Overcoming the empathy gap overcoming a societal lack of empathy
i want you to think about the last time
you had a conversation with someone that
felt like talking to a brick wall
if you actually can’t think of any
recent conversation like this
honestly i’m so happy for you but from
what i’ve seen and the 20 short years
i’ve been on this earth
most of us have had at least one
absurdly frustrating conversation
whether it was working retail doing a
school group project
or trying to convince a little kid that
you’re babysitting that
no you absolutely cannot put a metal
fork in an outlet
sure some of these stories are great
icebreakers
but dealing with someone that refuses to
hear what you’re saying takes a toll on
you
if you try to talk to someone who’s
decided hmm
actually i will make no attempt to
relate to you once
during this conversation you might get a
lot of back and forth
but very little comprehension or
learning
that’s not a real conversation but
that’s what happens with a lack of
empathy
which is precisely what i want to focus
on today
you see we live in a culture that kind
of encourages us to be terrible people
that is to say it’s really really easy
and
almost natural for us to downplay the
feelings of the people we surround
ourselves with
this explains how sometimes we do things
like tell our friends after they finally
open up to us
that their problems aren’t that bad or
ostracize a new kid at school
if they seem a little bit weird and then
make fun of the new kid for crying in
the bathroom every day at lunch
and on a completely unrelated note i was
not one of the people who enjoyed high
school
i guess you could say that was part of
the reason i grew to be really
interested
in what drives us to be terrible people
because one thing i kept observing over
and over almost like clockwork
is that all of our classrooms have these
cute inspirational posters on the walls
that say things like treat others the
way you want to be treated
and then it’s in these same classrooms
that you’ll hear kids
using every violent and historically
oppressive slur
under the sun and that does not check
out
like okay we were 14 and our prefrontal
cortexes weren’t fully developed
that could explain away the fights we
got into with our parents for no reason
sure but how do you explain an active
interest
in harming minorities like your average
angsty teenager
i turned to literature for clarity and
lo and behold
i found the answer apparently our
natural inclinations
towards being really mean people have a
biological basis
research shows evidence of an empathy
gap between members of an in-group
who are people that share the same
genetic cultural or ideological traits
and members of an app group
who don’t have these traits there’s an
actual difference in brain activity
and the amount of mirror neurons that
start firing
when we’re in a position to empathize
with someone who’s either part of an
in-group or an out group
and here’s the thing about the empathy
gap and in groups and
out groups our ability to a
understand the emotional states of
individuals in our lives
and b understand the conditions of
marginalized groups
they overlap much more than you might
think
the people in our lives are so so
diverse
they’re so different in terms of their
cultures family backgrounds and dynamics
their genders orientations and then all
the things that motivate them
and the stuff their dreams are made of
and all the baggage that they carry
and the obstacles they overcome every
day these traits are also unique
so i guess the reason that i find the
empathy gap being hardwired into our
biology such a
terrifying concept is because the way we
communicate with others
when we lack empathy is a tool we can
use to uphold
systems of oppression it sure explains a
lot of the ways that i’ve seen people
hurt each other and not care about it
when we lack empathy the fundamental
humanity of someone in and out group
isn’t a given it’s not immediately
obvious
it explains how every time my friends in
middle school made a joke about my skin
being darker than theirs they couldn’t
comprehend why i lashed out the way i
did
and told me to calm down and why i just
started to go along with it and join in
the self-deprecation
it’s because they never understand
my mom a new immigrant and also one of
the only immigrants in small town
newfoundland in 2007
took my sister to the playground when a
little girl came up to her and asked
are you an alien and my mom
still coping with the anxiety that comes
with hypervisibility
laughed because yeah this girl was only
like four and her parents
wouldn’t understand why they should
teach their daughter better than to ask
questions like that
because they just wouldn’t get it i
think of the friends that have come out
to me as we stayed up all night at
summer camp
and they’ve told me that they have to
hide this important piece of themselves
from their homophobic parents
for the rest of their lives and just
accept the fact that their parents are
going to miss 1 000 of their important
firsts and that they have to lie when
they get asked questions like
what happened at school today because
they won’t get it i think of every
single story from a woman that i care
about
where they tell me how they suffered
from a serious incident of gendered
violence
and i am sure i have now heard a million
of these stories
and it kills me each and every time when
they just have to come to terms with the
fact
that a lot of men in their lives will
seriously hurt them
and they just have to deal with it
through gritted teeth because
they won’t get it and that’s not an
inclusive list
it barely scratches the surface
these negative experiences were all
caused by a lack of empathy
which led to a breakdown in the way that
people interacted with members of out
groups
after all empathy facilitates social
understanding and shapes our
interactions
and it is through our interactions with
others that we design
the blueprints of our identities and my
identity is built of all my hopes
and ambitions and all my experiences and
memories
and also all of my damage whether it’s
sudden changes i faced or
self-esteem issues or personal losses
that have shaped me into who i am
but then there’s another type of damage
i don’t tend to acknowledge
which occurs when i accept that they
won’t get it
it keeps coloring all of my interactions
and i’d be lying if i said it didn’t do
a number on my mental health
they don’t understand my fundamental
humanity
i have to prove it constantly as a
student employee
artist friend whatever everything i
build myself up to be means so little
when i realize
nobody is going to give me that
fundamental humanity
yeah i can get the awesome position i’ve
been dreaming of
after spending forever preparing for the
interview and then yeah
that same night people can joke about
how i’m just a diversity hire
the work i put in means nothing to them
but hey
why should i complain i’ve known those
were the rules of the game since i was
born
the empathy gap dictates to us that if
you’re a member of an out group that
faces systemic
widespread forms of stigma then the
traits the
genetic cultural or ideological traits
that are so essential to your identity
these are the parts of you that are
wrong i talked about the bigotry of
middle school kids and homophobic
parents
because their bigotry didn’t just cause
some hurt feelings and
don’t get me wrong those hurt feelings
do matter
so much but their bigotry is also one of
the many channels
that society as a whole uses to
reinforce the way we think
feel and most importantly act in
response to people different than us
racism xenophobia patriarchy
all these different systems of
oppression flourish
when we decide people aren’t even worth
trying to relate to
and then we put these unfair
expectations on members of our groups to
just
persevere in the face of opposition sure
some of us will be able to accept
ourselves despite everyone telling us
how wrong we are
but frankly not everyone has the
resilience to thrive in an environment
where even their family and friends
reject them the people who are supposed
to understand them
is it hard to conceptualize take the
girl who found out she just has to work
with a bunch of people that spent their
night making fun of her for being
the diversity hire she has a couple of
options in front of her
she could bring it up to her superiors
or confront her colleagues directly
but at what cost she’s the only person
of color in that whole group so she
thinks to herself
yeah they probably wouldn’t even get why
that’s such a slap in the face to me
they won’t know how to deal with it and
i’ll look like a crybaby
worse all look like the aggressor and be
swiftly removed from the team
so she instead chooses to swallow her
hurt feelings pretend nothing ever
happened
and keep working with the people that
only see her as
the diversity hire i did all of that a
little while ago and honestly it’s one
of the stupidest things i’ve ever done
i shouldn’t have had to do that so i
sincerely hope at this point you agree
with me when i say that the concept of
the empathy gap sucks
like maybe as a 14 year old nihilist i
happily accept the thought of this
cognitive bias
wreaking havoc on the interpersonal
relationships of anyone who belongs to
an outgroup
but that had a lot more to do with the
fact that i was so desperate for some
type of answer
as to why such a thing even happened
as a slightly more well-read 20 year old
i now realize that systems of oppression
are complex and don’t just stem from the
formation of in groups and out groups
as a slightly more impatient 20 year old
i’m also tired of making excuses for
people that
choose not to relate to me because of
things i will never be able to control
offering empathy to someone else even in
the face of difference
that’s the bare minimum this traditional
notion that we are born
either being really good at empathy or
really bad empathy is one i’m sick
of we are not static beings and we as a
collective
can change our approach to empathy by
viewing it as a decision
we make every time we’re in an
empathetically challenging situation
we can either choose to disengage from
putting in relational effort
or we can choose to engage with our
emotional state and
actively invest our energy into being
empathetic
if we’re the victims of a natural maybe
evolutionary instinct to ostracize
others
that means we need to put in the work to
understand others
because empathy is not as automatic as
we make it out to be
but it starts with willingness you’ve
got to be willing to spend time talking
to someone who might otherwise be
excluded
and you’ve got to be willing to talk to
them in a genuine and positive way
so that you might start to understand
the full range of their complexity
what unique perspective do they offer
what’s their history
what’s their sense of humor like you
can’t ask more questions
you can be a better listener there are
so many ways in which we can make
legitimate attempts to be more
empathetic
and override what we consider an
automatic lack of empathy
making this effort is crucial because
it’s the way we can reduce stigma
reduce conflict and produce more
positive social outcomes
accepting and being yourself becomes so
much easier
when you finally feel like someone’s
listening to you
when one of my classmates finally stood
up to my friends and told them to stop
making racist jokes
and you know didn’t even shy away from
using the word racist
i felt like i got my voice back when the
people in small town newfoundland
saw that my mom felt shy about speaking
english because she wasn’t fluent yet
they would constantly go out of their
way to talk and make conversation with
her
get to know her as a person and make her
feel comfortable and these days she
actually won’t stop talking
we owe it to everyone else in this world
to fully be able to empathize with them
i want so badly to be recognized as a
complex human being
and i know i’m not the only one who
feels this way so strongly and so
desperately
the relationship between our personal
interactions and social hierarchies is
complicated
but if we stop allowing implicit biases
to influence the way we
interact with the people in our lives we
render this one tool of oppression
powerless and when we give people their
fundamental humanity
we’re able to develop the resiliency
that allows us
as a diverse and wildly different set of
people
to survive in the face of conflict and
sometimes it’s just as easy as having
a real conversation with someone that’s
why i’m a firm advocate for overcoming
the empathy gap