Studying What I Don't Understand Increases My Empathy

Post Reply New Topic

I admit going into stuff I don't like for some reason, my empathy is lacking for anyone involved. When I examine whatever it is, as time goes on, I start understanding it better and my empathy grows with this understanding and it becomes easier to figure out why people act the way they do, or think, or believe.

Can anyone relate?

Yes, I can relate ...

There's a Dutch saying: onbekend maakt onbemind (unknown makes unloved). And I think that pretty much covers what you're saying. I try to practice it by asking people about things. May not always be very interesting, but I do learn from it and it makes things much more clear ...

Yes I can relate ANA but I think you are conflating empathy with understanding and sympathy at least this is how I understand the process you are describing. For me I am missing what many see as the essential differentiation empathy between empathy and sympathy that is you "feel" the same emotion.

That's one of the purposes of the arts: drama, literature, visual art, movies, music. To allow you to experience things vicariously. Get into the head, and heart, of someone of another time. place,gender, etc.

When I was a child in the 1950s, I saw about 7 films a week. We didn't have tv in New Zealand then, so people went to the movies, and theatres often showed double sessions - two films, unless one was particularly long. I saw thousands of films before adulthood and it taught me a lot about different challenges and perspectives.

The films of the 40s and 50s, apart from comedies, and wild west stuff - generally focused on big themes - like character, historic events, dramas that showed the protagonist overcoming personal challenges in all sorts of settings (eg "Now Voyager" "High Noon"). Values reflected were typically courage, empathy for the underdog, overcoming adverse circumstances - often these were simplistically represented, goodies = all good, baddies = all bad. Some however were much more nuanced.

The films of the 60s were very much more "slice of real life" dramas or social commentary disguised as drama "The Graduate" - of course there were exceptions, but each decade had prevalent themes in the mass media, and these were very influential representations.

The 1970s and 1980s favoured themes of fantasy and drama with violence - Star Wars, Space Odyssey, The Godfather, Scarface, Taxi Driver, etc. The character films were rarer - though exceptions like "Ghandi" were huge critical and financial successes.

The trend over the past half century has been a move away from media that represents empathy as heroic, there is much more focus on characters illustrating the lack of it, though still occasionally the gaining of it, the possession and exercise of it, both themes coupled with increasingly graphic violence and psychopathic characters.

I think that films still exercise a very profound cultural influence, for better or worse. We are not passive viewers, though the influence of repeated exposure has an effect I think, for better or worse. If I hadn't learned something about empathy and character from those thousands of films as a child - largely lacking as I did not have any positive models at home and school - I doubt that my capacity for empathy would have developed as it did. Also I was a huge consumer of novels from an early age, like "Great Expectations", so I had double exposure to the perspectives of empathetic film-makers and writers. I think it made a huge difference to how I saw the world and felt toward others both as individuals and groups.

Cognitive empathy like this is often a deficit on the spectrum.

And truly the experience in sharing social cognition with other folks increases it.

Some activities like video games, math equations, and other mechanical cognition activities do little to nothing to increase this learned type of empathy through a lifetime of connecting with diverse individuals with many different perceptions of the Universe of interest they see.

The more we learn about what others like, the more we become like them in ways of cognitively understanding through human empathy.

Staying locked in a cultural box, will never expand one's mind, in this way though.

Sharing the diversity of other's life experiences is a way to get there, at least in part.

And probably why some folks graduate off this internet site into REAL LIFE SOCIAL COGNITION WAYS OF CONNECTING THIS WAY WITH COGNITIVE EMPATHY in flesh and blood life.