The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World by Jamil

Zaki; Crown, 261 pp., $27

These two new books give lucid, stimulating accounts of recent discoveries
in neuroscience and psychology. Both authors aim to challenge antiquated
views of the brain and human behavior. In so doing, they help us think
through perennial debates about the sources of morality and the degree to
which we inherit or can enhance traits like empathy. Both are careful to
evaluate the cogency of the research they cite, noting when it remains
inconclusive or unpersuasive. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at
Stanford, who also directs its Social Neuroscience Laboratory, usefully
includes an appendix summarizing the evidence for the findings he cites and
giving them a 1 to 5 rating, from weaker to stronger. Oddly, however, neither
book mentions, much less rates, possible moral problems with some of the
research, whether by neuroscientists injecting substances into the brains of
rats or monkeys or by social scientists subjecting students to deceptive
scenarios.

Early on, Churchland, professor emerita of philosophy at the University of

California–San Diego, sets forth a working formulation of conscience as “an
individual’s judgment about what is morally right or wrong, typically, but not
always, reflecting some standard of a group to which the individual feels
attached.” Later, she states that conscience “is a brain construct rooted in our
neural circuitry, not a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine
being.” The intervening chapters show in fascinating detail the path leading
from the first to the second formulation. They explain the role of the cortex
for mammals, culminating in the unusually large one of humans, and argue
that an attachment to mothers—and in some cases to fathers, kin, and
friends—is fundamental to social behavior and in turn to moral behavior.
Human moral responses are therefore rooted in the cortex, supported by more
ancient structures, such as basal ganglia and neurochemicals such as
dopamine, sex hormones, and the neurohormones of oxytocin and
vasopressin. Studies show how these factors combine, specifying their
different roles, as for oxytocin in strengthening social bonds. When it comes
to psychopaths, however—people with no moral compass who lack feelings
of guilt or remorse and exhibit no empathy toward people they have
injured—it has, so far, proved harder to locate specific brain abnormalities.
The same is true of persons exhibiting self-destructive moral behavior,
known as scrupulosity.

The subtlety with which Churchland describes examples of sociality and

caring in different species, including humans, and her willingness to explore
the “beguiling diversity” of how these species exhibit parental attachments
contrast with her sweeping rejection of large swaths of moral philosophy.
After devoting 10 brief pages to deficiencies in utilitarian and Kantian views
of morality, she concludes that they “look a bit thrashed at this point.” Yet
why should she not consider the diversity and ingenuity of her fellow
philosophers with the same interest that she devotes to nonhuman species? In
particular, why not look more closely into their writings about conscience
and its origins? Immanuel Kant, for example, specified that conscience,
along with moral feeling and the love of one’s neighbor, are “natural
predispositions” of the mind that are necessary for morality, though not
sufficient for its exercise.

In The War for Kindness, Zaki issues a call for concerted action to build
empathy in a world he sees as fractured and threatened by escalating
tribalism, cruelty, and isolation. He compares “being a psychologist studying
empathy today [to] being a climatologist studying the polar ice: each year we
discover more about how valuable it is, just as it recedes all around us.” Like
environmentalists who propose imaginative ways to reverse or at least arrest
developments contributing to global warming, Zaki provides examples of
efforts to restore or reinforce the capacity for empathy. He offers vivid
stories in many settings, such as nurses’ and physicians’ work in intensive-
care units, actors’ reenactments of crimes in a police academy, and
photojournalists’ documentation of uprisings, funerals, and wars.
 A study of American college students
found that the average person in 2009
was less empathetic than 75 percent of
people in 1979.
Recent research offers more hope for such efforts, Zaki insists, than when
empathy was regarded as an unchangeable trait you were either born with or
not. Defining empathy as an “umbrella term that describes multiple ways
people respond to one another, including sharing, thinking about, and caring
about others’ feelings,” he points to studies showing it to be more like a
teachable skill than a hardwired trait. Training in empathy even turns out to
bring growth in empathy-related parts of the brain.

Zaki’s larger assertions about the decreasing levels of empathy in the United
States and worldwide may require further consideration. He cites a study of
American college students showing that “the average person in 2009 was less
empathetic than 75 percent of people in 1979”; and he notes the increasing
proportions of people who live alone, in cities, and participate less in
activities like church attendance and team sports while engaging more in
solitary online pursuits. But more evidence would be needed to show that
these people are also becoming less capable of empathy. And how might he
respond to Steven Pinker’s view, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, of a
historical shift in the opposite direction?

Readers, regardless of how they come out on this score, will find themselves
engaged by Zaki’s moving accounts of individuals and groups learning to
become more empathetic, even in the most challenging circumstances. He
makes clear from the beginning how much he has learned about empathy in
his personal life, much as Churchland speaks of feeling her conscience
roiling or badgering her or otherwise making its voice heard. This personal
approach opens up both books to needed dialogue about their daunting
topics.