Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, empathy has been on everyone’s lips. Why do some people seem to feel more empathy for refugees from Kyiv or Kharkiv than for migrants from other, no less troubled countries? Shouldn’t we always respond in the same way to the needs and concerns of other people, no matter where they come from and how close they are to us?
Social neuroscience tries to provide answers to such questions. To do this, however, it is important to define more precisely what is meant by empathy. In everyday language, it is usually understood to mean how we respond to the suffering of others and try to alleviate that suffering. From a scientific point of view, however, the intention to help people in distress is only one very specific aspect of a multi-faceted phenomenon.
In science, we tend to define empathy – and again, there are different perspectives – as the ability to understand and relate to the emotions of our fellow human beings. This is not a trivial task, for how can we know what is going on inside another person? After all, we have no way of looking into the minds of our neighbours or directly perceiving their feelings. Of course, we can ask them how they feel. But there is no guarantee that they are aware of their own feelings. Most of the time, we have to infer their emotional state indirectly, for example from their facial expressions and gestures.
But how does the brain process this information?
Despite intensive research efforts over the past two decades, this question remains unanswered. According to a widely accepted research approach, empathy is based on the activation of so-called neural representations. This means that when we feel empathy for someone who is sad, areas of the brain are involved that are also active when we feel the same emotion, in this case sadness. For example, people who empathise with someone in pain often show activation in the anterior insula and the middle cingulate cortex – both areas of the brain that are also active when people in the lab feel pain. This is called empathising with another person’s emotional state.
Our brain responds to someone else’s suffering as if it were our own. This pretence is important for two reasons:
- The associated emotion allows us to judge more accurately how the other person is feeling at that moment. Not only do we think they are suffering, but we also feel the same emotion to some degree.
- Our own emotional response is an important driver of our willingness to help, often triggered by empathic compassion.
From an evolutionary perspective, emotions have a very special function: to motivate us to act. In this case, it is behaviour that primarily benefits the person in need of help, but also benefits the helper. Helping reduces the suffering of the sufferer, as well as the unpleasant feeling of empathic pretence reaction.
So why do we help some people more than others? Possibly because the emotional response in our brains is stronger and more immediate the closer we feel to the person in need. Whether we think this is right or wrong has nothing to do with empathy as such, but rather with our moral concepts. If we want to achieve a similar level of empathy and helpfulness towards all people, we can only do so by strengthening social norms such as equality and fairness and applying them to all people without distinction.