Empathology

I went to an interesting talk yesterday about empathy - its importance in a world that is growing more interconnected, why people feel it sometimes and not other times, the need to overcome "us/them" distinctions in order to feel empathy for people we don't know, etc. The speaker suggested that empathy is something we not only want, but need - we spend a significant part of our lives looking for a partner we can count on to empathize with us, and often the simple experience of receiving empathy from someone is enough to heal emotional wounds.

It reminded me of the Prisoner's Dilemma in game theory - when facing a competitor for resources, you each have a choice to play nice or cheat. If you both play nice, you both benefit. If you both cheat, you both lose. But if you cheat and they play nice, you get a huge benefit, and if you play nice and they cheat, you take a huge loss. Lots of applications for ecology and for human behavior. For a game with repeated play, the best strategy is to start off playing nice, and then after your first turn just copy everything your opponent does. If the game is long-term enough and if you are consistent in rewarding nice play and punishing cheating, your opponent will eventually play nice all the time. It's harder with a short-term game though (a competitor you will only interact with a few times).

Anyway, the connection with empathy is that when you offer empathy to someone who does not intend to empathize back, someone who doesn't share your philosophy or is just mean or is, say, funded by the pharmaceutical industry, it really stings when they don't return the favor. It feels like the worst outcome in the Prisoner's Dilemma. And the playing field is often unequal - if they have economic or political power and you don't, you don't have the option to punish them in your next turn.

I think one way to overcome that is to not expect empathy back. We get so outraged when we bend over backwards to be nice to people and they ignore us or take advantage. When you're up against someone who you know is not going to return the favor, you just have to school yourself not to expect anything back - to look at the encounter as an information-gathering exercise, or building credibility for the future, or just life experience on the path to enlightenment.