One of our biggest problems in the fight against coronavirus is a lack of empathy
In the weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the newsroom of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York, where I was an assistant metro editor, worked tirelessly to tell the stories of the men and women who were killed in the attacks.
Journalists interviewed friends and family members and told the stories of who the victims were, what they did for a living, where they came from, what they liked to do in their free time. We talked to widows and widowers, friends, parents, neighbors. Importantly, we got photos of those who were killed.
The stories and photos we told resonated with our readers. It made the story real and created a sense of empathy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of empathy lately, as we struggle through the coronavirus pandemic. Whether it comes to not wearing a mask or not recognizing the sheer number of coronavirus deaths (which, by the way, in the United States is now 158,000, more than 50 times the number of people killed on 9/11), our society continues to demonstrate a tremendous lack of empathy.
Remember the early messaging around wearing a mask. “I wear a mask to protect you; you wear a mask to protect me.” “Wear a mask for others.” “I wear a mask to keep you safe.” “Wear a mask for health care workers.”
It didn’t work for a lot of people — and still doesn’t work.
Many people are like Tony Green, a conservative from Texas who voted for Donald Trump and traveled “deep into the conspiracy trap over COVID-19.”
“I believed the virus to be a hoax,” he wrote in a guest opinion piece in the Dallas Voice last month. “I believed the mainstream media and the Democrats were using it to create panic, crash the economy and destroy Trump’s chances at re-election.”
Not wanting to give up his “God-given rights,” he hosted a party for family members in June.
In the days that followed, Green got sick, his partner got sick, his parents and in-laws all got sick, all testing positive for COVID-19. One relative died July 1. Another was put on a ventilator shortly thereafter.
Now, he finally believes the coronavirus is real.
It was yet another infuriating example of someone not believing something until it happens to them, usually when it’s too late. Herman Cain, Chuck Woolery, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert are just recent examples.
Is that what it has to take? Someone has to actually get COVID-19 before they actually believe it?
What is empathy?
Dr. Helen Riess, a psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the author of “The Empathy Effect,” which looks at the neurobiological connections people have with one another.
Her research into empathy is fascinating because it speaks directly to what we’re experiencing with relation to social media and how those dangers are playing out during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Empathy is the capacity to both feel and understand the emotions of others and to be motivated with a compassionate response,” Riess told me in a phone interview this week. “So it’s a capacity to both feel and understand the emotions of others, which move us emotionally and cognitively and motivate a response. And that response is compassion.”
This isn’t just a matter of the heart, though. It’s a brain function, and research has shown that the human brain actually generates a neurological response to someone else’s emotions similar to what the brain would generate when feeling that emotion first-hand.
That response is aided by stimulus inputs. One of the primary inputs is seeing someone’s facial expressions and body language. Looking at someone face to face produces reactions in the brain that allow a person to better perceive the other person’s feelings. You can better tell if someone is upset or offended or happy or angered.
“We have a lot of shared neural circuits, and some of these neurons are called mirror neurons, so that when we see somebody who looks sad, we immediately pick up that sad emotion and we’re moved by it,” Riess said. “This is why we tear up when we see something sad on TV, even though nothing is happening to us, or when we’re with a friend who’s really upset, we can catch that feeling of upsetness and sadness to these shared neural circuits that really give us almost a mapping of what other people are feeling.”
So here’s where it gets interesting and tells us a lot about what’s been going on with social media.
Anyone who’s spent five minutes looking at Facebook comments on a news story knows that this is not a hotbed of empathy.
Why is that?
Without seeing the expressions of others, actually seeing the result of your words on another person, that empathic response in the brain is dulled.
“Posting insults on Facebook or dropping derogatory comments on Twitter, the reason they do that with impunity is that they don’t actually see the impact of what they’re doing,” Riess said. “Very few people would say the same thing to somebody’s face, because, first of all, they would see the impact of what they said, and second of all, they would probably feel shamed inflicting so much either harm or hatred on somebody.”
Social media has dulled our sense of empathy, almost atrophying those neural connections that make empathy possible.
Empathy and the pandemic
Here’s why all this is brought to bear on the pandemic.
In her book, Riess writes that the reasons we have empathy are twofold: to avoid certain situations that we learn might be negative and to motivate us to help others.
Put in the context of the pandemic, a lack of empathy translates to a lack of capacity to avoid a negative outcome (contracting COVID-19) and a lack of motivation to help others (wear a mask to protect others). Those two things are desperately needed right now.
Here’s the good news: Empathy can be taught and developed.
Riess is also founder of Empathetics, a company that trains people in health care how to have empathy, what you’d otherwise call “bedside manner.”
The applications for empathy training can be extended into all sorts of fields, including teaching, business, even arts and politics.
“Well, interestingly, I founded Empathetic, which is an empathy training company for health care, but we are now getting calls from law enforcement,” Riess said. “And we actually have an engagement with a police force to teach empathy because the police chief says, ‘I want my police force, first and foremost, to be really good people.’”
If empathy can be learned and developed, what can a news outlet do?
This brings us back to the stories of the people killed on 9/11. Those stories helped our readers feel empathy with those victims.
Unfortunately, in the current pandemic, we don’t have as many stories of the people who died or survived COVID-19, for various reasons.
Samantha Hickey’s death
One notable exception was the death last month of Samantha Hickey, a 45-year-old, otherwise healthy pediatric nurse practitioner with St. Luke’s Health System who contracted COVID-19 and died.
St. Luke’s shared Samantha’s story and photo with the media. She was on the home page of every local news website, on the front page of every newspaper and led the TV newscasts.
Her story generated a tremendous amount of empathy in the community. You could just feel a change in the acceptance of the seriousness of the pandemic. Reading her story, seeing her face motivated people in the community to help others and to avoid a negative outcome.
In all, more than 200 people have died from COVID-19 in Idaho, but we have heard of only a handful of their stories.
And I think that’s an important factor in why there is such a lack of empathy surrounding COVID-19.
Without seeing the faces and hearing the stories of those who died, we’re able to go about our business as normal without a sense of the human toll that COVID-19 is taking.
To that end, the Idaho Statesman has put out a call to friends and family to share with us the stories of the people who have died or who have fallen ill from COVID-19.
If you’re willing to share your story, we’ve created a couple of forms to help us address this important piece of Idaho’s experience during the coronavirus pandemic.
In the first form, we want to hear from people who have had COVID-19.
In the second form, we hope to learn about those who’ve we lost.
Click on this story at idahostatesman.com or send me an email directly at smcintosh@idahostatesman.com to tell your story.
It’s important to tell these stories so that we can all better understand that this isn’t just some abstract concept. This is real, happening to real people. It may not be affecting you or someone you know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. We hope to tell these stories so that our readers can not only know what’s happening; it’s so that they may feel.
That’s what empathy is all about.
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
