Do you have “cognitive” or “affective” empathy?
A team of researchers, led by Robert Eres, from Monash University in Australia, have identified that people have physically different brains depending on the type of empathy they have.
I do not find this surprising at all. I believe that who we are is much more hard-wired than most of us realize.
So the question is: Are you a rational or emotional decision maker?
If you are emotional, you have affective empathy. If you are rational, you are a cognitive empathy.
When I sum up a person in front of me when assessing people, this is one element I look for immediately. People wear how they make decision on their face.
Why is this important for me? Because if you are telling me something, I will know how reliable you are by the type of decisions you make (rational or emotional). Emotions cloud judgement and will affect one’s ability to see things clearly and that matters when getting to the truth!
I cry mutt in this category.
Meyers Briggs has a more complex understanding of feeling vs. thinking in personality types. It’s true that “thinkers” are more reliable in terms of passing on accurate information. But thinkers can sometimes also come off as cold, detached or scripted — which gets in the way of successfully conveying information in a way it will be received… though I’m sure you take that into account.
I think I might be right in the middle of these two categories. I find that I am very analytical about people and what they would likely do, but I feel for people more than the average person does. Years ago, I worked in a doctor’s office, and I had to come out of that field, because I found that it sapped too much of my emotions. I have an ability to block my emotions on the cases that we look at to a degree by concentrating on the facts. However, if I see too much of the victim’s family crying, I can’t take it. I have to fast forward over the emotional parts to concentrate on the facts.
Could you elaborate on the last paragraph? Are you saying that affective empathy people, are emotional decision makers, and that they are unreliable because of this?
When you compare emotional decision makers to logical decision makers, yes, people who are emotional will have a more difficult time seeing the truth. Science has proven this in studies. But people who are emotional decision makers have a huge leg up in feeling compassion for other people and picking up on the needs of others, so there is no “one is better” category. They are different and have different strengths. For me, I take notice because its important for what I do.
I am affective (I bet you would have guessed:)). I know some people that come down the middle on this “dichotomy”. Also, I believe that stress is what is most likely to force a person to resort to their natural tendency. What is kind of interesting about that is that stress tends to make all types emotional. Emotional decision making probably means making decisions based on emotional concepts/system rather than “in a state of emotion”.
I think we know most of us by are personal views posted on many subjects here, so I’m not shocking anyone by outing myself as an emotional in this category! 🙂 it would be kinda fun to have eyes pick which one she thinks we all are from the history of our comments. I bet she knows us pretty well!
There are 4 children in our family., and each of us is very different. I think raising does make a difference, but we are all born with different qualities. I think the birth order makes a big difference, also.
I’m very much to the rational side. In fact I don’t take emotions (my own and other’s) enough into account when I’m making decisions. I can seem cold as a result, and I believe sometimes I actually am cold. However, I have a very strong belief in justice, fairness, and general decency. When I see these being ignored or pushed to the side, I feel very disgusted and sad.
Though I don’t like arguing, I do like listening to different points of view, and I’m very often willing to change my own point of view if I think someone else has opinions that make more sense than mine. When people make arguments based on intolerance or sweeping generalizations (“All Republicans are idiots! All Asian men are sexist! Everyone in the South is ignorant!”) that is really a pet peeve of mine. It’s not only offensive but obviously impossible!
Sometimes it seems like it is easier for me to see the “truth” of things because I don’t have a whole emotional investment in a lot of things. So a situation could go this way or that, and I don’t have an expectation or a hope bound up with it. I just see it.
But I am not a super empathetic person in my personal life, and I struggle with that. It can make life harder for me and those close to me, to say the least.
I’m wondering if a person who is found to be in one category may (over a period of time), experience physiological changes in hormones and finds themselves involuntarily moving to the other side of the spectrum. For example, a man may be a hardcore rational/cognitive empathy-type their whole adult life. Then, as they enter advanced-age and hormones go through their emotionally twisty process, they find themselves crying at sad parts in movies (oftentimes wondering, ‘what the heck’) or finding incredible joy at witnessing something as simple as a sunset. Suddenly, they would pass for an emotional/affective-type but still possess (at least internally) all the elements of the prior. Possible?
Good question, and personality characteristics do exist along continuum. Yet cross cultural studies show it’s really really rare for people’s orientation to over time SIGNIFICANTLY shift along any one of the so-called Big 5 or Myers Briggs traits (between which there’s some overlap). But yeah it can happen, and when it does it’s also reasonable basis for stoke or traumatic brain injury screening.
This makes a lot of sense Eyes. You can see it in people’s faces.
I think I’m a little emotional 🙂 but I’m working on that.
However I don’t know what people think of Judge Judy but she appears emotional when she’s letting certain people have a piece of her mind but she’s also very logical?
I don’t see Judge Judy as an affective empathy type person myself– she is cognitive if you ask me. She can be kind and thoughtful with people on her show too, but she is rational about it. I’ve never seen her as being ruled by her emotions, and that’s what causes a lot of the problems between the people on the show and her– those people are typically very emotion-based people, and that results in their making often very poor choices which is often how they wind up in the situations that get them on the show to begin with. 🙂
Hi Keith, I re-watched some of her shows and she uses her cognitive. No surprise given that she is a seasoned judge, but her emotions are rationally driven. She even uses her emotions for dramatic effect like any good teacher does. She also does a fair bit of emotional correction of people in front of her :))
Probably that’s the reason initially I didn’t like her show, many years ago, because I was reacting to all her emotions. But now if I watch a show, I see all the rationality in her process.
I actually need Eyes to tell me which I am. I’m very rational but I also act on impulse and emotions, usually when it comes to saving some stricken animal.
Well you have that insight.
Yeah but I’m curious as to which camp my brain falls under. It’s a 50/50 bet with me, I reckon.
I don’t know Sophie, but I find it hard to believe it is a fixed structure within our brains. There is a lot of flexibility in our brains.
Having said that, for a lot of people, they would like to think their brains are built of something permanent like concrete & steel because they’re not going to look at, understand and put in the effort to alter the way they behave even if it would be better for them if they did.
Most people are typically one over the other, Brent. We’d like to think we are more FLUID then we really are!
Most people won’t change. However the therapist in me says they could if they sincerely wanted to – but it will take some amount of guidance, time and effort. But again, do they want to change?
There are large benefits to be had by improving our decision making processes. But we often don’t see that. I’d bet the benefits are greater than doing a degree.
I’ve personally always seen the reluctance of certain types of people to introspect and/or change as a fundamental part of their hard-wiring rather than a conscious choice.
Certain personalities and characteristics are just kind of weighted toward some patterns of thought and behavior over others. If they weren’t, then we would see people change a lot more often, but they generally don’t over the long haul– on *either* end of the spectrum. It’s hard to fly without wings, it’s hard to run without legs, it’s hard to breathe under water without gills, and it’s hard to be someone you’re not, regardless of how much effort you put into it. I’ve always seen the kinds of people who do manage to introspect and put effort into changing as the kind of people who have that resilience and perseverance.
I might be able to work hard and practice a lot and learn to sing OK, but I’ll never be Luciano Pavarotti. On the other hand, Pavarotti could never have been me, either, but he sure was a darn fine opera singer, and I’m a pretty darn good me.
In other words, people can improve things they put effort into, but there are certain still constraints over which we have little or no meaningful control.
That said– for the therapist in you– I do find that mostly people have a lot more control over things than they think they do, and a lot less control over things than they think they do at the same time. A lot of times it seems to me that our perceptions are practically 180 degrees backward from our reality. We have plenty of agency that we don’t use, but we also tend to think we have a lot of control and influence over things that we really don’t have, and by getting the two confused, we become super efficient at being really ineffective. It’s difficult to articulate, but I also can hardly help but be amused by it at times. I don’t think you could see that and not have to laugh at times at the sad irony of it all.
I know what you mean Keith.
We don’t see things straight and so we don’t do things straight. It takes a lot of time to straighten out our perceptions and almost always requires expert guidance.
Are people not changing because they don’t know how to change or is it because they can’t change?
The truth is most people don’t want to change, even those that say they want to change.
A relative once asked for help for them to stop smoking. I showed them that they didn’t want to stop smoking. It was clear from their behaviour that they actually enjoyed smoking!
I actually like that you brought these points up. On certain things, I don’t think people can change. On the rest, I agree that they don’t really want to change– for whatever reason, whether they’re even conscious of it or not.
I think when someone wants to change and just doesn’t know how, they will try to find out how to change. Sometimes that might be a Google search, or browsing a self-help section in a book store or going to a library, asking friends or family members, asking others who they’re aware have gone through a similar process, asking a trusted mentor, seeking out a professional in terms of a counselor, psychologist, life coach, looking for a like-minded group in the form of something like Alcoholics Anonymous or a church or something like Toast Masters or debate.org– seeking out fellowship, enrolling in a class or course at a university, etc. People who do this are obviously at least passingly interested in making that change or they wouldn’t be putting in the effort to find out how to (even if in their search, they decide that the benefits don’t outweigh the cost of pursuit).
I think there are a lot of people who don’t want to change, but for whatever reason, it’s important to them to LOOK LIKE they want to change, so those people may put in “effort” to make changes, but without actually trying to or following through on their efforts, etc. These would be people who might go to counselling or meetings or enroll in a class (or simply lie about these things) only because they achieve their desired results by making other people believe their efforts are real, but they only really want those benefits, and not the actual change itself. These people I think tend to be toxic, but even of those who aren’t toxic, they’re still a parasitic drain on the people involved in their lives. I don’t like this approach myself, because even at its most harmless, it can still serve to distort other people’s perception of reality, which can make them more ripe to be exploited by those who genuinely are toxic. It’s just all around yucky.
As for people who can’t change– these are generally going to be things like an introvert isn’t going to become an extrovert no matter what effort they put into it, or someone with an addictive personality isn’t going to suddenly not have an addictive personality even if they overcome an addiction– that tendency will usually remain for life. A lot of times it evolves into an “addiction” to something that’s actually healthy, but it still functions the same mechanically as an unhealthy addiction does– it just has a better impact on their life than the unhealthy addiction it replaced. An example of this sort of “change” would be someone who was a drug addict or alcoholic becoming an exercise addict or work-a-holic, or constantly busying themselves with social activities like being involved in the PTA, neighborhood counsels, town hall meetings, little league, or things like that after “kicking” their addiction. A fundamental, underlying change on certain kinds of traits like these is much less common than a surface change is, if that makes sense.
Another point I meant to bring up was sort of a reverse of the comment below (or above? not sure how it’ll display).
I’ve used what I wrote in my other long reply in my own life to get a better grasp on who I am as a person by using it in reverse. I figure that if I really want something, regardless of whether I tell myself or other people that I want that thing, that I’ll actively pursue it. And the corollary to that would be that if I don’t actively pursue something, then in all likelihood it’s something that I’m not actually as interested in as I may think or say I am.
I’ve found that this is a pretty solid tool to use to learn about myself, and by learning more about myself, I’m able to make better decisions– or at least better decisions in terms of putting more of my effort into things that will pay off for me in terms of satisfaction or enduring over time. For example, I may realize that one job might appeal to me more than another, seemingly better job, just because it’s something I’m more likely to enjoy doing and thus keep doing longer, and be able to improve more rapidly or more thoroughly due to that heightened interest and increased satisfaction.
I wonder if that’s a tool that you’re familiar with or use yourself as a therapist, or if it might be useful to you in some way. I hope it can be if it’s not something you’ve encountered before. 🙂
What you says makes sense. It can make sense to people but they still might not be able to do it. Often people have unconscious mental blocks and usually those have to be forgotten or rewired. They are like a subroutine running in the background.
For example my relative’s joy at realising he enjoyed smoking and didn’t need to stop probably lasted all of a week. Then his partner would have reminded him that it wasn’t about ‘him’, it was about his family and their future. Then he would have put his efforts behind this reaffirmed reason and the love for his family to forget about smoking. But because his ‘unconscious pleasure’ in smoking had been addressed he will move towards his goal with less hinderance. His decision is more conscious and ‘honest’.
One other comment though Keith, ‘If God had wanted us to fly we would have been given wings’
The whole evolutionary process embodies change. Human beings have gained the ability for conscious evolution.
That’s true, but evolutionary changes happen over generations, and no individual (save for ideas like reincarnation or something maybe?) gets more than their one generation, so that limits things a bit by comparison.
But I may have misunderstood what you meant with this comment?
A lot of our mind is unconscious but unlike many species we can become more ‘conscious’. Our minds govern our behaviour. Any restriction in our behaviour is ‘likely’ to involve the mind. Hence a restriction in our behaviour is more than likely to be a mind constraint rather than an actual physical constraint. I guess what I mean is that because a lot of our ability is believed to be ‘what we see’ we don’t know until we start changing what our actual potential is. It’s like the hidden part of the iceberg.
BTW I’ve seen a person with a fog-horn voice become a melodic singer. Now he probably didn’t have the interest to sing like Pavarotti (and besides that is the pinnacle and takes a lot more practice and effort to gain greater control etc..) but I was amazed at how this person’s singing voice changed with a voice coach. He didn’t have surgery, he just learnt something under a good teacher and quite quickly. He learnt to be more conscious of how he was using his voice. and body.
Well, among humans’ greatest adaptive strength is our relative lack of instinct compared to other animals’, offset by our increased capacity & need for socialization. And impressionability to nurture’s influence is ironically enough an inherited characteristic, which is the insight responsible for some pretty promising epigenetic theories.
You are a hard one for me to say because I know many personal elements about you that bias me 🙂 I can see 50/50 depending on the situation. I will chat privately if you want to email me 🙂
This is a very interesting article Eyes and the follow up research to be done should be revealing also.
The brain difference was found in the grey matter, which makes, reinforces and inhibits connections. Grey matter is mostly made from our experiences.
The article describes likely follow up research:
‘the discovery also raises new questions – like whether people could train themselves to be more empathic, and would those areas of the brain become larger if they did, or whether we can lose our ability to empathise if we don’t use it enough.
My own opinion is there is flexibility there, but mostly unused and is something that takes time to become habit, so for every-day purposes an emotional decider is an emotional decider, especially if you see them making another emotional decision recent in time to the situation in question.
Also in terms of reliability without question the rational decider is going to be more reliable. Emotions provide their own self-justification for our actions, rightly or wrongly is another matter, so emotions can easily be a ‘blind leading the blind’ situation. They went into a blind-rage is an example.
But I have a question, the article is about empathy, but you are relating it to decision making, what is the connection?
Hello eyes and everyone else! Would you or anyone kindly recommend any online quiz that would be accurate in assessing whether one is more of an emotional decision-maker or a rational decision-maker? Thanks
You could probably contact the researcher and ask for the test they used.
I found this interesting on empathy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq_nCTGSfWE