The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,359

retaliation.

In these experiments, sympathy was manipulated indirectly, by varying the similarity in values between a participant and the target, or it was entirely endogenous: the experimenters counted on some participants spontaneously being more empathic than others, for whatever reason. The key question for understanding the decline of violence is whether sympathy can be pushed around exogenously.

Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy. A prime communality-builder is inducing people to cooperate in a project with a superordinate goal. (The classic example is the warring boys at the Robbers Cave camp, who had to pull together to haul a bus out of the mud.) Many conflict-resolution workshops operate by a similar principle: they bring adversaries together in friendly surroundings where they get to know each other as individuals, and they are tasked with the superordinate goal of figuring out how to resolve the conflict. These circumstances can induce mutual sympathy, and the workshops often try to help it along with exercises in which the participants adopt each other’s viewpoints.57 But in all these cases, cooperation is being forced upon the participants, and it’s obviously impractical to get billions of people together in supervised conflict-resolution workshops.

The most powerful exogenous sympathy trigger would be one that is cheap, widely available, and already in place, namely the perspective-taking that people engage in when they consume fiction, memoir, autobiography, and reportage. So the next question in the science of empathy is whether perspective-taking from media consumption actually engages sympathy for the writers and talking heads, and for members of the groups they represent.

In several studies the Batson team convinced participants they were helping with market research for the university radio station.58They were asked to evaluate a pilot show called News from the Personal Side, a program that aimed to “go beyond the facts of local events to report how these events affect the lives of the individuals involved.” One set of participants was asked to “focus on the technical aspects of the broadcast” and “take an objective perspective toward what is described,” not getting caught up in the feelings of the interview subject. Another set was asked to “imagine how the person who is interviewed feels about what has happened and how it has affected his or her life”—a manipulation of perspective-taking that ought to instill a state of sympathy. Admittedly, the manipulation is a bit ham-handed: people are not generally told how to think and feel as they read a book or watch the news. But writers know that audiences are most engaged in a story when there is a protagonist whose viewpoint they are seduced into taking, as in the old advice to aspiring scriptwriters, “Find a hero; put him in trouble.” So presumably real media also rope their audiences into sympathy with a lead character without the need for explicit orders.

A first experiment showed that the sympathy induced by perspective-taking was as sincere as the kind found in the studies of shocked Elaine.59 Participants listened to an interview with Katie, who lost her parents in a car crash and was struggling to bring up her younger siblings. They were later presented with an opportunity to help her out in small ways, such as babysitting and giving her lifts. The experimenters manipulated the sign-up sheet so that it looked either as if a lot of students had put their names down, creating peer pressure for them to do the same, or as if only two had, allowing the students to feel comfortable ignoring her plight. The participants who had focused on the technical aspects of the interview signed up to help only if many of their peers had done so; the ones who had listened from Katie’s point of view signed up regardless of what their peers had done.

It’s one thing to sympathize with a character in need, but it’s another to generalize one’s sympathy to the group that the character represents. Do readers sympathize just with Uncle Tom or with all African American slaves? With Oliver Twist or with orphaned children in general? With Anne Frank or with all victims of the Holocaust? In an experiment designed to test for such generalizations, students listened to the plight of Julie, a young woman who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion after a car accident. (The experiment was run before effective treatments had been discovered for that often-fatal disease.)

Well, as you