“Ukrainian refugees are coming.” Why have we lost the ability to empathize with the tragedies of others?

In a blatantly racist statement, an NBC reporter described the Ukrainian refugees bound for Poland: "They are not from Syria, but from neighboring Ukraine. Frankly, these are Christians; they are white, and they look like people who live in Poland."

This was not just an outlier, as it seemed a recurring pattern that also emerged with a CBS reporter reporting on the war: "This place is not Iraq or Afghanistan, which have been in conflict for decades. This is a relatively civilized country, relatively European, and you wouldn't expect Or you wish something like that could happen to him."

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Things weren't any better on Arab social media, albeit in the opposite way.

While a terrible and cruel war was raging, comments appeared about the "beautiful Ukrainian refugees" waiting to arrive in the Arab countries, in complete disregard for the suffering experienced by other human beings. What is happening on both sides?

"we" and "them"

Throughout human history, and in front of all stories of conflict, whatever their causes, people have divided the two sides of the conflict into “us” and “them.” We automatically identify with those who are like us, closest to our identity, language and values, and these are the ones who receive our sympathy and support.

As for the "others" who are not like us, we do not care if they become victims of wars and oppression.

After World War II, the modern world realized the heavy price that humanity can pay for ostracizing the "other" and justifying the killing of it.

Therefore, through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some have sought to establish consistent standards that give both value and dignity to all human beings, and at the same time sociologists and psychologists have begun to push the concept of empathy aggressively into global culture.

The main motivation for this was the fear that humans would kill each other with nuclear weapons, so we sought to learn to see the world through the eyes of others, and it seemed that things would move towards a more compassionate and just future.

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But the following years witnessed a development in the opposite direction.

In the late 1960s, Sarah Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University, was observing in her studies a change in the attitude of American youth toward "empathy" for others.

Through her surveys of American university students, that tone seemed to pick up at the start of the new millennium, and by 2009 Konrath's research found that young adults were, on average, 40% less empathetic than young adults in their 1960s.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) poses for a selfie with a refugee during a visit to a refugee reception center in Berlin

The refugee issue expresses this change.

In 2015, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with her defense of asylum and her call for full support to help refugees integrate into German culture, was one of the rare sympathetic voices on the world stage.

By 2018, fewer leaders were willing to take such steps to welcome refugees, after rising inequality, strong political opposition and the increasing influence of far-right parties around the world.

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In 2017, Social Psychological and Personality Science published a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University on the effect of feeling belonging to one group on empathy for other groups.

The study was conducted on three different groups: Americans versus citizens of Middle Eastern countries, Hungarians in their dealings with Muslim refugees, and Greeks in their attitudes toward Germans. Participants showed less sympathy or anxiety about witnessing the suffering of their counterparts, and were less willing to support them.

This feeling of diminished empathy means less support during problems of war or disaster, so that things seem to be turning back.

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Are we tired of empathy?

Some scientific literature treats empathy as a spontaneous feeling that easily occurs due to our evolutionary roots, but psychology and neuroscience research that has focused on situations in which we fail to show empathy says otherwise.

In 2012, a picture of three young women attending New York Fashion Week spread, an image that would have seemed normal had it not been for the appearance of a homeless man on the side of the picture, sitting on the sidewalk with shabby clothes and a tired face, while the girls completely ignore his presence.

The British newspaper The Guardian considered this shot one of the most important pictures of the year.

Perhaps we should ask here: Doesn't this happen to all of us?

Haven't each of us passed by homeless people on the streets without caring?

After all, this feeling can sometimes help us;

When the distress of empathizing with the suffering of others impedes us from performing certain tasks, the best-known example of this is what doctors do, they activate this “empathy failure” for a functional reason. Feeling extreme sadness every time someone suffers can backfire on the doctor.

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Yes, we may be able to go to great lengths to save a single victim, pay attention to and empathize with her, but show indifference if the problem is much larger.

Likewise, we are concerned with pursuing the case of, say, a single individual who has been killed, while ignoring mass murder and genocide.

The fact is that the repetition of accidents or the mention of statistics on killings in wars fail to arouse our further interest, since we can neither save nor sympathize with everyone.

On the other hand, the feeling of anger or shock in the face of the tragedy fades away with its recurrence due to habituation, or what we might call "empathy fatigue".

This can be explained by our striving to avoid repeating the trauma we already suffered, so the tenth time we see images of horrific deaths in conflict zones, the brain will tell us it's OK, it's happened before and we are used to it to protect us from burning.

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How does empathy occur in our brain?

In 2013, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences asked the question about exactly what role the brain plays in regulating empathy, and they discovered that there is a region in our brains called the right supramarginal gyrus that helps regulate empathy processes both to ourselves and to ourselves. Or others, and they observed that our ability to empathize with others is enormously affected by our psychological and mental state.

For example, when participants were exposed to pleasurable visual and tactile stimuli, they tended to think that others were better off than they really were, while they imagined that others were less happy when exposed to unpleasant stimuli such as a foul odor or pictures of disgusting insects.

We can generalize that picture more broadly and ask: Can rich countries have less sympathy for the miseries of others simply because they are rich countries?

When the right supramarginal gyrus function abnormally, it distorts our perceptions of other people's pain or happiness. This happens in a variety of other ways, for example when our experiences are different from them, and when our brain needs more time and some deliberation to imagine other people's situations and understand their suffering, and from Then develop feelings of sympathy for them.

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Fortunately, however, it is not completely inevitable, and humans can develop their ability to empathize with others.

In a 2009 study published in Social Issues and Policy Review on the use of empathy to improve intergroup attitudes and relationships, the study suggested that improving intergroup relationships might be made possible by training individuals from different groups to Understanding, appreciating and humanizing individuals from other groups, and conversely dehumanizing and denigrating each other, has fueled hatred and conflict, something that has been used throughout history by those who seek to fan the flames of hatred between groups and through which they have been able to carry out acts of genocide .

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One of the most famous examples here is what happened in the country of Rwanda between April and July 1994, when the Hutu tribes, through the army and private militias, began to kill all Tutsi citizens they got their hands on. During that massacre, Hutu extremists set up radio stations to spread hatred and anger. against the Tutsi.

The most famous and most frequent sentence was: "Get rid of the cockroaches." This message was a declaration of the dehumanization of the Tutsi, and the results were 800,000 deaths, and the rape of hundreds of thousands of women, or cockroaches in the eyes of their opponents.

In the milder form of this is the 'empathy bias', which explains our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward people outside of our social groups.

(10) In the book “The Dark Side of Empathy,” Fritz Braithopt, director of the Experimental Humanities Laboratory at Indiana University, says that empathy is a morally ambiguous ability, people imagine that empathy can help resolve tensions in conflict situations, and this seems true, but in many Sometimes it has the opposite effect, leading to extremism.

In a family feud or civil war, you find that we are too quick to take sides and empathize too much with what our community stands for.

When we see things from one perspective, what really happens is that we sympathize with his companions to the same extent that we nurture the feeling that the other side does not deserve any sympathy.

Sometimes we commit atrocities, says Breithaupt, not because of our inability to empathize, but as a direct result of successful, perhaps very successful empathy.

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It seems, then, that sympathy is a very complex feeling, and what we presented a while ago is the tip of the iceberg in this domain, but we are sure of one thing only, which is that the human soul is more complex than our naive perceptions of it, and that it has dark sides, which may sometimes lead us to a cure in the occurrence of tragedies With those who do not look like us and the mockery of their surgeries.

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