The Borders Around Our Own Empathy

When a suicide bomber detonated at an arena concert in Manchester in May 2017, it shook America to its bones. A little more than a week later, when a car bomb exploded at a busy market in Kabul, Afghanistan, America merely shivered. Terrorist attacks are ubiquitous and hard to keep up with, and an individual’s capacity for compassion has its limits.

So, which tragedies receive the empathy of an American news consumer? For one, people may have racial borders around their ability to be compassionate. A 2010 study for Current Biology by Joan Chiao and Vani Mathur showed that brain regions responsible for empathy were more activated when watching a hand of a subject’s own race being poked by a needle and less activated when watching the same procedure on a hand of a different race. This may demonstrate that people feel more empathy towards those of their own race. In the case of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, the fact that African-Americans were primarily affected may have played a role in the delay in them receiving aid from the mostly white Michigan legislature. Although the Flint water crisis is far from being solved, media reporting and donations have declined starkly in the past year since the crisis was in the spotlight. For those who don’t recognize themselves in the victims, once the story is out of sight, the problem is out of mind.

Racial borders often go hand in hand with socioeconomic borders. It’s easier to find empathy towards those with similar socioeconomic status to us because status determines situations we can imagine ourselves in. For example, it may be easier for a student at Wash U who has gone to several big arena concerts to imagine themselves as a victim of the Manchester bombing than as a victim of a bombing in a war zone. In the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks, Americans reacted by superimposing the French flag over their Facebook profile pictures, lighting up important buildings in the red, white, and blue stripes of the flag, and covering social media with hashtags and images of solidarity. In the same year, after Baga was ravaged by militants, leaving 2,000 people dead, American outpouring of empathy was notably more subdued – perhaps because France is much more like America than Nigeria, both racially and economically.

The “mainstream media” isn’t entirely to blame for the way that upper middle to upper class Americans and people of similar standing in other powerful countries react to events around the world. This group of news consumers, though not the largest faction, have the most consequential empathetic reactions because they have the most donating and political power. Like any industry, the news media’s product depends on the preferences of the consumer. Attention towards an event is partially an effect of how much coverage it receives, but visibility depends on traction, which depends on how much people care. Empathy is hard to quantify, but attention to news stories about a tragedy can be seen as an informal way to measure concern. News stories get more attention the more shock value they have. To the upper-class consumer of news, attacks in a war-ravaged place like Syria or the misfortunes of the citizens of poor cities like Flint are not newsworthy because it’s “normal” for those things to happen there; 126 people dead in Paris garners a more extreme reaction than 2,000 people dead in Baga from Boko Haram. In a 2015 article in the Huffington Post, Daniel Gastfriend reported that “between January 7th and January 12th, the highest reporting days for [the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Baga attack], the top mainstream U.S. news outlets mentioned Charlie Hebdo in 4,349 sentences. Baga: 131” The lack of an audience for news about poor areas comes back to the wealth and power disparities between the traditional colonizers of the Global North and the traditional colonized of less developed countries, and between the ruling class of a country and the citizens of its economically disadvantaged regions.

It is natural for people to have these borders around their own empathy; what matters is what actions people take in the wake of a tragedy. Although tragedies affecting those most like us can hit closest to our hearts, our priorities still need to be on preventing crises in the most vulnerable areas of the world. Only spreading news of first world tragedies and expressing solidarity for those victims ensures the continual isolation of victims in areas that already get less support. The existing empathetic divide means we need to try harder to bring victims of crises in underserved areas relief, and take an inward look at ourselves and the way we react to world events. The actions that we take out of empathy are the first steps to creating positive change.

Laura Cornell ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at lauracornell@wustl.edu.