Empathy and Disgust

OK, this morning has agreed to accept the award as Most Beautiful Morning Out There Ever. This is a great time of year, leaves are falling, we've got a ton of box elder bug nymphs swarming around the box elder tree, a herd of deer including two bucks has been grazing up along the street, relatively fearless. I know some people who are going to the Renaissance Fair today, and man, they picked a great day to do it.

Yesterday was a busy one. First, some friends have this great crab feast every year, out in Darnestown. They set up rows of tables covered with brown paper, and boxes of crabs, and a bunch of other food, and have about a hundred people over. The lady there and my wife are friends from way back, and we go every year, my wife gets to see a lot of her old friends and of course that's some good eating, which I don't mind.

Then we went to the Birchmere, in Alexandria. The Seldom Scene were playing, they've got a new CD and I guess that's a big deal locally, everybody loves them, but that's not why we were there.

We went to see the opening act, Valerie Smith and Liberty Pike. This was a weird thing. There was a TV show a couple of months ago, late at night on some unwatched channel, somebody had videotaped some bluegrass bands at a festival or something. I was clicking the remote at two in the morning or so, and we came across this. And I can't tell you what it was, but I started crying like a baby. I told you, it was weird. Every time I'd look at the TV screen, the tears would start pouring out of my eyes. I couldn't explain it, still can't. Like, look, I played music for a living for twenty years, you've gotta be pretty good to get my attention. But this singer got my attention. She projects this honest ... I don't know what ... feeling, she has a great voice, incredible dynamics and phrasing, but hey I've worked with a lot of singers in my day, including some really good ones. I don't know what to say, Valerie Smith is an angel. And the band is perfect, they frame her performance perfectly; they're not just excellent musicians, they get it. Sometime I'll talk about Becky Buller's influence on this group, but not now, I got too much to say already.

So Valerie Smith and Liberty Pike were playing at the Birchmere, and they were definitely worth seeing: it was an extraordinary show. The Seldom Scene were good, too, but the truth is they changed the world, they revolutionized bluegrass music, and now they almost don't stand out from the crowd. And this is strange, because I don't really even listen to bluegrass music, but the Seldom Scene are bigger than their genre. They were a bunch of happy, likeable old guys (like, my age), playing an idiosyncratic repertoire skillfully. OK, that's worth seeing, but I was there for the openers, the amazing Valerie Smith and the amazing Liberty Pike band (with the amazing Becky Buller, who makes the whole crazy thing work).

But that's not what I want to talk about this morning. I want to talk about a research paper I read this week.

First, there is a matter of empathy. Empathy is when you feel how somebody else is feeling. There has been some really interesting research in neuroscience recently, which I've mentioned here, on "mirror neurons," which might go some way toward explaining how empathy works. It turns out there are some brain cells that fire when you see someone doing something, they're running a sort of simulation in your mind of what that person is doing. So if they raise their hand, your brain is mimicking the action is real time, telling you to raise your hand, too. Sensors on the muscles in your arm will show that they are getting the message to lift up, even though you don't actually do it.

So think about this, this is cool. You are actively imagining along with what you see, your brain is doing what it sees other people doing. If you think it through, you can see how this would give language its meaning, for instance; you are able to imagine what it must feel like to utter the words that you hear someone else saying, and so you know what they mean.

OK, let's go over to Ba Le and get a pot of tea and we can talk about it. That is cool indeed, but it's not exactly why I'm here.

What is the opposite of empathy? You'd have to say the opposite is disgust. I remember years ago when a psychologist up in Pennsylvania said it should be added to the list of basic emotions. It seemed to me he was mainly trying to justify some grant money, you know, but more and more it makes sense. This paper by Gordon Hodson and Kimberly Costello, in Canada, says, "Disgust is associated with turning away from, avoiding, and distancing oneself from offensive stimuli, as opposed to instigating attack or fight responses." But there are different kinds of disgust. This paper focuses on a type they call "interpersonal disgust," which is that feeling you have when somebody is just too close, that creepy feeling you get sometimes about somebody else. Some people feel this more than others, and they have a questionnaire they can give that asks how you feel about, for instance, sitting on a chair that is still warm from the last person who sat there, or how you'd feel about wearing clean second-hand clothes. You could go to the extreme, like, how would you like it if a stranger drooled on you, but almost everybody is disgusted by that. The questionnaire is looking for individual differences in how much people experience interpersonal disgust.

Interpersonal disgust is different from, I don't know, impersonal disgust, like you would feel looking at rat guts or something. There are four subcategories of disgust; interpersonal, core, death, and sex. Some people are disgusted by some kinds of things, and others by another kind, these are the main categories of things that psychologists have found disgust people. See how interesting this is already?

These researchers hypothesized that interpersonal disgust is a predictor of negative attitudes toward outgroups, what we normal folk call "prejudice," and found experimental evidence to support that. A little bit of a quote:

These findings highlight dehumanization as a cognitive antecedent to intergroup attitudes... We introduced an indirect method of assessing dehumanization based on the perceived relative absence in out-groups of traits seen as uniquely human.

Let me go back to mirror neurons. I'll suggest a way to look at this.

Let's say that when we look at another person doing something, there is a part of us that does the same thing. When they laugh, there is a part of us that laughs, too (and look at this interesting study showing that autistic kids don't "catch" yawns like the rest of us do). When someone gets hurt, there is part of us that hurts right along with them. We actively participate in what we perceive of other people, simulating what we see in real time, you might say. This is what we call "understanding," it's more than just seeing patterns of light or objects moving in space, it is knowing what it's like (to use Chalmers' term) to be that person.

It seems clear to me that there is pleasure in this. Why do people read novels? It is to go through the experiences of the protagonist as if it were themselves, people enjoy taking someone else's perspective. We watch movies, gossip, all kinds of things that show that we like taking another person's point of view, and we do it well. It is really the foundation of our social behavior, which is the foundation of everything having to do with thinking and behaving -- everything about us as people, in other words.

But sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes we try to take somebody else's point of view and it just doesn't work. Try, for instance, to imagine what it's like to be a child molester. If you're like me, you just hit a brick wall, it doesn't compute, the child molester to me is not a human being. This is the dehumanization they were talking about, and you can see how it has a functional application. You don't want to empathize with child molesters. Soldiers in a war don't want to see the enemy as a human being. It's okay to be disgusted by some people, for a number of reasons. And really, I don't think it would be a good thing if strangers drooled on us; disgust serves its purposes.

It seems to me that maybe there is some effort involved in empathizing with someone, and if they are different from us in some crucial ways it may not be worth it. This is the glue that holds groups together, we identify with "our people" but not with everyone. And for some people, this failure to empathize is experienced as interpersonal disgust.

This week I saw the most offensive web site. It was comparing gay people to Nazis, and had other statements like that, and it had a picture of this homely boy in drag (or so they say, it looks like a girl to me) being led around on a leash by a homely lesbian. And you think, of all the gay people in the world, why would these idiots want to show a picture of these particular ones? And the answer comes pretty easily, given what I've just been talking about.

The point is disgust. You want to portray these people in such a way that ordinary straight people simply cannot imagine themselves doing what they're doing. And I really can't, I can't imagine weighing ninety pounds and wearing eye make-up and walking around with some lesbian holding my leash.

If I had come across this picture on Flickr or something, I would have just clicked to go on to another one. But the people who put up this web site wanted to keep it, to dwell on it, to show it to everybody. And why? Because they want to nourish the feeling of interpersonal disgust that comes when you see something you would never do yourself. They like that feeling, they live for it, and they want others to share the feeling with them.

I think this dimension of empathy versus disgust is at the heart of the culture wars' focus on homosexuality. Really, there aren't very many gay people. According to the CDC, about six and a half percent of men, and about twice that many women, have had sex with someone of their own gender, and only about 2.3 percent of men and half as many women label themselves as homosexual. No question, they're a minority.

What this means is that most people simply can't imagine being that way. And people differ in how they deal with that, and this is the interesting part, for me. Some people see somebody do something they themselves can't imagine doing, and they think, ooh, that's disgusting. From there it only "makes sense" to define that non-empathic feeling as one of moral judgment, and say that the observed behavior is not only disgusting but wrong. If people wouldn't act like that, you wouldn't have this bad feeling, right?

On the other hand, some people see something they can't imagine doing, and just keep moving. They figure, well I can't understand why they want to do that, but it's not hurting anything, and it's none of my business, and they move on.

The people who put up that gross web site want disgust to work in their favor. They want those people who hate what they can't imagine doing to join up with them. A good way to do that is to feature pictures of people doing what no ordinary person would think of doing, what no ordinary person can imagine themselves doing, and imply that the entire outgroup is like that. They love for you to think that all gay people are homely boys in eye make-up being led on leashes by homely lesbians, because it is very difficult to empathize with that, and easy to feel disgust.

Luckily this doesn't work on most people.