THE SCIENCE OF EMPATHY
Scientists met this week to discuss the latest research into empathy, and how it could help resolve Middle East conflict
FOR NEARLY 70 years, politicians, diplomats, grassroots activists and militants have tried and failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine crisis.
Perhaps scientists should be given a chance — although they might want to work on the titles of their conferences: “Empathy Neuroscience: Translational Relevance for Conflict Resolution” was held this week at the British Academy in London.
The gathering, the brainchild of Cambridge professor Simon BaronCohen, was about stripping down the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to the cellular level. Literally.
Attendees shared findings about the specific areas of the brain that respond empathically and the chemicals they secrete. The hope was that the science might provide some insights into creating what is still lacking between the two peoples: an empathic understanding of the “other” side that would allow for a lasting peace settlement.
The detail was fascinating. It touched on ideas that do not immediately come to mind when thinking about solutions to Israel-Palestine, such as the brain’s role in secreting hormones related to childbirth and how cannabinoids — which create the same sensations people get when smoking marijuana and hashish — are stimulated during empathic reactions.
Emile Bruneau, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began the scientific presentations by quoting Yehuda Amichai’s poem The Place Where We Are Right: “From the place where we are right/Flowers will never grow/In the spring.”
Mr Bruneau showed photographs that highlighted the different areas of the brain that respond to emotional and physical pain. He went on to demonstrate that when we see people like us — family members or members of our social group — in pain, the brain’s electronic signals respond more intensely than when we see people from other groups in pain.
His point was that we all have a physiological capacity for empathy but, over the years, it becomes parochial, focused on our own narrowly defined social group. The inference was that creating empathy for the other side in conflict resolution is often as intractable as the conflicts themselves.
Ruth Feldman, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bar-Ilan University, demonstrated how deeply embedded empathy is in human beings.
Empathic re actions set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone associated with birth contractions and the release of breast milk. Professor Feldman’s scientific research is in bio-behavioural synchrony: the way mothers and the children they carry have synchronised heart beats, endocrine systems and, eventually, brain functions. After birth, we mirror facial expressions and sound from our immediate families. Through this mimicking, we are primed for empathic response from the beginning.
Professor Feldman conducted studies with groups of Palestinian and Israeli teenagers in social interactions. She then measured oxytocin levels and had their brains imaged. Hostility between the two was reduced when the youngsters were able to communicate one-on-one, in ways similar to those early mimicking behaviours.
The most interesting research was that of the University of Reading’s Bhismadev Chakrabarti, who earned his PhD under Professor Baron-Cohen.
Because our capacity to empathise with other groups diminishes as we build our adult identities, Mr Chakrabarti focuses more on way the brain rewards certain feelings and actions. The brain secretes some very pleasurable substances — opioids and cannabinoids — and his research looks not just at why kinship-based empathy kick-starts that process but also why such chemicals are released when we notice distress in people who are not in our social group.
But how do you use this information to move from the cellular level to finally making two peoples who have been fighting over the same small piece of land for decades reach a degree of understanding that allows for a resolution of their conflict?
At the end of the conference’s first day, that question was put to Ahmad Abu-Akel, social neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Feldman.
Mr Abu-Akel, a Palestinian Israeli by birth, said such research could have a positive impact indirectly: “People like to have science as a validation for the things they do.”
Professor Feldman, who is a direct descendant — on her mother’s side —
of the Gaon of Vilna, agreed: “Science can lead to political intervention.” She believes that her research, which began 20 years ago when she returned to Israel following her doctoral studies at Yale, offers a template for building the necessary empathic understanding to finally break the impasse.
She studied ways to get youths from both sides to reach measurable and observable changes in their empathy with the “other”.
Professor Feldman, who studied 100 youths, added: “We scientists can build a programme and test whether it can work, but the next level is for the government or one of the big NGOs who have a lot of money, to implement it in order to have an impact. “
Once people are out of their teenage years, the empathic response withers. That was on display in the conference as well.
The first non-scientist to give a talk was Nawal Musleh-Motut, a historian at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Ms Musleh-Motut, a Palestinian brought up in Canada, spoke about her research which involves diaspora Palestinians and Israelis sharing photos and stories about the Holocaust and the Nakba.
In the question-and-answer session that followed, the extreme cordiality in the room was strained by a Jewish woman who questioned the linkage between these two events. Ms MuslehMotut had not made any linkage. She had, in fact, been making the point that they were different events and perceived differently by those who suffered in them. But simply mentioning the Holocaust and the Nakba in the same sentence had been a provocation to the questioner. Soon empathy went out the window and we were on the familiar ground of the suffering Olympics. Holocaust, Nakba. Whose refugees have it worse: Palestinians or Jews? Why do you deny our catastrophe so you can talk up yours?
Mr Chakrabarti’s ideas about rewards suddenly seemed very relevant. These kinds of arguments have got people nowhere for 70 years and yet, for some reason, we keep coming back to them. Maybe oxytocin is secreted in Israeli (and Jewish) and Palestinian brains when contemplating how cruel history has been to us. Maybe we are being rewarded for remembering our terrible pasts. Professor Feldman poured balm on the troubled waters. Her family traces its roots in the Holy Land to the 1780s, shortly after the Gaon of Vilna died. In 1929, during the Arab riots against Jews in Mandate Palestine, her grandfather was sheltered by a Palestinian. “That man risked his own life to save his. I am here today because my grandfather was saved by a Palestinian.”
We were no longer in the realm of neuroscience but in the world of social experience where one-to-one communcation with the “other” seems to be the best way for improving relations. However, this is made difficult by group-to-group interactions.
Beyond the pleasure and pain centres of the brain, the “other” was the focus of much discussion.
Seated in the back of the room was the leading Palestinian public intellectual Sari Nusseibeh. After all this time, surely Israelis and Palestinians know everything there is to know about the “other”?
He laughed, “I think they do.” He added: “But the science is interesting.”
We all have capacity for empathy, but over the years it becomes focuse donour own social group