Empathy Group Sizes
Apr. 7th, 2005 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 12:20 am (UTC)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. :)