Conflict and Empathy
When groups are in conflict with each other, people are less empathic and compassionate toward their enemies. It's a self-evident truth, reinforced by controlled laboratory studies of conflict. But when cognitive scientist Emile Bruneau of the University of Massachusetts looked at the brains of people involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, he found something very unusual.
Bruneau read stories of Arab and Israeli suffering to members of each group. As expected, each group expressed compassion for its own members, and little empathy toward its rivals. In areas of their brains linked to empathy, however, there was no difference: For Arab participants, Israeli tragedy elicited the same empathic response in the brain as an Arab tragedy, and vice versa. Brain and behavior seemed disconnected.
"The absence of any region whose neural response mirrors the pattern of behavioural judgements is puzzling," wrote Bruneau's team. It may simply reflect a limitation of the tests -- or perhaps our minds work very differently than we think.
Image: Palestine Solidarity Project/Flickr
Citation: "Social cognition in members of conflict groups: behavioural and neural responses in Arabs, Israelis and South Americans to each other's misfortunes." By Emile G. Bruneau, Nicholas Dufour and Rebecca Saxe. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.