Freddy Purcell covers Carmen Mosser’s talk questioning whether online spaces make us less empathetic and possible solutions to remedy this.
For our latest Phil on Tap we welcomed Carmen Mossner from the University of Osnabrück. Carmen’s background is primarily in situated affectivity, sometimes focussing on empathy. There is a general perception that recent generations are lacking empathy, supported by some psychological research. However, being somewhat suspicious of this idea, Carmen investigated how digital worlds affect our ability to empathise.
Empathy is generally defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, so requires acknowledging and connecting to another person. One common position is the direct social perception view, that claims we have a lived body that is constituted by expressions and habits that allow others to directly experience our emotions, without needing to consciously interpret our behaviour. Carmen stood in contrast to this view, arguing that emotions aren’t just transported as empathy is context dependent, amongst other things.
Carmen then gave three conditions for empathy. (1) Seeing another as an embodied subject like us, capable of experiencing similar emotions and expressing them in similar ways. (2) We need a set of experiences from our own lives to draw on, as we are better able to understand the emotions of others when we have experienced similar things ourselves. (3) We often require background information on that person; including who they are, what they’ve been through, and the context they’re in. These three conditions are essential in being able to feel empathy, but also in interpreting another person’s emotions accurately.
As Carmen pointed out, online spaces seem to diminish our ability to interpret other’s emotions accurately. Online spaces appear to be less experientially rich as they take away most of the senses, diminishing the extent to which we act with full embodiment. Carmen accepted that, of course, things like video calls exist to enrich our sensory experience, but in these cases, you often must deal with poor video or audio quality. Carmen also claimed that actions in online spaces are often repetitive, encouraging us to act automatically without considering others. All this seems to heavily challenge the first condition for empathy where we fail to encounter others online as embodied in the same way as us. The anonymity often afforded to people online also limits the third condition as we often don’t know much about people encountered online.
Temporally accepting that that online spaces do diminish our empathetic abilities, Carmen moved to how we would combat this. She referenced studies that have shown that role-playing, meditation, and writing essays can help people to develop more empathy. However, Carmen was sceptical about whether these strategies would work outside a clinical setting and pointed out that they are time consuming, so would likely be impractical to apply to all our online interactions.
One possible solution is to implicate processes that cause people to reflect. For example, you might have a message to remind people to be empathetic at the beginning of a gaming chat or receive a notification telling you to be kinder if you type out something mean. However, Carmen was unsure whether these solutions would work, as it is possible that someone receiving a message saying that they’re being rude will only be encouraged to send a ruder message out of spite.
Carmen’s preferred solution is therefore to introduce affective scaffolds. More broadly, these are items, like a comfort light, that we associate with a certain emotion, so incorporate into our being as the context in which we feel that emotion. In online spaces, this might be to change the text that appears in comment boxes from “write a comment” to “write a comment to X”, subtlety reminding the individual that they are messaging a person, challenging the disembodied nature of digital interaction. Changes like these have already been trialled, with the game League of Legends making the chat to all function slower to access, discouraging people from reflexively typing something mean. Carmen argued that these sorts of changes would be easy and cheap to implicate, so may be the most effective way to encourage empathetic interactions in online spaces.
Finally, Carmen returned to the assumption that we are less empathetic online, challenging it with two ideas. Firstly, she argued that it may be that empathy is evolving instead of diminishing as we may use it in different ways online. Secondly, we may not want to be empathetic all the time on online spaces. For example, if we encountered someone being hateful online, we may not want to expend energy trying to understand their position and may instead challenge the hate or move on. Furthermore, in the number of online interactions each of us have daily, it may be impossible to feel empathy in all of them.
We had some very interesting questions at the end of this talk, and I had several conversations with friends afterwards, demonstrating how enjoyable it was! Some challenges raised included that idea that it isn’t so much that we encounter others more abstractly online that makes us feel less empathetic, but the medium itself that gives us the anonymity to feel safe making hateful comments. For example, when celebrities receive hate online from fans, these fans can know a lot about that celebrity and see them as an embodied subject but feel able to be hateful as there will be no repercussions. I also had an interesting conversation with my housemates where we discussed how there is often a lot of interpretive work that goes into text conversations to try to understand the feelings behind a person’s message, leading us to say things like “you sounded off in those messages”. In these instances, it appears that some intense interpretation takes place as we lack information from a person’s expressions. This may suggest that we often still find ways to be empathetic online, despite some challenges.
There was a lot to think about with this talk, so thank you Carmen! As always, please leave any of your thoughts down in the comments below.