10. EmpathyMilo is a small gray mouse. His first memory is of feeding from his mother in a small cage, remarkably similar to the one he’s in now. For as long as he can remember, the man in the white coat has visited periodically with pellets, toys, electrodes, and other variations to his otherwise solitary and monotonous existence. Two weeks ago Milo’s life changed when he got the unexpected delight of a cagemate, an affectionate white mouse named Lula. They play together, chase each other around the cage, and sometimes even pile up in the corner for warmth (lab air conditioning is absolutely polar). Life is better with Lula, but Milo has found that when she hurts, so does he. One day, the man in the white coat came over, opened the cage door, and pinched Lula on the back of the neck with something sharp … With the use of names, subjectivity, indicators of similarity, and signs of affection—the help of just a few simple social cues—this summary of a lab experiment becomes a story with characters with whom we can empathize. In the lab, Milo was probably listed as mouse 456b for the same reason farmers don’t name their pigs. But the story of Milo holds more than one clue to empathy. Dale Langford and his colleagues (Langford, 2010; Langford et al., 2006) tested the interactions between pain sensitivity and mouse behavior (for strangers versus cagemates), revealing groundbreaking evidence of empathy in mice. Specifically, their work has shown that pain among mice is shared (viewing another mouse in pain increases a mouse’s own sensitivity to pain), that mice express pain through recognizable facial expressions, that female mice will approach their cagemates when they see they are in pain, and that this may even provide comfort (“analgesic effects”) (Langford, 2010). Evidence of empathy in animals as dissimilar to humans as mice may or may not be surprising depending on your view of the animal kingdom. Many of us generally think of empathy as being something exclusively human, but then we tend to underestimate other animals with regularity, placing Homo sapiens on a rather elaborate pedestal. Of course, this anthropocentric view may simply be a by-product of necessary pragmatism. The fact that we modulate our empathy for animals is unsurprising because it is necessary if we are to use them for food, clothing, and scientific experiment as much as we do—all of which would be decidedly less palatable if our empathy for them was more intensely felt. By comparison, most people (barring a few cultural exceptions) are loath to the idea of eating dogs. This is not because dogs are more intelligent than the pigs we do eat (pigs are strikingly intelligent), but simply because so many of us have formed empathic relationships with domesticated dogs. They are part of the human family. We bear daily witness to the many ways in which dogs are similar to us—we see their joy, their fear, their loving attention—and we feel for them. People’s capacity for empathy has been influenced in many ways throughout history. It has been deliberately eroded through the use of stereotyping and depersonalization, as in Nazi propaganda. It has been fostered by literature, art, and community-building efforts. Empathy is frequently thought of in terms of sharing the negative (misery loves company), but it is equally valid for the sharing of positive emotions. Empathy is a development of animalian evolution with distinct advantages (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006), and its various neurological foundations are beginning to be revealed. Empathy is a fascinating aspect of being human that is essential to healthy relationships, to collaboration, to wellbeing, and to personal growth. Remarkably, some inspiring technologies, from work with autistic children to virtual-reality games, have been designed specifically to develop it. It is for these reasons that we dedicate a chapter to empathy, to its scientific grounding, and to some of the many strategies for fostering it employed by psychology, art, and technology.
Understanding Empathy The social work definition reveals there are both cognitive and affective sides of empathy. Cognitive empathy (often referred to as “theory of mind”) is the ability to recognize emotions and intentions in others. Affective empathy is our ability to share the feelings of others and to react with appropriate emotion to what someone else is feeling or thinking. The distinction is physically visible in the brain in that each of these aspects relies on separate neuronal circuitry (Singer, 2006), and, as such, each can be developed independently of the other. For example, the sociopath may have well-developed cognitive empathy such that he is able to effectively lie, persuade, and make friends, but without affective empathy he fails to react with appropriate emotions such as guilt or remorse, which often leads to violent behavior. In contrast, those with autism spectrum disorders may have poor cognitive empathy, making it very difficult for them to discern what others are feeling and thinking, but they will be visibly distressed when others are suffering. But a two-sided model is not quite enough. The recent accumulation of evidence for distinct neural processes associated with various aspects of empathy has begun to lend a level of concreteness to our understanding of it. Based on a combination of psychology and social neuroscience research, Jean Decety and Yoshiya Moriguchi (2007) propose a model of empathy that has four components:
A cross-disciplinary academic definition of empathy awaits us in the future, but more critical to positive computing is whether empathy is something fixed or something we can actually develop, and if so, how.
Developing Empathy In the now iconic psychological experiment on obedience, Stanley Milgram (1963) encouraged subjects to inflict strangers with electric shocks in order to investigate how far obedience to perceived authority could influence people to act in contradiction to their conscience and override feelings of empathy. His intention was to understand how so many ordinary people could have engaged actively in the atrocities of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Although the impact of war, charismatic leadership, and propaganda are all critical parts of ongoing empathy research, it is from the research done within the context of ordinary life that positive computing has most to learn. For example, the power of family and school relationships to foster or inhibit the growth of empathy is immense. Parental attention and interaction in early childhood have been shown to be critical to the development of both the cognitive and affective sides of empathy (Farrant, Devine, Maybery, & Fletcher, 2012). Not only does a lack of parental empathy unsurprisingly predict neglectful parenting, but neglectful parenting leads to underdeveloped empathy in children—an unfortunate cycle, the consequences of which reverberate throughout society. As such, some measures for the prevention of child abuse, crime, and bullying approach these problems via programs for developing empathy in schools and among at-risk adolescents. Empathy and Art One of the most compelling arguments for the critical importance of the arts is their singular ability to expand our perspective, allow us to experience other lives, and deepen our sense of empathy and compassion. Whether it is through witnessing atrocities in a movie such as Schindler’s List, identifying with the feelings of loss expressed in the essential lines of an Auden poem, being transported to the streets of Victorian England through the portal of a Dickens novel, opening to the emotional pangs brought forth by a Munch painting, or savoring the rare honesty and beauty of an Otis Redding song, great art has an unparalleled capacity to cut across boundaries of time, space, and language, to allow experiences otherwise inaccessible, to explore a shared humanity, and to foster personal growth. Great art will challenge us by helping us to understand not only the suffering of the oppressed, but also the suffering of the oppressors. The popularity of work by writers such as Shakespeare persists because even his villains are complex and human—they have something to teach us, something with which we can identify—hints at the precursors of immorality, the seeds of which are in everyone (as Milgram showed). In this way, art is one of humanity’s greatest allies for understanding ourselves and others, and art’s greatest ally is probably empathy. In general, the ways in which technologies might someday foster empathy will likely be very different to the emotionally direct and often nonverbal ways in which art so often does. However, there is one area in which we may find that there are some overlaps and convergences, and that is amid the narrative and role-playing potential of digital games. We get to that later in this chapter, but, first, let’s lighten the mood. Empathic Joy One utterly underdiscussed aspect of empathy, in Western culture at least, is empathic joy. Empathy is generally associated with sharing in another’s suffering, and the German word schadenfreude has been appropriated into a number of languages to allow us to communicate the notion of “enjoying another’s suffering” in one word. Yet we have somehow escaped the need to find a good word for “enjoying another’s happiness” (although the Yiddish word naches makes occasional appearance and refers to the pleasure one takes in one’s children and grandchildren). Despite our general linguistic failure to represent a state of empathic joy, we frequently do experience it. We share in the natural jubilance of children; we are overjoyed at hearing a brother has landed a great job or a best friend has found love. We cry for joy at weddings and births and smile uncontrollably at the laughter of others. Empathic joy is given considerably more attention in Buddhist psychology, and mudita, a Sanskrit word meaning “sympathetic or vicarious joy,” is listed as one of four sublime states of mind. Together with loving kindness, equanimity, and compassion, vicarious joy is considered an ideal mind state for optimal social wellbeing. According to Buddhist teacher, Ven. Nyanaponika Thera (1999), these states “level social barriers, build harmonious communities, awaken slumbering magnanimity long forgotten, revive joy and hope long abandoned, and promote human brotherhood against the forces of egotism.” Could technology be designed to foster mudita? It just might need to if recent studies are correct in indicating that we are losing our sense of empathy. Is Empathy Taking a Downturn? As mentioned in the chapter on self-awareness, birth cohort studies have shown evidence for changes in dispositional narcissism and specifically in empathy over the past 30 years. A cross-temporal meta-analysis of American college students (Konrath, O’Brien, & Hsing, 2011) showed a sharp decline in standard measures of empathic concern, and, most notably for positive computing, this decline was particularly sharp from the year 2000 on. Alignment of the trend with growth in new media has led the authors to speculate a relationship between the two. The apparent rise in narcissism and decrease in empathy is still hotly debated, and although the causes for such changes may not be fully understood, the possible relationship with an increasingly digital environment is difficult to ignore and certainly worth confronting from a positive-computing perspective. There are pockets of further evidence. For example, as with other forms of violent media, there is significant evidence that violent videogames decrease empathy and physiologically desensitize users to violence (Anderson et al., 2010), but then prosocial games increase prosocial behavior (Gentile et al., 2009). This is critical to positive computing because gaming makes up an ever-increasing chunk of our digital experience, and it makes more sense to look at videogames’ psychological impacts from a higher level and holistic angle rather than inadvertently suggesting their influences go only one way. To that end, Katherine Buckley and Craig Anderson (2006) provide a learning-based theoretical model to help organize and explain the full gamut of positive and negative effects of videogames. Social media likewise have given us reason to believe that technology, through facilitating either cyberbullying or shared experience, can detract or support empathy in many ways. What’s clear is that digital technology has a very significant impact, and whether that impact is positive or negative will be up to us. From the positive-computing perspective, the need for preventative positive-computing design is clear. Preventative design means features found to influence empathy negatively (by decreasing it or increasing corresponding callous or aggressive behavior) should be identified, and either removed or redesigned. But there is also promise for more active and dedicated approaches that seek to identify and implement features, or even whole systems, for deliberately increasing empathy in the populations who use them. Technology poses another, more pervasive potential hindrance to our experience of empathy. One of the most significant differences between face-to-face and technology-meditated communication is the poor support for nonverbal communication, which is so critical to empathy. Many of the environmental and physical cues—such as gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice—that critically inform and shape our understanding of what others are feeling in a face-to-face context are entirely missing from computer-based communication. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the deep implications of this problem can be understood as a lack of plurality, which inhibits our ability to grow as human beings from our interactions with others (see his sidebar in this chapter). As such, perhaps the greatest prerequisite challenge regarding empathy for positive computing will be picking away at the barriers to holistic communication imposed by technology design as it exists today. Some will do so by moving toward technology-based interaction that more closely resembles the face to face. Others will advance the capability of computer systems to detect nonverbal cues in order to amplify or reexpress those in other ways. Others will seek nontechnical answers by interrogating our sociocultural expectations of what technology can or should do for us. Whatever the path, we all will need a way of evaluating our efforts, and, to that end, we turn to methods of measuring empathy.
Measuring Empathy Another of the most commonly used measures is the Empathy Quotient (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004) developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism researcher at the University of Cambridge (and yes, he is related to Ali G, but do try and stay focused). The Empathy Quotient is a self-report scale with 60 questions that has been evaluated for its psychometric properties in numerous studies (Lawrence, Shaw, Baker, Baron-Cohen, & David, 2004). It is a multiple choice questionnaire that, though lengthy, could easily be delivered online. It is often used to measure the impact of therapeutic interventions and is frequently combined with other measures. Karen Gerdes, Elizabeth Segal, and Cynthia Lietz (2010) point out that self-report measures are by far the most commonly used for measuring empathy, yet there is little they can tell us about empathic accuracy (Would you know if you were misunderstanding someone’s emotions?), and they therefore recommend validating them with triangulation or comparison methods. They also provide a useful review of both the historical evolution of empathy research and the various measurement strategies available from self-reports to observation and neuroimaging.
Strategies and Interventions for Fostering Empathy Certainly the fact that a pathological lack of empathy is disabling and associated with multiple mental illnesses links empathy to wellbeing from an inverse perspective. But even outside of these relatively rare cases, a lack of empathy will inhibit the development of the strong social relationships so often directly linked to wellbeing. One study (Thomas et al., 2007) found that decreases in wellbeing correlated to the decline in empathy that famously occurs with medical students over the duration of their training and residency. Furthermore, if one is to consider that empathy is a pillar of EI, then we can draw on the research that has linked increased EI to increased wellbeing (Gallagher & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). Interventions with the specific intention of increasing wellbeing through the development of empathy remain to be developed. Until then, for the purposes of positive computing, the value of increased empathy for wellbeing derives, at the very least, from its associated decreases in unhealthy behavior relevant to technology, such as cyberbullying, self-comparison, and envy. The literature on interventions for empathy development is of mixed scientific sophistication. On the one hand, there are clear operational guidelines, such as Roman Krznaric’s “Six Habits of Highly Empathic People,”1 but although the veracity of these guidelines might be considered self-evident, they lack scientific backing. A subset of empathy interventions has been thoroughly evaluated in peer-reviewed journals, and an even smaller subset has been evaluated in independent randomized control trials. Studies have demonstrated some of the challenges to carrying out independent evaluations of socioemotional learning interventions. In one study (Owens, Granader, Humphrey, & Baron-Cohen, 2008), researchers compared LEGO therapy with the Social Use of Language Programme and with a no-intervention control group. The programs were evaluated as social skills interventions for school-age children with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome but are similar to those used for general populations, and the results revealed the importance of using multiple measures for these kinds of studies. For example, on an autism-specific social interaction score (the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale), the LEGO therapy group improved more than the other groups. On a maladaptive behavior score, both the LEGO and the Social Use of Language Programme groups fared better than the control group, and for communication and socialization skills there was a nonsignifiant trend. Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotions (created by Simon Baron-Cohen) is a computer-based multimedia program designed to help develop empathy (particularly for those with autism spectrum disorders). Video, audio (i.e., voice intonation), and storytelling are used to demonstrate an impressive 412 emotions in 24 categories. As a bonus, user progress is rewarded with the opportunity to manipulate the emotional response of a young Daniel Radcliffe (the actor who played Harry Potter). Whereas Mind Reading is typically used as a therapeutic intervention, Roots of Empathy is a preventative measure.2 Roots of Empathy is a highly successful school program for which babies and their mothers visit a classroom on a regular basis throughout the year. The children in the class develop empathy by observing the baby’s emotions and behaviors in response to toys, to their mother, and to the class. This program has been shown to have a significant impact on reducing bullying and violence in schools (which suggests that online interventions for empathy could reduce online bullying and aggressive behaviors). An intervention such as Roots of Empathy is decidedly not technological and, as such, is inspirational in that it shows how very simple and natural human interactions are enough to increase empathy significantly in developing children and to lead to concrete results in the form of decreased antisocial behavior. Just as adding names and subjectivity to the story of mice at the start of this chapter increased reader empathy for the mice, and just as photographs of people in news stories increase our connection with political issues, fostering empathy does not have to be complicated or high tech. It is a natural product of human biology for which simple nudges and experiences can go a long way. We discuss low-tech approaches to developing empathy within digital environments later under “Design Implications.” Of course, there are more difficult cases, such as when ingrained historical prejudices or conflict obstruct empathy development, and in these cases more advanced technologies are already showing they may have a very powerful role to play.
Technologies for the Development of Empathy Of course, it is this challenge to which many researchers in affective computing have turned. Affective-computing researchers work on building technologies that can recognize and in some cases even express emotions as feedback for their human users. Although we suggest caution with designing machines to solicit or express empathy in human ways (which could become emotionally confusing or potentially undermine our ability to set sensible priorities), there are already some applications of virtual empathy that show very promising results for positive computing (see the work of Timothy Bickmore and his sidebar at the end of this chapter). There is also a clear role for this research to help technologies respond better to users as well as to help us understand human empathy better. Rana El Kaliouby, Rosalind Picard, and Simon Baron-Cohen (2006), for example, have acknowledged the overlap of goals and challenges between autism research and affective-computing research and suggest that closer collaboration will lead to benefits to both areas. In the computer-supported education context, one study (Cheng, Chiang, Ye, & Cheng, 2010) has given evidence for the efficacy of using collaborative 3D virtual learning environments to enhance empathy. This program, like the Mind Reading program discussed earlier, was developed for people with empathy-related special needs. With the move from desktop to touch-screen computers, doors have burst wide open in the area of special-needs support. For example, the improved usability and increased access made possible by mobile technologies has fueled incredible growth in the development of apps for children with disabilities (the advocacy group Autism Speaks maintains a list of dozens of apps for supporting children with autism at its website autismspeaks.org). Moreover, there are also an increasing number of apps, games, and other technologies for developing factors such as empathy for the general population. Developing Empathy through Gaming Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing trustworthy media reviews to help parents make informed choices about family media consumption. It rates various forms of media on scales for criteria such as positive role models, violence, scariness, and consumerism. Along with a list of books and movies that promote empathy, they have a list of top games for empathy building. These games target a variety of platforms from handheld devices and console games to mobile and computer-based games. Herotopia, for example, is a computer game in which kids combat bullying. Kids at Home is an app that allows kids to learn about diverse cultures and lifestyles by visiting other kids’ homes virtually, and Mission US: Flight to Freedom is a computer-simulation game in which players experience the life of a slave girl in pre–Civil War America. The diversity and creativity in these early examples is inspiring, and games for empathy are by no means restricted to children’s titles. Games have some magical powers when it comes to supporting empathy. They have the capacity to provide us with “firsthand” (even embodied) experience of scenarios that would otherwise remain totally foreign to us. As vehicles for role playing, they allow us to “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” as close to literally as possible. Combine these affordances with the growing work in games for social good, and a new era of empathy-promoting games becomes visible on the horizon. For example, browse the selection at GamesforChange.org, and you’ll find that making social change requires empathy and that many of these games are designed to promote it. Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan (2010) provide a review and insight into designing games that foster empathy, along with a series of design heuristics that we’ll come back to in the design section of this chapter. Role-playing games designed to promote conflict resolution have gotten special attention for their ability to allow players not only to envision but to take first-person action from the perspective of two different sides of a conflict. For example, in the multi-award-winning PeaceMaker game,3 players variably take on the role of Israeli prime minister and Palestinian president, and in both conditions they must choose strategies to make a “two-state solution” viable. The players have the choice to take conciliatory or hostile actions and to pursue collaborative or one-sided initiatives. The game provides players with real-life consequences to political decisions and shows how even small gestures can contribute to peaceful solutions. It incorporates real photos and video, which not only lend the experience authenticity but also engage players emotionally (i.e., empathically). The makers of Frontiers, a 3D online multiplayer game, took the popular HalfLife 2D game (a first-person shooter) and modified it into a moving and realistic immersion into the migration paths and borderlands inhabited by political refugees. Players can elect to play the role of an escaping refugee or a member of the border patrol. The game makers, a group of Austrian artists, describe Frontiers as both a game and a work of art that “aims to enhance the perception and understanding of the migrants situation above a causal level of catastrophic news.”4 These are just a few examples of games designed to foster empathy. The number of such games in the name of art, entertainment, and social change is on the rise, and we hope to see a corresponding increase in evaluations of the impacts of these games in the research literature in the near future. Certainly, the literature demonstrating the prosocial benefits of playing prosocial games is relevant here. Tobias Greitemeyer, Silvia Osswald, and Markus Brauer (2010), for example, have given evidence that prosocial games increase interpersonal empathy and decrease schadenfreude. Further along the immersion scale, the power of highly embodied virtual experience to increase levels of empathy and even altruistic behavior has been indicated by research in virtual reality (see Jeremy Bailenson’s sidebar on virtual reality for empathy and prosocial behavior in chapter 11). Because these studies have measured an increase in prosocial action (rather than specifically empathic response), we come back to them in the following chapter on compassion and altruism. Research Technologies for Understanding Empathy Beyond promotional or therapeutic interventions, technologies can also be used to help us better understand factors of wellbeing such as empathy. Computer vision tools and affective-computing techniques, for example, have been used to explore parent–child interactions and how empathy is developed (Messinger et al., 2014). Although we have not included these types of applications within the scope of positive computing, we believe they represent a closely related field of research in which psychologists and engineers will need to work together. Technologies for Group Empathy Although the term empathy is most frequently used in the context of one-on-one interaction, it can also be extended to groups of people. Certainly, we can empathize with a group of people when we come to know something of their suffering. Likewise, it seems reasonable to assume that good leaders and, in an organizational context, effective managers will empathize with the joys and struggles of their team. Take, for example, David Caruso and Peter Salovey’s (2004) notion of the emotionally intelligent manager. Arguably, managers and leaders need an ability not only to empathize one on one, but also to attend to the pulse of a team’s or organization’s emotional state. We suspect that technologies have a unique capacity to make this feasible—in other words, to help leaders to better understand the collected emotions of a large group of people and thus to be able to react to them more appropriately (e.g., through better management practices or policies). The benefit of such technology is even more clear in the modern workplace in which coworkers are distributed over time and space and meet only on occasion and in which most communication occurs digitally. Imagine this scenario: Mr. W. E. Coyote is a director at ACME Inc., an innovative company with 1,200 employees. The fast-growing company has recognized employee wellbeing as important, both for its own sake and as a way to increase productivity and staff retention. Mr. Coyote would like to measure the impact that his new policies have on the subjective wellbeing of his staff, including their engagement and life satisfaction. Fortunately, the company has an active community in its Enterprise Social Network, and the forums in its knowledge-management system are thriving. He can’t help but think there must be some way he could use this information—which employees make publically available to the whole organization—to gauge the impact of his policy and management interventions. Can technology help organizational decision making by supporting EI with information about employees’ emotional state? We think it can (Calvo, Pardo, & Peters, 2013), and, indeed, companies such as Kanjoya are already commercializing products that use data from customer forums and enterprise social networks to turn “unstructured data and digital texts into actionable insights,”5 communicated through various visualizations, in order to help organizations improve leadership decision making and customer experience. New data algorithms can also be trained to detect people’s emotions based not only on written text, but also from speech, writing, facial expression, voice, and physiology. Behavioral data (e.g., time factors) could be integrated to highlight possible anomalies in organizational “circadian rhythms” (i.e., too many employees working late hours, a likely precursor to poor performance and retention). We have also speculated on the potential for similar tools to be used in the other direction—toward developing leader self-awareness. For example, Daniel Goleman (2000) identifies six leadership styles:
Leadership styles, whether more authoritarian or more permissive, impact employee performance and even wellbeing. Therefore, helping leaders to recognize these elements in themselves can help them to leverage their strengths, change unhelpful approaches, and adapt to various contexts and circumstances as appropriate.
Design Implications As mentioned earlier, one of our greatest design challenges will be devising ways to manage, technically resolve, or compensate for the lack of empathy cues and plurality inherent to current technology-mediated communication (particularly if it continues to comprise an increasing percentage of our interaction with others). In theory, adding more accurate sensory channels (video, audio, tactile, olfactory, etc.) should begin to reduce the social filter, but current technologies are still far from matching face-to-face interaction, and, perhaps, rather than attempting to force various digital media to approximate face-to-face interaction, we should be looking to medium-specific strategies for better results. The uptake of emoticons is a perfect example of a crowd-based design solution to computer limitations. In a chat box, I can’t indicate to you that I’m sad, excited, or being facetious, so I append representative emotional symbols to compensate. When hoping for some sympathy, the tearing sad face does the trick. We have a friend who insists there should be a typographic style (like italics or bold) for indicating sarcasm. Along these lines, one approach to improving our ability to express emotion and empathize via online interaction may come in the form of more sophisticated approaches to annotation and labeling. Preventative and Active Design Approaches Custom technologies dedicated to fostering empathy will make up only a percentage of work in this area, whereas strategies integrated into other kinds of software have the potential to reach wider audiences. Finding ways to prevent loss of empathy or to support it in the context of other online activities could prove beneficial to large numbers of developers across multiple industries. For example, as we begin to separate those aspects of social networks that decrease empathy from those that are neutral or promotional, we can begin to redesign interfaces and interaction for a better user experience. These measures could decrease negative experiences such as cyberbullying but also increase positive experiences via increases in positive emotions and empathic joy. Likewise, as we begin to separate those aspects of digital games that decrease rather than increase empathy, we can begin to lead a shift in game design that embraces positive outcomes and player wellbeing and moves away from design features with measurably deleterious effects. Imagine a generation of people who grew up on games that developed their empathy for others and helped them learn to care for and collaborate with each other—we’d sign up for that future. Low-Tech Approaches—the Power of Graphics and Narrative Some empathy design interventions will remain decidedly low tech. Already, designers frequently add high-impact photographs of people and faces to communicate the humanity behind otherwise faceless stories and issues. By way of example, charity organizations have been moving from an older approach of including imagery of those suffering in extreme ways to including imagery of those being empowered by charitable assistance to improve their lives, regaining joy and autonomy (e.g., a child dying of malnutrition versus a newly thriving community tending to the livestock provided by charitable donation). Oversensitivity to the feelings of others can be considered a downside or malfunction of the regulation aspects of empathy. A feeling of being overwhelmed or an inability to cope in the face of another’s suffering can lead to depression, hopelessness, and lack of action. Allowing for empathic joy in the face of great social challenges adds empowerment to the picture, moving empathic concern toward practical action. Based on appraisal studies, it has been noted that “feelings of compassion should increase when the individual feels capable of coping with the target’s suffering. Appraisals of low coping ability, by contrast, should activate distress in the face of another’s suffering, which countervails compassion-related tendencies when resources are low,” and that “sadness and fear are associated with appraisals of feeling weak, powerless and unable to cope” (Roseman, Spindel, & Jose, 1990 and Hoffman 1981, quoted in Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). This really crosses over to the subject of compassion and altruism, which we move to in the next chapter. Nevertheless, the example of charities’ image choice shows the emotional power that simple design decisions can have. Moving to the workplace, we come across many contexts in which human strangers must interact with each other online to conduct business and without the benefit of face-to-face interaction. In customer-service scenarios, such as call centers, both customers and representatives may find it difficult to empathize with each other, increasing the chances of impatience, customer/job dissatisfaction, or conflict. Simply increasing information channels (such as moving to video chat) would be intrusive in this context, but low-tech solutions, such as showing customer-type images to reps for each call or vice versa—displaying rep images to the customer for online interactions—could prove useful strategies for improving empathy and overall wellbeing. High-Tech Approaches—Role Playing and Embodiment In light of early research in digital games and virtual reality, it seems reasonable to imagine that these technologies’ ability to support role play and full-body experience will have significant impact on the use of technology for developing empathy. Embodiment, whether as part of virtual-reality environments or gesture-based videogame play, has the unique ability to activate the empathy-promotional benefits of synchronous movement and to allow people to experience, as close to literally as possible, lives, circumstances, and times that would otherwise be impossible for them to experience. In one study, Peter Yellowlees and James Cook (2006) created a virtual psychiatry clinic in the virtual world Second Life to promote empathy for people with serious mental illness. By touring the clinic, participants could experience firsthand the auditory and visual hallucinations associated with psychosis. The majority of more than 500 visitors to the clinic who voluntarily responded to the researchers’ survey said it helped them better understand this experience. Heuristics for the Design of Empathy Games Belman and Flanagan (2010) speculate on a state of game play they call “empathetic play” in which “players intentionally try to infer the thoughts and feelings of people or groups represented in the game (cognitive empathy), and/or they prepare themselves for an emotional response, for example by looking for similarities between themselves and characters in the game (emotional empathy).” They further speculate that games for empathy must deliberately support the player in entering a state of empathetic play and that it should not be assumed that the content is enough to elicit empathy as intended. This recommendation is formulated as one of their four principles for the design of games to foster empathy. They draw these principles from their experience working with designers of “games for good.” The principles, although pending evaluation at the time of this writing, are founded in current practice and related empathy research:
We encourage you to see the full paper for a full explanation of these principles along with some exemplary cases. Technologies for empathy are still in their infancy, but it is an impressively enthusiastic infancy. Apps as a format have been embraced by those seeking to support empathy development in children, and the new wave of designers interested in creating games for social change has fueled a slew of sophisticated vicarious experiences created to deepen our understanding of, concern for, and desire to assist those in dire circumstances. Moreover, as discussed, great art has always played a role in developing empathy and compassion. Now imagine the impact of an experience that converges the literary prowess of Victor Hugo and the artistic genius of Van Gogh with the interaction and embodiment made possible by the modern digital games medium. Should such a transformative convergence take form, expect to see us first in line to play. | 10. EmpathyMilo is a small gray mouse. His first memory is of feeding from his mother in a small cage, remarkably similar to the one he’s in now. For as long as he can remember, the man in the white coat has visited periodically with pellets, toys, electrodes, and other variations to his otherwise solitary and monotonous existence. Two weeks ago Milo’s life changed when he got the unexpected delight of a cagemate, an affectionate white mouse named Lula. They play together, chase each other around the cage, and sometimes even pile up in the corner for warmth (lab air conditioning is absolutely polar). Life is better with Lula, but Milo has found that when she hurts, so does he. One day, the man in the white coat came over, opened the cage door, and pinched Lula on the back of the neck with something sharp … With the use of names, subjectivity, indicators of similarity, and signs of affection—the help of just a few simple social cues—this summary of a lab experiment becomes a story with characters with whom we can empathize. In the lab, Milo was probably listed as mouse 456b for the same reason farmers don’t name their pigs. But the story of Milo holds more than one clue to empathy. Dale Langford and his colleagues (Langford, 2010; Langford et al., 2006) tested the interactions between pain sensitivity and mouse behavior (for strangers versus cagemates), revealing groundbreaking evidence of empathy in mice. Specifically, their work has shown that pain among mice is shared (viewing another mouse in pain increases a mouse’s own sensitivity to pain), that mice express pain through recognizable facial expressions, that female mice will approach their cagemates when they see they are in pain, and that this may even provide comfort (“analgesic effects”) (Langford, 2010). Evidence of empathy in animals as dissimilar to humans as mice may or may not be surprising depending on your view of the animal kingdom. Many of us generally think of empathy as being something exclusively human, but then we tend to underestimate other animals with regularity, placing Homo sapiens on a rather elaborate pedestal. Of course, this anthropocentric view may simply be a by-product of necessary pragmatism. The fact that we modulate our empathy for animals is unsurprising because it is necessary if we are to use them for food, clothing, and scientific experiment as much as we do—all of which would be decidedly less palatable if our empathy for them was more intensely felt. By comparison, most people (barring a few cultural exceptions) are loath to the idea of eating dogs. This is not because dogs are more intelligent than the pigs we do eat (pigs are strikingly intelligent), but simply because so many of us have formed empathic relationships with domesticated dogs. They are part of the human family. We bear daily witness to the many ways in which dogs are similar to us—we see their joy, their fear, their loving attention—and we feel for them. People’s capacity for empathy has been influenced in many ways throughout history. It has been deliberately eroded through the use of stereotyping and depersonalization, as in Nazi propaganda. It has been fostered by literature, art, and community-building efforts. Empathy is frequently thought of in terms of sharing the negative (misery loves company), but it is equally valid for the sharing of positive emotions. Empathy is a development of animalian evolution with distinct advantages (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006), and its various neurological foundations are beginning to be revealed. Empathy is a fascinating aspect of being human that is essential to healthy relationships, to collaboration, to wellbeing, and to personal growth. Remarkably, some inspiring technologies, from work with autistic children to virtual-reality games, have been designed specifically to develop it. It is for these reasons that we dedicate a chapter to empathy, to its scientific grounding, and to some of the many strategies for fostering it employed by psychology, art, and technology.
Understanding Empathy The social work definition reveals there are both cognitive and affective sides of empathy. Cognitive empathy (often referred to as “theory of mind”) is the ability to recognize emotions and intentions in others. Affective empathy is our ability to share the feelings of others and to react with appropriate emotion to what someone else is feeling or thinking. The distinction is physically visible in the brain in that each of these aspects relies on separate neuronal circuitry (Singer, 2006), and, as such, each can be developed independently of the other. For example, the sociopath may have well-developed cognitive empathy such that he is able to effectively lie, persuade, and make friends, but without affective empathy he fails to react with appropriate emotions such as guilt or remorse, which often leads to violent behavior. In contrast, those with autism spectrum disorders may have poor cognitive empathy, making it very difficult for them to discern what others are feeling and thinking, but they will be visibly distressed when others are suffering. But a two-sided model is not quite enough. The recent accumulation of evidence for distinct neural processes associated with various aspects of empathy has begun to lend a level of concreteness to our understanding of it. Based on a combination of psychology and social neuroscience research, Jean Decety and Yoshiya Moriguchi (2007) propose a model of empathy that has four components:
A cross-disciplinary academic definition of empathy awaits us in the future, but more critical to positive computing is whether empathy is something fixed or something we can actually develop, and if so, how.
Developing Empathy In the now iconic psychological experiment on obedience, Stanley Milgram (1963) encouraged subjects to inflict strangers with electric shocks in order to investigate how far obedience to perceived authority could influence people to act in contradiction to their conscience and override feelings of empathy. His intention was to understand how so many ordinary people could have engaged actively in the atrocities of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Although the impact of war, charismatic leadership, and propaganda are all critical parts of ongoing empathy research, it is from the research done within the context of ordinary life that positive computing has most to learn. For example, the power of family and school relationships to foster or inhibit the growth of empathy is immense. Parental attention and interaction in early childhood have been shown to be critical to the development of both the cognitive and affective sides of empathy (Farrant, Devine, Maybery, & Fletcher, 2012). Not only does a lack of parental empathy unsurprisingly predict neglectful parenting, but neglectful parenting leads to underdeveloped empathy in children—an unfortunate cycle, the consequences of which reverberate throughout society. As such, some measures for the prevention of child abuse, crime, and bullying approach these problems via programs for developing empathy in schools and among at-risk adolescents. Empathy and Art One of the most compelling arguments for the critical importance of the arts is their singular ability to expand our perspective, allow us to experience other lives, and deepen our sense of empathy and compassion. Whether it is through witnessing atrocities in a movie such as Schindler’s List, identifying with the feelings of loss expressed in the essential lines of an Auden poem, being transported to the streets of Victorian England through the portal of a Dickens novel, opening to the emotional pangs brought forth by a Munch painting, or savoring the rare honesty and beauty of an Otis Redding song, great art has an unparalleled capacity to cut across boundaries of time, space, and language, to allow experiences otherwise inaccessible, to explore a shared humanity, and to foster personal growth. Great art will challenge us by helping us to understand not only the suffering of the oppressed, but also the suffering of the oppressors. The popularity of work by writers such as Shakespeare persists because even his villains are complex and human—they have something to teach us, something with which we can identify—hints at the precursors of immorality, the seeds of which are in everyone (as Milgram showed). In this way, art is one of humanity’s greatest allies for understanding ourselves and others, and art’s greatest ally is probably empathy. In general, the ways in which technologies might someday foster empathy will likely be very different to the emotionally direct and often nonverbal ways in which art so often does. However, there is one area in which we may find that there are some overlaps and convergences, and that is amid the narrative and role-playing potential of digital games. We get to that later in this chapter, but, first, let’s lighten the mood. Empathic Joy One utterly underdiscussed aspect of empathy, in Western culture at least, is empathic joy. Empathy is generally associated with sharing in another’s suffering, and the German word schadenfreude has been appropriated into a number of languages to allow us to communicate the notion of “enjoying another’s suffering” in one word. Yet we have somehow escaped the need to find a good word for “enjoying another’s happiness” (although the Yiddish word naches makes occasional appearance and refers to the pleasure one takes in one’s children and grandchildren). Despite our general linguistic failure to represent a state of empathic joy, we frequently do experience it. We share in the natural jubilance of children; we are overjoyed at hearing a brother has landed a great job or a best friend has found love. We cry for joy at weddings and births and smile uncontrollably at the laughter of others. Empathic joy is given considerably more attention in Buddhist psychology, and mudita, a Sanskrit word meaning “sympathetic or vicarious joy,” is listed as one of four sublime states of mind. Together with loving kindness, equanimity, and compassion, vicarious joy is considered an ideal mind state for optimal social wellbeing. According to Buddhist teacher, Ven. Nyanaponika Thera (1999), these states “level social barriers, build harmonious communities, awaken slumbering magnanimity long forgotten, revive joy and hope long abandoned, and promote human brotherhood against the forces of egotism.” Could technology be designed to foster mudita? It just might need to if recent studies are correct in indicating that we are losing our sense of empathy. Is Empathy Taking a Downturn? As mentioned in the chapter on self-awareness, birth cohort studies have shown evidence for changes in dispositional narcissism and specifically in empathy over the past 30 years. A cross-temporal meta-analysis of American college students (Konrath, O’Brien, & Hsing, 2011) showed a sharp decline in standard measures of empathic concern, and, most notably for positive computing, this decline was particularly sharp from the year 2000 on. Alignment of the trend with growth in new media has led the authors to speculate a relationship between the two. The apparent rise in narcissism and decrease in empathy is still hotly debated, and although the causes for such changes may not be fully understood, the possible relationship with an increasingly digital environment is difficult to ignore and certainly worth confronting from a positive-computing perspective. There are pockets of further evidence. For example, as with other forms of violent media, there is significant evidence that violent videogames decrease empathy and physiologically desensitize users to violence (Anderson et al., 2010), but then prosocial games increase prosocial behavior (Gentile et al., 2009). This is critical to positive computing because gaming makes up an ever-increasing chunk of our digital experience, and it makes more sense to look at videogames’ psychological impacts from a higher level and holistic angle rather than inadvertently suggesting their influences go only one way. To that end, Katherine Buckley and Craig Anderson (2006) provide a learning-based theoretical model to help organize and explain the full gamut of positive and negative effects of videogames. Social media likewise have given us reason to believe that technology, through facilitating either cyberbullying or shared experience, can detract or support empathy in many ways. What’s clear is that digital technology has a very significant impact, and whether that impact is positive or negative will be up to us. From the positive-computing perspective, the need for preventative positive-computing design is clear. Preventative design means features found to influence empathy negatively (by decreasing it or increasing corresponding callous or aggressive behavior) should be identified, and either removed or redesigned. But there is also promise for more active and dedicated approaches that seek to identify and implement features, or even whole systems, for deliberately increasing empathy in the populations who use them. Technology poses another, more pervasive potential hindrance to our experience of empathy. One of the most significant differences between face-to-face and technology-meditated communication is the poor support for nonverbal communication, which is so critical to empathy. Many of the environmental and physical cues—such as gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice—that critically inform and shape our understanding of what others are feeling in a face-to-face context are entirely missing from computer-based communication. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the deep implications of this problem can be understood as a lack of plurality, which inhibits our ability to grow as human beings from our interactions with others (see his sidebar in this chapter). As such, perhaps the greatest prerequisite challenge regarding empathy for positive computing will be picking away at the barriers to holistic communication imposed by technology design as it exists today. Some will do so by moving toward technology-based interaction that more closely resembles the face to face. Others will advance the capability of computer systems to detect nonverbal cues in order to amplify or reexpress those in other ways. Others will seek nontechnical answers by interrogating our sociocultural expectations of what technology can or should do for us. Whatever the path, we all will need a way of evaluating our efforts, and, to that end, we turn to methods of measuring empathy.
Measuring Empathy Another of the most commonly used measures is the Empathy Quotient (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004) developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism researcher at the University of Cambridge (and yes, he is related to Ali G, but do try and stay focused). The Empathy Quotient is a self-report scale with 60 questions that has been evaluated for its psychometric properties in numerous studies (Lawrence, Shaw, Baker, Baron-Cohen, & David, 2004). It is a multiple choice questionnaire that, though lengthy, could easily be delivered online. It is often used to measure the impact of therapeutic interventions and is frequently combined with other measures. Karen Gerdes, Elizabeth Segal, and Cynthia Lietz (2010) point out that self-report measures are by far the most commonly used for measuring empathy, yet there is little they can tell us about empathic accuracy (Would you know if you were misunderstanding someone’s emotions?), and they therefore recommend validating them with triangulation or comparison methods. They also provide a useful review of both the historical evolution of empathy research and the various measurement strategies available from self-reports to observation and neuroimaging.
Strategies and Interventions for Fostering Empathy Certainly the fact that a pathological lack of empathy is disabling and associated with multiple mental illnesses links empathy to wellbeing from an inverse perspective. But even outside of these relatively rare cases, a lack of empathy will inhibit the development of the strong social relationships so often directly linked to wellbeing. One study (Thomas et al., 2007) found that decreases in wellbeing correlated to the decline in empathy that famously occurs with medical students over the duration of their training and residency. Furthermore, if one is to consider that empathy is a pillar of EI, then we can draw on the research that has linked increased EI to increased wellbeing (Gallagher & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). Interventions with the specific intention of increasing wellbeing through the development of empathy remain to be developed. Until then, for the purposes of positive computing, the value of increased empathy for wellbeing derives, at the very least, from its associated decreases in unhealthy behavior relevant to technology, such as cyberbullying, self-comparison, and envy. The literature on interventions for empathy development is of mixed scientific sophistication. On the one hand, there are clear operational guidelines, such as Roman Krznaric’s “Six Habits of Highly Empathic People,”1 but although the veracity of these guidelines might be considered self-evident, they lack scientific backing. A subset of empathy interventions has been thoroughly evaluated in peer-reviewed journals, and an even smaller subset has been evaluated in independent randomized control trials. Studies have demonstrated some of the challenges to carrying out independent evaluations of socioemotional learning interventions. In one study (Owens, Granader, Humphrey, & Baron-Cohen, 2008), researchers compared LEGO therapy with the Social Use of Language Programme and with a no-intervention control group. The programs were evaluated as social skills interventions for school-age children with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome but are similar to those used for general populations, and the results revealed the importance of using multiple measures for these kinds of studies. For example, on an autism-specific social interaction score (the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale), the LEGO therapy group improved more than the other groups. On a maladaptive behavior score, both the LEGO and the Social Use of Language Programme groups fared better than the control group, and for communication and socialization skills there was a nonsignifiant trend. Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotions (created by Simon Baron-Cohen) is a computer-based multimedia program designed to help develop empathy (particularly for those with autism spectrum disorders). Video, audio (i.e., voice intonation), and storytelling are used to demonstrate an impressive 412 emotions in 24 categories. As a bonus, user progress is rewarded with the opportunity to manipulate the emotional response of a young Daniel Radcliffe (the actor who played Harry Potter). Whereas Mind Reading is typically used as a therapeutic intervention, Roots of Empathy is a preventative measure.2 Roots of Empathy is a highly successful school program for which babies and their mothers visit a classroom on a regular basis throughout the year. The children in the class develop empathy by observing the baby’s emotions and behaviors in response to toys, to their mother, and to the class. This program has been shown to have a significant impact on reducing bullying and violence in schools (which suggests that online interventions for empathy could reduce online bullying and aggressive behaviors). An intervention such as Roots of Empathy is decidedly not technological and, as such, is inspirational in that it shows how very simple and natural human interactions are enough to increase empathy significantly in developing children and to lead to concrete results in the form of decreased antisocial behavior. Just as adding names and subjectivity to the story of mice at the start of this chapter increased reader empathy for the mice, and just as photographs of people in news stories increase our connection with political issues, fostering empathy does not have to be complicated or high tech. It is a natural product of human biology for which simple nudges and experiences can go a long way. We discuss low-tech approaches to developing empathy within digital environments later under “Design Implications.” Of course, there are more difficult cases, such as when ingrained historical prejudices or conflict obstruct empathy development, and in these cases more advanced technologies are already showing they may have a very powerful role to play.
Technologies for the Development of Empathy Of course, it is this challenge to which many researchers in affective computing have turned. Affective-computing researchers work on building technologies that can recognize and in some cases even express emotions as feedback for their human users. Although we suggest caution with designing machines to solicit or express empathy in human ways (which could become emotionally confusing or potentially undermine our ability to set sensible priorities), there are already some applications of virtual empathy that show very promising results for positive computing (see the work of Timothy Bickmore and his sidebar at the end of this chapter). There is also a clear role for this research to help technologies respond better to users as well as to help us understand human empathy better. Rana El Kaliouby, Rosalind Picard, and Simon Baron-Cohen (2006), for example, have acknowledged the overlap of goals and challenges between autism research and affective-computing research and suggest that closer collaboration will lead to benefits to both areas. In the computer-supported education context, one study (Cheng, Chiang, Ye, & Cheng, 2010) has given evidence for the efficacy of using collaborative 3D virtual learning environments to enhance empathy. This program, like the Mind Reading program discussed earlier, was developed for people with empathy-related special needs. With the move from desktop to touch-screen computers, doors have burst wide open in the area of special-needs support. For example, the improved usability and increased access made possible by mobile technologies has fueled incredible growth in the development of apps for children with disabilities (the advocacy group Autism Speaks maintains a list of dozens of apps for supporting children with autism at its website autismspeaks.org). Moreover, there are also an increasing number of apps, games, and other technologies for developing factors such as empathy for the general population. Developing Empathy through Gaming Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing trustworthy media reviews to help parents make informed choices about family media consumption. It rates various forms of media on scales for criteria such as positive role models, violence, scariness, and consumerism. Along with a list of books and movies that promote empathy, they have a list of top games for empathy building. These games target a variety of platforms from handheld devices and console games to mobile and computer-based games. Herotopia, for example, is a computer game in which kids combat bullying. Kids at Home is an app that allows kids to learn about diverse cultures and lifestyles by visiting other kids’ homes virtually, and Mission US: Flight to Freedom is a computer-simulation game in which players experience the life of a slave girl in pre–Civil War America. The diversity and creativity in these early examples is inspiring, and games for empathy are by no means restricted to children’s titles. Games have some magical powers when it comes to supporting empathy. They have the capacity to provide us with “firsthand” (even embodied) experience of scenarios that would otherwise remain totally foreign to us. As vehicles for role playing, they allow us to “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” as close to literally as possible. Combine these affordances with the growing work in games for social good, and a new era of empathy-promoting games becomes visible on the horizon. For example, browse the selection at GamesforChange.org, and you’ll find that making social change requires empathy and that many of these games are designed to promote it. Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan (2010) provide a review and insight into designing games that foster empathy, along with a series of design heuristics that we’ll come back to in the design section of this chapter. Role-playing games designed to promote conflict resolution have gotten special attention for their ability to allow players not only to envision but to take first-person action from the perspective of two different sides of a conflict. For example, in the multi-award-winning PeaceMaker game,3 players variably take on the role of Israeli prime minister and Palestinian president, and in both conditions they must choose strategies to make a “two-state solution” viable. The players have the choice to take conciliatory or hostile actions and to pursue collaborative or one-sided initiatives. The game provides players with real-life consequences to political decisions and shows how even small gestures can contribute to peaceful solutions. It incorporates real photos and video, which not only lend the experience authenticity but also engage players emotionally (i.e., empathically). The makers of Frontiers, a 3D online multiplayer game, took the popular HalfLife 2D game (a first-person shooter) and modified it into a moving and realistic immersion into the migration paths and borderlands inhabited by political refugees. Players can elect to play the role of an escaping refugee or a member of the border patrol. The game makers, a group of Austrian artists, describe Frontiers as both a game and a work of art that “aims to enhance the perception and understanding of the migrants situation above a causal level of catastrophic news.”4 These are just a few examples of games designed to foster empathy. The number of such games in the name of art, entertainment, and social change is on the rise, and we hope to see a corresponding increase in evaluations of the impacts of these games in the research literature in the near future. Certainly, the literature demonstrating the prosocial benefits of playing prosocial games is relevant here. Tobias Greitemeyer, Silvia Osswald, and Markus Brauer (2010), for example, have given evidence that prosocial games increase interpersonal empathy and decrease schadenfreude. Further along the immersion scale, the power of highly embodied virtual experience to increase levels of empathy and even altruistic behavior has been indicated by research in virtual reality (see Jeremy Bailenson’s sidebar on virtual reality for empathy and prosocial behavior in chapter 11). Because these studies have measured an increase in prosocial action (rather than specifically empathic response), we come back to them in the following chapter on compassion and altruism. Research Technologies for Understanding Empathy Beyond promotional or therapeutic interventions, technologies can also be used to help us better understand factors of wellbeing such as empathy. Computer vision tools and affective-computing techniques, for example, have been used to explore parent–child interactions and how empathy is developed (Messinger et al., 2014). Although we have not included these types of applications within the scope of positive computing, we believe they represent a closely related field of research in which psychologists and engineers will need to work together. Technologies for Group Empathy Although the term empathy is most frequently used in the context of one-on-one interaction, it can also be extended to groups of people. Certainly, we can empathize with a group of people when we come to know something of their suffering. Likewise, it seems reasonable to assume that good leaders and, in an organizational context, effective managers will empathize with the joys and struggles of their team. Take, for example, David Caruso and Peter Salovey’s (2004) notion of the emotionally intelligent manager. Arguably, managers and leaders need an ability not only to empathize one on one, but also to attend to the pulse of a team’s or organization’s emotional state. We suspect that technologies have a unique capacity to make this feasible—in other words, to help leaders to better understand the collected emotions of a large group of people and thus to be able to react to them more appropriately (e.g., through better management practices or policies). The benefit of such technology is even more clear in the modern workplace in which coworkers are distributed over time and space and meet only on occasion and in which most communication occurs digitally. Imagine this scenario: Mr. W. E. Coyote is a director at ACME Inc., an innovative company with 1,200 employees. The fast-growing company has recognized employee wellbeing as important, both for its own sake and as a way to increase productivity and staff retention. Mr. Coyote would like to measure the impact that his new policies have on the subjective wellbeing of his staff, including their engagement and life satisfaction. Fortunately, the company has an active community in its Enterprise Social Network, and the forums in its knowledge-management system are thriving. He can’t help but think there must be some way he could use this information—which employees make publically available to the whole organization—to gauge the impact of his policy and management interventions. Can technology help organizational decision making by supporting EI with information about employees’ emotional state? We think it can (Calvo, Pardo, & Peters, 2013), and, indeed, companies such as Kanjoya are already commercializing products that use data from customer forums and enterprise social networks to turn “unstructured data and digital texts into actionable insights,”5 communicated through various visualizations, in order to help organizations improve leadership decision making and customer experience. New data algorithms can also be trained to detect people’s emotions based not only on written text, but also from speech, writing, facial expression, voice, and physiology. Behavioral data (e.g., time factors) could be integrated to highlight possible anomalies in organizational “circadian rhythms” (i.e., too many employees working late hours, a likely precursor to poor performance and retention). We have also speculated on the potential for similar tools to be used in the other direction—toward developing leader self-awareness. For example, Daniel Goleman (2000) identifies six leadership styles:
Leadership styles, whether more authoritarian or more permissive, impact employee performance and even wellbeing. Therefore, helping leaders to recognize these elements in themselves can help them to leverage their strengths, change unhelpful approaches, and adapt to various contexts and circumstances as appropriate.
Design Implications As mentioned earlier, one of our greatest design challenges will be devising ways to manage, technically resolve, or compensate for the lack of empathy cues and plurality inherent to current technology-mediated communication (particularly if it continues to comprise an increasing percentage of our interaction with others). In theory, adding more accurate sensory channels (video, audio, tactile, olfactory, etc.) should begin to reduce the social filter, but current technologies are still far from matching face-to-face interaction, and, perhaps, rather than attempting to force various digital media to approximate face-to-face interaction, we should be looking to medium-specific strategies for better results. The uptake of emoticons is a perfect example of a crowd-based design solution to computer limitations. In a chat box, I can’t indicate to you that I’m sad, excited, or being facetious, so I append representative emotional symbols to compensate. When hoping for some sympathy, the tearing sad face does the trick. We have a friend who insists there should be a typographic style (like italics or bold) for indicating sarcasm. Along these lines, one approach to improving our ability to express emotion and empathize via online interaction may come in the form of more sophisticated approaches to annotation and labeling. Preventative and Active Design Approaches Custom technologies dedicated to fostering empathy will make up only a percentage of work in this area, whereas strategies integrated into other kinds of software have the potential to reach wider audiences. Finding ways to prevent loss of empathy or to support it in the context of other online activities could prove beneficial to large numbers of developers across multiple industries. For example, as we begin to separate those aspects of social networks that decrease empathy from those that are neutral or promotional, we can begin to redesign interfaces and interaction for a better user experience. These measures could decrease negative experiences such as cyberbullying but also increase positive experiences via increases in positive emotions and empathic joy. Likewise, as we begin to separate those aspects of digital games that decrease rather than increase empathy, we can begin to lead a shift in game design that embraces positive outcomes and player wellbeing and moves away from design features with measurably deleterious effects. Imagine a generation of people who grew up on games that developed their empathy for others and helped them learn to care for and collaborate with each other—we’d sign up for that future. Low-Tech Approaches—the Power of Graphics and Narrative Some empathy design interventions will remain decidedly low tech. Already, designers frequently add high-impact photographs of people and faces to communicate the humanity behind otherwise faceless stories and issues. By way of example, charity organizations have been moving from an older approach of including imagery of those suffering in extreme ways to including imagery of those being empowered by charitable assistance to improve their lives, regaining joy and autonomy (e.g., a child dying of malnutrition versus a newly thriving community tending to the livestock provided by charitable donation). Oversensitivity to the feelings of others can be considered a downside or malfunction of the regulation aspects of empathy. A feeling of being overwhelmed or an inability to cope in the face of another’s suffering can lead to depression, hopelessness, and lack of action. Allowing for empathic joy in the face of great social challenges adds empowerment to the picture, moving empathic concern toward practical action. Based on appraisal studies, it has been noted that “feelings of compassion should increase when the individual feels capable of coping with the target’s suffering. Appraisals of low coping ability, by contrast, should activate distress in the face of another’s suffering, which countervails compassion-related tendencies when resources are low,” and that “sadness and fear are associated with appraisals of feeling weak, powerless and unable to cope” (Roseman, Spindel, & Jose, 1990 and Hoffman 1981, quoted in Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). This really crosses over to the subject of compassion and altruism, which we move to in the next chapter. Nevertheless, the example of charities’ image choice shows the emotional power that simple design decisions can have. Moving to the workplace, we come across many contexts in which human strangers must interact with each other online to conduct business and without the benefit of face-to-face interaction. In customer-service scenarios, such as call centers, both customers and representatives may find it difficult to empathize with each other, increasing the chances of impatience, customer/job dissatisfaction, or conflict. Simply increasing information channels (such as moving to video chat) would be intrusive in this context, but low-tech solutions, such as showing customer-type images to reps for each call or vice versa—displaying rep images to the customer for online interactions—could prove useful strategies for improving empathy and overall wellbeing. High-Tech Approaches—Role Playing and Embodiment In light of early research in digital games and virtual reality, it seems reasonable to imagine that these technologies’ ability to support role play and full-body experience will have significant impact on the use of technology for developing empathy. Embodiment, whether as part of virtual-reality environments or gesture-based videogame play, has the unique ability to activate the empathy-promotional benefits of synchronous movement and to allow people to experience, as close to literally as possible, lives, circumstances, and times that would otherwise be impossible for them to experience. In one study, Peter Yellowlees and James Cook (2006) created a virtual psychiatry clinic in the virtual world Second Life to promote empathy for people with serious mental illness. By touring the clinic, participants could experience firsthand the auditory and visual hallucinations associated with psychosis. The majority of more than 500 visitors to the clinic who voluntarily responded to the researchers’ survey said it helped them better understand this experience. Heuristics for the Design of Empathy Games Belman and Flanagan (2010) speculate on a state of game play they call “empathetic play” in which “players intentionally try to infer the thoughts and feelings of people or groups represented in the game (cognitive empathy), and/or they prepare themselves for an emotional response, for example by looking for similarities between themselves and characters in the game (emotional empathy).” They further speculate that games for empathy must deliberately support the player in entering a state of empathetic play and that it should not be assumed that the content is enough to elicit empathy as intended. This recommendation is formulated as one of their four principles for the design of games to foster empathy. They draw these principles from their experience working with designers of “games for good.” The principles, although pending evaluation at the time of this writing, are founded in current practice and related empathy research:
We encourage you to see the full paper for a full explanation of these principles along with some exemplary cases. Technologies for empathy are still in their infancy, but it is an impressively enthusiastic infancy. Apps as a format have been embraced by those seeking to support empathy development in children, and the new wave of designers interested in creating games for social change has fueled a slew of sophisticated vicarious experiences created to deepen our understanding of, concern for, and desire to assist those in dire circumstances. Moreover, as discussed, great art has always played a role in developing empathy and compassion. Now imagine the impact of an experience that converges the literary prowess of Victor Hugo and the artistic genius of Van Gogh with the interaction and embodiment made possible by the modern digital games medium. Should such a transformative convergence take form, expect to see us first in line to play. |
Notes
1. For these habits, see greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_habits_of_highly _empathic_people1 or Krznaric’s video at goo.gl/7Axbg.
2. For Roots of Empathy, see the website at rootsofempathy.org.
3. PeaceMaker can be found at peacemakergame.com.
4. From the game makers’ website at goldextra.com.
5. For Kanjoya, see kanjoya.com/crane.
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