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| 11 Compassion and Altruism
To be a superhero is to have compassion, whereas to be a supervillain is to be entirely without it. It’s not enough to experience empathy if you’re a superhero because heroes need to take action as well. We daydream about being superheroes, not only because it would be great to fly and wear skin-tight unitards, but also because superheroes are fantastically empowered to make things right. Compassion comes packaged with that all-important desire to act and make change, but less well known is the fact that compassion is also an antidote to the pain and distress that comes with empathy. In other words, compassion can be seen as a form of resilience. But you were probably expecting a source with slightly more scientific integrity than DC Comics. In terms of the academic literature, compassion, like empathy, suffers from a long-standing lack of consensus with regard to a precise definition. In this chapter, we favor those conceptualizations that view compassion as a distinct emotion based on its unique behavioral and physiological imprint. For example, based on a cross-disciplinary review of the research, Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas (2010) define compassion as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.” The key words in this definition are emotion, suffering, and desire to help. According to the literature, compassion is considered both an emotional state and a trait (and sometimes a motivation); it is distinguished from love in that it arises as a result of witnessing suffering; it is distinctive from empathy in that the feelings aroused do not necessarily mirror those witnessed in another; and it elicits approach behavior and a caring desire to help (which don’t necessarily follow empathy). Although compassion may arise from empathic concern, it can be distinguished by the accompanying desire to take action. This action-oriented aspect of compassion leads us seamlessly into a discussion of altruism. If compassion describes a desire to act, altruism is the action. Altruism is generally described as a type of behavior rather than an emotional state. According to much of the literature on altruism, an altruistic act is one that confers benefit on someone else at a cost to oneself (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). As you may suspect, there will be much overlap in the technology examples and strategies we gave in the previous chapter and those found in this one simply because, although empathy and compassion are different, they do, of course, frequently come together. For instance, although the focus of a particular game may be to encourage perspective taking and vicarious feeling (aspects of empathy), this will probably be in aid of inspiring the player to take compassionate action. Nevertheless, it’s important for technology designers to distinguish the two because empathy can lead to either wellbeing or distress, and compassion may be the difference. Any discussion of compassion should include compassion turned toward the self, or self-compassion, which Buddhist psychology implicates as necessary for compassion toward others and which scientific literature has identified as a significant predictor of wellbeing. So, you can also expect some links to chapter 8, herein. Finally, the mere act of bearing witness to compassion and altruism has its own benefits for wellbeing, so we look at the unique characteristics of inspiration or “elevation” and how technology can be used to promote it. To our great benefit, the past decade has seen a new wave of psychologists, neuroscientists, and even technologists begin to take on compassion and altruism like never before. There’s even a business case for it. Facebook, for example, has hosted several “Compassion Research Days” with the goal of using the science of emotions and relationships to develop features that reduce conflict and increase understanding among people. After all, when people are antisocial or cruel on Facebook, it’s bad for business, and if design can make a difference, everyone wins. This new energy around the science of compassion is likely fueled by the growing interest in wellbeing research in general, but also by movements for social change and on the emerging research showing how compassion could make our world a far better place to live in for everyone. What better reason than to dedicate the following pages to the work of these researchers and to the designers who have followed their lead and begun to explore the capacity for new technologies to play a part in this work? Research on Compassion and Altruism
Compassion, Empathy, Love, Sadness?What’s the Difference? It can be difficult to disentangle compassion from other similar and interrelated emotions such as love, empathy, pity, and sadness. However, the evidence for its uniqueness is summarized elegantly in the review by Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010). Their synthesis draws on findings in psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience to highlight a number of important ways in which compassion is distinctive, including the following characteristics:
Grit Hein and Tania Singer (2008) point to another stirring difference between empathy and compassion. Pointing to theory of mind (one’s ability to know what another is thinking) and how this cognitive aspect can be separate from the shared-feeling aspect of empathy (a fact we discussed in relation to psychopathy in chapter 10), the authors explain: “Empathy can have a dark side, for example when it is used to find the weakest spot of a person to make her or him suffer, which is far from showing compassion with the other. It is suggested that empathy has to be transformed into sympathy or empathic concern [we would suggest compassion] in order to elicit prosocial motivation.” Sympathy is often used in a way that is roughly synonymous with compassion, especially before the twentieth century. For example, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and David Hume used the term sympathy (Hein & Singer, 2008; Wispe, 1986). We propose that the combination of concepts we have just described might be visualized as something like what’s shown in figure 11.1.
Figure 11.1 The ability for compassion to work as a healthier, more effective alternative to empathic distress is also evident in the brain. Olga Klimecki and colleagues have found that while empathy training activates distress and associated neural networks, compassion training elicits activity in brain regions associated with positive affect and affiliation. They concluded that “findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others” (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2013). The implications for preventing burnout, supporting resilience, and promoting wellbeing are significant. Compassion as Mediated by Fairness Meg studied hard all night but failed her exam. Mog didn’t bother studying, chose to play poker all night instead, and also failed her exam. Who are you inspired to help? You’re probably even a bit irritated by Mog. Unsurprisingly, research has found that whether we feel compassion or anger for someone who is suffering is determined by our appraisal of their deservedness, or how responsible for their condition we feel they are. As Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010) put it, “Studies indicate that appraisals of low controllability and responsibility on the part of the target are critical to the elicitation of compassion and not anger.” The influence of blame has implications for those seeking to leverage technology for social change. Prejudice, stigma, and perceived difference often lead people to attribute blame to those who are suffering. For example, various studies have shown that people are likely to blame (and therefore less likely to feel compassion for) people who are suffering as a result of homelessness, obesity, or drug abuse. Tackling the perceptions that sit at the root of blame will be prerequisite to fostering compassion around similar issues. Fairness also makes an appearance in the literature on altruism. According to research, there is a cross-cultural human value for fairness (likely owing to the evolutionary benefits of a cooperative society), and this desire for fairness is manifest in what researchers call “altruistic punishment.” Laboratory experiments that engage people in gamelike interactions in which real money is at stake have shown that people are frequently willing to take action that punishes someone else for being unfair at a cost to themselves (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). This example of “altruistic punishment” is not the kind of warm-hearted, generous, prosocial act one generally associates with the word altruism. Of course, in part that’s because altruism is dealt with in research as a behavior rather than as a virtue. At the same time, because punishing the selfish helps enforce prosocial norms (fairness, justice), altruistic punishment can be viewed as benefiting a social good. Despite the very familiar effects of fairness on both compassion and altruism, there remains a conspicuously missing piece to the puzzle. If an appraisal of fairness is essential to both our experience of compassion and our altruistic behavior, how does one explain those people (often considered the wisest in our societies) who manage to experience compassion and act altruistically despite incredible unfairness and in parallel with appraisals of dramatic injustice? Compassion in the Face of Injustice Clearly, for most of us most of the time, fairness has a strong and predictable influence on the likelihood of compassion arising within us. Yet there are people who work compassionately with drug abusers and criminals, and there are widely admired cultural heroes who maintain compassion resolutely in the face of extreme oppression. Buddhist psychology provides a lucid explanation for this phenomenon by explaining that nonjudgmental compassion is not an exception to the rule but in fact describes the very nature of compassion itself, visible when our response is unmediated and uninhibited by the effects of other emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear. Buddhist psychology defines compassion as an empathic concern that is, by nature, unaffected by negative behavior in another (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, n.d.). It is other emotions (i.e., anger, hatred, fear, desire, sadness etc.) that respond to stigma, righteousness, and notions of deservedness, and these emotions can inhibit compassion. The Dalai Lama explains, We must be clear about what we mean by compassion. Many forms of compassionate feeling are mixed with desire and attachment. For instance, the love parents feel of their child is often strongly associated with their own emotional needs. … True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively. … When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. His definition speaks of compassion as involving an attitude, a motivation, a cognition, and an emotion. Specifically, it includes “commitment” (motivation), which involves “reasoning” (i.e., perspective taking, appraisal of one’s similarity to others), and empathy. Further, he emphasizes that although “developing this kind of compassion is not at all easy!” it is decidedly possible. The deliberate cultivation of compassion is now being played out in Western psychology, and Buddhist compassion practices are proving effective in various contexts from promoting resilience among care workers to treating mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (we discuss some of this work in the section on interventions in this chapter). One poignant example of compassion as essentially nonjudgmental is the Buddhist practice of cultivating it for one’s enemies. Jack Kornfield (2011) describes an encounter with a group of Tibetan nuns who when they were teenagers had survived years of imprisonment, torture, and depravation as part of Chinese government oppression. Asked if they were ever afraid during these years, they responded “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards?that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.” Few of us have experience with such a highly developed level of compassion, so the notion that it is possible not to feel hatred for torturers (let alone one’s own) is hard to fathom. Moreover, it’s worth acknowledging that emotions such as anger and fear are useful survival instincts and that their existence alongside empathy has probably helped us protect ourselves. However, relying on these emotions to guide our actions does confer a cost. We know emotions such as anger and fear are hard on the mind and body, and when they carry on unregulated, they become hatred or chronic anxiety. Furthermore, they motivate quick but not necessarily reasoned or wise action. The monks who cultivate compassion for their enemies do appraise their situations as unjust, and they actively struggle to end the injustices (Buddhists from Tibet, Burma, and previously Vietnam are examples), but at the same time they work to reduce the development of self-destructive emotions such as hatred and terror?emotions that can hinder both individual resilience and wise action. From this perspective, the nuns’ admission that losing their compassion was their greatest fear seems incredibly reasoned. Their compassion was neither a denial of circumstances nor blind polyannaism, but rather a key to their resilience. Losing it would have meant losing their greatest asset in surviving such trauma. Matthieu Ricard (2007), among others who have worked intimately with Tibetan refugees, observes that this population shows fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of their spiritual practice (see also Elsass, Carlsson, & Husum, 2010). Neuroplastic changes have been demonstrated in neuroimaging studies that differentiate the brains of expert and novice practitioners of a number of meditative practices, including compassion cultivation (Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008). The ability to cultivate compassion in a way that is disentangled from associated self-destructive emotions is utterly necessary if compassion is to support emotional resilience even in the face of difficulty and injustice. The Buddhist approach presents us with the possibility that we can develop our capacity for compassion to a point where the primal responses of anger and fear have less power and where compassion can serve as a healthier regulator of action?a cognitive-emotional experience that both builds resilience and increases our wellbeing. The example of the nuns seems to describe compassion training at Olympic proportions, but their existence as well as research studies on compassion practice give evidence that cultivating compassion is possible and that each step on the path increases wellbeing. Paul Gilbert (2005) for example has developed methods for people to increase their compassion in order to improve their mental health. Gilbert and Sue Procter (2006) define compassionate abilities as including “non-judgment related to the ability to be non-critical of the other’s situation or behaviors.” They add that all the aspects of compassion “require the emotional tone of warmth.” This “nonjudgment” and “warmth” turn out to be critical to the wellbeing benefits of self-compassion and elements previously missing from many other psychotherapeutic approaches. Altruism - Why Bother One question that has intrigued scientists for centuries is why humans would be moved to help others without benefit to themselves and even at great cost. Although colloquially we think of altruism as being defined by benevolence and a refreshing lack of ulterior motive, many researchers have been little satisfied with such an explanation and have made a case for ulterior motives as diverse as expected reciprocity, reputation building, peer pressure, fear of punishment, and increasing one’s chances of mating (a number of studies show that indicators of compassion and altruism increase one’s perceived attractiveness). Social exchange theory (Homans, 1958) suggests that all behavior (altruism included) is regulated by cost?benefit analysis (and made on the basis that benefit will outweigh cost). Theories of altruism based on egoistic motivators are an important contribution to the research. After all, we are indeed influenced by social pressure, and compassionate mates make better parents, so it’s sensible they would attract. But we can’t help but feel that if we left you with a sense that fostering altruism was just about helping your users get their mojo on, it would quickly lose its appeal as a potential focus for positive computing. Fortunately, there are also research-based conceptualizations that indicate altruism just might be motivated by empathy and compassion and that describe it as an other-centered phenomenon. In another of Charles Darwin’s way-ahead-of-his-time moments, he described compassion (he used the term sympathy) as stronger than any other of our social instincts and as utterly logical from an evolutionary standpoint because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, quoted in Goetz et al., 2010). To put it simply, compassion and altruism are evolutionarily beneficial because they are prosocial: they allow for collaboration within one’s group, but also for cooperation with those outside of it. Compassion also allows for the caring of vulnerable offspring, which not only ensures greater group survival but would have been necessary for increasingly intelligent humans to survive the corresponding period of helplessness required by a larger brain (a newborn giraffe can stand up and run within an hour of being born, but humans are utterly dependent for years as their complicated brains mature). The Dalai Lama (n.d.) similarly articulates the evolutionary imperative of compassion: “The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others.” Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Adam Smith are among those who have pointed to empathy and compassion as a trigger for altruism. More recently, in the 1980s, C. Daniel Batson began to explore ways of testing motivations behind altruism experimentally in order to disentangle the various possible motivations (self-focused or other-focused). As a result of his findings (Batson, 1991, 2002), Batson proposed the “empathy?altruism hypothesis,” which states that the likely cause of altruistic motivation is empathy. That’s not to say that all altruistic behavior is always triggered exclusively by empathy, but Batson’s work is critical in making the point that nonegoistic altruism does in fact exist. Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center are sources of a wealth of relevant research in this area. One paradoxical and fascinating element of altruism is that when it does stem from an other-centered compassionate response, then it seems to confer significant benefits to the self?namely, measurable increases to wellbeing. Compassion and Wellbeing One interesting, even paradoxical, thing about compassion is that despite the fact that it involves witnessing suffering (and often leads to action at a cost to oneself), it has been shown in many different studies to confer benefits of wellbeing, including increased social connectedness and stress-reduction. Compassion reduces stress (Cosley, McCoy, Saslow, & Epel, 2010) in a way that doesn’t require the kind of escape from events that other forms of stress release do. Whereas empathic distress can lead to elevated heart rate and skin conductance associated with stress (fight or flight responses), compassion responses trigger heart-rate deceleration and lowered skin conductance consistent with the brain prepping for caregiving and other-focused attention (Goetz et al., 2010). In other words, whereas stress prevents us from being able to help others in need (because it triggers fight-or-flight states rather than affiliative states), and not being able to help others in need causes us stress (as in empathic distress), compassion may be an antidote. The stress-buffering effect of compassion versus empathy-related distress is manifest in the phenomena of “compassion satisfaction” versus “burnout” among aid workers (Conrad & Kellar-Guenther, 2006; Thomas, 2013). If that weren’t enough, compassion has also been described as an instrument against fear, anger, envy, and vengeance (Goleman, 2003), and studies have linked compassionate lifestyles to greater longevity (Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003; Okun, Yeung, & Brown, 2013). Be nice, live longer. What’s amazing is that just the act of volunteering is not enough; you have to be doing it for the right reasons. Morris Okun, Ellen WanHeung Yeung, and Stephanie Brown (2013) found that older adults volunteering for self-oriented reasons had mortality rates similar to nonvolunteers, whereas those who volunteered for other-centered reasons experienced lower mortality. This suggests it is compassion itself that contributes to our wellbeing, perhaps owing to its very beneficial physiological effects. Researchers have hypothesized that compassion’s effect on wellbeing might also be explained by the way it supports social connectedness and/or by the way it helps us to broaden our perspective beyond ourselves (both depression and anxiety are linked to self-focus). (For an accessible review of the literature behind compassion and its influence on wellbeing, see Seppala, 2013.) If the design of technologies can encourage the development of compassionate attitudes and can elicit compassionate states in the face of social problems, we will not only be helping to address those problems, we’ll also be improving the wellbeing of those experiencing compassion. Self-Compassion and Wellbeing Although we have consistently described compassion as “other-centered,” this attitude can also (more paradoxes) be directed toward the self and with remarkably positive consequences. As mentioned previously, self-compassion “entails being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical; perceiving one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as isolating; and holding painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than over-identifying with them” (Neff, 2011). When people can react toward themselves in a caring, nonjudgmental way, as they would to a close friend or child, then wellbeing benefits manifest. The work of Paul Gilbert has validated the effectiveness of cultivating compassion for the self as a method for treating people who suffer from extreme self-criticism and shame. More so than self-esteem, compassion is linked to affiliative physiological responses and warm emotional tone, which, according to Gilbert (2010), are critical in these cases. According to his work compassion generates essential elements of physiologically felt nonjudgmental nurturing and love that are necessary to wellbeing. Perhaps cultivating these nurturing qualities toward oneself increases their availability in response to others, as both the trait and practice of self-compassion has been correlated with increased compassion for others (Reyes, 2011). The same study shows correlations with increased self-care capacity, relatedness, autonomy, and sense of self. It has also been associated with increased psychological functioning and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and rumination (Neff, Kirkpatrick & Rude, 2007). Other studies show greater self-compassion predicts lower incidents of automatic thoughts, interpersonal cognitive distortions, and, as mentioned previously, Internet addiction. Could methods for cultivating the components of self-compassion (or reducing their polar opposites) be used within the context of games and other technologies as a measure for decreasing addiction? Altruism and Wellbeing?in Giving of Ourselves, We Receive Wellbeing benefits extend to altruism as well. Groundbreaking work has shown that, despite what our inner skeptics might assume, human beings (from as young as infancy) derive greater happiness from giving something away (or even from watching things being given to others) than they do from receiving those things themselves (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). From another angle, studies have found that across cultures, the amount of money people spend on other people correlates strongly to their personal wellbeing, regardless of their income (Aknin et al., 2013). According to Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (2013), “across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.” The idea that giving produces positive emotions that exceed receiving could have many positive implications for technology design. Although these studies are carried out largely in the context of giving material things (objects and money), there are other ways to “give,” and we may find that there are benefits to the giving and receiving of praise, gratitude, and endorsement that goes on virtually. Many of us have experienced the warm fuzzies conferred by an opportunity to praise a friend on a social network or publically endorse a colleague for skills we admire. Interestingly, these warm fuzzies also emerge when we virally share images and videos of people helping others at some cost to themselves (for example, the truck driver who rescued bear cubs from a trash can, the homeless man who found $40,000 and returned it, or any of the other spontaneous moments of altruism to which we deeply enjoy bearing witness). These acts are worth sharing because they inspire us, which leads us to another trigger for compassion. Altruism and Inspiration?More Links to Wellbeing If we attempt to explain altruism based purely on self-serving motivations, we find ourselves in a pickle when we come up against the fact that we are absolutely giddy at seeing other people do altruistic things. Jonathan Haidt (2005) uses the term elevation to describe the “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.” Research has also demonstrated the effects of elevation at work showing that self-sacrificing behavior among leaders can increase commitment and compassion among employees (Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010) and that elevation predicts volunteerism even three months after an inspiring experience (Cox, 2010). Inspiration carries with it a motivator to altruistic action that is separate from empathy. When we are inspired to act, we seem to be motivated by a renewed feeling of faith in human goodness and our ability to play a part. Moreover, elevation seems to be a vector for the spread of altruism, which according to research can lead to a chain reaction within social networks (Fowler & Christakis, 2010). But it is the description of the heartfelt feelings evoked from one study participant that says it best: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed” (Haedt, 2005). The links between compassion, altruism, and inspiration are also evident in the brain according to the work of Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues. Yang’s neuroscientific research in this area (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009) has shown that the neural circuits involved in interoceptive processing are activated in both admiration for virtue and compassion for another’s pain. This work suggests that both states involve recognizing emotions and reflecting on one’s own behaviors in response (Immordino-Yang, 2011). (See her sidebar in this chapter for further inspiration.) If we know that bearing witness to altruism motivates kindness, compassion, and further altruism, why don’t news programs spend more time on stories about compassionate people, altruistic action or progress as part of their lineup? How often are reports on current atrocities piled one against the other and perhaps capped off with a sport or beauty update? Many find the news overwhelming and avoid it, others watch without hope of being able to do anything in response, so think how much would change if news programs took the advice of empathy game-design researchers and ended reports with suggestions or depictions of related compassionate action? Recent initiatives such as the Huffington Post’s Good News section and the Good News Network have responded to the desire for positive news. However, these remain separate from the mainstream. We look forward to more balanced reporting in mainstream news that supports compassionate response and acknowledgement of progress instead of just bleeding leads. You’ll forgive us for dwelling so long on the research behind compassion, altruism, and its links to wellbeing, but without a sufficiently sophisticated grasp of these phenomena we would be little equipped to design genuinely helpful interventions to foster their development. Now, on to the interventions.
Interventions and Strategies for Cultivating Compassion and Altruism What’s interesting is the way in which compassion meditation does not dull one’s emotional reaction to pain (to make it bearable) but instead results in an alternate response, specifically reducing amygdala activation associated with threat perception but increasing responsiveness to suffering (Desbordes et al., 2012; Lutz et al., 2008). This seems to support the idea that compassion is highly sensitive to suffering but responds with caring and approach rather than with distress or avoidance. In other words, in empathic distress we appraise another’s suffering as threatening (to our sense of security perhaps), but when we feel compassion, we do not experience this threat response. Both of these studies also give evidence that the changes to neural activation that come as a result of compassion meditation can be enduring. In compassion-focused therapy, Gilbert and colleagues have used multiple methods for eliciting and developing compassionate responses toward the self (see, e.g., Gilbert, 2010 and the edited volume, Gilbert, 2005). In order to foster feelings of warmth, they guide patients to bring to mind an image that, for them, represents their ideal of caring and compassion. In another intervention, patients write themselves compassionate letters. Psychologists also employ psychoeducation?that is, they explain to patients, using imagery, that just as images of food or sex are enough to elicit physiological responses of hunger or arousal, internal criticism is enough to induce the physiological stress and wear caused by real external criticism. Research studies often use imagery, videos, and stories in a lab setting to induce states of compassion for experimental purposes, which suggests that these things might also be helpful in the context of technology environments, at least for priming or eliciting temporary compassionate response.
Technologies in the Development of Compassion In general, technology has been more interested in computer strengths than it has been in human ones. The ACM Digital Library lists 1,334 publications that contain the word altruism, and nearly all of them relate to computer altruism, which refers to collaborative behaviors in which a computer or software agent takes into account the interests of other computers. Excluding computer altruism leaves us with 198 studies on human cooperation, such as in business or for volunteer content generation?for example, wikis and open-source development. There are also some studies that apply the concept of altruism to new algorithms. However, very few involve the ways in which human altruism might be influenced by design. Exceptions include a study (Davis, Farnham, & Jensen, 2002) that took what we would call a preventative design approach and explored the impact of different user-interface designs on how often players cooperated rather than “short-circuited” (or defected) a collaboration. Specifically, 25 pairs of participants were randomly assigned to using either an interface with text chat but no personal profile, a text chat but with a small personal profile, or a text-to-speech system with no personal profile. The results showed that the text-to-speech system (voice) reduced uncooperative behaviors, despite its being computer generated and gender neutral. The fact that this effect was stronger than having a profile page is quite significant and provides evidence that further work is needed to understand what drives prosocial and antisocial behavior in digital environments. In a very different study, Yeoreum Lee and colleagues (2011) proposed a concept of “altruistic interaction” that requires participants to help and be helped. The participants designed and tested a fan that blows air on someone (produces an output) only when a person somewhere else blows into it (acts as input). In doing the blowing, participants felt they were helping another person, and the recipient was able to express gratitude. The design created a situation in which a user was able to help another, although issues of reciprocity and contingency blurred the line between altruism and a dependency that arguably compromised autonomy. More familiar are examples within social media and social games. For example, in the farm game Hay Day, players can choose to help other players by tapping on fruit trees that have withered. Tapping revives a tree, allowing tree owners to grow fruit once again. It’s entirely plausible that this small opportunity to help another, although only virtually, elicits some of the positive affect associated with giving. Interestingly, however, the act eventually confers benefits on the performer in the form of thank-you certificates, a virtual currency that is automatically sent when the receiver accepts their revived tree. The result is a complicated mix of giving, receiving, and expectation of reward. When I (Dorian) played this game for the first time, I enjoyed the affirming glow of having been benevolent each time I revived someone’s wilted tree. Once I got conditioned to the idea that I would receive payment, however, the glow diminished. I found that the opportunity for altruistic warmth had been replaced by the dopaminergic drive to accrue certificates, so familiar to gameplay. The idea that anticipated payback might undermine the psychophysiological benefits of compassion and altruism sound suspiciously like the capacity for extrinsic rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation. Exploring a balance between opportunities to give unconditionally and opportunities for reciprocity and social exchange in games is a fascinating area for future research and experimental design. Prosociality through Games Although the relationship between violent games and behavior has received considerable research and media attention, an increasing number of developers and researchers are exploring the impact of games designed to support positive qualities and prosocial behaviors. For example, in one study (Gentile et al., 2009) a team of researchers from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and the United States reported the effects of prosocial games on the prosocial behaviors of people within three different age groups and across three different countries over extended periods of time. Critically, the study confirmed the hypothesis (controlling for sex, age, and time spent playing) that prosocial game exposure had a positive causal relationship to prosocial behaviors and traits. The study used careful experimental designs combining correlational and longitudinal analysis and converging results. The evidence showed that just as playing violent games produces hurtful behavior, playing prosocial games produces helpful behavior in both the short and longer term. An interesting aspect of the study is how it demonstrates the way in which multiple instruments (i.e., questionnaires) can be used to measure aspects of prosocial behavior. The study combined the use of
Each of these instruments has been independently tested for reliability and validity to support their use in psychological research. More importantly for our purposes, designers can use them to measure the impact of their designs. These studies used out-of-the-box commercial games. Given the evidence that prosocial (i.e., positive) games develop altruism and other prosocial behaviors (linked to wellbeing), we expect to see greater interest in these wellbeing-boosting games from parents, teachers, developers, and gamers. Virtual Reality?Embodying Altruism and Helping Behavior In a recent study published in PLOS ONE, a team at Stanford led by Jeremy Bailenson (Rosenberg, Baughman, & Bailenson, 2013) found that augmented virtual-reality games could lead to increases in altruism. Half of the 60 participants who completed the study were given the virtual power to fly like Superman (the “superhero” condition), while the other half could fly around the same space in a virtual helicopter. In the two-by-two design, participants in each of these groups were also allocated either to helping a sick child or touring a virtual city. At the end of the virtual-reality experience, participants were confronted by “someone in need of help” (an actor). The researchers measured the time to help and the amount of help provided by those in the different experimental conditions, and the results showed that those in the superhero/child-saving condition were significantly faster and helped more than those in the touring conditions. Six of the touring participants didn’t help at all, whereas all of the former superheroes did. The researchers hypothesized that the embodied experience of helping facilitated the transfer of this behavior to the real world. As we have seen, prosocial games foster prosocial behaviors even with lower tech immersion, so the idea that embodiment might play a role in fostering compassion and altruism is unsurprising. These studies seem to suggest that giving people practice in helping (or perhaps the experience of being capable of helping?increasing their sense of coping ability) inspires prosociality even after the game is over.
Design Implications
As a start, these factors (relevance, goal congruence, and coping ability) could be considered logical targets for systems seeking to develop compassion. Digital systems that aim to connect people, to help them work together, or to allow them to help each other are in a unique position to leverage what we know about the factors that increase compassion and altruism. Take, for example, nonprofit organizations targeting poverty through microlending, such as Kiva and GoodReturn. They have two main user groups: low-income entrepreneurs who need funding for small ventures (e.g., a motorcycle to start a home-delivery service) and higher-income funders who wish to contribute to social good as microinvestors. Over the past few years, I (Rafael) have been involved in a number of small projects on behalf of GoodReturn. Although we have yet to attempt to apply compassion research to these projects, we could, for example, attempt to match charitable projects to users based on compassion-appraisal factors. In the case of first-time donors, for example, a system that could match investors with entrepreneurs based on goal congruence (or even taking into account investor coping ability) may increase the effectiveness of these sorts of environments. One interesting thing about microlending is that it includes evidence of responsibility or deservedness, which, as we have seen influences altruism positively. Those seeking funding are doing so in order to actively combat their own poverty, and they commit to repaying a loan. For situations involving charitable giving in contrast, appraisals of responsibility will be more prone to affect prosocial behavior, so designers may need to address perceptions regarding blame. Design to Address Judgment and Blame In light of the inhibiting effects that judgment has on compassion and altruism, designers seeking to foster social change will often need to address underlying perceptions having to do with issues of suffering. In some cases, this will be about correcting misconceptions (about, for example, the various roots of mental illness or poverty). In other circumstances, strategies for fostering empathy may be the first step, such as for conflict resolution (as with the PeaceMaker game). By way of example, Belman and Flanagan (2010) give the hypothetical example of a game for eliciting empathy in relation to homelessness (in aid of soliciting aid). They point out that for players who attribute blame to those who are homeless, although engaging with the game may increase their experience of empathy, they are unlikely to give time or money to a shelter because their appraisal of the situation is incongruent with their goals. In other words, people’s attitudes toward homelessness will affect whether the game leads to compassion and helping behavior or stops at empathy. Finally, there is an open question as to how technologies can be used to foster the nonjudgmental aspect of compassion, based on a notion of common humanity. Design for Inspiration As we have seen, empathy and compassion aren’t the only triggers for altruism. Based on the work by researchers such as Haidt and Immordino-Yang, allowing people to witness other people’s compassion and perhaps supporting reflection on their own behavior could prove to be another effective strategy to cultivating compassion and altruism. Supporting the sharing of inspiring images, videos, and stories across social networks provides one simple example of inspiration sharing. For other contexts, designers might use elevation as a way to support a sense of empowerment/coping ability as a way of transforming empathy into action. As mentioned previously, many charities have moved from depicting extreme suffering to depicting the fruits of helping (empowerment), suggesting that it is the latter that more consistently inspires giving. There are a number of exciting paths open to exploration in this area, and we expect to see a growing area of special interest at the intersection of inspiration, elevation, and technology over the next decade. Detecting Compassion Where technologies or games seek to foster empathy or compassion but do not have access to measuring consequential action, the question arises as to how technologists might automatically know if their efforts are at all helpful. As far as we are aware, compassion detection has yet to be attempted with affective computing (Calvo, D’Mello, Gratch, & Kappas, 2014), but research suggests there are physiological signals and facial expressions unique to compassion, so there is potential for noninvasive automatic techniques that would certainly prove helpful to work in this area. Movement and Synchrony According to fascinating research on dance, rituals, and movement, there is evidence that synchronous movement can enhance cooperative ability, compassion, and even altruism (Behrends, Muller, & Dziobek, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Although we have yet to come across videogames designed deliberately to leverage this intriguing phenomenon, the implications for physical systems such as the Wii or gesture-camera-based systems such as Kinect are self-evident. We eagerly await developments at this intersection of movement, compassion, and games. Until then, keep dancing. In conclusion, in an article on the wellbeing benefits of compassion, Emma Seppala (2013), associate director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, concludes that, “thanks to rigorous research on the benefits of compassion, we are moving toward a world in which the practice of compassion is understood to be as important for health as physical exercise and a healthful diet, empirically validated techniques for cultivating compassion are widely accessible, and the practice of compassion is taught and applied in schools, hospitals, prisons, the military, and beyond.” As technologists, we can be part of making that world. Seeing as technology is now woven into the fabric of each of these areas, we’ll need to be. | 11 Compassion and Altruism
To be a superhero is to have compassion, whereas to be a supervillain is to be entirely without it. It’s not enough to experience empathy if you’re a superhero because heroes need to take action as well. We daydream about being superheroes, not only because it would be great to fly and wear skin-tight unitards, but also because superheroes are fantastically empowered to make things right. Compassion comes packaged with that all-important desire to act and make change, but less well known is the fact that compassion is also an antidote to the pain and distress that comes with empathy. In other words, compassion can be seen as a form of resilience. But you were probably expecting a source with slightly more scientific integrity than DC Comics. In terms of the academic literature, compassion, like empathy, suffers from a long-standing lack of consensus with regard to a precise definition. In this chapter, we favor those conceptualizations that view compassion as a distinct emotion based on its unique behavioral and physiological imprint. For example, based on a cross-disciplinary review of the research, Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas (2010) define compassion as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.” The key words in this definition are emotion, suffering, and desire to help. According to the literature, compassion is considered both an emotional state and a trait (and sometimes a motivation); it is distinguished from love in that it arises as a result of witnessing suffering; it is distinctive from empathy in that the feelings aroused do not necessarily mirror those witnessed in another; and it elicits approach behavior and a caring desire to help (which don’t necessarily follow empathy). Although compassion may arise from empathic concern, it can be distinguished by the accompanying desire to take action. This action-oriented aspect of compassion leads us seamlessly into a discussion of altruism. If compassion describes a desire to act, altruism is the action. Altruism is generally described as a type of behavior rather than an emotional state. According to much of the literature on altruism, an altruistic act is one that confers benefit on someone else at a cost to oneself (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). As you may suspect, there will be much overlap in the technology examples and strategies we gave in the previous chapter and those found in this one simply because, although empathy and compassion are different, they do, of course, frequently come together. For instance, although the focus of a particular game may be to encourage perspective taking and vicarious feeling (aspects of empathy), this will probably be in aid of inspiring the player to take compassionate action. Nevertheless, it’s important for technology designers to distinguish the two because empathy can lead to either wellbeing or distress, and compassion may be the difference. Any discussion of compassion should include compassion turned toward the self, or self-compassion, which Buddhist psychology implicates as necessary for compassion toward others and which scientific literature has identified as a significant predictor of wellbeing. So, you can also expect some links to chapter 8, herein. Finally, the mere act of bearing witness to compassion and altruism has its own benefits for wellbeing, so we look at the unique characteristics of inspiration or “elevation” and how technology can be used to promote it. To our great benefit, the past decade has seen a new wave of psychologists, neuroscientists, and even technologists begin to take on compassion and altruism like never before. There’s even a business case for it. Facebook, for example, has hosted several “Compassion Research Days” with the goal of using the science of emotions and relationships to develop features that reduce conflict and increase understanding among people. After all, when people are antisocial or cruel on Facebook, it’s bad for business, and if design can make a difference, everyone wins. This new energy around the science of compassion is likely fueled by the growing interest in wellbeing research in general, but also by movements for social change and on the emerging research showing how compassion could make our world a far better place to live in for everyone. What better reason than to dedicate the following pages to the work of these researchers and to the designers who have followed their lead and begun to explore the capacity for new technologies to play a part in this work? Research on Compassion and Altruism
Compassion, Empathy, Love, Sadness - What’s the Difference? It can be difficult to disentangle compassion from other similar and interrelated emotions such as love, empathy, pity, and sadness. However, the evidence for its uniqueness is summarized elegantly in the review by Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010). Their synthesis draws on findings in psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience to highlight a number of important ways in which compassion is distinctive, including the following characteristics:
Grit Hein and Tania Singer (2008) point to another stirring difference between empathy and compassion. Pointing to theory of mind (one’s ability to know what another is thinking) and how this cognitive aspect can be separate from the shared-feeling aspect of empathy (a fact we discussed in relation to psychopathy in chapter 10), the authors explain: “Empathy can have a dark side, for example when it is used to find the weakest spot of a person to make her or him suffer, which is far from showing compassion with the other. It is suggested that empathy has to be transformed into sympathy or empathic concern [we would suggest compassion] in order to elicit prosocial motivation.” Sympathy is often used in a way that is roughly synonymous with compassion, especially before the twentieth century. For example, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and David Hume used the term sympathy (Hein & Singer, 2008; Wispe, 1986). We propose that the combination of concepts we have just described might be visualized as something like what’s shown in figure 11.1.
Figure 11.1 The ability for compassion to work as a healthier, more effective alternative to empathic distress is also evident in the brain. Olga Klimecki and colleagues have found that while empathy training activates distress and associated neural networks, compassion training elicits activity in brain regions associated with positive affect and affiliation. They concluded that “findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others” (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2013). The implications for preventing burnout, supporting resilience, and promoting wellbeing are significant. Compassion as Mediated by Fairness Meg studied hard all night but failed her exam. Mog didn’t bother studying, chose to play poker all night instead, and also failed her exam. Who are you inspired to help? You’re probably even a bit irritated by Mog. Unsurprisingly, research has found that whether we feel compassion or anger for someone who is suffering is determined by our appraisal of their deservedness, or how responsible for their condition we feel they are. As Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010) put it, “Studies indicate that appraisals of low controllability and responsibility on the part of the target are critical to the elicitation of compassion and not anger.” The influence of blame has implications for those seeking to leverage technology for social change. Prejudice, stigma, and perceived difference often lead people to attribute blame to those who are suffering. For example, various studies have shown that people are likely to blame (and therefore less likely to feel compassion for) people who are suffering as a result of homelessness, obesity, or drug abuse. Tackling the perceptions that sit at the root of blame will be prerequisite to fostering compassion around similar issues. Fairness also makes an appearance in the literature on altruism. According to research, there is a cross-cultural human value for fairness (likely owing to the evolutionary benefits of a cooperative society), and this desire for fairness is manifest in what researchers call “altruistic punishment.” Laboratory experiments that engage people in gamelike interactions in which real money is at stake have shown that people are frequently willing to take action that punishes someone else for being unfair at a cost to themselves (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). This example of “altruistic punishment” is not the kind of warm-hearted, generous, prosocial act one generally associates with the word altruism. Of course, in part that’s because altruism is dealt with in research as a behavior rather than as a virtue. At the same time, because punishing the selfish helps enforce prosocial norms (fairness, justice), altruistic punishment can be viewed as benefiting a social good. Despite the very familiar effects of fairness on both compassion and altruism, there remains a conspicuously missing piece to the puzzle. If an appraisal of fairness is essential to both our experience of compassion and our altruistic behavior, how does one explain those people (often considered the wisest in our societies) who manage to experience compassion and act altruistically despite incredible unfairness and in parallel with appraisals of dramatic injustice? Compassion in the Face of Injustice Clearly, for most of us most of the time, fairness has a strong and predictable influence on the likelihood of compassion arising within us. Yet there are people who work compassionately with drug abusers and criminals, and there are widely admired cultural heroes who maintain compassion resolutely in the face of extreme oppression. Buddhist psychology provides a lucid explanation for this phenomenon by explaining that nonjudgmental compassion is not an exception to the rule but in fact describes the very nature of compassion itself, visible when our response is unmediated and uninhibited by the effects of other emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear. Buddhist psychology defines compassion as an empathic concern that is, by nature, unaffected by negative behavior in another (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, n.d.). It is other emotions (i.e., anger, hatred, fear, desire, sadness etc.) that respond to stigma, righteousness, and notions of deservedness, and these emotions can inhibit compassion. The Dalai Lama explains, We must be clear about what we mean by compassion. Many forms of compassionate feeling are mixed with desire and attachment. For instance, the love parents feel of their child is often strongly associated with their own emotional needs. … True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively. … When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. His definition speaks of compassion as involving an attitude, a motivation, a cognition, and an emotion. Specifically, it includes “commitment” (motivation), which involves “reasoning” (i.e., perspective taking, appraisal of one’s similarity to others), and empathy. Further, he emphasizes that although “developing this kind of compassion is not at all easy!” it is decidedly possible. The deliberate cultivation of compassion is now being played out in Western psychology, and Buddhist compassion practices are proving effective in various contexts from promoting resilience among care workers to treating mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (we discuss some of this work in the section on interventions in this chapter). One poignant example of compassion as essentially nonjudgmental is the Buddhist practice of cultivating it for one’s enemies. Jack Kornfield (2011) describes an encounter with a group of Tibetan nuns who when they were teenagers had survived years of imprisonment, torture, and depravation as part of Chinese government oppression. Asked if they were ever afraid during these years, they responded “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards?that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.” Few of us have experience with such a highly developed level of compassion, so the notion that it is possible not to feel hatred for torturers (let alone one’s own) is hard to fathom. Moreover, it’s worth acknowledging that emotions such as anger and fear are useful survival instincts and that their existence alongside empathy has probably helped us protect ourselves. However, relying on these emotions to guide our actions does confer a cost. We know emotions such as anger and fear are hard on the mind and body, and when they carry on unregulated, they become hatred or chronic anxiety. Furthermore, they motivate quick but not necessarily reasoned or wise action. The monks who cultivate compassion for their enemies do appraise their situations as unjust, and they actively struggle to end the injustices (Buddhists from Tibet, Burma, and previously Vietnam are examples), but at the same time they work to reduce the development of self-destructive emotions such as hatred and terror?emotions that can hinder both individual resilience and wise action. From this perspective, the nuns’ admission that losing their compassion was their greatest fear seems incredibly reasoned. Their compassion was neither a denial of circumstances nor blind polyannaism, but rather a key to their resilience. Losing it would have meant losing their greatest asset in surviving such trauma. Matthieu Ricard (2007), among others who have worked intimately with Tibetan refugees, observes that this population shows fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of their spiritual practice (see also Elsass, Carlsson, & Husum, 2010). Neuroplastic changes have been demonstrated in neuroimaging studies that differentiate the brains of expert and novice practitioners of a number of meditative practices, including compassion cultivation (Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008). The ability to cultivate compassion in a way that is disentangled from associated self-destructive emotions is utterly necessary if compassion is to support emotional resilience even in the face of difficulty and injustice. The Buddhist approach presents us with the possibility that we can develop our capacity for compassion to a point where the primal responses of anger and fear have less power and where compassion can serve as a healthier regulator of action?a cognitive-emotional experience that both builds resilience and increases our wellbeing. The example of the nuns seems to describe compassion training at Olympic proportions, but their existence as well as research studies on compassion practice give evidence that cultivating compassion is possible and that each step on the path increases wellbeing. Paul Gilbert (2005) for example has developed methods for people to increase their compassion in order to improve their mental health. Gilbert and Sue Procter (2006) define compassionate abilities as including “non-judgment related to the ability to be non-critical of the other’s situation or behaviors.” They add that all the aspects of compassion “require the emotional tone of warmth.” This “nonjudgment” and “warmth” turn out to be critical to the wellbeing benefits of self-compassion and elements previously missing from many other psychotherapeutic approaches. Altruism - Why Bother One question that has intrigued scientists for centuries is why humans would be moved to help others without benefit to themselves and even at great cost. Although colloquially we think of altruism as being defined by benevolence and a refreshing lack of ulterior motive, many researchers have been little satisfied with such an explanation and have made a case for ulterior motives as diverse as expected reciprocity, reputation building, peer pressure, fear of punishment, and increasing one’s chances of mating (a number of studies show that indicators of compassion and altruism increase one’s perceived attractiveness). Social exchange theory (Homans, 1958) suggests that all behavior (altruism included) is regulated by cost?benefit analysis (and made on the basis that benefit will outweigh cost). Theories of altruism based on egoistic motivators are an important contribution to the research. After all, we are indeed influenced by social pressure, and compassionate mates make better parents, so it’s sensible they would attract. But we can’t help but feel that if we left you with a sense that fostering altruism was just about helping your users get their mojo on, it would quickly lose its appeal as a potential focus for positive computing. Fortunately, there are also research-based conceptualizations that indicate altruism just might be motivated by empathy and compassion and that describe it as an other-centered phenomenon. In another of Charles Darwin’s way-ahead-of-his-time moments, he described compassion (he used the term sympathy) as stronger than any other of our social instincts and as utterly logical from an evolutionary standpoint because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, quoted in Goetz et al., 2010). To put it simply, compassion and altruism are evolutionarily beneficial because they are prosocial: they allow for collaboration within one’s group, but also for cooperation with those outside of it. Compassion also allows for the caring of vulnerable offspring, which not only ensures greater group survival but would have been necessary for increasingly intelligent humans to survive the corresponding period of helplessness required by a larger brain (a newborn giraffe can stand up and run within an hour of being born, but humans are utterly dependent for years as their complicated brains mature). The Dalai Lama (n.d.) similarly articulates the evolutionary imperative of compassion: “The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others.” Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Adam Smith are among those who have pointed to empathy and compassion as a trigger for altruism. More recently, in the 1980s, C. Daniel Batson began to explore ways of testing motivations behind altruism experimentally in order to disentangle the various possible motivations (self-focused or other-focused). As a result of his findings (Batson, 1991, 2002), Batson proposed the “empathy?altruism hypothesis,” which states that the likely cause of altruistic motivation is empathy. That’s not to say that all altruistic behavior is always triggered exclusively by empathy, but Batson’s work is critical in making the point that nonegoistic altruism does in fact exist. Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center are sources of a wealth of relevant research in this area. One paradoxical and fascinating element of altruism is that when it does stem from an other-centered compassionate response, then it seems to confer significant benefits to the self?namely, measurable increases to wellbeing. Compassion and Wellbeing One interesting, even paradoxical, thing about compassion is that despite the fact that it involves witnessing suffering (and often leads to action at a cost to oneself), it has been shown in many different studies to confer benefits of wellbeing, including increased social connectedness and stress-reduction. Compassion reduces stress (Cosley, McCoy, Saslow, & Epel, 2010) in a way that doesn’t require the kind of escape from events that other forms of stress release do. Whereas empathic distress can lead to elevated heart rate and skin conductance associated with stress (fight or flight responses), compassion responses trigger heart-rate deceleration and lowered skin conductance consistent with the brain prepping for caregiving and other-focused attention (Goetz et al., 2010). In other words, whereas stress prevents us from being able to help others in need (because it triggers fight-or-flight states rather than affiliative states), and not being able to help others in need causes us stress (as in empathic distress), compassion may be an antidote. The stress-buffering effect of compassion versus empathy-related distress is manifest in the phenomena of “compassion satisfaction” versus “burnout” among aid workers (Conrad & Kellar-Guenther, 2006; Thomas, 2013). If that weren’t enough, compassion has also been described as an instrument against fear, anger, envy, and vengeance (Goleman, 2003), and studies have linked compassionate lifestyles to greater longevity (Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003; Okun, Yeung, & Brown, 2013). Be nice, live longer. What’s amazing is that just the act of volunteering is not enough; you have to be doing it for the right reasons. Morris Okun, Ellen WanHeung Yeung, and Stephanie Brown (2013) found that older adults volunteering for self-oriented reasons had mortality rates similar to nonvolunteers, whereas those who volunteered for other-centered reasons experienced lower mortality. This suggests it is compassion itself that contributes to our wellbeing, perhaps owing to its very beneficial physiological effects. Researchers have hypothesized that compassion’s effect on wellbeing might also be explained by the way it supports social connectedness and/or by the way it helps us to broaden our perspective beyond ourselves (both depression and anxiety are linked to self-focus). (For an accessible review of the literature behind compassion and its influence on wellbeing, see Seppala, 2013.) If the design of technologies can encourage the development of compassionate attitudes and can elicit compassionate states in the face of social problems, we will not only be helping to address those problems, we’ll also be improving the wellbeing of those experiencing compassion. Self-Compassion and Wellbeing Although we have consistently described compassion as “other-centered,” this attitude can also (more paradoxes) be directed toward the self and with remarkably positive consequences. As mentioned previously, self-compassion “entails being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical; perceiving one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as isolating; and holding painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than over-identifying with them” (Neff, 2011). When people can react toward themselves in a caring, nonjudgmental way, as they would to a close friend or child, then wellbeing benefits manifest. The work of Paul Gilbert has validated the effectiveness of cultivating compassion for the self as a method for treating people who suffer from extreme self-criticism and shame. More so than self-esteem, compassion is linked to affiliative physiological responses and warm emotional tone, which, according to Gilbert (2010), are critical in these cases. According to his work compassion generates essential elements of physiologically felt nonjudgmental nurturing and love that are necessary to wellbeing. Perhaps cultivating these nurturing qualities toward oneself increases their availability in response to others, as both the trait and practice of self-compassion has been correlated with increased compassion for others (Reyes, 2011). The same study shows correlations with increased self-care capacity, relatedness, autonomy, and sense of self. It has also been associated with increased psychological functioning and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and rumination (Neff, Kirkpatrick & Rude, 2007). Other studies show greater self-compassion predicts lower incidents of automatic thoughts, interpersonal cognitive distortions, and, as mentioned previously, Internet addiction. Could methods for cultivating the components of self-compassion (or reducing their polar opposites) be used within the context of games and other technologies as a measure for decreasing addiction? Altruism and Wellbeing?in Giving of Ourselves, We Receive Wellbeing benefits extend to altruism as well. Groundbreaking work has shown that, despite what our inner skeptics might assume, human beings (from as young as infancy) derive greater happiness from giving something away (or even from watching things being given to others) than they do from receiving those things themselves (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). From another angle, studies have found that across cultures, the amount of money people spend on other people correlates strongly to their personal wellbeing, regardless of their income (Aknin et al., 2013). According to Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (2013), “across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.” The idea that giving produces positive emotions that exceed receiving could have many positive implications for technology design. Although these studies are carried out largely in the context of giving material things (objects and money), there are other ways to “give,” and we may find that there are benefits to the giving and receiving of praise, gratitude, and endorsement that goes on virtually. Many of us have experienced the warm fuzzies conferred by an opportunity to praise a friend on a social network or publically endorse a colleague for skills we admire. Interestingly, these warm fuzzies also emerge when we virally share images and videos of people helping others at some cost to themselves (for example, the truck driver who rescued bear cubs from a trash can, the homeless man who found $40,000 and returned it, or any of the other spontaneous moments of altruism to which we deeply enjoy bearing witness). These acts are worth sharing because they inspire us, which leads us to another trigger for compassion. Altruism and Inspiration - More Links to Wellbeing If we attempt to explain altruism based purely on self-serving motivations, we find ourselves in a pickle when we come up against the fact that we are absolutely giddy at seeing other people do altruistic things. Jonathan Haidt (2005) uses the term elevation to describe the “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.” Research has also demonstrated the effects of elevation at work showing that self-sacrificing behavior among leaders can increase commitment and compassion among employees (Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010) and that elevation predicts volunteerism even three months after an inspiring experience (Cox, 2010). Inspiration carries with it a motivator to altruistic action that is separate from empathy. When we are inspired to act, we seem to be motivated by a renewed feeling of faith in human goodness and our ability to play a part. Moreover, elevation seems to be a vector for the spread of altruism, which according to research can lead to a chain reaction within social networks (Fowler & Christakis, 2010). But it is the description of the heartfelt feelings evoked from one study participant that says it best: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed” (Haedt, 2005). The links between compassion, altruism, and inspiration are also evident in the brain according to the work of Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues. Yang’s neuroscientific research in this area (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009) has shown that the neural circuits involved in interoceptive processing are activated in both admiration for virtue and compassion for another’s pain. This work suggests that both states involve recognizing emotions and reflecting on one’s own behaviors in response (Immordino-Yang, 2011). (See her sidebar in this chapter for further inspiration.) If we know that bearing witness to altruism motivates kindness, compassion, and further altruism, why don’t news programs spend more time on stories about compassionate people, altruistic action or progress as part of their lineup? How often are reports on current atrocities piled one against the other and perhaps capped off with a sport or beauty update? Many find the news overwhelming and avoid it, others watch without hope of being able to do anything in response, so think how much would change if news programs took the advice of empathy game-design researchers and ended reports with suggestions or depictions of related compassionate action? Recent initiatives such as the Huffington Post’s Good News section and the Good News Network have responded to the desire for positive news. However, these remain separate from the mainstream. We look forward to more balanced reporting in mainstream news that supports compassionate response and acknowledgement of progress instead of just bleeding leads. You’ll forgive us for dwelling so long on the research behind compassion, altruism, and its links to wellbeing, but without a sufficiently sophisticated grasp of these phenomena we would be little equipped to design genuinely helpful interventions to foster their development. Now, on to the interventions.
Interventions and Strategies for Cultivating Compassion and Altruism What’s interesting is the way in which compassion meditation does not dull one’s emotional reaction to pain (to make it bearable) but instead results in an alternate response, specifically reducing amygdala activation associated with threat perception but increasing responsiveness to suffering (Desbordes et al., 2012; Lutz et al., 2008). This seems to support the idea that compassion is highly sensitive to suffering but responds with caring and approach rather than with distress or avoidance. In other words, in empathic distress we appraise another’s suffering as threatening (to our sense of security perhaps), but when we feel compassion, we do not experience this threat response. Both of these studies also give evidence that the changes to neural activation that come as a result of compassion meditation can be enduring. In compassion-focused therapy, Gilbert and colleagues have used multiple methods for eliciting and developing compassionate responses toward the self (see, e.g., Gilbert, 2010 and the edited volume, Gilbert, 2005). In order to foster feelings of warmth, they guide patients to bring to mind an image that, for them, represents their ideal of caring and compassion. In another intervention, patients write themselves compassionate letters. Psychologists also employ psychoeducation?that is, they explain to patients, using imagery, that just as images of food or sex are enough to elicit physiological responses of hunger or arousal, internal criticism is enough to induce the physiological stress and wear caused by real external criticism. Research studies often use imagery, videos, and stories in a lab setting to induce states of compassion for experimental purposes, which suggests that these things might also be helpful in the context of technology environments, at least for priming or eliciting temporary compassionate response.
Technologies in the Development of Compassion In general, technology has been more interested in computer strengths than it has been in human ones. The ACM Digital Library lists 1,334 publications that contain the word altruism, and nearly all of them relate to computer altruism, which refers to collaborative behaviors in which a computer or software agent takes into account the interests of other computers. Excluding computer altruism leaves us with 198 studies on human cooperation, such as in business or for volunteer content generation?for example, wikis and open-source development. There are also some studies that apply the concept of altruism to new algorithms. However, very few involve the ways in which human altruism might be influenced by design. Exceptions include a study (Davis, Farnham, & Jensen, 2002) that took what we would call a preventative design approach and explored the impact of different user-interface designs on how often players cooperated rather than “short-circuited” (or defected) a collaboration. Specifically, 25 pairs of participants were randomly assigned to using either an interface with text chat but no personal profile, a text chat but with a small personal profile, or a text-to-speech system with no personal profile. The results showed that the text-to-speech system (voice) reduced uncooperative behaviors, despite its being computer generated and gender neutral. The fact that this effect was stronger than having a profile page is quite significant and provides evidence that further work is needed to understand what drives prosocial and antisocial behavior in digital environments. In a very different study, Yeoreum Lee and colleagues (2011) proposed a concept of “altruistic interaction” that requires participants to help and be helped. The participants designed and tested a fan that blows air on someone (produces an output) only when a person somewhere else blows into it (acts as input). In doing the blowing, participants felt they were helping another person, and the recipient was able to express gratitude. The design created a situation in which a user was able to help another, although issues of reciprocity and contingency blurred the line between altruism and a dependency that arguably compromised autonomy. More familiar are examples within social media and social games. For example, in the farm game Hay Day, players can choose to help other players by tapping on fruit trees that have withered. Tapping revives a tree, allowing tree owners to grow fruit once again. It’s entirely plausible that this small opportunity to help another, although only virtually, elicits some of the positive affect associated with giving. Interestingly, however, the act eventually confers benefits on the performer in the form of thank-you certificates, a virtual currency that is automatically sent when the receiver accepts their revived tree. The result is a complicated mix of giving, receiving, and expectation of reward. When I (Dorian) played this game for the first time, I enjoyed the affirming glow of having been benevolent each time I revived someone’s wilted tree. Once I got conditioned to the idea that I would receive payment, however, the glow diminished. I found that the opportunity for altruistic warmth had been replaced by the dopaminergic drive to accrue certificates, so familiar to gameplay. The idea that anticipated payback might undermine the psychophysiological benefits of compassion and altruism sound suspiciously like the capacity for extrinsic rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation. Exploring a balance between opportunities to give unconditionally and opportunities for reciprocity and social exchange in games is a fascinating area for future research and experimental design. Prosociality through Games Although the relationship between violent games and behavior has received considerable research and media attention, an increasing number of developers and researchers are exploring the impact of games designed to support positive qualities and prosocial behaviors. For example, in one study (Gentile et al., 2009) a team of researchers from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and the United States reported the effects of prosocial games on the prosocial behaviors of people within three different age groups and across three different countries over extended periods of time. Critically, the study confirmed the hypothesis (controlling for sex, age, and time spent playing) that prosocial game exposure had a positive causal relationship to prosocial behaviors and traits. The study used careful experimental designs combining correlational and longitudinal analysis and converging results. The evidence showed that just as playing violent games produces hurtful behavior, playing prosocial games produces helpful behavior in both the short and longer term. An interesting aspect of the study is how it demonstrates the way in which multiple instruments (i.e., questionnaires) can be used to measure aspects of prosocial behavior. The study combined the use of
Each of these instruments has been independently tested for reliability and validity to support their use in psychological research. More importantly for our purposes, designers can use them to measure the impact of their designs. These studies used out-of-the-box commercial games. Given the evidence that prosocial (i.e., positive) games develop altruism and other prosocial behaviors (linked to wellbeing), we expect to see greater interest in these wellbeing-boosting games from parents, teachers, developers, and gamers. Virtual Reality?Embodying Altruism and Helping Behavior In a recent study published in PLOS ONE, a team at Stanford led by Jeremy Bailenson (Rosenberg, Baughman, & Bailenson, 2013) found that augmented virtual-reality games could lead to increases in altruism. Half of the 60 participants who completed the study were given the virtual power to fly like Superman (the “superhero” condition), while the other half could fly around the same space in a virtual helicopter. In the two-by-two design, participants in each of these groups were also allocated either to helping a sick child or touring a virtual city. At the end of the virtual-reality experience, participants were confronted by “someone in need of help” (an actor). The researchers measured the time to help and the amount of help provided by those in the different experimental conditions, and the results showed that those in the superhero/child-saving condition were significantly faster and helped more than those in the touring conditions. Six of the touring participants didn’t help at all, whereas all of the former superheroes did. The researchers hypothesized that the embodied experience of helping facilitated the transfer of this behavior to the real world. As we have seen, prosocial games foster prosocial behaviors even with lower tech immersion, so the idea that embodiment might play a role in fostering compassion and altruism is unsurprising. These studies seem to suggest that giving people practice in helping (or perhaps the experience of being capable of helping?increasing their sense of coping ability) inspires prosociality even after the game is over.
Design Implications
As a start, these factors (relevance, goal congruence, and coping ability) could be considered logical targets for systems seeking to develop compassion. Digital systems that aim to connect people, to help them work together, or to allow them to help each other are in a unique position to leverage what we know about the factors that increase compassion and altruism. Take, for example, nonprofit organizations targeting poverty through microlending, such as Kiva and GoodReturn. They have two main user groups: low-income entrepreneurs who need funding for small ventures (e.g., a motorcycle to start a home-delivery service) and higher-income funders who wish to contribute to social good as microinvestors. Over the past few years, I (Rafael) have been involved in a number of small projects on behalf of GoodReturn. Although we have yet to attempt to apply compassion research to these projects, we could, for example, attempt to match charitable projects to users based on compassion-appraisal factors. In the case of first-time donors, for example, a system that could match investors with entrepreneurs based on goal congruence (or even taking into account investor coping ability) may increase the effectiveness of these sorts of environments. One interesting thing about microlending is that it includes evidence of responsibility or deservedness, which, as we have seen influences altruism positively. Those seeking funding are doing so in order to actively combat their own poverty, and they commit to repaying a loan. For situations involving charitable giving in contrast, appraisals of responsibility will be more prone to affect prosocial behavior, so designers may need to address perceptions regarding blame. Design to Address Judgment and Blame In light of the inhibiting effects that judgment has on compassion and altruism, designers seeking to foster social change will often need to address underlying perceptions having to do with issues of suffering. In some cases, this will be about correcting misconceptions (about, for example, the various roots of mental illness or poverty). In other circumstances, strategies for fostering empathy may be the first step, such as for conflict resolution (as with the PeaceMaker game). By way of example, Belman and Flanagan (2010) give the hypothetical example of a game for eliciting empathy in relation to homelessness (in aid of soliciting aid). They point out that for players who attribute blame to those who are homeless, although engaging with the game may increase their experience of empathy, they are unlikely to give time or money to a shelter because their appraisal of the situation is incongruent with their goals. In other words, people’s attitudes toward homelessness will affect whether the game leads to compassion and helping behavior or stops at empathy. Finally, there is an open question as to how technologies can be used to foster the nonjudgmental aspect of compassion, based on a notion of common humanity. Design for Inspiration As we have seen, empathy and compassion aren’t the only triggers for altruism. Based on the work by researchers such as Haidt and Immordino-Yang, allowing people to witness other people’s compassion and perhaps supporting reflection on their own behavior could prove to be another effective strategy to cultivating compassion and altruism. Supporting the sharing of inspiring images, videos, and stories across social networks provides one simple example of inspiration sharing. For other contexts, designers might use elevation as a way to support a sense of empowerment/coping ability as a way of transforming empathy into action. As mentioned previously, many charities have moved from depicting extreme suffering to depicting the fruits of helping (empowerment), suggesting that it is the latter that more consistently inspires giving. There are a number of exciting paths open to exploration in this area, and we expect to see a growing area of special interest at the intersection of inspiration, elevation, and technology over the next decade. Detecting Compassion Where technologies or games seek to foster empathy or compassion but do not have access to measuring consequential action, the question arises as to how technologists might automatically know if their efforts are at all helpful. As far as we are aware, compassion detection has yet to be attempted with affective computing (Calvo, D’Mello, Gratch, & Kappas, 2014), but research suggests there are physiological signals and facial expressions unique to compassion, so there is potential for noninvasive automatic techniques that would certainly prove helpful to work in this area. Movement and Synchrony According to fascinating research on dance, rituals, and movement, there is evidence that synchronous movement can enhance cooperative ability, compassion, and even altruism (Behrends, Muller, & Dziobek, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Although we have yet to come across videogames designed deliberately to leverage this intriguing phenomenon, the implications for physical systems such as the Wii or gesture-camera-based systems such as Kinect are self-evident. We eagerly await developments at this intersection of movement, compassion, and games. Until then, keep dancing. In conclusion, in an article on the wellbeing benefits of compassion, Emma Seppala (2013), associate director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, concludes that, “thanks to rigorous research on the benefits of compassion, we are moving toward a world in which the practice of compassion is understood to be as important for health as physical exercise and a healthful diet, empirically validated techniques for cultivating compassion are widely accessible, and the practice of compassion is taught and applied in schools, hospitals, prisons, the military, and beyond.” As technologists, we can be part of making that world. Seeing as technology is now woven into the fabric of each of these areas, we’ll need to be. | 11 Compassion and Altruism
To be a superhero is to have compassion, whereas to be a supervillain is to be entirely without it. It’s not enough to experience empathy if you’re a superhero because heroes need to take action as well. We daydream about being superheroes, not only because it would be great to fly and wear skin-tight unitards, but also because superheroes are fantastically empowered to make things right. Compassion comes packaged with that all-important desire to act and make change, but less well known is the fact that compassion is also an antidote to the pain and distress that comes with empathy. In other words, compassion can be seen as a form of resilience. But you were probably expecting a source with slightly more scientific integrity than DC Comics. In terms of the academic literature, compassion, like empathy, suffers from a long-standing lack of consensus with regard to a precise definition. In this chapter, we favor those conceptualizations that view compassion as a distinct emotion based on its unique behavioral and physiological imprint. For example, based on a cross-disciplinary review of the research, Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas (2010) define compassion as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.” The key words in this definition are emotion, suffering, and desire to help. According to the literature, compassion is considered both an emotional state and a trait (and sometimes a motivation); it is distinguished from love in that it arises as a result of witnessing suffering; it is distinctive from empathy in that the feelings aroused do not necessarily mirror those witnessed in another; and it elicits approach behavior and a caring desire to help (which don’t necessarily follow empathy). Although compassion may arise from empathic concern, it can be distinguished by the accompanying desire to take action. This action-oriented aspect of compassion leads us seamlessly into a discussion of altruism. If compassion describes a desire to act, altruism is the action. Altruism is generally described as a type of behavior rather than an emotional state. According to much of the literature on altruism, an altruistic act is one that confers benefit on someone else at a cost to oneself (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). As you may suspect, there will be much overlap in the technology examples and strategies we gave in the previous chapter and those found in this one simply because, although empathy and compassion are different, they do, of course, frequently come together. For instance, although the focus of a particular game may be to encourage perspective taking and vicarious feeling (aspects of empathy), this will probably be in aid of inspiring the player to take compassionate action. Nevertheless, it’s important for technology designers to distinguish the two because empathy can lead to either wellbeing or distress, and compassion may be the difference. Any discussion of compassion should include compassion turned toward the self, or self-compassion, which Buddhist psychology implicates as necessary for compassion toward others and which scientific literature has identified as a significant predictor of wellbeing. So, you can also expect some links to chapter 8, herein. Finally, the mere act of bearing witness to compassion and altruism has its own benefits for wellbeing, so we look at the unique characteristics of inspiration or “elevation” and how technology can be used to promote it. To our great benefit, the past decade has seen a new wave of psychologists, neuroscientists, and even technologists begin to take on compassion and altruism like never before. There’s even a business case for it. Facebook, for example, has hosted several “Compassion Research Days” with the goal of using the science of emotions and relationships to develop features that reduce conflict and increase understanding among people. After all, when people are antisocial or cruel on Facebook, it’s bad for business, and if design can make a difference, everyone wins. This new energy around the science of compassion is likely fueled by the growing interest in wellbeing research in general, but also by movements for social change and on the emerging research showing how compassion could make our world a far better place to live in for everyone. What better reason than to dedicate the following pages to the work of these researchers and to the designers who have followed their lead and begun to explore the capacity for new technologies to play a part in this work? Research on Compassion and Altruism
Compassion, Empathy, Love, Sadness?What’s the Difference? It can be difficult to disentangle compassion from other similar and interrelated emotions such as love, empathy, pity, and sadness. However, the evidence for its uniqueness is summarized elegantly in the review by Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010). Their synthesis draws on findings in psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience to highlight a number of important ways in which compassion is distinctive, including the following characteristics:
Grit Hein and Tania Singer (2008) point to another stirring difference between empathy and compassion. Pointing to theory of mind (one’s ability to know what another is thinking) and how this cognitive aspect can be separate from the shared-feeling aspect of empathy (a fact we discussed in relation to psychopathy in chapter 10), the authors explain: “Empathy can have a dark side, for example when it is used to find the weakest spot of a person to make her or him suffer, which is far from showing compassion with the other. It is suggested that empathy has to be transformed into sympathy or empathic concern [we would suggest compassion] in order to elicit prosocial motivation.” Sympathy is often used in a way that is roughly synonymous with compassion, especially before the twentieth century. For example, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and David Hume used the term sympathy (Hein & Singer, 2008; Wispe, 1986). We propose that the combination of concepts we have just described might be visualized as something like what’s shown in figure 11.1.
Figure 11.1 The ability for compassion to work as a healthier, more effective alternative to empathic distress is also evident in the brain. Olga Klimecki and colleagues have found that while empathy training activates distress and associated neural networks, compassion training elicits activity in brain regions associated with positive affect and affiliation. They concluded that “findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others” (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2013). The implications for preventing burnout, supporting resilience, and promoting wellbeing are significant. Compassion as Mediated by Fairness Meg studied hard all night but failed her exam. Mog didn’t bother studying, chose to play poker all night instead, and also failed her exam. Who are you inspired to help? You’re probably even a bit irritated by Mog. Unsurprisingly, research has found that whether we feel compassion or anger for someone who is suffering is determined by our appraisal of their deservedness, or how responsible for their condition we feel they are. As Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010) put it, “Studies indicate that appraisals of low controllability and responsibility on the part of the target are critical to the elicitation of compassion and not anger.” The influence of blame has implications for those seeking to leverage technology for social change. Prejudice, stigma, and perceived difference often lead people to attribute blame to those who are suffering. For example, various studies have shown that people are likely to blame (and therefore less likely to feel compassion for) people who are suffering as a result of homelessness, obesity, or drug abuse. Tackling the perceptions that sit at the root of blame will be prerequisite to fostering compassion around similar issues. Fairness also makes an appearance in the literature on altruism. According to research, there is a cross-cultural human value for fairness (likely owing to the evolutionary benefits of a cooperative society), and this desire for fairness is manifest in what researchers call “altruistic punishment.” Laboratory experiments that engage people in gamelike interactions in which real money is at stake have shown that people are frequently willing to take action that punishes someone else for being unfair at a cost to themselves (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). This example of “altruistic punishment” is not the kind of warm-hearted, generous, prosocial act one generally associates with the word altruism. Of course, in part that’s because altruism is dealt with in research as a behavior rather than as a virtue. At the same time, because punishing the selfish helps enforce prosocial norms (fairness, justice), altruistic punishment can be viewed as benefiting a social good. Despite the very familiar effects of fairness on both compassion and altruism, there remains a conspicuously missing piece to the puzzle. If an appraisal of fairness is essential to both our experience of compassion and our altruistic behavior, how does one explain those people (often considered the wisest in our societies) who manage to experience compassion and act altruistically despite incredible unfairness and in parallel with appraisals of dramatic injustice? Compassion in the Face of Injustice Clearly, for most of us most of the time, fairness has a strong and predictable influence on the likelihood of compassion arising within us. Yet there are people who work compassionately with drug abusers and criminals, and there are widely admired cultural heroes who maintain compassion resolutely in the face of extreme oppression. Buddhist psychology provides a lucid explanation for this phenomenon by explaining that nonjudgmental compassion is not an exception to the rule but in fact describes the very nature of compassion itself, visible when our response is unmediated and uninhibited by the effects of other emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear. Buddhist psychology defines compassion as an empathic concern that is, by nature, unaffected by negative behavior in another (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, n.d.). It is other emotions (i.e., anger, hatred, fear, desire, sadness etc.) that respond to stigma, righteousness, and notions of deservedness, and these emotions can inhibit compassion. The Dalai Lama explains, We must be clear about what we mean by compassion. Many forms of compassionate feeling are mixed with desire and attachment. For instance, the love parents feel of their child is often strongly associated with their own emotional needs. … True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively. … When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. His definition speaks of compassion as involving an attitude, a motivation, a cognition, and an emotion. Specifically, it includes “commitment” (motivation), which involves “reasoning” (i.e., perspective taking, appraisal of one’s similarity to others), and empathy. Further, he emphasizes that although “developing this kind of compassion is not at all easy!” it is decidedly possible. The deliberate cultivation of compassion is now being played out in Western psychology, and Buddhist compassion practices are proving effective in various contexts from promoting resilience among care workers to treating mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (we discuss some of this work in the section on interventions in this chapter). One poignant example of compassion as essentially nonjudgmental is the Buddhist practice of cultivating it for one’s enemies. Jack Kornfield (2011) describes an encounter with a group of Tibetan nuns who when they were teenagers had survived years of imprisonment, torture, and depravation as part of Chinese government oppression. Asked if they were ever afraid during these years, they responded “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards?that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.” Few of us have experience with such a highly developed level of compassion, so the notion that it is possible not to feel hatred for torturers (let alone one’s own) is hard to fathom. Moreover, it’s worth acknowledging that emotions such as anger and fear are useful survival instincts and that their existence alongside empathy has probably helped us protect ourselves. However, relying on these emotions to guide our actions does confer a cost. We know emotions such as anger and fear are hard on the mind and body, and when they carry on unregulated, they become hatred or chronic anxiety. Furthermore, they motivate quick but not necessarily reasoned or wise action. The monks who cultivate compassion for their enemies do appraise their situations as unjust, and they actively struggle to end the injustices (Buddhists from Tibet, Burma, and previously Vietnam are examples), but at the same time they work to reduce the development of self-destructive emotions such as hatred and terror?emotions that can hinder both individual resilience and wise action. From this perspective, the nuns’ admission that losing their compassion was their greatest fear seems incredibly reasoned. Their compassion was neither a denial of circumstances nor blind polyannaism, but rather a key to their resilience. Losing it would have meant losing their greatest asset in surviving such trauma. Matthieu Ricard (2007), among others who have worked intimately with Tibetan refugees, observes that this population shows fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of their spiritual practice (see also Elsass, Carlsson, & Husum, 2010). Neuroplastic changes have been demonstrated in neuroimaging studies that differentiate the brains of expert and novice practitioners of a number of meditative practices, including compassion cultivation (Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008). The ability to cultivate compassion in a way that is disentangled from associated self-destructive emotions is utterly necessary if compassion is to support emotional resilience even in the face of difficulty and injustice. The Buddhist approach presents us with the possibility that we can develop our capacity for compassion to a point where the primal responses of anger and fear have less power and where compassion can serve as a healthier regulator of action?a cognitive-emotional experience that both builds resilience and increases our wellbeing. The example of the nuns seems to describe compassion training at Olympic proportions, but their existence as well as research studies on compassion practice give evidence that cultivating compassion is possible and that each step on the path increases wellbeing. Paul Gilbert (2005) for example has developed methods for people to increase their compassion in order to improve their mental health. Gilbert and Sue Procter (2006) define compassionate abilities as including “non-judgment related to the ability to be non-critical of the other’s situation or behaviors.” They add that all the aspects of compassion “require the emotional tone of warmth.” This “nonjudgment” and “warmth” turn out to be critical to the wellbeing benefits of self-compassion and elements previously missing from many other psychotherapeutic approaches.
Altruism?Why Bother? Theories of altruism based on egoistic motivators are an important contribution to the research. After all, we are indeed influenced by social pressure, and compassionate mates make better parents, so it’s sensible they would attract. But we can’t help but feel that if we left you with a sense that fostering altruism was just about helping your users get their mojo on, it would quickly lose its appeal as a potential focus for positive computing. Fortunately, there are also research-based conceptualizations that indicate altruism just might be motivated by empathy and compassion and that describe it as an other-centered phenomenon. In another of Charles Darwin’s way-ahead-of-his-time moments, he described compassion (he used the term sympathy) as stronger than any other of our social instincts and as utterly logical from an evolutionary standpoint because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, quoted in Goetz et al., 2010). To put it simply, compassion and altruism are evolutionarily beneficial because they are prosocial: they allow for collaboration within one’s group, but also for cooperation with those outside of it. Compassion also allows for the caring of vulnerable offspring, which not only ensures greater group survival but would have been necessary for increasingly intelligent humans to survive the corresponding period of helplessness required by a larger brain (a newborn giraffe can stand up and run within an hour of being born, but humans are utterly dependent for years as their complicated brains mature). The Dalai Lama (n.d.) similarly articulates the evolutionary imperative of compassion: “The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others.” Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Adam Smith are among those who have pointed to empathy and compassion as a trigger for altruism. More recently, in the 1980s, C. Daniel Batson began to explore ways of testing motivations behind altruism experimentally in order to disentangle the various possible motivations (self-focused or other-focused). As a result of his findings (Batson, 1991, 2002), Batson proposed the “empathy?altruism hypothesis,” which states that the likely cause of altruistic motivation is empathy. That’s not to say that all altruistic behavior is always triggered exclusively by empathy, but Batson’s work is critical in making the point that nonegoistic altruism does in fact exist. Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center are sources of a wealth of relevant research in this area. One paradoxical and fascinating element of altruism is that when it does stem from an other-centered compassionate response, then it seems to confer significant benefits to the self?namely, measurable increases to wellbeing. Compassion and Wellbeing One interesting, even paradoxical, thing about compassion is that despite the fact that it involves witnessing suffering (and often leads to action at a cost to oneself), it has been shown in many different studies to confer benefits of wellbeing, including increased social connectedness and stress-reduction. Compassion reduces stress (Cosley, McCoy, Saslow, & Epel, 2010) in a way that doesn’t require the kind of escape from events that other forms of stress release do. Whereas empathic distress can lead to elevated heart rate and skin conductance associated with stress (fight or flight responses), compassion responses trigger heart-rate deceleration and lowered skin conductance consistent with the brain prepping for caregiving and other-focused attention (Goetz et al., 2010). In other words, whereas stress prevents us from being able to help others in need (because it triggers fight-or-flight states rather than affiliative states), and not being able to help others in need causes us stress (as in empathic distress), compassion may be an antidote. The stress-buffering effect of compassion versus empathy-related distress is manifest in the phenomena of “compassion satisfaction” versus “burnout” among aid workers (Conrad & Kellar-Guenther, 2006; Thomas, 2013). If that weren’t enough, compassion has also been described as an instrument against fear, anger, envy, and vengeance (Goleman, 2003), and studies have linked compassionate lifestyles to greater longevity (Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003; Okun, Yeung, & Brown, 2013). Be nice, live longer. What’s amazing is that just the act of volunteering is not enough; you have to be doing it for the right reasons. Morris Okun, Ellen WanHeung Yeung, and Stephanie Brown (2013) found that older adults volunteering for self-oriented reasons had mortality rates similar to nonvolunteers, whereas those who volunteered for other-centered reasons experienced lower mortality. This suggests it is compassion itself that contributes to our wellbeing, perhaps owing to its very beneficial physiological effects. Researchers have hypothesized that compassion’s effect on wellbeing might also be explained by the way it supports social connectedness and/or by the way it helps us to broaden our perspective beyond ourselves (both depression and anxiety are linked to self-focus). (For an accessible review of the literature behind compassion and its influence on wellbeing, see Seppala, 2013.) If the design of technologies can encourage the development of compassionate attitudes and can elicit compassionate states in the face of social problems, we will not only be helping to address those problems, we’ll also be improving the wellbeing of those experiencing compassion. Self-Compassion and Wellbeing Although we have consistently described compassion as “other-centered,” this attitude can also (more paradoxes) be directed toward the self and with remarkably positive consequences. As mentioned previously, self-compassion “entails being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical; perceiving one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as isolating; and holding painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than over-identifying with them” (Neff, 2011). When people can react toward themselves in a caring, nonjudgmental way, as they would to a close friend or child, then wellbeing benefits manifest. The work of Paul Gilbert has validated the effectiveness of cultivating compassion for the self as a method for treating people who suffer from extreme self-criticism and shame. More so than self-esteem, compassion is linked to affiliative physiological responses and warm emotional tone, which, according to Gilbert (2010), are critical in these cases. According to his work compassion generates essential elements of physiologically felt nonjudgmental nurturing and love that are necessary to wellbeing. Perhaps cultivating these nurturing qualities toward oneself increases their availability in response to others, as both the trait and practice of self-compassion has been correlated with increased compassion for others (Reyes, 2011). The same study shows correlations with increased self-care capacity, relatedness, autonomy, and sense of self. It has also been associated with increased psychological functioning and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and rumination (Neff, Kirkpatrick & Rude, 2007). Other studies show greater self-compassion predicts lower incidents of automatic thoughts, interpersonal cognitive distortions, and, as mentioned previously, Internet addiction. Could methods for cultivating the components of self-compassion (or reducing their polar opposites) be used within the context of games and other technologies as a measure for decreasing addiction? Altruism and Wellbeing?in Giving of Ourselves, We Receive Wellbeing benefits extend to altruism as well. Groundbreaking work has shown that, despite what our inner skeptics might assume, human beings (from as young as infancy) derive greater happiness from giving something away (or even from watching things being given to others) than they do from receiving those things themselves (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). From another angle, studies have found that across cultures, the amount of money people spend on other people correlates strongly to their personal wellbeing, regardless of their income (Aknin et al., 2013). According to Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (2013), “across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.” The idea that giving produces positive emotions that exceed receiving could have many positive implications for technology design. Although these studies are carried out largely in the context of giving material things (objects and money), there are other ways to “give,” and we may find that there are benefits to the giving and receiving of praise, gratitude, and endorsement that goes on virtually. Many of us have experienced the warm fuzzies conferred by an opportunity to praise a friend on a social network or publically endorse a colleague for skills we admire. Interestingly, these warm fuzzies also emerge when we virally share images and videos of people helping others at some cost to themselves (for example, the truck driver who rescued bear cubs from a trash can, the homeless man who found $40,000 and returned it, or any of the other spontaneous moments of altruism to which we deeply enjoy bearing witness). These acts are worth sharing because they inspire us, which leads us to another trigger for compassion. Altruism and Inspiration?More Links to Wellbeing If we attempt to explain altruism based purely on self-serving motivations, we find ourselves in a pickle when we come up against the fact that we are absolutely giddy at seeing other people do altruistic things. Jonathan Haidt (2005) uses the term elevation to describe the “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.” Research has also demonstrated the effects of elevation at work showing that self-sacrificing behavior among leaders can increase commitment and compassion among employees (Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010) and that elevation predicts volunteerism even three months after an inspiring experience (Cox, 2010). Inspiration carries with it a motivator to altruistic action that is separate from empathy. When we are inspired to act, we seem to be motivated by a renewed feeling of faith in human goodness and our ability to play a part. Moreover, elevation seems to be a vector for the spread of altruism, which according to research can lead to a chain reaction within social networks (Fowler & Christakis, 2010). But it is the description of the heartfelt feelings evoked from one study participant that says it best: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed” (Haedt, 2005). The links between compassion, altruism, and inspiration are also evident in the brain according to the work of Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues. Yang’s neuroscientific research in this area (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009) has shown that the neural circuits involved in interoceptive processing are activated in both admiration for virtue and compassion for another’s pain. This work suggests that both states involve recognizing emotions and reflecting on one’s own behaviors in response (Immordino-Yang, 2011). (See her sidebar in this chapter for further inspiration.) If we know that bearing witness to altruism motivates kindness, compassion, and further altruism, why don’t news programs spend more time on stories about compassionate people, altruistic action or progress as part of their lineup? How often are reports on current atrocities piled one against the other and perhaps capped off with a sport or beauty update? Many find the news overwhelming and avoid it, others watch without hope of being able to do anything in response, so think how much would change if news programs took the advice of empathy game-design researchers and ended reports with suggestions or depictions of related compassionate action? Recent initiatives such as the Huffington Post’s Good News section and the Good News Network have responded to the desire for positive news. However, these remain separate from the mainstream. We look forward to more balanced reporting in mainstream news that supports compassionate response and acknowledgement of progress instead of just bleeding leads. You’ll forgive us for dwelling so long on the research behind compassion, altruism, and its links to wellbeing, but without a sufficiently sophisticated grasp of these phenomena we would be little equipped to design genuinely helpful interventions to foster their development. Now, on to the interventions.
Interventions and Strategies for Cultivating Compassion and Altruism What’s interesting is the way in which compassion meditation does not dull one’s emotional reaction to pain (to make it bearable) but instead results in an alternate response, specifically reducing amygdala activation associated with threat perception but increasing responsiveness to suffering (Desbordes et al., 2012; Lutz et al., 2008). This seems to support the idea that compassion is highly sensitive to suffering but responds with caring and approach rather than with distress or avoidance. In other words, in empathic distress we appraise another’s suffering as threatening (to our sense of security perhaps), but when we feel compassion, we do not experience this threat response. Both of these studies also give evidence that the changes to neural activation that come as a result of compassion meditation can be enduring. In compassion-focused therapy, Gilbert and colleagues have used multiple methods for eliciting and developing compassionate responses toward the self (see, e.g., Gilbert, 2010 and the edited volume, Gilbert, 2005). In order to foster feelings of warmth, they guide patients to bring to mind an image that, for them, represents their ideal of caring and compassion. In another intervention, patients write themselves compassionate letters. Psychologists also employ psychoeducation?that is, they explain to patients, using imagery, that just as images of food or sex are enough to elicit physiological responses of hunger or arousal, internal criticism is enough to induce the physiological stress and wear caused by real external criticism. Research studies often use imagery, videos, and stories in a lab setting to induce states of compassion for experimental purposes, which suggests that these things might also be helpful in the context of technology environments, at least for priming or eliciting temporary compassionate response.
Technologies in the Development of Compassion In general, technology has been more interested in computer strengths than it has been in human ones. The ACM Digital Library lists 1,334 publications that contain the word altruism, and nearly all of them relate to computer altruism, which refers to collaborative behaviors in which a computer or software agent takes into account the interests of other computers. Excluding computer altruism leaves us with 198 studies on human cooperation, such as in business or for volunteer content generation?for example, wikis and open-source development. There are also some studies that apply the concept of altruism to new algorithms. However, very few involve the ways in which human altruism might be influenced by design. Exceptions include a study (Davis, Farnham, & Jensen, 2002) that took what we would call a preventative design approach and explored the impact of different user-interface designs on how often players cooperated rather than “short-circuited” (or defected) a collaboration. Specifically, 25 pairs of participants were randomly assigned to using either an interface with text chat but no personal profile, a text chat but with a small personal profile, or a text-to-speech system with no personal profile. The results showed that the text-to-speech system (voice) reduced uncooperative behaviors, despite its being computer generated and gender neutral. The fact that this effect was stronger than having a profile page is quite significant and provides evidence that further work is needed to understand what drives prosocial and antisocial behavior in digital environments. In a very different study, Yeoreum Lee and colleagues (2011) proposed a concept of “altruistic interaction” that requires participants to help and be helped. The participants designed and tested a fan that blows air on someone (produces an output) only when a person somewhere else blows into it (acts as input). In doing the blowing, participants felt they were helping another person, and the recipient was able to express gratitude. The design created a situation in which a user was able to help another, although issues of reciprocity and contingency blurred the line between altruism and a dependency that arguably compromised autonomy. More familiar are examples within social media and social games. For example, in the farm game Hay Day, players can choose to help other players by tapping on fruit trees that have withered. Tapping revives a tree, allowing tree owners to grow fruit once again. It’s entirely plausible that this small opportunity to help another, although only virtually, elicits some of the positive affect associated with giving. Interestingly, however, the act eventually confers benefits on the performer in the form of thank-you certificates, a virtual currency that is automatically sent when the receiver accepts their revived tree. The result is a complicated mix of giving, receiving, and expectation of reward. When I (Dorian) played this game for the first time, I enjoyed the affirming glow of having been benevolent each time I revived someone’s wilted tree. Once I got conditioned to the idea that I would receive payment, however, the glow diminished. I found that the opportunity for altruistic warmth had been replaced by the dopaminergic drive to accrue certificates, so familiar to gameplay. The idea that anticipated payback might undermine the psychophysiological benefits of compassion and altruism sound suspiciously like the capacity for extrinsic rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation. Exploring a balance between opportunities to give unconditionally and opportunities for reciprocity and social exchange in games is a fascinating area for future research and experimental design. Prosociality through Games Although the relationship between violent games and behavior has received considerable research and media attention, an increasing number of developers and researchers are exploring the impact of games designed to support positive qualities and prosocial behaviors. For example, in one study (Gentile et al., 2009) a team of researchers from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and the United States reported the effects of prosocial games on the prosocial behaviors of people within three different age groups and across three different countries over extended periods of time. Critically, the study confirmed the hypothesis (controlling for sex, age, and time spent playing) that prosocial game exposure had a positive causal relationship to prosocial behaviors and traits. The study used careful experimental designs combining correlational and longitudinal analysis and converging results. The evidence showed that just as playing violent games produces hurtful behavior, playing prosocial games produces helpful behavior in both the short and longer term. An interesting aspect of the study is how it demonstrates the way in which multiple instruments (i.e., questionnaires) can be used to measure aspects of prosocial behavior. The study combined the use of
Each of these instruments has been independently tested for reliability and validity to support their use in psychological research. More importantly for our purposes, designers can use them to measure the impact of their designs. These studies used out-of-the-box commercial games. Given the evidence that prosocial (i.e., positive) games develop altruism and other prosocial behaviors (linked to wellbeing), we expect to see greater interest in these wellbeing-boosting games from parents, teachers, developers, and gamers. Virtual Reality?Embodying Altruism and Helping Behavior In a recent study published in PLOS ONE, a team at Stanford led by Jeremy Bailenson (Rosenberg, Baughman, & Bailenson, 2013) found that augmented virtual-reality games could lead to increases in altruism. Half of the 60 participants who completed the study were given the virtual power to fly like Superman (the “superhero” condition), while the other half could fly around the same space in a virtual helicopter. In the two-by-two design, participants in each of these groups were also allocated either to helping a sick child or touring a virtual city. At the end of the virtual-reality experience, participants were confronted by “someone in need of help” (an actor). The researchers measured the time to help and the amount of help provided by those in the different experimental conditions, and the results showed that those in the superhero/child-saving condition were significantly faster and helped more than those in the touring conditions. Six of the touring participants didn’t help at all, whereas all of the former superheroes did. The researchers hypothesized that the embodied experience of helping facilitated the transfer of this behavior to the real world. As we have seen, prosocial games foster prosocial behaviors even with lower tech immersion, so the idea that embodiment might play a role in fostering compassion and altruism is unsurprising. These studies seem to suggest that giving people practice in helping (or perhaps the experience of being capable of helping?increasing their sense of coping ability) inspires prosociality even after the game is over.
Design Implications
As a start, these factors (relevance, goal congruence, and coping ability) could be considered logical targets for systems seeking to develop compassion. Digital systems that aim to connect people, to help them work together, or to allow them to help each other are in a unique position to leverage what we know about the factors that increase compassion and altruism. Take, for example, nonprofit organizations targeting poverty through microlending, such as Kiva and GoodReturn. They have two main user groups: low-income entrepreneurs who need funding for small ventures (e.g., a motorcycle to start a home-delivery service) and higher-income funders who wish to contribute to social good as microinvestors. Over the past few years, I (Rafael) have been involved in a number of small projects on behalf of GoodReturn. Although we have yet to attempt to apply compassion research to these projects, we could, for example, attempt to match charitable projects to users based on compassion-appraisal factors. In the case of first-time donors, for example, a system that could match investors with entrepreneurs based on goal congruence (or even taking into account investor coping ability) may increase the effectiveness of these sorts of environments. One interesting thing about microlending is that it includes evidence of responsibility or deservedness, which, as we have seen influences altruism positively. Those seeking funding are doing so in order to actively combat their own poverty, and they commit to repaying a loan. For situations involving charitable giving in contrast, appraisals of responsibility will be more prone to affect prosocial behavior, so designers may need to address perceptions regarding blame. Design to Address Judgment and Blame In light of the inhibiting effects that judgment has on compassion and altruism, designers seeking to foster social change will often need to address underlying perceptions having to do with issues of suffering. In some cases, this will be about correcting misconceptions (about, for example, the various roots of mental illness or poverty). In other circumstances, strategies for fostering empathy may be the first step, such as for conflict resolution (as with the PeaceMaker game). By way of example, Belman and Flanagan (2010) give the hypothetical example of a game for eliciting empathy in relation to homelessness (in aid of soliciting aid). They point out that for players who attribute blame to those who are homeless, although engaging with the game may increase their experience of empathy, they are unlikely to give time or money to a shelter because their appraisal of the situation is incongruent with their goals. In other words, people’s attitudes toward homelessness will affect whether the game leads to compassion and helping behavior or stops at empathy. Finally, there is an open question as to how technologies can be used to foster the nonjudgmental aspect of compassion, based on a notion of common humanity. Design for Inspiration As we have seen, empathy and compassion aren’t the only triggers for altruism. Based on the work by researchers such as Haidt and Immordino-Yang, allowing people to witness other people’s compassion and perhaps supporting reflection on their own behavior could prove to be another effective strategy to cultivating compassion and altruism. Supporting the sharing of inspiring images, videos, and stories across social networks provides one simple example of inspiration sharing. For other contexts, designers might use elevation as a way to support a sense of empowerment/coping ability as a way of transforming empathy into action. As mentioned previously, many charities have moved from depicting extreme suffering to depicting the fruits of helping (empowerment), suggesting that it is the latter that more consistently inspires giving. There are a number of exciting paths open to exploration in this area, and we expect to see a growing area of special interest at the intersection of inspiration, elevation, and technology over the next decade. Detecting Compassion Where technologies or games seek to foster empathy or compassion but do not have access to measuring consequential action, the question arises as to how technologists might automatically know if their efforts are at all helpful. As far as we are aware, compassion detection has yet to be attempted with affective computing (Calvo, D’Mello, Gratch, & Kappas, 2014), but research suggests there are physiological signals and facial expressions unique to compassion, so there is potential for noninvasive automatic techniques that would certainly prove helpful to work in this area. Movement and Synchrony According to fascinating research on dance, rituals, and movement, there is evidence that synchronous movement can enhance cooperative ability, compassion, and even altruism (Behrends, Muller, & Dziobek, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Although we have yet to come across videogames designed deliberately to leverage this intriguing phenomenon, the implications for physical systems such as the Wii or gesture-camera-based systems such as Kinect are self-evident. We eagerly await developments at this intersection of movement, compassion, and games. Until then, keep dancing. In conclusion, in an article on the wellbeing benefits of compassion, Emma Seppala (2013), associate director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, concludes that, “thanks to rigorous research on the benefits of compassion, we are moving toward a world in which the practice of compassion is understood to be as important for health as physical exercise and a healthful diet, empirically validated techniques for cultivating compassion are widely accessible, and the practice of compassion is taught and applied in schools, hospitals, prisons, the military, and beyond.” As technologists, we can be part of making that world. Seeing as technology is now woven into the fabric of each of these areas, we’ll need to be. | 11 Compassion and Altruism
To be a superhero is to have compassion, whereas to be a supervillain is to be entirely without it. It’s not enough to experience empathy if you’re a superhero because heroes need to take action as well. We daydream about being superheroes, not only because it would be great to fly and wear skin-tight unitards, but also because superheroes are fantastically empowered to make things right. Compassion comes packaged with that all-important desire to act and make change, but less well known is the fact that compassion is also an antidote to the pain and distress that comes with empathy. In other words, compassion can be seen as a form of resilience. But you were probably expecting a source with slightly more scientific integrity than DC Comics. In terms of the academic literature, compassion, like empathy, suffers from a long-standing lack of consensus with regard to a precise definition. In this chapter, we favor those conceptualizations that view compassion as a distinct emotion based on its unique behavioral and physiological imprint. For example, based on a cross-disciplinary review of the research, Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas (2010) define compassion as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.” The key words in this definition are emotion, suffering, and desire to help. According to the literature, compassion is considered both an emotional state and a trait (and sometimes a motivation); it is distinguished from love in that it arises as a result of witnessing suffering; it is distinctive from empathy in that the feelings aroused do not necessarily mirror those witnessed in another; and it elicits approach behavior and a caring desire to help (which don’t necessarily follow empathy). Although compassion may arise from empathic concern, it can be distinguished by the accompanying desire to take action. This action-oriented aspect of compassion leads us seamlessly into a discussion of altruism. If compassion describes a desire to act, altruism is the action. Altruism is generally described as a type of behavior rather than an emotional state. According to much of the literature on altruism, an altruistic act is one that confers benefit on someone else at a cost to oneself (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). As you may suspect, there will be much overlap in the technology examples and strategies we gave in the previous chapter and those found in this one simply because, although empathy and compassion are different, they do, of course, frequently come together. For instance, although the focus of a particular game may be to encourage perspective taking and vicarious feeling (aspects of empathy), this will probably be in aid of inspiring the player to take compassionate action. Nevertheless, it’s important for technology designers to distinguish the two because empathy can lead to either wellbeing or distress, and compassion may be the difference. Any discussion of compassion should include compassion turned toward the self, or self-compassion, which Buddhist psychology implicates as necessary for compassion toward others and which scientific literature has identified as a significant predictor of wellbeing. So, you can also expect some links to chapter 8, herein. Finally, the mere act of bearing witness to compassion and altruism has its own benefits for wellbeing, so we look at the unique characteristics of inspiration or “elevation” and how technology can be used to promote it. To our great benefit, the past decade has seen a new wave of psychologists, neuroscientists, and even technologists begin to take on compassion and altruism like never before. There’s even a business case for it. Facebook, for example, has hosted several “Compassion Research Days” with the goal of using the science of emotions and relationships to develop features that reduce conflict and increase understanding among people. After all, when people are antisocial or cruel on Facebook, it’s bad for business, and if design can make a difference, everyone wins. This new energy around the science of compassion is likely fueled by the growing interest in wellbeing research in general, but also by movements for social change and on the emerging research showing how compassion could make our world a far better place to live in for everyone. What better reason than to dedicate the following pages to the work of these researchers and to the designers who have followed their lead and begun to explore the capacity for new technologies to play a part in this work? Research on Compassion and Altruism
Compassion, Empathy, Love, Sadness?What’s the Difference? It can be difficult to disentangle compassion from other similar and interrelated emotions such as love, empathy, pity, and sadness. However, the evidence for its uniqueness is summarized elegantly in the review by Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010). Their synthesis draws on findings in psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience to highlight a number of important ways in which compassion is distinctive, including the following characteristics:
Grit Hein and Tania Singer (2008) point to another stirring difference between empathy and compassion. Pointing to theory of mind (one’s ability to know what another is thinking) and how this cognitive aspect can be separate from the shared-feeling aspect of empathy (a fact we discussed in relation to psychopathy in chapter 10), the authors explain: “Empathy can have a dark side, for example when it is used to find the weakest spot of a person to make her or him suffer, which is far from showing compassion with the other. It is suggested that empathy has to be transformed into sympathy or empathic concern [we would suggest compassion] in order to elicit prosocial motivation.” Sympathy is often used in a way that is roughly synonymous with compassion, especially before the twentieth century. For example, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and David Hume used the term sympathy (Hein & Singer, 2008; Wispe, 1986). We propose that the combination of concepts we have just described might be visualized as something like what’s shown in figure 11.1.
Figure 11.1 The ability for compassion to work as a healthier, more effective alternative to empathic distress is also evident in the brain. Olga Klimecki and colleagues have found that while empathy training activates distress and associated neural networks, compassion training elicits activity in brain regions associated with positive affect and affiliation. They concluded that “findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others” (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2013). The implications for preventing burnout, supporting resilience, and promoting wellbeing are significant. Compassion as Mediated by Fairness Meg studied hard all night but failed her exam. Mog didn’t bother studying, chose to play poker all night instead, and also failed her exam. Who are you inspired to help? You’re probably even a bit irritated by Mog. Unsurprisingly, research has found that whether we feel compassion or anger for someone who is suffering is determined by our appraisal of their deservedness, or how responsible for their condition we feel they are. As Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas (2010) put it, “Studies indicate that appraisals of low controllability and responsibility on the part of the target are critical to the elicitation of compassion and not anger.” The influence of blame has implications for those seeking to leverage technology for social change. Prejudice, stigma, and perceived difference often lead people to attribute blame to those who are suffering. For example, various studies have shown that people are likely to blame (and therefore less likely to feel compassion for) people who are suffering as a result of homelessness, obesity, or drug abuse. Tackling the perceptions that sit at the root of blame will be prerequisite to fostering compassion around similar issues. Fairness also makes an appearance in the literature on altruism. According to research, there is a cross-cultural human value for fairness (likely owing to the evolutionary benefits of a cooperative society), and this desire for fairness is manifest in what researchers call “altruistic punishment.” Laboratory experiments that engage people in gamelike interactions in which real money is at stake have shown that people are frequently willing to take action that punishes someone else for being unfair at a cost to themselves (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). This example of “altruistic punishment” is not the kind of warm-hearted, generous, prosocial act one generally associates with the word altruism. Of course, in part that’s because altruism is dealt with in research as a behavior rather than as a virtue. At the same time, because punishing the selfish helps enforce prosocial norms (fairness, justice), altruistic punishment can be viewed as benefiting a social good. Despite the very familiar effects of fairness on both compassion and altruism, there remains a conspicuously missing piece to the puzzle. If an appraisal of fairness is essential to both our experience of compassion and our altruistic behavior, how does one explain those people (often considered the wisest in our societies) who manage to experience compassion and act altruistically despite incredible unfairness and in parallel with appraisals of dramatic injustice? Compassion in the Face of Injustice Clearly, for most of us most of the time, fairness has a strong and predictable influence on the likelihood of compassion arising within us. Yet there are people who work compassionately with drug abusers and criminals, and there are widely admired cultural heroes who maintain compassion resolutely in the face of extreme oppression. Buddhist psychology provides a lucid explanation for this phenomenon by explaining that nonjudgmental compassion is not an exception to the rule but in fact describes the very nature of compassion itself, visible when our response is unmediated and uninhibited by the effects of other emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear. Buddhist psychology defines compassion as an empathic concern that is, by nature, unaffected by negative behavior in another (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, n.d.). It is other emotions (i.e., anger, hatred, fear, desire, sadness etc.) that respond to stigma, righteousness, and notions of deservedness, and these emotions can inhibit compassion. The Dalai Lama explains, We must be clear about what we mean by compassion. Many forms of compassionate feeling are mixed with desire and attachment. For instance, the love parents feel of their child is often strongly associated with their own emotional needs. … True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively. … When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. His definition speaks of compassion as involving an attitude, a motivation, a cognition, and an emotion. Specifically, it includes “commitment” (motivation), which involves “reasoning” (i.e., perspective taking, appraisal of one’s similarity to others), and empathy. Further, he emphasizes that although “developing this kind of compassion is not at all easy!” it is decidedly possible. The deliberate cultivation of compassion is now being played out in Western psychology, and Buddhist compassion practices are proving effective in various contexts from promoting resilience among care workers to treating mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (we discuss some of this work in the section on interventions in this chapter). One poignant example of compassion as essentially nonjudgmental is the Buddhist practice of cultivating it for one’s enemies. Jack Kornfield (2011) describes an encounter with a group of Tibetan nuns who when they were teenagers had survived years of imprisonment, torture, and depravation as part of Chinese government oppression. Asked if they were ever afraid during these years, they responded “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards?that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.” Few of us have experience with such a highly developed level of compassion, so the notion that it is possible not to feel hatred for torturers (let alone one’s own) is hard to fathom. Moreover, it’s worth acknowledging that emotions such as anger and fear are useful survival instincts and that their existence alongside empathy has probably helped us protect ourselves. However, relying on these emotions to guide our actions does confer a cost. We know emotions such as anger and fear are hard on the mind and body, and when they carry on unregulated, they become hatred or chronic anxiety. Furthermore, they motivate quick but not necessarily reasoned or wise action. The monks who cultivate compassion for their enemies do appraise their situations as unjust, and they actively struggle to end the injustices (Buddhists from Tibet, Burma, and previously Vietnam are examples), but at the same time they work to reduce the development of self-destructive emotions such as hatred and terror?emotions that can hinder both individual resilience and wise action. From this perspective, the nuns’ admission that losing their compassion was their greatest fear seems incredibly reasoned. Their compassion was neither a denial of circumstances nor blind polyannaism, but rather a key to their resilience. Losing it would have meant losing their greatest asset in surviving such trauma. Matthieu Ricard (2007), among others who have worked intimately with Tibetan refugees, observes that this population shows fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of their spiritual practice (see also Elsass, Carlsson, & Husum, 2010). Neuroplastic changes have been demonstrated in neuroimaging studies that differentiate the brains of expert and novice practitioners of a number of meditative practices, including compassion cultivation (Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008). The ability to cultivate compassion in a way that is disentangled from associated self-destructive emotions is utterly necessary if compassion is to support emotional resilience even in the face of difficulty and injustice. The Buddhist approach presents us with the possibility that we can develop our capacity for compassion to a point where the primal responses of anger and fear have less power and where compassion can serve as a healthier regulator of action?a cognitive-emotional experience that both builds resilience and increases our wellbeing. The example of the nuns seems to describe compassion training at Olympic proportions, but their existence as well as research studies on compassion practice give evidence that cultivating compassion is possible and that each step on the path increases wellbeing. Paul Gilbert (2005) for example has developed methods for people to increase their compassion in order to improve their mental health. Gilbert and Sue Procter (2006) define compassionate abilities as including “non-judgment related to the ability to be non-critical of the other’s situation or behaviors.” They add that all the aspects of compassion “require the emotional tone of warmth.” This “nonjudgment” and “warmth” turn out to be critical to the wellbeing benefits of self-compassion and elements previously missing from many other psychotherapeutic approaches.
Altruism?Why Bother? Theories of altruism based on egoistic motivators are an important contribution to the research. After all, we are indeed influenced by social pressure, and compassionate mates make better parents, so it’s sensible they would attract. But we can’t help but feel that if we left you with a sense that fostering altruism was just about helping your users get their mojo on, it would quickly lose its appeal as a potential focus for positive computing. Fortunately, there are also research-based conceptualizations that indicate altruism just might be motivated by empathy and compassion and that describe it as an other-centered phenomenon. In another of Charles Darwin’s way-ahead-of-his-time moments, he described compassion (he used the term sympathy) as stronger than any other of our social instincts and as utterly logical from an evolutionary standpoint because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, quoted in Goetz et al., 2010). To put it simply, compassion and altruism are evolutionarily beneficial because they are prosocial: they allow for collaboration within one’s group, but also for cooperation with those outside of it. Compassion also allows for the caring of vulnerable offspring, which not only ensures greater group survival but would have been necessary for increasingly intelligent humans to survive the corresponding period of helplessness required by a larger brain (a newborn giraffe can stand up and run within an hour of being born, but humans are utterly dependent for years as their complicated brains mature). The Dalai Lama (n.d.) similarly articulates the evolutionary imperative of compassion: “The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others.” Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Adam Smith are among those who have pointed to empathy and compassion as a trigger for altruism. More recently, in the 1980s, C. Daniel Batson began to explore ways of testing motivations behind altruism experimentally in order to disentangle the various possible motivations (self-focused or other-focused). As a result of his findings (Batson, 1991, 2002), Batson proposed the “empathy?altruism hypothesis,” which states that the likely cause of altruistic motivation is empathy. That’s not to say that all altruistic behavior is always triggered exclusively by empathy, but Batson’s work is critical in making the point that nonegoistic altruism does in fact exist. Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center are sources of a wealth of relevant research in this area. One paradoxical and fascinating element of altruism is that when it does stem from an other-centered compassionate response, then it seems to confer significant benefits to the self?namely, measurable increases to wellbeing. Compassion and Wellbeing One interesting, even paradoxical, thing about compassion is that despite the fact that it involves witnessing suffering (and often leads to action at a cost to oneself), it has been shown in many different studies to confer benefits of wellbeing, including increased social connectedness and stress-reduction. Compassion reduces stress (Cosley, McCoy, Saslow, & Epel, 2010) in a way that doesn’t require the kind of escape from events that other forms of stress release do. Whereas empathic distress can lead to elevated heart rate and skin conductance associated with stress (fight or flight responses), compassion responses trigger heart-rate deceleration and lowered skin conductance consistent with the brain prepping for caregiving and other-focused attention (Goetz et al., 2010). In other words, whereas stress prevents us from being able to help others in need (because it triggers fight-or-flight states rather than affiliative states), and not being able to help others in need causes us stress (as in empathic distress), compassion may be an antidote. The stress-buffering effect of compassion versus empathy-related distress is manifest in the phenomena of “compassion satisfaction” versus “burnout” among aid workers (Conrad & Kellar-Guenther, 2006; Thomas, 2013). If that weren’t enough, compassion has also been described as an instrument against fear, anger, envy, and vengeance (Goleman, 2003), and studies have linked compassionate lifestyles to greater longevity (Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003; Okun, Yeung, & Brown, 2013). Be nice, live longer. What’s amazing is that just the act of volunteering is not enough; you have to be doing it for the right reasons. Morris Okun, Ellen WanHeung Yeung, and Stephanie Brown (2013) found that older adults volunteering for self-oriented reasons had mortality rates similar to nonvolunteers, whereas those who volunteered for other-centered reasons experienced lower mortality. This suggests it is compassion itself that contributes to our wellbeing, perhaps owing to its very beneficial physiological effects. Researchers have hypothesized that compassion’s effect on wellbeing might also be explained by the way it supports social connectedness and/or by the way it helps us to broaden our perspective beyond ourselves (both depression and anxiety are linked to self-focus). (For an accessible review of the literature behind compassion and its influence on wellbeing, see Seppala, 2013.) If the design of technologies can encourage the development of compassionate attitudes and can elicit compassionate states in the face of social problems, we will not only be helping to address those problems, we’ll also be improving the wellbeing of those experiencing compassion. Self-Compassion and Wellbeing Although we have consistently described compassion as “other-centered,” this attitude can also (more paradoxes) be directed toward the self and with remarkably positive consequences. As mentioned previously, self-compassion “entails being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical; perceiving one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as isolating; and holding painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than over-identifying with them” (Neff, 2011). When people can react toward themselves in a caring, nonjudgmental way, as they would to a close friend or child, then wellbeing benefits manifest. The work of Paul Gilbert has validated the effectiveness of cultivating compassion for the self as a method for treating people who suffer from extreme self-criticism and shame. More so than self-esteem, compassion is linked to affiliative physiological responses and warm emotional tone, which, according to Gilbert (2010), are critical in these cases. According to his work compassion generates essential elements of physiologically felt nonjudgmental nurturing and love that are necessary to wellbeing. Perhaps cultivating these nurturing qualities toward oneself increases their availability in response to others, as both the trait and practice of self-compassion has been correlated with increased compassion for others (Reyes, 2011). The same study shows correlations with increased self-care capacity, relatedness, autonomy, and sense of self. It has also been associated with increased psychological functioning and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and rumination (Neff, Kirkpatrick & Rude, 2007). Other studies show greater self-compassion predicts lower incidents of automatic thoughts, interpersonal cognitive distortions, and, as mentioned previously, Internet addiction. Could methods for cultivating the components of self-compassion (or reducing their polar opposites) be used within the context of games and other technologies as a measure for decreasing addiction? Altruism and Wellbeing?in Giving of Ourselves, We Receive Wellbeing benefits extend to altruism as well. Groundbreaking work has shown that, despite what our inner skeptics might assume, human beings (from as young as infancy) derive greater happiness from giving something away (or even from watching things being given to others) than they do from receiving those things themselves (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). From another angle, studies have found that across cultures, the amount of money people spend on other people correlates strongly to their personal wellbeing, regardless of their income (Aknin et al., 2013). According to Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (2013), “across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.” The idea that giving produces positive emotions that exceed receiving could have many positive implications for technology design. Although these studies are carried out largely in the context of giving material things (objects and money), there are other ways to “give,” and we may find that there are benefits to the giving and receiving of praise, gratitude, and endorsement that goes on virtually. Many of us have experienced the warm fuzzies conferred by an opportunity to praise a friend on a social network or publically endorse a colleague for skills we admire. Interestingly, these warm fuzzies also emerge when we virally share images and videos of people helping others at some cost to themselves (for example, the truck driver who rescued bear cubs from a trash can, the homeless man who found $40,000 and returned it, or any of the other spontaneous moments of altruism to which we deeply enjoy bearing witness). These acts are worth sharing because they inspire us, which leads us to another trigger for compassion. Altruism and Inspiration?More Links to Wellbeing If we attempt to explain altruism based purely on self-serving motivations, we find ourselves in a pickle when we come up against the fact that we are absolutely giddy at seeing other people do altruistic things. Jonathan Haidt (2005) uses the term elevation to describe the “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.” Research has also demonstrated the effects of elevation at work showing that self-sacrificing behavior among leaders can increase commitment and compassion among employees (Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010) and that elevation predicts volunteerism even three months after an inspiring experience (Cox, 2010). Inspiration carries with it a motivator to altruistic action that is separate from empathy. When we are inspired to act, we seem to be motivated by a renewed feeling of faith in human goodness and our ability to play a part. Moreover, elevation seems to be a vector for the spread of altruism, which according to research can lead to a chain reaction within social networks (Fowler & Christakis, 2010). But it is the description of the heartfelt feelings evoked from one study participant that says it best: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed” (Haedt, 2005). The links between compassion, altruism, and inspiration are also evident in the brain according to the work of Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues. Yang’s neuroscientific research in this area (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009) has shown that the neural circuits involved in interoceptive processing are activated in both admiration for virtue and compassion for another’s pain. This work suggests that both states involve recognizing emotions and reflecting on one’s own behaviors in response (Immordino-Yang, 2011). (See her sidebar in this chapter for further inspiration.) If we know that bearing witness to altruism motivates kindness, compassion, and further altruism, why don’t news programs spend more time on stories about compassionate people, altruistic action or progress as part of their lineup? How often are reports on current atrocities piled one against the other and perhaps capped off with a sport or beauty update? Many find the news overwhelming and avoid it, others watch without hope of being able to do anything in response, so think how much would change if news programs took the advice of empathy game-design researchers and ended reports with suggestions or depictions of related compassionate action? Recent initiatives such as the Huffington Post’s Good News section and the Good News Network have responded to the desire for positive news. However, these remain separate from the mainstream. We look forward to more balanced reporting in mainstream news that supports compassionate response and acknowledgement of progress instead of just bleeding leads. You’ll forgive us for dwelling so long on the research behind compassion, altruism, and its links to wellbeing, but without a sufficiently sophisticated grasp of these phenomena we would be little equipped to design genuinely helpful interventions to foster their development. Now, on to the interventions.
Interventions and Strategies for Cultivating Compassion and Altruism What’s interesting is the way in which compassion meditation does not dull one’s emotional reaction to pain (to make it bearable) but instead results in an alternate response, specifically reducing amygdala activation associated with threat perception but increasing responsiveness to suffering (Desbordes et al., 2012; Lutz et al., 2008). This seems to support the idea that compassion is highly sensitive to suffering but responds with caring and approach rather than with distress or avoidance. In other words, in empathic distress we appraise another’s suffering as threatening (to our sense of security perhaps), but when we feel compassion, we do not experience this threat response. Both of these studies also give evidence that the changes to neural activation that come as a result of compassion meditation can be enduring. In compassion-focused therapy, Gilbert and colleagues have used multiple methods for eliciting and developing compassionate responses toward the self (see, e.g., Gilbert, 2010 and the edited volume, Gilbert, 2005). In order to foster feelings of warmth, they guide patients to bring to mind an image that, for them, represents their ideal of caring and compassion. In another intervention, patients write themselves compassionate letters. Psychologists also employ psychoeducation?that is, they explain to patients, using imagery, that just as images of food or sex are enough to elicit physiological responses of hunger or arousal, internal criticism is enough to induce the physiological stress and wear caused by real external criticism. Research studies often use imagery, videos, and stories in a lab setting to induce states of compassion for experimental purposes, which suggests that these things might also be helpful in the context of technology environments, at least for priming or eliciting temporary compassionate response.
Technologies in the Development of Compassion In general, technology has been more interested in computer strengths than it has been in human ones. The ACM Digital Library lists 1,334 publications that contain the word altruism, and nearly all of them relate to computer altruism, which refers to collaborative behaviors in which a computer or software agent takes into account the interests of other computers. Excluding computer altruism leaves us with 198 studies on human cooperation, such as in business or for volunteer content generation?for example, wikis and open-source development. There are also some studies that apply the concept of altruism to new algorithms. However, very few involve the ways in which human altruism might be influenced by design. Exceptions include a study (Davis, Farnham, & Jensen, 2002) that took what we would call a preventative design approach and explored the impact of different user-interface designs on how often players cooperated rather than “short-circuited” (or defected) a collaboration. Specifically, 25 pairs of participants were randomly assigned to using either an interface with text chat but no personal profile, a text chat but with a small personal profile, or a text-to-speech system with no personal profile. The results showed that the text-to-speech system (voice) reduced uncooperative behaviors, despite its being computer generated and gender neutral. The fact that this effect was stronger than having a profile page is quite significant and provides evidence that further work is needed to understand what drives prosocial and antisocial behavior in digital environments. In a very different study, Yeoreum Lee and colleagues (2011) proposed a concept of “altruistic interaction” that requires participants to help and be helped. The participants designed and tested a fan that blows air on someone (produces an output) only when a person somewhere else blows into it (acts as input). In doing the blowing, participants felt they were helping another person, and the recipient was able to express gratitude. The design created a situation in which a user was able to help another, although issues of reciprocity and contingency blurred the line between altruism and a dependency that arguably compromised autonomy. More familiar are examples within social media and social games. For example, in the farm game Hay Day, players can choose to help other players by tapping on fruit trees that have withered. Tapping revives a tree, allowing tree owners to grow fruit once again. It’s entirely plausible that this small opportunity to help another, although only virtually, elicits some of the positive affect associated with giving. Interestingly, however, the act eventually confers benefits on the performer in the form of thank-you certificates, a virtual currency that is automatically sent when the receiver accepts their revived tree. The result is a complicated mix of giving, receiving, and expectation of reward. When I (Dorian) played this game for the first time, I enjoyed the affirming glow of having been benevolent each time I revived someone’s wilted tree. Once I got conditioned to the idea that I would receive payment, however, the glow diminished. I found that the opportunity for altruistic warmth had been replaced by the dopaminergic drive to accrue certificates, so familiar to gameplay. The idea that anticipated payback might undermine the psychophysiological benefits of compassion and altruism sound suspiciously like the capacity for extrinsic rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation. Exploring a balance between opportunities to give unconditionally and opportunities for reciprocity and social exchange in games is a fascinating area for future research and experimental design. Prosociality through Games Although the relationship between violent games and behavior has received considerable research and media attention, an increasing number of developers and researchers are exploring the impact of games designed to support positive qualities and prosocial behaviors. For example, in one study (Gentile et al., 2009) a team of researchers from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and the United States reported the effects of prosocial games on the prosocial behaviors of people within three different age groups and across three different countries over extended periods of time. Critically, the study confirmed the hypothesis (controlling for sex, age, and time spent playing) that prosocial game exposure had a positive causal relationship to prosocial behaviors and traits. The study used careful experimental designs combining correlational and longitudinal analysis and converging results. The evidence showed that just as playing violent games produces hurtful behavior, playing prosocial games produces helpful behavior in both the short and longer term. An interesting aspect of the study is how it demonstrates the way in which multiple instruments (i.e., questionnaires) can be used to measure aspects of prosocial behavior. The study combined the use of
Each of these instruments has been independently tested for reliability and validity to support their use in psychological research. More importantly for our purposes, designers can use them to measure the impact of their designs. These studies used out-of-the-box commercial games. Given the evidence that prosocial (i.e., positive) games develop altruism and other prosocial behaviors (linked to wellbeing), we expect to see greater interest in these wellbeing-boosting games from parents, teachers, developers, and gamers. Virtual Reality?Embodying Altruism and Helping Behavior In a recent study published in PLOS ONE, a team at Stanford led by Jeremy Bailenson (Rosenberg, Baughman, & Bailenson, 2013) found that augmented virtual-reality games could lead to increases in altruism. Half of the 60 participants who completed the study were given the virtual power to fly like Superman (the “superhero” condition), while the other half could fly around the same space in a virtual helicopter. In the two-by-two design, participants in each of these groups were also allocated either to helping a sick child or touring a virtual city. At the end of the virtual-reality experience, participants were confronted by “someone in need of help” (an actor). The researchers measured the time to help and the amount of help provided by those in the different experimental conditions, and the results showed that those in the superhero/child-saving condition were significantly faster and helped more than those in the touring conditions. Six of the touring participants didn’t help at all, whereas all of the former superheroes did. The researchers hypothesized that the embodied experience of helping facilitated the transfer of this behavior to the real world. As we have seen, prosocial games foster prosocial behaviors even with lower tech immersion, so the idea that embodiment might play a role in fostering compassion and altruism is unsurprising. These studies seem to suggest that giving people practice in helping (or perhaps the experience of being capable of helping?increasing their sense of coping ability) inspires prosociality even after the game is over.
Design Implications
As a start, these factors (relevance, goal congruence, and coping ability) could be considered logical targets for systems seeking to develop compassion. Digital systems that aim to connect people, to help them work together, or to allow them to help each other are in a unique position to leverage what we know about the factors that increase compassion and altruism. Take, for example, nonprofit organizations targeting poverty through microlending, such as Kiva and GoodReturn. They have two main user groups: low-income entrepreneurs who need funding for small ventures (e.g., a motorcycle to start a home-delivery service) and higher-income funders who wish to contribute to social good as microinvestors. Over the past few years, I (Rafael) have been involved in a number of small projects on behalf of GoodReturn. Although we have yet to attempt to apply compassion research to these projects, we could, for example, attempt to match charitable projects to users based on compassion-appraisal factors. In the case of first-time donors, for example, a system that could match investors with entrepreneurs based on goal congruence (or even taking into account investor coping ability) may increase the effectiveness of these sorts of environments. One interesting thing about microlending is that it includes evidence of responsibility or deservedness, which, as we have seen influences altruism positively. Those seeking funding are doing so in order to actively combat their own poverty, and they commit to repaying a loan. For situations involving charitable giving in contrast, appraisals of responsibility will be more prone to affect prosocial behavior, so designers may need to address perceptions regarding blame. Design to Address Judgment and Blame In light of the inhibiting effects that judgment has on compassion and altruism, designers seeking to foster social change will often need to address underlying perceptions having to do with issues of suffering. In some cases, this will be about correcting misconceptions (about, for example, the various roots of mental illness or poverty). In other circumstances, strategies for fostering empathy may be the first step, such as for conflict resolution (as with the PeaceMaker game). By way of example, Belman and Flanagan (2010) give the hypothetical example of a game for eliciting empathy in relation to homelessness (in aid of soliciting aid). They point out that for players who attribute blame to those who are homeless, although engaging with the game may increase their experience of empathy, they are unlikely to give time or money to a shelter because their appraisal of the situation is incongruent with their goals. In other words, people’s attitudes toward homelessness will affect whether the game leads to compassion and helping behavior or stops at empathy. Finally, there is an open question as to how technologies can be used to foster the nonjudgmental aspect of compassion, based on a notion of common humanity. Design for Inspiration As we have seen, empathy and compassion aren’t the only triggers for altruism. Based on the work by researchers such as Haidt and Immordino-Yang, allowing people to witness other people’s compassion and perhaps supporting reflection on their own behavior could prove to be another effective strategy to cultivating compassion and altruism. Supporting the sharing of inspiring images, videos, and stories across social networks provides one simple example of inspiration sharing. For other contexts, designers might use elevation as a way to support a sense of empowerment/coping ability as a way of transforming empathy into action. As mentioned previously, many charities have moved from depicting extreme suffering to depicting the fruits of helping (empowerment), suggesting that it is the latter that more consistently inspires giving. There are a number of exciting paths open to exploration in this area, and we expect to see a growing area of special interest at the intersection of inspiration, elevation, and technology over the next decade. Detecting Compassion Where technologies or games seek to foster empathy or compassion but do not have access to measuring consequential action, the question arises as to how technologists might automatically know if their efforts are at all helpful. As far as we are aware, compassion detection has yet to be attempted with affective computing (Calvo, D’Mello, Gratch, & Kappas, 2014), but research suggests there are physiological signals and facial expressions unique to compassion, so there is potential for noninvasive automatic techniques that would certainly prove helpful to work in this area. Movement and Synchrony According to fascinating research on dance, rituals, and movement, there is evidence that synchronous movement can enhance cooperative ability, compassion, and even altruism (Behrends, Muller, & Dziobek, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Although we have yet to come across videogames designed deliberately to leverage this intriguing phenomenon, the implications for physical systems such as the Wii or gesture-camera-based systems such as Kinect are self-evident. We eagerly await developments at this intersection of movement, compassion, and games. Until then, keep dancing. In conclusion, in an article on the wellbeing benefits of compassion, Emma Seppala (2013), associate director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, concludes that, “thanks to rigorous research on the benefits of compassion, we are moving toward a world in which the practice of compassion is understood to be as important for health as physical exercise and a healthful diet, empirically validated techniques for cultivating compassion are widely accessible, and the practice of compassion is taught and applied in schools, hospitals, prisons, the military, and beyond.” As technologists, we can be part of making that world. Seeing as technology is now woven into the fabric of each of these areas, we’ll need to be. |
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