain kinds of music, or despise other ethnic groups. The ability to do something does not mean that the action/emotion is a required part of the makeup. That is is present just means that training in that area was emphasised in socialization.
Think about potty training. Most adults would not willingly soil their pants, and would feel deeply ashamed if they did so in public. Yet, to a child, it’s perfectly natural to move the bowels or empty the bladder whenever they feel the need. They have not been taught that social shame yet. Once it is present, it is incredibly strong.
Secondly, think of how we form lines at checkouts. It’s also a seemingly instinctive behavior, but it’s one which was carefully drilled into us as children. We are shocked, almost offended, when someone breaks that taboo and charges to the front of the line.
Our socializers make us who we are. The training isn’t always necessarily overt, either. A child learns when they see dad react with sadness when he sees an accident, or if dad laughs at the victims. They watch their parents’ reactions to violations of social taboos, and copy it. They learn which of their actions trigger disgust in people around them, and when they should feel shame.
In empathy, emotions get involved in the training. We are taught to think of how we would feel if something happened to us. We are taught to have an emotional response to certain stimuli, in other words.
Likewise, social animals like the apes empathise with one another because they’ve been taught that that is the reaction one displays when a member of the group is distressed. It’s a function which makes their society run more smoothly. An ape raised in captivity, away from others, does not display this same empathy.
Not sure I agree, but this is an area where a fair bit of research appears to be going on. I don’t think we’re emotional blank slates, and that entirely arbitrary emotional responses can be socialised into us.
Okay. I think we’re talking about drives at different levels. I submit that the capacity to feel the pain we call shame is built in, in the same way as the capacity to feel the pains we call cold and hunger. The circumstances which induce shame however are amenable to socialisation.
Certainly, that’s why it evolved. But are you saying there’s no associated internal sensation for apes when they display empathy?
Does not display the same empathy with whom? Apes in the wild empathise with individuals within their own groups.
We’re getting into a nature vs. nurture debate that is a bit tangential. I completely acknowledge the the importance of socialisation, but I dispute that it’s the whole story. Would you say the protective behaviours mammals show towards their young are the result of socialisation?
This tells me that the behavior is socially trained, otherwise the sexes would be equal.
If you’re asking if I believe they have emotions, just as we do: yes. But, just as in humans, they have been trained by those around them as to when they should feel happy or sad.
Here’s a prime example of this “emotional programming”:
In the Middle Ages, one of the favorite sports was bear-baiting. A live bear was tortured, attacked by dogs and the like until it was dead. Bull-baiting was also extremely popular-- so popular that a particular breed of dog was developed which was more suited to the game.
As a modern woman, I react with utter horror when I see an animal suffer. I can remember clearly an incident from my childhood when I rolling puppies in a box down a hill. My aunt scolded me harshly, in tones of outrage. It made a powerful impression on me. Incidents like this, when my parents or family expressed disgust or anger at animals being harmed, trained me to feel the same way.
However, if I lived 600 years ago, I’d probably be laughing until I split when I saw a bear being ripped to shreds by vicious dogs.
I was referring to apes who have been raised in captivity, away from others of its kind and are introduced into groups. They don’t naturally fall into social interraction, including displaying empathy.
No, it’s a product of emotion. Love is a very simple emotion, really, though we humans tend to make it more complex. It is beneficial, evolutionarily speaking, for if the parent has an emotional involvement with its offspring, it will care for it better. From what I have read, I believe that most mammals, especially social ones, feel love.
What we learn from our parents is how to SHOW that love-- which gestures, words and actions demonstrate our feelings properly.
Shit. This is all just shit. There’s no “Dark Christ” trying to teach us any lesson whatsoever. There’s just us. We make planes that, given the limitations of technology, crash from time to time. Quite often, we acively kill the victims ourselves…whether we call it collateral damage or ethnic cleansing. The New Year is scarcely 2 days old and I already nominate this as most horseshitty OP of 2006.
BTW, Lissia, I have continued to read your posts and would like to thank you for debating/discussing in a highly mature and intellectually sound fashion. You are an example to others.
Sorry to disappear on you Lissa, I’d gone to bed. Regarding the inquity aversion in monkeys, I’d say there’s insufficient data as to whether it is a purely socialised response. However, could you elaborate on the different aversion levels of females and males and this comment?
I don’t why the sexes would be necessarily be equal if this behaviour were instinctive. They are after all physiologically different.
I agree with that, but I think the emotional pains and pleasures we experience are rather more nuanced than simple “happy” and “sad”. “Guilt” is not a more intense version of “embarassment”, for example. “Disgust” is different from both.
I believe, and have argued elsewhere on these boards, that elements of our emotional responses are innate and have evolved along with our big brains and opposable thumbs. The capacity at least to feel empathy, loneliness, affection, shame, love, a sense of justice etc. are intrinsic, necessary ingredients to being social animals and working in co-operative groups. Unfortunately our capacities are conflicted - the capacity to feel xenophobia, rage, hate etc. are also intrinsic, necessary ingredients to our group being able to drive the outsiders away from the prized fruit tree. So I believe that the emotion of empathy is innate, but the socialisation process guides us as to who and what we consider as our group and who and what we consider as outsiders.
I was aware of that charming little middle-age activity, but I interpret modern socialisation as having extended the cuter animals into “our” group. So the intrinsic empathy that we apes used to reserve for our nearest and dearest is now applied to almost anything with a face. I blame Disney.
Clearly you and I place very different weights on the importance of intrinsic emotions and socialisation, and I admit I probably haven’t thought about socialisation enough. I certainly haven’t researched it! Could you explain how and why the socialisation process develops at all? If each generation learns empathy from the previous one, is there a Buddha ape somewhere in the ancestry which invented empathy and taught it to its children? How does it all get started?
To a certain, small extent, the sexes differ, but most of our differences are exaggerated by socialization. In human society, women tend to be more verbally adept while men are more skilled with logic and planning. Women tend to cue in more on people’s emotions, but women and men are raised differently. People may not even notice how differently they treat male and female babies, and how that treatment shapes them.
A few years back, there was an experiment involving infants. A female infant was taken out in public dressed in a fluffy pink outfit. The researchers noted the way people reacted to the baby: they spoke to her in soft, cooing tones, patted her gently and talked about how pretty and delicate she was.
The next day, the same baby was dressed in blue with a ball cap. The researchers noted that people spoke in gruffer voices to “him”, prodded the baby with gentle punches, and complimented him as a “tough little man” he was, and marvelled at how strong his grip was.
In the past, the differences were more pronounced, especially in the toys our children were given: doyls for girls, outdoor sports equipment for boys. I have an antique copy of a Dick and Jane reader from the early fifties. Jane has tea parties while Dick plays firefighter. Jane watches helplessly while her kitten is stuck in a tree until Dick comes along to save it.
Today, we make an effort to make our children’s toys gender-neutral, but we can never totally eliminate societally imposed sex differences.
Ape societies are no different. Female ape babies learn from their mothers proper social behavior in females, and males strive to emulate their father. They have the same sense of social shame that we do: a female ape would be just as embarassed doing a “male” behavior as a woman would feel if she acciedently stumbled into a men’s bathroom.
Quite so. Since our thinking is more advanced, we tend to add more structure to our emotional responses. Apes are probably the equivellent of a five-year-old human child when it comes to emotions, according to what I’ve read.
If it were innate, such as the sex drive, all humans would feel it. The simple fact is, humans raised in abnormal enviornments never acquire it. Sure, we all have the CAPACITY for it, but it needs to be cultivated and encouraged in order to thrive.
An infant doesn’t care that Mother is exhausted or upset-- the infant just wants fed NOW. It isn’t until later that the child learns to read what mother is feeling and will delay its requests out of consideration for her.
Disney may share a big part of the blame, I agree.
My point was that kindness to animals seems “natural” to me-- to the point where I cannot understand why anyone could possibly torture an animal. But when I was four or five, I was cheerfully rolling puppies in a box down a hill.
That empathy with the suffering of animals was culturally created in me. I did not develop it independantly. As I said, if I’d lived 600 years ago, I would have made fun of anyone espousing animal rights and would have thought bull-baiting was jolly good fun. Likewise, I likely would have looked forward to witch burnings and been utterly disgusted and terrified when I saw people of a different race.
I like to believe that if I had lived in Germany in the 1930s and '40s that I would have helped to hide Jews, but if I had been raised to fear and loathe them, would I have supported Hitler’s progroms? I don’t much like to think about this one.
Every social animal socializes its young. Dogs teach their pups “dog etiquette”, without which a dog is a social misfit who gets in fights and is rejected by other dogs. Ape mothers teach their young the inticate social web around them and their place within it, and how to avoid giving offense to those of higher status. All socieities, animal and human, developed ways to get along with one another, and taboos to avoid behaviors destructive to the group. They naturally passed this knowledge down to their young.
It’s not a process which sprang from human culture-- it’s a process which evolved alongside. As our society became more complex, so did our socialization process.