The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,351

you lose.) The exploration of our better angels must show not only how they steer us away from violence, but why they so often fail to do so; not just how they have been increasingly engaged, but why history had to wait so long to engage them fully.

EMPATHY

The word empathy is barely a century old. It is often credited to the American psychologist Edward Titchener, who used it in a 1909 lecture, though the Oxford English Dictionary lists a 1904 usage by the British writer Vernon Lee.6 Both derived it from the German Einfühlung (feeling into) and used it to label a kind of aesthetic appreciation: a “feeling or acting in the mind’s muscles,” as when we look at a skyscraper and imagine ourselves standing straight and tall. The popularity of the word in English-language books shot up in the mid-1940s, and it soon overtook Victorian virtues such as willpower (in 1961) and self-control (in the mid-1980s).7

The meteoric rise of empathy coincided with its taking on a new meaning, one that is closer to “sympathy” or “compassion.” The blend of meanings embodies a folk theory of psychology: that beneficence toward other people depends on pretending to be them, feeling what they are feeling, walking a mile in their moccasins, taking their vantage point, or seeing the world through their eyes.8 This theory is not self-evidently true. In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William James reflected on the bond between man and man’s best friend:Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? 9

So the sense of empathy that gets valorized today—an altruistic concern for others—cannot be equated with the ability to think what they are thinking or feel what they are feeling. Let’s distinguish several senses of the word that has come to be used for so many mental states.10

The original and most mechanical sense of empathy is projection—the ability to put oneself into the position of some other person, animal, or object, and imagine the sensation of being in that situation. The example of the skyscraper shows that the object of one’s empathy in this sense needn’t even have feelings, let alone feelings that the empathizer cares about.

Closely related is the skill of perspective-taking, namely visualizing what the world looks like from another’s vantage point. Jean Piaget famously showed that children younger than about six cannot visualize the arrangement of three toy mountains on a tabletop from the viewpoint of a person seated across from him, a kind of immaturity he called egocentrism. In fairness to children, this ability doesn’t come easy to adults either. Reading maps, deciphering “you are here” signs, and mentally rotating three-dimensional objects can tax the best of us, but that should not call our compassion into doubt. More broadly, perspective-taking can embrace guesses about what a person is thinking and feeling as well as what he is seeing, and that brings us to yet another sense of the word empathy.

Mind-reading, theory of mind, mentalizing, or empathic accuracy is the ability to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling from their expressions, behavior, or circumstances. It allows us to infer, for instance, that a person who has just missed a train is probably upset and is now trying to figure out how to get to his or her destination on time.11 Mind-reading does not require that we experience the person’s experiences ourselves, nor that we care about them, only that we can figure out what they are. Mind-reading may in fact comprise two abilities, one for reading thoughts (which is impaired in autism), the other for reading emotions (which is