EMPATHY AND STORYTELLING - The way we connect and communicate
INTRODUCTION
This unremarkable human animal
“Our language evolved as a way of gossiping”
Imagine being in the shoes of one of the first human beings walking over the wild earth some millions of years ago.
Life is hard, and the competition is tough. We are not strong enough to compete with even some of the small predators and not fast enough to outrun the larger ones. Standing on two legs gives us some advantages—our hands are free to use tools, and we can see to the horizon.
But this evolving has come with major setbacks. One important hindrance is that our hips are getting smaller, just as our brains and skulls are getting bigger, making it ever harder for females to give birth. To help alleviate this problem human babies are born rather prematurely, and, as we continue to grow outside the womb, we are subjected to a longer period of helplessness and dependence than most other animals.
No creature in this situation has a good chance of making it alone; we need to protect and take care of each other during vulnerable periods.
Humans are social animals—we depend on each other to survive and thrive in the world, because there is strength in numbers. But cooperation and social bounding come with their own challenges. Even if we wanted to, we don’t have the luxury of living in our own bubble. But interacting and socializing demand a lot of energy, even for our big brains. We needed to connect with other people in our tribe and recognize their needs and intentions, “to put ourselves in their shoes,” as the saying goes, even before the development of language. This is where the skill of empathy comes into play.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of others, to momentarily transcend yourself, your thoughts and experiences, and see life through the body and mind of another human being. This ability plays also an important role in learning a new skill—while observing a mentor executing his craft, especially a physical one, we gain a greater feeling and understanding of his actions than we could from a mere list of instructions, picking up clues and details that might easily escape conscious awareness. Watching a mentor perform a task is the best way to learn a new skill.
The process of empathy is also active during storytelling. When we engage with a story, we are momentarily drawn away from our circumstances and enter into a different universe living it through the protagonist. His goals become our goals; we feel his achievements and losses as our own.
The ability to empathize has two major components: on a lower unconscious level we have affective empathy—the ability to take in the emotions of another in an almost contagious way; on a higher conscious level we experience cognitive empathy—the ability to comprehend and grasp what another person is thinking at a given time. To really get into someone else’s mind both components are required.
THE STRUCTURE OF EMPATHY
Affective Empathy
“It’s not that we are social because we mimic; we mimic because we are social”
We have ways of understanding and communicating with each other that go far beyond language and conscious awareness. The spoken word is a relatively recent development compared to the origins of social grouping. The words we say actually matter very little in the activity of communicating (some researchers say it’s as low as 7%). The rest is expressed through the signals we display, such as tone of voice, body posture, eye direction, pupil dilation, breathing patterns, and smells. These all have an influence on the quality of the exchanges we have.
Our bodies tend to mimic each other during a conversation. When we feel connected to the other person our posture tends to mirror that of the speaker. This is not limited to our bodies. When we are really engaged with another person the corresponding parts of our gray matter are being activated in both of us. We tend to mirror each other on a neuronal level, and our brains are literally synchronized. This process is called neural coupling.
In 1980, a team of researchers in Parma, Italy, while studying the brains of monkeys, discovered a system in their brains that may shed some light on this phenomenon. They discovered, almost by accident, that a specific set of neurons fired (meaning they were activated) not only when the subject monkey was executing an action, but also when the monkey observed another monkey executing the same action. These neurons were found to be primarily in the premotor area of the brain and were called mirror neurons. What this means is that monkeys can create a similar experience both in executing an action and by simply observing it.
Mirror neurons help us enter unconsciously into another person’s mind and literally feel what they feel on an emotional level as they are experiencing it. This is reflected in our language as well, with comments like: “I’m so happy for you” or “I’m proud of you.” In these cases the person expressing the emotion is only observing it in another who was the direct receiver of whatever caused it.
Emotional contagion plays its part in the equation. When someone we interact with is happy it tends to put us in a happy mood, and in the same way, when someone is stressed that emotional state tends to spread to everyone nearby.
Without the mirror neuron system, connecting with other humans would be almost impossible. The system affords us a natural ability to enter others’ minds and to experience the world through their bodies. This skill can be elevated even more when we make a conscious effort to share their thoughts and comprehend their world view.
Cognitive Empathy
“I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”
If affective empathy can be summarized as “I feel what you feel,” then the cognitive form of empathy can be expressed as “I know what you’re thinking.” Cognitive empathy is contingent on making a conscious effort to understand other people’s perspectives and internal states. Unlike affective empathy, which seems to appear in a newborn baby within the first few hours of life, cognitive empathy develops later in life.
Imagine this scenario: this story has two characters, Sally and Anne. They stand in a room, each with a basket in front of her. Sally has a cookie in her hand, puts it in her basket, and leaves the room. While she is away, Anne takes the cookie from Sally’s basket and puts it in her own. Now Sally returns. Where will she look for her cookie?
The obvious answer would be in her basket, because that’s where she left it; logically that’s where she would look for it. Children under the age of four, on the other hand, will tell you that Sally will look instead in Anne’s basket because, as they were told by the storyteller, that’s where the cookie is now. What these children lack in this case is not the emotional connection with others—they’ve been picking up on the emotions of others since they were just a few hours old. What they are missing instead is what is called Theory of Mind.
Theory of mind is the ability to understand that other people have different experiences from our own, that everyone has his or her own unique perspective, desires, values, and goals. Seen from this perspective, getting inside someone else’s shoes first requires you to detach yourself momentarily from your own inner world.
True empathy is always non-judgmental. In order to enter someone else’s spirit fully, you have to leave yourself behind. Thus, it comes as no surprise that we tend to empathize more easily with people who are similar to us and with whom we share a part of our psychological makeup. This cognitive skill is not infallible; it is too easy to project our own feelings and thoughts onto other people. As an example: “I know this happened to her, so she must be feeling that way because I would feel that way.” This kind of empathic behavior is highly demanding, and even the best of us fail, but it remains essential in a social environment, whether cooperative or competitive.
Combining both an affective and a cognitive effort creates a higher level of empathy. It is very functional in making us capable of living in someone else’s skin or seeing through the eyes of another person, even when that person and his life are completely imaginary.
STORYTELLING AND FICTION
THE CREATION OF STORIES - Cognitive play
“...we actively pursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crucial domain, social information”
There is more to fiction than meets the eye, more than a random sequence of made up events in an imaginary universe. The stories that become part of our childhood and our character shape our values, and, as a side effect, they do the same to our culture.
Let’s take our imagination back again to the tribal era. Before fiction, stories may have originated from the pressure of social dynamics. Knowing who did what and who slept with whom is part of everybody’s social obligation, especially if you want to avoid useless conflicts. One theory says that this is probably where the most basic form of storytelling was born: gossiping.
Fictional stories, the most popular kind, ironically seem to have no particular benefit or value. Why would we consciously look for pieces of information we already know are not true? Much like children’s play, fictional stories at first glance look like just a waste of time and resources, but like physical play, they actually have an important role in our development. Physical play developed as a safe way to keep our physical and mental skills sharp and ready for real needs like hunting or war. Likewise, fiction is training and keeping our social and cognitive skills sharp, so we can practice understanding the actions and reactions of people without the risk of real-life conflicts. And they do this work wonderfully by preselecting the information needed to understand the plot and by minimizing the irrelevant clues. Fiction and play survive and thrive thanks to our attention. It is essential for them to be structured in such a way that they keep us on the edge of our seats and wanting more.
Influential fiction also has the function of defining a tribe and keeping it united. As a group reaches a certain size, cooperation, coordination and cohesion become increasingly difficult. Shared stories and myths, especially if they are integrated with rituals, as in religions, give the group a sense of identity. They shape individuals’ ideals of what is good and what is evil, values that are then reflected on a larger scale in the specific culture at that particular time.
These narratives come in very disparate forms with different scenarios and imaginary universes and, in modern times, even in different media, such as movies, books, video-games, and so on. But they all make use of a protagonist around whom the adventure evolves. Behind the diverse façades of events taking place, the hero’s journey is remarkably immutable, and the hero becomes the emotional beacon through which we live the drama.
CONNECTING WITH THE CHARACTERS - Bringing it all together
“Psychologically the dragon is one’s binding of oneself to one’s ego, and you’re captured in your own dragon cage.”
There are really only two main elements in stories: events and characters, and if there is one of them we tend to fall in love with more, it is the characters. Events are what make a story interesting and full of surprises, what make us turn one page after another holding our attention and all the while keeping us wondering what will come next. But characters and events are deeply interconnected. If events answer the question of what happens in a particular story, the characters answer why we should care about it. For us to walk in the shoes of the personalities in a story, the characters don’t even have to be human, far from it.
Our over trained social brain is so good at projecting a sense of agency (a sense of awareness and control over one’s own actions) that we unconsciously infer intention with a minimum amount of information at hand, for example:
How easy was it to create a narrative out of this short video? Did you consciously do it? Everything we have seen so far with our empathic brains applies equally to fictional characters as to real people.
When we begin a new adventure we first get to know our hero as we are introduced to his personality, his dreams, his past and current life, and his general psychological makeup. We start to understand the way he thinks and feels, we enter his spirit, sympathize with him, and live in his world. Over time we slowly synchronize our mind with his, and almost inevitably we bring our own psychological baggage to the story. Without realizing it we become emotionally hooked. The goals of the main character become our goals; we feel his achievements as our own as well as his losses and failures.
Our modern lifestyle is very different from that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our lives are considerably safer, but with that safety comes a certain sameness, and we easily become locked into our routines. Stories give us a temporary escape from our environment to explore different, more exciting universes. A good story is like an emotional rollercoaster, where we experience the thrill of adventure while remaining safe and comfortable on the couch, using the hero as a way of living countless journeys without putting ourselves in any danger. This is what our empathic brains do best; without them storytelling couldn't be the huge industry that it is.
But, after all of this is said, even empathy has its limitations.
THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY
“It is essential therefore for a prince to have learned how to be other than good and to use, or not to use, his goodness as necessity requires.”
As the story goes, in 1939, during the second world war, German U-boats were dominating the Atlantic sinking every Allied ship they targeted. The best hope for the Allied navy was to intercept the communications of the Germans, but this was not a simple task. The German navy was using one of the most advanced cryptography machines known at the time, called Enigma. The number of possible combinations to be tested in order to crack the code was so high that their communication lines couldn’t possibly be intercepted. Until, of course, they were.
With the help of mathematician Alan Turing, the English created the Bomb, a computer-like machine that, given an initial direction, was capable of crunching the numbers faster than anything else up to that time. The Allies finally had a powerful window into the Germans' tactics, and in many cases they could anticipate their attacks to either avoid them or strike first.
But this is where a problem crept in: if you start saving all the ships you can, the German navy will suspect that you’ve broken into their lines of communication and change their coding system putting you back to square one. But if you purposely let some ships sink, you preserve your advantage and save far more lives in the end, probably winning the war.
So what would you do? Would having more empathy with the people on those sacrificed ships be of any help in this situation? Probably not. The people on those ships do not deserve to die, but that isn’t the crucial matter.
The social part of our brain is a very powerful tool, but as a tool, it is morally neutral. The set of rules and values that we recognize as morality has little to do with empathy, especially when we must apply our values to a large population of individuals. To begin with, our empathy, our social mirror system, works naturally in a very narrow circle, usually the circle of people closest to us. Much like a spotlight, this system is very good at illuminating brightly, focusing our attention on the individual, on one single personal story, and disregarding or blinding us, for the most part, to whatever happens outside that bright circle.
When we enter another person’s spirit we almost inevitably tend to transfer all the biases, favoritism and unfairness that we normally keep to ourselves. We want the people close to us to do well and succeed, and if someone somewhere else pays a small price for it, “Well, I’m sure they’ll do fine anyway,” we may think. It’s easy to lose track of everybody else when we focus our attention on one person in particular.
On another note, mirroring someone’s emotional state does not necessarily improve the situation. In moments of stress or concern, we would prefer the company and guidance of someone who is calm and in control. Even if our biological predisposition induces us to share stressful emotions, sometimes life asks you to be a leader rather than a follower.
In conclusion: The limits of our social environment are correlated to the size of the neocortex; the bigger it is, the larger the group we can live in. Our social skills demand that we understand not only how to interact with person A, B or C, but also how B interacts with C, C with A, and so on. The combinations to remember multiply quickly with each new person we add. The maximum number that humans can handle is thought to be around 150 people. These are the people we can say we know, the ones that we feel comfortable with.
Our social instincts evolved in an environment of tribes and by consequence are most effective within a small, close group of people including friends, family, and partners.
Scale disrupts things; in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, the best approach with masses may be one of logic and pragmatism above emotions as the best way to ensure equality. As Joseph Stalin put it, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.”
PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
DEVELOPING SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours”
Whether we like it or not we are social creatures. Every day we interact with or create something for other people, so social intelligence is an essential part of our toolkit. Social intelligence is the ability to navigate social settings knowing what to say and when, and in order to do that, we need to start understanding people better.
The first critical step toward empathy is paying attention. If we don’t pay attention we have no chance of understanding somebody deeply. This seems obvious until we notice how many times we get distracted while in the company of others.
Most of the time we are very self-aware and our focus tends to be on ourselves and our insecurities: Am I being funny? Do they like me? What do they think of me? Instead, we must try to shift the focus of our attention to the other person and figure out what makes them tick. Be a good listener; it’s about them, not you, so try to get out of your own mind. See it like this: every person we meet is as complicated as you and I are. Every person has his or her own unique character that has developed from childhood until today. Our job is to understand deeply the boundaries of this character, the strong sides that they usually display in public and the weak sides that we all try to hide. What gets them excited? What leaves them indifferent? What do they not want to talk about?
If you can understand their unfulfilled needs and provide for those, you have the key to winning them. We cannot literally read minds—the thoughts of another person are always inaccessible, and people can deceive, sometimes even themselves, so focus not on their words, but rather on their gestures, their tone of voice, their actions, their emotional reactions to different topics and events. Their true character is always revealed through their actions and choices, not their words.
The end game is always to get inside people’s spirits as deeply as possible, without judgment, and to see the world through their eyes. The skill of social intelligence can be applied not just to your close relationships but also to your work. It is a way of understanding and thinking about your audience when creating a new product, a story, a movie, or any work of art, or, as in this case, writing.
QUOTES
“The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
“Honor?! I’ve got Seven Kingdoms to rule! One king, seven kingdoms! Do you think honor keeps them in line? Do you think it’s honor that’s keeping the peace?”
“Deprived of a capacity to learn by observation, our modern world would never have developed. Without it, any innovation serves only the innovator, and the knowledge dies with its discoverer”
“Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you”
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Synchronized Walking
Like mirroring postures, synchronized walking is normally a sign of friendliness and sociability.
Bibliography and references
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https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_evolution_of_empathy
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Edgar, Andrew.The Imitation Game: Morality and Statistics:
http://www.cardiffsciscreen.co.uk/article/imitation-game-morality-and-statistics
Pictures:
Chimps by George Hodan:
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=167046&picture=chimps
Dragon Prince by Dawn Hudson: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=189408&picture=dragon-prince
African ancient anonymous art by Fancycrave.com:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/african-ancient-anonymous-art-267858/
Throne by William Krause:
https://unsplash.com/photos/IkYuzPneQWs
Niccolò Machiavelli by wgbieber:
https://pixabay.com/en/niccol%C3%B2-macchiavelli-florence-165412/
Old Book by George Hodan :
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=225726&picture=old-book
Nerve Cell by ColiN00B:
https://pixabay.com/en/nerve-cell-neuron-brain-neurons-2213009/
Baby Children by Pixabay:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/baby-children-cute-dress-264109/
Family by soledad martinez:
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=23173&picture=family
Cave Hands by Tory Kallman:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/cave-hands-569593777
https://www.photojoiner.net/ for the photo edit