Interviewee: Dr. Marius Vollberg, specialized in psychology and neuroscience. 
As a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Marius investigates the affective and social determinants of behaviour.

Interviewers: Curator Tiina Rauhala and Artist Maija Tammi, Doctor of Arts

T&M: The artwork Hulda & Lilli invites viewers to side and empathize with two different main characters. What is empathy? 
MV: It has been written that there are more definitions of empathy than there are empathy researchers (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006). But maybe it is helpful to start with this: empathy generally refers to how we relate to the experiences of others. It is an umbrella term that can be divided into cognitive empathy (thoughts) and affective empathy (feelings). 

Affective empathy can be further divided into four categories. This further division is all about how congruent or incongruent your feelings are with somebody else’s. When your feelings align—you feel good about somebody else feeling good—this is called positive empathy. And when you feel bad about somebody feeling bad, that is negative empathy. 

Then there are two incongruent categories: when you feel bad about somebody feeling good, this is called gluckschmerz. A German word is used because there is not a good alternative in English, but basically it means being “in pain” because something good happens to somebody you dislike. The fourth and last category is feeling good when somebody feels bad. This is called schadenfreude, another German word that translates to feeling “joy” over another person’s “damages”.

T&M: What determines whether we experience cognitive or affective empathy?
MV: There are a lot of factors, and the categories can also overlap. For example, people often have a strong affective reaction when they see someone being bitten by a spider or snake. Our first response is fear or disgust instead of cognitively thinking “Oh, it must be awful for the person to be bitten by a spider”.

Other kinds of experiences might lend themselves to more of a cognitive appraisal. A common, yet problematic, example are large scale statistics. Let’s say you hear about 10 000 Finns being displaced by a flood. In this case, your response is most likely a mix. You cognitively understand that it’s bad. You might run mental simulations about your basement being underwater, but you may not immediately imagine a person in the water swimming for their life, like you would when you see a horror movie or when you hear your friend being attacked by someone.  So there is all this contextual information that can affect the proportion between cognitive and affective empathy.

All of this is on the side of the stimulus—the input we perceive, but there are also factors on the side of the perceiver that influence how we relate to others, including personality traits and past experiences.

T&M: How does our imagination influence how much we empathize? And what is the role of storytelling?
MV: The intensity of the response depends on tons of variables. But one key element is our ability to imagine events. Whenever we have to transcend our own perspective beyond the here and now, beyond what is right in front of us, we mentally travel across space, perspective and time. There is research to suggest that we do this by recombining past experiences into novel scenarios.

And these scenarios may be more or less detailed, depending on whether we like the actor, person or animal in the situation. Interestingly, the more detailed we can imagine the situation, the more we feel empathy with the actor; and vice versa: the less detailed we imagine the situation or scene, the less we empathize with the actor. Naturally people also differ in how they imagine in general. 

As we have established, imagination relies on the flexible recombination of past experiences, or memories, into novel scenarios, which in turn set the scene for empathy. Storytelling interacts with this process by guiding the way in which we imagine the scene. The background story, motivations of the protagonists, their past experiences – all of this helps us draw the scene in our minds. Consequently, this also means that you are likely to draw a more charitable image of the protagonist that you're identifying with more, whether it is Hulda or Lilli. I think this exhibition is a great example of how we create—rather than take—perspectives based on our knowledge and motivations.

T&M: How do groups influence empathy?
MV: This relates to what is probably one of the most robust effects across social psychology: people can quickly and flexibly form groups and subsequently favour their own group over others. From religious or political groups all the way to sports clubs or niche identities that you were only assigned to this morning, you are likely to see more identification with the “in-group” compared to the “out-group”.

In a famous study from the 1970s, people were asked to rate Klee and Kandinsky paintings (shown without signature), after which they were assigned to a group, either the Klee group or the Kandinsky group. They were not assigned to a certain group based on their judgement about the paintings, so someone who really hated the Klee paintings might still be put in the Klee group. Not only did people allocate more resources to their own group when given the chance, but they would also accept getting less money as long as it meant that the other group received even less. And all of this happened even though people had only just been assigned to the groups and were thus unlikely to have cared about them before.

I think this is really interesting because most of the groups that we care about in our actual lives have much more meaning to us. And if being assigned to an experimental group already makes people forgo substantial reward just to spite the other group, you can't help but wonder how strong these effects are for groups that we have grown up with or that have been embedded in our cultures. 

Depending on the route we take in this exhibition, we most likely take the corresponding side, may it be team Hulda or team Lilli. This affiliation may then influence everything that we experience, even extending to how we process basic facts.

Another famous study from the 1950s documented perceptions of a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton. The study is just titled “They Saw A Game”, because seemingly the only thing the perceivers had in common was that they saw a match. But when it came to counting the transgressions or recounting specific events that happened on the field, the participants often had wildly different accounts of what actually happened, in large part depending on which team they were supporting.

T&M: How does empathy mix with morality?
MV: Empathy is extremely relevant to how people think about moral decision making. And of course, when you think about moral decision making, you inevitably start to branch more into philosophy. 

The fundamental distinction is between deontologist and utilitarian reasoning. Deontologists always follow their principles no matter the consequences, while utilitarians make decisions more flexibly based on cost-benefit calculations. An example could be: if you are a deontologist, you will never harm anybody, because it is wrong to do so in principle. And if you are a utilitarian, you might sometimes harm others if it seems worth it. Why does this matter for empathy? For example, if you are extremely moved by an individual’s suffering, it might be harder for you to do some kind of cost-benefit calculation of whether it would be good to let this person suffer in order to save three others. 

T&M: Can empathy make a (positive) difference in the world?
MV: Per default, empathy has an immensely positive connotation: it is what heroes have and villains lack. But it probably isn’t that simple.

The case for a more complex story is laid out beautifully in Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy. Bloom questions whether we actually want people to feel more empathy. One of his examples that has stuck with me is one where people raised money for one dog that had cancer in a Canadian province. The money that was raised vastly exceeded the actual cost of treatment. People were so moved by the story that they all donated excessively. And it makes you wonder how many other dogs’ lives or human lives you could have saved by distributing those resources more efficiently.

According to Bloom, this example reflects one of the ways in which empathy may lead us astray. Instead, we may be better off practicing compassion, relating more cognitively to others’ situations without feeling as much of the emotion ourselves, so that we can allocate resources more efficiently.

So empathy might not always be a positive thing, but one of the things it certainly can do is act as a sort of flashlight that highlights need for action. And even though subsequent actions may sometimes overshoot, need for calibration does not mean empathy is bad in general.

In sum, thinking of empathy as good or bad may be missing the point. It can set various processes in motion, and we need to figure out how to get it to stop at the right time. Until we have figured this out, or proved it insufficient, it is hard to take this debate beyond a trivial “it is sometimes positive”.

T&M: Why is it that our emotions can lead us astray, and when can we trust them?
MV: It seems pretty clear by now that cultural evolution moves much faster than biological evolution. In consequence, parts of our emotional toolkit may be a little out of date. For example, the emotional response that helps us run for our lives when seeing a predator may also get triggered online, or when we are about to give a presentation. But unfortunately, our body doesn't really know the difference. And while pooping our pants may help us run a little faster, it rarely improves a presentation.

If we fully embrace this perspective, it becomes clearer why calibrating our responses to the suffering of others is far from trivial. Not only are we faced with suffering that keeps taking new qualitative and quantitative forms (e.g., new diseases and the scale of wars), it can also transcend the boundaries of time and space. If we imagine someone suffering under the first case of a new virus in a distant country, whatever we feel is unlikely to accurately reflect that person’s actual state.  And I think that this exhibition does a great job at demonstrating how hard it is to calibrate empathy.

Notably, emotions and thoughts may be so intertwined that we cannot really choose which to trust. Ultimately, in order to evaluate something as good or bad, we likely integrate across a lot of different sources of information including our emotions. Let’s take for example the story of Hulda, and the facts we are given about her. As we discussed earlier, our view of the story is coloured in by how much we like Hulda, our general preferences concerning animals and morality, and so on. Now, even if someone does not empathize with Hulda at all, their response may still be defined by emotion; that is, they may feel good or neutral in spite of Hulda’s suffering, and any cognitive process that we might like to think of as unemotional may in reality be in part a form of rationalization in service of that (lack of) emotion.