Empathy is what connects us as humans. Empathy evolves us through emotional connection. We all collectively share emotions and feelings and act on those feelings. But, empathy is not purely humanistic. Our closest primates can share the same brain functions as us. Empathy is also the basis of love. If you love someone, you connect and are therefore empathetic towards them. If they were to pass away, it is natural human emotion to feel sad and yearn for their presence. Humans must be empathetic in order to continue a complicated society. It is literally coded into our brains.
You don’t need to necessarily share someone’s opinion in order to acknowledge it. Learning about the worlds through other people’s experiences is a key element to seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. It is also important to open up about your own experiences. Empathy is a 2-way street. Through a combination of uncovering the deeper motivations of someone else’s position, to expressing our own underlying concerns, we often discover a shared commonality even with those who hold different beliefs than ours. When you keep an open mind, empathy helps us challenge prejudice, find commonality, and expand our moral universe. Without it, we are wanting to label people outside our circle as problems. These labels draw lines in the sand that prevent us from moving forward. It cuts us off from the realization that the human experience is a shared experience. We have much more in common than we think.
It is also essential that we share others’ positive emotions. They are at the foundation of human relationships. They help us stay connected to each other for years and decades of our lives. And those kinds of relationships are crucial to survival.
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Empathy evolves us. Without the ability to feel what someone else is feeling, there is no caring for each other. Not only is our DNA and our physical growth essential to human evolution, what we are feeling, our empathy, is just as important in human society. Empathy can be located in the right supramarginal gyrus of the brain. It helps us distinguish between our own emotions state and that of another’s. This plays a key role in our ability to assess and connect to other people’s feelings.
We can see this in action when we consider looking at our closest primates, called bonobos. We are the only two species in the world that have mirror neurons in our brains. Mirror neurons cause us to copy that of another person. That’s why we yawn after someone, and why we mimic physical pain by saying “ouch” when we see someone else stub their toe on the corner of a table. Studies show that humans are quicker to yawn than a bonobo. We believe this is because we have a more emotional relationship complex than any other animal. Humans are just more evolved than any other species on the planet.
Bonobos and humans alike respond better to emotional stimuli when we develop relationships with each other. We are actually more likely to copy a yawn from a friend than a stranger because of a stronger emotional connection between the two. On the same subject, we make friends through emotional connections: being on the same baseball team or maybe living on the same street. And the same goes for bonobos. They could be in the same family or living near the same area. They connect to one another the same way that we do. Another way of connecting the bonobo with the human through empathy is sharing. If a bonobo sees that they have more food in their stash than a friend, he will share. Same goes for humans: children will share their lunches with a friend at school if they forgot to grab their lunch bag before leaving the house. This proves that the building blocks of morality are present in out ancestors. Humans, like primates, are group animals. And groups that work well together will survive together longer.
Empathy is the basis of love. You cannot fix how someone else feels, but you can show empathy to help. Your partner will feel more connected to you if you stop and feel what they are feeling. When a loved one passes away, we yearn for their presence. We want to feel them with us again. We become sad, and some of us withdrawal from society and stop eating for a while. We will do destructive things to ourselves because we want to feel better, but we just can’t.
We humans also have a pure balance of empathy, but we are not 100% purely empathic creatures. Humans will kill animals for food, we will kill other humans as well. Not enough and too much empathy in someone can be negative.
Nowadays with the growing popularity of social media, we can all collectively see a dip in empathy towards others. Online, all we see is a profile picture and maybe a 15-word bio about themselves. We are becoming less empathic in the form of cyberbullying. We all cannot have a social connection to the ever-growing millions and millions of people with online presences. We are quick to judge another’s opinion without looking at the facts. Cyberbullying very often leads to acts of suicide in teenagers. The anonymity of online comments seems to have become a breeding ground for users to lose their precious empathic skills. Cyberbullying can very easily be done anonymously by a few simple clicks of creating a new profile with a blank name and avatar. Nobody will ever know the source, so the real person behind the screen does not get any backlash for even maybe not feel bad for writing bad posts or comments. If users just took the time to empathize with strangers who hold different opinions than they do, it might create a more accepting and empathetic attitude in the general population.
Social media can also help spread people’s stories and actually increase one’s sense of empathy. It is very common to see screenshots of someone’s GoFundMe page scrolling down an Instagram feed; or scrolling past a family member’s photos of their vacation. Social networking leads to kids making more new friends out of commonality. Maybe they both like the same Instagram influencer, or the same photo editing style. These people don’t have to live in the same city to connect to each other anymore. People can be hundreds of miles apart and still become friends. These are all positive signs that empathy is still alive in the online universe of social media.
Gender differences play a part in empathy as well. Stereotypically, females are seen to show more empathy than males. It is a sort of maternal instinct that drives this bias. Females are seen as more expressive with their emotions rather than their ‘strong’ male counterparts. Women are more likely to recognize happiness and excitement while men see anger and sadness more often. This is because, in evolution, females are shown to be more of a parental figure and caretaker of children. Prehistoric males didn’t have the same responsibilities as women did.
References
- Six Habits of Highly Empathic People – Greater Good Science Center
- Neural basis of empathy and the shared neural processing of positive emotions: Implications for psychiatry
- Empathy, compassion, and love: a systematic review and meta-analysis of functional MRI studies
- This study uncovers the mediating effect of professional empathy between personal distress and burnout.
