The speaker in Gigobuster’s video claims it is soft-wired but then offers conflicting evidence: Babies crying in response to another baby crying vs. an animal observing a human opening a nut and having the same area in his brain stimulated.
I’d make a guess that soft-wired would be more accurate based on his argument that technology has allowed empathy to expand. He claims that modern man’s primary need is for belonging rather than food, shelter, clothing. Remove those basics and empathy would be brushed aside rather rapidly.
What do you think?
Now before I time out, I’ll post this and come back to check out your reference. My error.
Not quite, the speaker reports that what babies show there is Empathic Distress, that is more specific. The focus is in Mature Empathy. Some people do not develop this.
Okay. I get that. And the implication is that mature empathy is made possible by technology. That’s an interesting observation. No wonder it’s controversial. I can think of many ways that technology also can make a society less apt to develop empathy.
I guess it’s fair to say that we are hard wired for the potential to develop empathy. But I’m not sure still of what the OP was looking for.
Well…my friend’s stated reason for the internship was that she wanted to develop empathy for people in the social class that she would work with the future. Subsequently she did work for a church in SF Chinatown for 20 years and did an exceptional job serving the under-privileged.
But I was shocked by her statement that she did not feel that she established an empathic link to the family that she stayed with. She lived at the same house, eating the same diet, and knew these people inside and out. I started to feel that if she couldn’t establish an empathetic link, then it was hopeless for me since I’ve never even gone through the deprivation she had.
Was she trying to establish an “empathetic link,” or was she just there to try to understand what underprivliledged people need to deal with? Would an “empathetic link” have made her a more or less effective social worker?
A person does not need an “empathetic link” to recognize problems and work to allleviate them.
Not quite the point, the idea here is to take into account how humans employed systems to expand that empathy, it was limited to a family or tribe (the monkey sphere is related to this IMO), then it was expanded to more people with the use of Religion, then progress enable us to expand empathy to a whole nation. The point is that technology is allowing us to expand empathy to the world now.
Of course this does not deny that technology can affect that empathy negatively (religion or nation states can screw it up too); however, I do think that overall the good use of those devices to enhance empathy eventually overcomes the bad.