The interesting thing about opinions is how little interest an enquirer often has in the content of the information they are asking for compared to their ability to obtain it.
Children learn this when they discover the word “why”.
They can make an adult stop what they are doing and provide them with a resource – attention.
To a parent this may be exasperating but to an infant it’s important. They are learning how to control, manage and utilise the constituents of their environment.
It is a skill that most middle managers seem to able to retain and refine, which is why a few years ago when a pre-publication copy of a book was handed to me I nodded, smiled and paid the appropriate due deference to the ever-so-earnest request for my opinion and placed it to one side; knowing that my take on it would be met with surprise as a reminder to this long-forgotten request a week or so later.
That book was Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron-Cohen.
Somewhere between Victoria and Euston on the London Underground that evening I started reading it to break the familiarity of the journey.
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It would be fair to say that I hadn’t really considered empathy as a topic previously. To me, then, it was just another cutesy subject in psychology that if we just had a bit more government funding or a few more studies we could find the magic answer to the ills of society.
It turns out that empathy is a lot more serious topic than my layman’s estimation of it.
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The first hurdle is what is empathy, what use is it to us to make it worth our while supporting the facility and how do we experience it?
If we take empathy to be ability to share a response to the environment with another individual we can see how this ability might lead to the initiation of cooperation.
Cooperation requires the understanding that a counterparty is not simply operating a bad strategy. If an individual can “feel” through empathy that exploiting this gambit would be unfair then the option that they are left with is to cooperate.
This is positive cooperation rather than enforced collaboration through Nash’s Trap.
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When we are empathetic we take on another’s response to the environment and share it with them.
If we can rule out some form of psychic wi-fi connection, how do we do this?
Applying the RoUCa grid to the problem we can rule out several areas.
Empathy is something that we tend to feel rather than think – if someone bangs their shin on the table you recoil or your knees go weak – so we can rule out the Cognitive Sector. There is not a mismatch between expectation and result so we can scrub the Emotional Sector and likewise we are not introducing additional lotteries so we can eliminate the Influencing sector as well.
For us then, this would leave the Automatic sector, which logically makes sense.
(In the RoUCa model) If this sector operates before the sense of self has been formed the same syntactic and semantic information is being picked up from the environment by each individual.
Essentially (as the sense of self has not been formed) the neural real estate responsible for producing a rendering of the environment at this point have mirror properties. That RoU or Ca is taken into our render and leaves us to respond as others do.
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Unfortunately, like most things in life, empathy is not that simple.
Firstly, although we habitually assume equivalence, as Individuals we produce different Us. Secondly, again although we assume equivalence, people have different levels of empathy. Criminals tend to do criminal things because they are not bothered by doing them rather than an inability to distinguish between right and wrong.
How you represent this can be quite difficult. By analogy, if you order an item online and it doesn’t arrive, all you know is that you have wasted a morning in waiting for the courier. You don’t know if there is a delay with the manufacturer, a logistics problem at the dispatching warehouse or if the delivery driver has your parcel but is stuck in traffic.
If a person doesn’t produce a behaviour can you say whether this is because they haven’t picked-up information from the environment, been able to decode/encode it or that the signal has been interrupted along the way?
This is why the RoUCa model has a Wiper in the Cognitive sector. Generally, unless something is obviously unusual, you can’t say too much about an Individual’s Automatic sector without a brain scan of some sort, only if they have a Global or Local bias, based upon their report of the world.
It is though quite easy to tell whether an Individual can screen out empathy by their reaction to being confronted with error. A narrow-Wipered What will rapidly Deny anything that confronts them – you just have to watch the next reality TV advert to see this response.
Which brings us back to the work of Baron-Cohen.
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In the RoUCa model we have syntactic information represented by RoU, How and precision, and semantic information represented by Ca, What and accuracy. We also have left or right-sided Wipers.
Initially I thought that that Baron-Cohen’s empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory would map straight onto the grid. However (and more by luck than judgement) to avoid confusion with already named sectors I replaced (termwise) cognitive and affective empathy with syntactic and semantic.
– Interestingly the relationship between the two pairs appears to be orthogonal, just as earlier two-stream theories of vision are to Milner and Goodale’s version. –
This has turned to be quite handy as it allows us to separate out those with a Global or Local bias of their render of the environment in the Automatic sector (by report when not confronted with error) and their How/What response to the environment attenuated by their Wiper in the Cognitive sector.
As such Individuals with different empathy impairments have different distributions on the grid. It is the goal of the RoUCa model to diagnose behaviour, not ill-health, but it is interesting to see the distribution for those having Autistic-style behaviours compared to those with Cluster B type disorders.
For the majority empathy explains why we tear-up at the climatic finale of a film (accompanied by the soaring string embellished soundtrack) or a carriage of previously silent strangers can rapidly form a cohesive and vocal mob of protestors in the event of a delay.
The majority assume equivalence of empathy. The next time someone does something unexpected it may be your fault for making this assumption.
People who lack empathy, however this may be, are only doing what make sense to them.