Empathy Group Sizes

[ashnistrike]

This started as a comment to cynthiarose's latest entry, but it got long. The original article is here, and the original report is here. The gist is that human cortex size suggests that we are capable of representing about 150 individuals as real people, and empathizing with them and trying to treat them well. Everyone else is outside of our little bubble. Of those 150, only about 12 are likely to be particularly intimate. Cyn went into the deeper philosophical and ethical implications of this, and wondered what it meant for religious beliefs like "If I hurt another person, I offend god," and "What I put out into the universe will come back to bite me in the ass." That last one is the Law of Sympathy or the Threefold Law, very roughly summarized.

Behold, as I answer a deep philosophical post with cognitive psych geekery.

Most of the numerical limits on our thinking have work-arounds. For example, we're only capable of keeping 7 (plus or minus 2) items of information in short-term memory. However, that can be 7 random letters, 7 words, 7 sentences, 7 theatre monologues...with practice, you can get some very large items in under that limit. It's called chunking, and depends on how large you can make items and still keep them meaningful to you. It's no stretch to think the same thing could be done with what I'll call Empathy Group Size.

So, the Law of Sympathy is one way of chunking your treatment of large numbers of people, and quite a rational way of dealing ethically with a large population. So is "I want to work for the betterment of poor people." So is "all politicians are idiots" (also a way of chunking, that is--not also rational). How we treat the bulk of humanity depends on whether we chunk them into units that are well-treated or poorly treated. So, "if you hurt another person, you hurt your one true god" chunks about 6 billion units into one unit--a marvel of cognitive efficiency.

Now, separately, the geek questions. I'm wondering about maximum pantheon sizes. Twelve, for intimate relationships? Or 150, for meaningful individuals? Do we have to trade off gods and people? What about pets--if you take in a cat, is that one less person you can care about, or do they go in a separate category? And is Empathy Group Size correlated with short-term memory size? (Since short-term memory size is normally correlated with IQ, that would have some interesting, if doubtful, implications.) Do we have an open slot or two into which we stick people currently in the news?

Right now, I've got a slot for "my class that meets this evening, which I still need to finish prep for." It's a motivation lecture, of course, and my third of the week.

Comments

[sable-twilight.livejournal.com]

It's not very long, or as sophisticated, but I has some thoughts on Media and the Monkey Sphere (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sable_twilight/143115.html). It sort of mimics your questions.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

Can we chunk people that way, though? I have difficulty even seeing two people as a unit in my head ... it's easier for me to assign a single trait to many individuals separately than to create a mental category.

While I can say to myself that X, Y, Z, A, B, C are all, say, "coworkers," that doesn't mean that I can assign "coworkers" to a slot and view them as a unit. Almost immediately there will be subcategories -- coworkers I like, coworkers I don't like, coworkers I enjoy working with, coworkers who need to be suspended by a rope over a pit of spikes, and so forth. The category breaks down, and turns from a top-down category into just one more bottom-up trait.

I'm frankly suspicious of the notion that we truly can take an entire category and feel the same emotional strength towards every member of it that we can towards a single person. Remember, throughout history revolutionary movements have had to have an enemy figurehead because people just can't stir up as much hate against anything as nebulous as an organization.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

People are pretty good at stirring up hate against large groups, as well as sympathy. I suspect racists, for example, don't think of "black" as "just another trait." We generalize across groups--not of people we see every day (which is why the number one predictor of non-homophobia is knowing someone who's gay)--but of people we don't have as much experience with. We may still "need" to think about these people, especially with the distance news travels these days, and are likely to chunk them. "I want to help the poor victims of the tsunami" is one chunk. "Fundamentalists are trying to take away our rights" is another chunk.

Your coworkers are likely to be within your monkeysphere, if I'm understanding the term correctly. People that you have enough experience with will be seen as individuals.

I'd wonder, in fact, if the 150 figure really is a limit, or if it was just the monkeysphere size of the brains they looked at. The brain is fairly elastic, and areas associated with our specialties tend to become larger than average. A painter, for example, is likely to end up with an unusually large visual cortex. A businessman, or just a socialite, might develop a larger monkeysphere area than normal, and be able to accomodate a larger group. That would imply that the size of the cortical area isn't actually the causal factor here--that in fact, you need to have a certain amount of experience with people in order to see them as real, and that 150 is the average number of people that we get this level of experience with.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

That's the issue, really. Any group of people that I would be able to classify as similar due to insufficient experience or generalization would be out of the monkeysphere anyway, so I couldn't take an entire unit of people in one "slot." What I guess I'm hypothesizing is that there are different rules for chunking a group into a short-term memory slot and a monkeysphere slot.

It's hard to say. The more you exercise any of the brain's capacities, the better it gets at them, particularly early on. I'd also say that maybe we can't extrapolate results from other primates -- other primates don't have as many different kinds of communication as we do. Does a person we know only through e-mail or chat qualify as someone we can care about? How could we possibly ever know?

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was wondering about that (whether people and on-line acquaintances in particular could take up different size slots).

I think the "Monkeysphere" article oversimplifies--the conclusions from the original are much less certain. I think there's honestly probably a continuum of caring.

As for how we'd know--from this line of research, you would look at what parts of the brain lit up when you thought about different types of acquaintances. Eventually, if your research got really cutting-edge, you'd check to see if there was any correlation between brain activity and behavior towards these people. :)

squeeee!

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's amazing. Will you marry me?

Re: squeeee!

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

*blink* *blink* I'll have to check with my wife. ;)

I'm glad you liked it. Now if only more of my students would react that way. (Okay, maybe not marriage proposals, but at least enthusiasm).

And welcome, yourself.

Re: squeeee!

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Cogsci was one of my favorite subjects (as well as my minor) in college. I was also one of those insufferably enthusiastic students who was always doing her homework, raising her hand to argue with the teacher, and all that nerdy stuff.

As to marriage, well I'll admit I might have proposed prematurely, as I've not et checked it out with my husband. I just couldn't control myself!