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https://psyche.co/ideas/the-empathy-gap-that-is-imperilling-future-generations>
"Mary is on her daily walk around the neighbourhood. Suddenly, she breaks into
a fit of wheezing and coughing. Her chest feels constricted as she tries to
regain her breath. She grabs a seat on a nearby bench to gather herself.
Now, I’ll add one last detail to the story: Mary is living in the year 2050.
Her suffering is no different because of this fact. But perhaps it now feels a
bit harder to empathise with her.
Warnings about the future peril facing humanity – which, of course, will be
made up of specific people like Mary – are common these days, and for good
reason. The harms of the climate crisis are poised to ramp up, while pandemics
worse than COVID-19, threats of nuclear conflict, and safety risks from
advancements in AI loom large. Experts estimate the odds of a catastrophe that
kills at least one in 10 humans within a five-year span at 20 per cent this
century – basically a roll of the dice. Yet most of the world remains
insufficiently focused on mitigating the gravest threats to our species’ future
wellbeing.
How should we balance our focus on immediate, shorter-term problems versus more
gradually developing and future threats? It’s very difficult to say. But in a
world where people could more easily empathise with future generations, public
pressure to address those catastrophic risks would be greater. This, in turn,
might lead to relevant safety policies moving closer to the front of political
parties’ agendas. Government agencies that focus on such policies could receive
much more funding to establish larger research teams and regulatory capacities
for risk mitigation.
Public discourse has been gradually filling up with philosophical arguments and
statistical information to marshal action to reduce the risks to our collective
future. However, while presenting persuasive logic and convincing data is
absolutely critical, it’s just not enough. To win the hearts and minds of
policymakers and society at large, we also need to overcome emotional hurdles.
It’s already difficult for many of us to care about our future selves, let
alone future generations. Many of us don’t save enough for retirement or
exercise as much as we think we should, in large part because we find it hard
to sufficiently empathise with the person we’ll eventually become. Present bias
is pervasive. Passing the societal version of the marshmallow test may prove
even more challenging, as it involves forms of favouritism that are both
temporal (present vs future) and interpersonal (me vs you). In order to set
humankind up for a flourishing future, we need to push against the
psychological tendency to value our present selves far more than we value
future others.
Other scholars have argued that there is no inherent moral distinction between
someone’s suffering now or in the future. In a series of studies, David DeSteno
and I recently investigated differences in how people actually feel when
thinking about future versus present pain – and what, if anything, can be done
to make future suffering more emotionally evocative.
We used a simple experimental design in which we randomly assigned participants
to imagine a person suffering – from a respiratory disease, a broken ankle, etc
– either in the present or at least 25 years in the future. Besides a brief
description of the suffering (as in the case of Mary), participants weren’t
told much else about this hypothetical person. We found that participants rated
the amount of suffering the person experienced as nearly the same whether it
was in the present or the future. However, when asked about their level of
distress and concern, people reported 8 to 16 per cent less empathy toward the
future sufferer (depending on how far in the future it was). That is, there was
a mismatch between what people understood at an intellectual level (the amount
of pain experienced by someone else) and their felt experience when imagining
someone else’s suffering."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
