Empathy and the Power of One

Matt Johnson, PhD at TEDx Hult London

What is the connection between empathy and storytelling? And how do stories impact consumer behavior, human connection, and everyday decision making? Matt Johnson, PhD discusses the research of him and his colleagues (Prince Ghuman and Laura Detter) which explores the curious psychology of empathy. These results suggest that while empathy is an incredible human ability, its influence is often expressed in unexpected ways.

Click here to view transcript (5-minute read)

You’re probably wondering what these images represent.

They all have something very specific in common

A house, a city, a world cup trophy, a computer..

All of these were made possible by human collaboration

And clearly this slide could have been filled with many many more images. When people band together, we’re capable of powerful things well beyond what we could hope to do as individuals.

In other words, there is a strength in numbers. For nearly everything we hope to do, we’re better off going at it as a group than going at as individuals.

So while this is accepted wisdom.. at the same time, this emphasis in the strength in numbers neglects a key truth:

As an illustration, consider this number: “350 million”

This is an estimate for the number of people, who as a result of China’s one-child policy, who were NOT born.

This is a strange number. We can understand what it means on an intellectual level, but it feels strange because we can’t empathize with hypothetical people.

This process of empathy, is something we do every day. If you think directly about someone you know, you can easily put yourself in their shoes, and imagine for that moment what it’s like to be them.

But what’s interesting is that it doesn’t get much easier to empathize when 350 million people are real.

Think about 350 million actual people, which is roughly the population of the U.S. Try and empathize with all of them, simultaneously. Still feels incredibly abstract.

If you keep going down from 350 million 100 million people 1 million 10,000 100 people

It might start to feel a little more human, but still just numbers.

When you drill all the way down, the number which we’re best able to empathize with is ... 1. The single individual

So despite all of the amazing powers of the group - the synchrony, the collaboration, the teamwork.. We see that in this limited instance of empathy, there’s in fact a massive advantage, a massive strength..in a single person.

And this strength of the individual produces powerful, unanticipated consequences..

And the key to this power lies in empathy. As a psychology and neuroscience researcher, this is a process I’m fascinated by. Empathy is an amazing human ability. By just glancing at someone, we can not only know what they feel, but we can actually come to feel this ourselves. If we see someone stub their toe, we immediately recoil in pain; if someone walks into a room smiling ear to ear, we usually can’t help feeling a little happier ourselves. We automatically assimilate the mental and emotional states of those around us.

And empathy seems to operate inversely to the principle of strength of numbers. But what makes this individual empathy powerful? How does it produce practical impact?

Individual Empathy becomes especially powerful within the vessel of a story.

Whether movies, or books, or spoken word, stories can export the amazing power of empathy. Now it’s not just the person across from us who we’re empathizing with, but now its people and characters we would never ordinarily meet in our regular walk of life. As the late great James Baldwin puts it, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read.”

And stories and empathy have a unique relationship. One specific feature of stories which has motivated some of our experiments is that stories tend to revolve around a single individual. One main character. In Star Wars, this is Luke Skywalker, In Great Expectations it was Pip. With few exceptions, stories tend to revolve around around single individuals who we become emotionally invested in.

Given all of this, we conducted a series of studies to test this connection directly.

We created a series of stories and situations such as running through an airport and barely making a flight. These were very subtly constructed in order to feature a single person doing this, or a group of people. So a single individual running through an airport, barely making a flight, or this same scenario with a group of people.

We found that, across a very wide array of stories and situations, that stories which revolved around a single person generated far higher rates of emotion and empathy

Put to the test - we see that the most potent unit of empathy is the single, individual narrative.

This is a very powerful thing, which goes well beyond simple emotion. These individual narratives can compel us to take incredible actions:

Take Detroit resident James Robertson for example. The 58-year-old had an unbelievable story: To get to his factory job, he took two buses and walked over 10 miles - each way. He would get home early in the morning, sleep a couple of hours, and do it all over again.

After learning of his story, a 19 year old stranger opened a Gofundme page to help get James a car for his commute. In the end, the campaign raised over $350,000. This outpouring of support came from complete strangers who were simply moved by the power of the story.

Taking this a step further, story can be the literal difference between life and death. This was the case for Dante Sipp - a young gymnastics instructor suffering from stage 4 kidney failure. Through a video of his story he posted online, he came into contact with Lauren Larrison. Despite never actually meeting him, she felt so connected to him through his story, that she donated him one of her kidneys. It saved his life.

There are countless examples of this - incredible generosity by complete strangers. Made possible by the power of the individual narrative.

As Mother Teresa perhaps one of the most empathetic people in human history said, “if i see the masses I will never act; if i see one, i must act”

However, this quote also illustrates that in some instances empathy can actually be TOO powerful. By focusing on a single individual, what else are we missing?

For example, it seems to contribute to a phenomenon known as genocide neglect. This is research pioneered by Paul Slovic at University of Oregon. He would present participants with a scenario in which they could donate to a child in need. For a single child, people said they would donate say $10. However, when he presented a scenario in which there were two children in need, he uncovered a troubling pattern: the amount they were willing to donate actually decreased. With 3 children, even less money still. And so on. This horrifying trend continues. As the scope of the issue increases - our empathy, and our willingness to assist actually goes down.

And this comes back to the fact that empathy is catered maximally at a single individual, and doesn’t scale well from there.

Other research has found that empathy for single individuals can erode our sense of fairness. Most of us are generally committed to a principle of fairness. We reject the idea that say, in a hospital line full of sick people, that you should let one person - who’s not any more sick than anyone else, skip the line to be treated first. But in these experiments, participants were made to empathize with this one individual, by being told a compelling, emotional story about their suffering. And when they’re told this story, they’re much more likely to allow this one person to cut and move ahead of equally sick people.

These individually driven narratives are also powerful enough to corrode our values.

So where does this leave us? On the one hand, we see that individual empathy can foster incredible connection - making us more open, generous, and compassionate. On the other hand, it can lead us to act in contradiction to our own moral principles.

So if we’re looking for an easy answer - Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing across the board - that’s difficult to say. But one thing should be clear - as individuals, we’re much more influential than we realize.

Just as we've come to recognize the power of the group, the strength in numbers, we should also come to recognize the power of the individual. Not only to recognize this in others and how their stories affect us, but to also come to recognize this power in ourselves.

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