Are people naturally empathetic?

        People do not automatically have the capacity to empathize with other. The skills of empathy have to be learned. Let's start with infancy.

          Projection is the infant’s first cognitive style. The newborn infant knows only itself, and its easiest mental state is to impute its own wants and thoughts onto others. People continue to project their own subjective experiences into the "minds of others" for many years – and some people, for all their lives. For example, teen boys tend to think that sex is fun and easy, with no strings attached, and many of them assume that girls think the same about sex. Girls think that boys should think more like girls and are shocked that boys can have such simplistic approaches to sex and relationships.
           It takes many years for people to learn to empathize a great deal. Children begin to learn how to empathize when something happens to them at the same time that it happens to others. If three kids are all playing in a pond and having a great time, they all feel happy, see happy faces on each other, and come to have a common and empathetic understanding of each others’ emotions. If the same three kids had been playing in the clover and got stung by bees at about the same time, they all might understand that bees sting and cause enough pain to make one cry. This experience would help them understand what each of the others was feeling and thinking when stung by bees. A by-standing child who did not get stung might look at the three kids and think that they were cry-babies and not learn to empathize with them much, if any at all. The more experiences that people have with other people where they can learn the facial cues, posture cues and words that others use to describe their feelings, the more that people can learn empathy.
          Science helps us empathize with dogs and cats, etc. as we see their potential for smell, vision, hearing, and so forth. The more hours we watch the discovery channel and see animals of all types, the more we can relate to animals of all kinds. Movies, documentaries and TV also help us empathize with people in Afghanistan, India, and other nations. It takes many years to gain the capacity for a large range of empathy, even though some people incorrectly assume that they can empathize with many others. Perhaps they are merely "mind raping," assuming that they know what thoughts and feelings other have, without really checking to be sure. Empathy is not the way infants begin their lives, but developing empathy is part of the human potential, if we have appropriate social learning experiences.
          [Dogs have a great sense of smell, but poor vision. Cats can see movement and hear mouse noises well, but they too have poor vision. Lots of scientific data help us understand the sensory and brain capacities of other species. Cats and dogs do not understand music because Broca’s area of the brain seems to be central to that. We who have little experience with animals may look at dogs and cats and imagine that they perceive the world as we do, but that is projection. Our modern understanding of empathy causes us to be humble about our capacities to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people and animals.]

July '01

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