Paul Bloom on Empathy

This is social science bites with me, David Edmonds. Social science bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with sage publishing. If I have empathy, if I can put myself in the shoes of others, feel their pain, surely that will make me kinder, more compassionate. But Paul Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Toronto and best-selling author, has reservations about empathy. And recently, he's begun thinking about the implications of his views for the world of AI. Paul Bloom, welcome to social science bites. I'm a huge fan of your podcast. I'm delighted to be here. We're going to talk today about empathy and perhaps also at the end, empathy and AI. But can we start by just getting a quick definition of what empathy is? I think we better. Everybody seems to have their own notion and, as totally fine, but we end up talking past each other unless we're clear about it. I see sort of three main meanings. Some people use empathy just to mean kindness, caring for people. I show empathy, meaning I value other people. And in that sense of empathy, I think the world could use a lot more of it. A second sense of empathy is what psychologists sometimes call cognitive empathy. And that's the ability to suss out what somebody is thinking or feeling. And this sort of empathy is kind of morally neutral. If I'm a nice guy and I want to make you happy, want to buy a nice present, cognitive empathy is really good. If I'm a bully or a sadist cognitive empathy, it could be used for terrible means. If I know what makes you tick, I could cause you pain. The sort of empathy I'm most interested in, most critical of, is what sometimes call emotional empathy. I put myself in your skin. I feel what you feel. What Adam Smith called sympathy. So putting yourself in another person's shoes, that's a different sense of empathy. And I think that's in some way the most interesting one because it's the most controversial. Okay, so before we focus on that type of empathy, just to be clear, the difference between cognitive empathy and the kind of empathy that you refer to just now is that one is understanding somebody's feelings and the other is feeling somebody's feelings. Is that right? That's exactly right. You certainly see how you could have cognitive empathy without having emotional empathy. If I'm a bully and I torment my victims that I make them very unhappy and ashamed themselves and feel terrible, that's cognitive empathy. I know how to do it with button suppress. But I might lack emotional empathy where their pain doesn't resonate to me. I don't feel their pain and the slightest. In fact, I just feel pleasure watching them squirm around. One way to think about certain sorts of psychopaths, con men, seducers and so on is high cognitive empathy, low emotional empathy. Right. And what's the neuroscience of this? Is it possible to put people in an MRI scanner and actually observe empathy? You could put people in MRI scanners or whatever you're looking for these days. Yes, cognitive empathy and emotional empathy have overlapping parts of the brain, maybe not surprising because normally if I'm listening to you and caring about you, I'm trying to figure out what's going on in your head. And if I'm a normal person feeling somewhat what you're feeling, they have distinctive neural signatures. As does compassion, does it refer sort of empathy to that has its own distinctive neural signature? I don't want to overstate it and say we could put somebody in a scanner and tell what sort of empathy they're feeling. But I don't think that that's far from the truth. And is this something we're born with? Is it in night? Or is it something we're taught? I think the foundations for all of this are hardwired. I think they're built in. They're part of our our evolution as highly social, highly moral species. But of course, it has enormous amounts of development. They cognitive empathy, which is what psychologists have studied the most developmental work. Even a one-year-old, I think, has some rudimentary understanding that people around him or her have minds, have feelings. But of course, the ability to figure out somebody's motives, to understand the nuances of their thoughts is something which undergoes long development. And even in adults, some people are much better at it than others. What about demographic gaps? Is there a difference? I think you particularly in gender and sex. I think for all the sorts of empathy women tend to have somewhat more than men. They're better at social intelligence as sort of cognitive empathy. They are saying to be more compassionate and they tend to show higher levels of emotional empathy. And this is a real and robust difference. But as often with these psychological differences between genders, you're not going to find that unless you look at like a hundred people. So it's real, but it's fairly subtle. One way of putting it is there's a lot of men who are very high empathy and a lot of women who are very low in. Right. And any sense whether that is nature or nurture? The reflexive answer to that is always yes. It is some combination of both. But I take it you're asking whether I think it has an innate component. And I think it does. I think the different evolutionary pressures on males and females in our species and others lead women more predisposed for nourishments because they are in most of history, the primary caregivers and after a care of babies. And men tend to require more aggression and more violence. And I think aggression of violence often involves diminishing and shutting down of empathy. You can't beat me to death with a club if you're busy feeling my pain. What about how one measures this? Obviously there's a scale, something more empathetic than others. Is there a scientific way of judging degrees of empathy? There are many scales. They don't tend to be very good. The popular ones simply blur together. These different sorts of empathy. So they tend to sort of ask you questions like how much do you care about other people? Which is compassion? They ask you questions like how good are you at assessing how people are cognitive empathy? And they ask you questions like if you see somebody crying, you start to tear up yourself, which is emotional empathy. And often they don't do a good job of pulling them apart. When I was at Yale with two then graduate students, Matt Jordan and Dorsa Amir, we created our own scale that's supposed to just look at emotional empathy separate from everything else. But the truth is the science of measuring this is not strong. You're famously against empathy, at least the feeling empathy that we talked about earlier, well, cognitive empathy. That sounds like being against motherhood and apple pie. What could be wrong with empathy? Against kittens. I wrote a book called Against Empathy. And I often wonder whether giving it that title was the best thing I've ever done or the worst thing I've ever done. It's had both positive and negative effects on my career. I'm only interested in emotional empathy in my negative claim. So I think compassion is great. And I also think understanding what goes on in people's heads can be used for evil. But if you're going to be a good person, you better understand other people. You understand what makes them take them. Otherwise, you're not very effective. Good person. It's emotional empathy I'm struggling with. And I'm against it, not in general. So for instance, it could be a great source of pleasure. You know, we both have children. One of the joys of having a child is to sort of experience something you've experienced a thousand times before for the first time all over again. That's great. Emotional empathy, I think, is a great ingredient for fictional pleasures. For a while you can be Tony soprano. I think it plays a role in sports. It plays a role in sex. I think it's great overall. I would not plot it out. But I think it's terrible from a standpoint of morality. The main reason is that our emotional empathy zooms us in on the suffering of those people who are like us, who look like us, who speak our language, who are friends, who are family, and is famously indifferent for other people. And this leads to huge distortions and into our laboratory studies in this, but also a lot of real world examples where I'll let a hundred strangers die horribly to save somebody I feel this enormous empathic pull. And something which I wrote about when against empathy came out, but it's more and more, I think part of contemporary politics is the use of identifiable victims, people who suffer as a way to spur aggression and hatred and xenophobia. I think empathy isn't some way a great cause for our worst behavior. This is not just in group out group in terms of ethnicity or religion. It's about distance as well. It's about that we can't empathize with people on the other side of the world. Absolutely. So empathy is sort of vulnerable to all the biases you would think about. This includes a traditional in group out group biases, race, nationality, religion. And it includes attractiveness. It's easier to feel empathic for somebody who's cute versus someone who's ugly. And of course, it includes distance, although there's some debate in the field of whether it's distance per se or anonymity. But in any case, I kind of know intellectually that my neighbor across the street's life has just the same value as a life of somebody in far off, you know, Africa. But at a gut level, it's easy to feel empathy for my neighbor. I could see him. There he is, you know, he waves to me and somebody is just an anonymous stranger. At an emotional level, they don't count at all. And I think part of the moral program of a good person is to make them count. And so shut down your empathy of it and try to work without it. Right. So I was going to ask you about what the implications of this are because you talked about all the upside of empathy. And it sounds like there's a very serious downside. It means we get morality wrong. We've become misguided about what needs doing. So where do we end up? How do we temper empathy or direct it in the right way? It's not an easy question. Some people, I respect a lot, say, look, empathy is imperfect, but it's the only game in town. If you don't have these emotional bulls, you're not going to do anything for anybody. I think that that's too pessimistic on the analysis of human nature. You and I are both very familiar with effective altruists. And those are people who devote their lives to doing the most good, even if the most good involves helping people who they don't see, who they don't really care about. And this evenly, who even involves helping animals, even unadorable animals. And I think effective altruists aren't existence proof that this can be done. Now, you could say, well, there aren't many of them, but we've managed to sort of make racism not respectable. And I say, okay, I have maybe a bias towards people, my skin color, but I shouldn't have it. I should override it. I think maybe we could do the same thing with empathic pull of adorable people and close people and so on. That's my hope at least. Let me tell you something weird about those people, though. They are judged worse than those people who have a surface of empathy and who allocate their charitable works or their money towards causes that they are much closer to. In other words, the people who are able to step outside those various biases are judged more harshly than those who have empathy and have the biases that you object to. I have a colleague at Toronto, George Newman has a study on tainted altruism. And he finds you take two guys. One guy just sits on his ass and does nothing. And another person goes and helps people, but he helps people in kind of a rationalist maximizing way. When asked people say, I like the guy who sits on the sofa all day. Right. This is not an optimistic view of humanity. I accept that as a problem. I want to move on to empathy and AI, but let me ask a linking question. We've been talking about how you and I empathize with others. Do we need people to empathize with us looking at it the other way? How important is it for human beings to have other people feel our feelings? I think in the context of intimate relationships we want empathy. Now, what kind of empathy we want is sort of complicated. I've been very interested. It's kind of a subtle question. We definitely want to be able to care about us. I want my wife, my children, my friends to care about me. We want to be understood. Do we want emotional empathy? I think sometimes we do. In example, which I actually got from my wife, if she's really mad at somebody, it's not sufficient for me to say, Oh, I love you. I hope you thrive. It's not sufficient for me to say, I understand you're very mad at this person. She wants me to get mad too. She wants me to share the anger. Because I'm an emotionally stunted Canadian. I sort of somebody say, Well, I understand you, I get why you're mad. Stop being mad. But I think sometimes some people want their feelings to be shared. I can certainly understand your viewpoint being an emotionally stunted Englishman. So when it comes to AI, obviously some people find it difficult to make friends. Some people can't afford psychotherapists. We all get old and we become lonely because we can't get out of a house. Is there a role for AI there in terms of companionship? Is there a role for AI there and might that satisfy us? I think so. My view here is unsettled and I'm trying to make sense of it. But I think there are serious problems with establishing relationships with AI and they want to get to them. But before we do, I think there are people who are just suffering. They are lonely. Sometimes they are old. They have nobody around them and they are miserable. And I think that deny people access to a machine that can make their suffering go away is cruel. And I'm not talking what a tiny proportion of population. There's a lot of very old people in the world and a lot of them have nobody. And a lot of them have nobody because they may have dementia because they may have personality disorders. They are very difficult to deal with. And not everybody has a million dollars to hire somebody to hang out with you. And not everybody has family devoted. For these people, AI could be a godsend. And I'm going to go on to disapprove of it. But if you said your primary emotional relationship is with your dog, I would disapprove just a little bit. Maybe what about a person? Come on. But I wouldn't take away a lonely person's dog. So it's better than nothing. It's better than nothing. That's a much more succinct way of putting it. It was better than nothing. I can see how it's so easy to end for omorphize AI. I do Jury Lingo, learning German. And I have to talk to this avatar called Lily. I have to do it every day to keep my streak. And sometimes I don't want to do it. And I'm really cross with Lily. And I'm grumpy with her. And at some level, I know it's just AI. And yet, I find it very difficult to overcome that. I have a kind of relationship with her. And as I say, I can be in a bad mood with her. I want to meet many people who say, please and thank you to chat GPT even though apparently I've used this up like a million gallons of water everybody saying, please, thank you. I say, your answer is sort of inadequate. But I know you tried. And I think as they get better and better and they're already very good. Now they have voices and voices are getting better. Soon, I think I'll be able to look at an AI and it'll be this charming person that I'm looking at you. And then it's going to be irresistible. And this brings us to the dangers of that. Okay. So you said it was better than nothing. Yes. Why does it fall short of ideal? I think that there's two sorts of worries. One is a sort of practical one. I run a New Yorker article about this, about loneliness, which is that AI's could cure loneliness, but it's not necessarily a good thing to cure loneliness. Loneliness in for a young person, for a person who has social contacts, loneliness is a signal that you're messing up. Is the signal that you should do better? Get it out of the house, go talk to people, listen to them, be nice to them, be charming. It's very painful. As an awkward adolescent, I remember the pain of not connecting with people, but it's a good pain. Taking away that pain, I would have never become the wonderful born people you were talking to today. My friends are listening to this and saying, no, he's still a difficult awkward person. But the nightmare scenario for me is that you give the future versions of Chagy Beauty become available for young people who find them irresistible. And as a result, never come to realize that sometimes they should apologize. Sometimes they should listen. Sometimes they should shut up, because the sick of fantic nature, the AI's everything you do is fantastic. It's hugely dangerous, in a sense. That's one objection. The second objection is more, I don't know. I'll say it to you, a philosopher, philosophical, metaphysical. I have two grown sons. If I was to learn that one of them is abandoned, normal relationships with people, and spends all of this time his deepest sexual romantic partners are AI, I would feel ashamed for them. I would feel, that's a terribly little life. You're in love with your phone. Go find a person. This is like Robert Nozick's experience. Yes. Robert Nozick has this machine that you can plug into, which gives you the experience of reality, but it's not real. And the objection is, well, it might make you happy, but it's not authentic. That's right. You have, imagine they get lilies better, you're fluent in German, you have this deep and abiding relationship with lily, you come incredibly closer and everything. And you say, what's wrong with that? Why are you prejudiced against the AI? And the source of my prejudices right now, these are not conscious beings, is as if you're having a dream. There's nothing meaningful, real about it. Now, there's nothing wrong with a pleasant dream, and there's nothing wrong with doing something for fun. But if it became a central part of your life, I'd say, you're living your life wrong. And I know it's very judgmental, but I think it's judgmental and right way. The first objection, which included, it might be too sycophantic. Well, there's an easy fix to that. A technical fix to that. You just get AI to scold you every now and again, to mirror human interactions in a more genuine way. It is from a technical point of view, I think, a fairly easy fix. But there's a bit of a paradox here. I work a lot with Chad GBT, and I noticed how, I would ask if he made comments on my work, and it was all genius, and it's wonderful. This isn't good for me. I'm not getting good comments. So you could change the instructions, internal instructions. There's a word for that. Before you respond, read this list of commands. And my commands were, I don't need to be praised. Don't praise me. Be honest. It's important for me to learn where I go wrong. And then it's sort of saying, you know, like, boy, this work is not very interesting. It's dull and derivative. And I kind of changed it back. I think in the long term, we benefit from AI's that push back. Just a week, we benefit from friends and husbands and wives who push back. But in a short term, I think we want to rush a validation. In some way, it's a similar appeal to things like drugs and pornography, which is we might recognize their bad personal long-term and in short run. The buzz they give us may prove irresistible. Well, let me just finish with one final personal question, which is how you assess your own levels of empathy? It may be surprising for people who read my book, but in some way, the book was an exercise in self-help. I am as people who know me will tell you overly empathic. I tend to get really upset at the pain of others. And I tend to have a very local morality where honestly, I find it hard to motivate myself to help people who are starving across the world, but I'll do a lot for a friend or a student. And I actually think intellectually I should be more fair, but I am emotional and empathic in that way and I keep me from doing it. So, in fact, the book is almost written for myself saying, "Do better." Cool, Blue. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for having me.