The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

I’ve never been averse to the idea of debate on important issues. But a person entering a conversation online—especially with strangers—can’t be assumed to be armed with Robert’s Rules of Order. In an actual debate—formal or not—both people are usually aware of the stakes and have previously agreed on some rules. On social media, you never know when someone might swoop into a comment thread and demand that everyone else start playing by their rule book. And if you don’t comply, they “win.”

People like this are often called “trolls.” Some of them have one goal: to derail a conversation and turn the attention on themselves. They will start off civil, then purposely change their rules with every response from their target, and they feel they’ve won if the other person seems angry or upset or shows any emotion.

Green and her colleagues did an experiment in which they presented participants with issues that people generally tend to agree on—food safety, support for veterans—as well as some that are more polarizing, like stem-cell research. The subjects were then asked to rate how threatening a computer-generated face with a neutral expression looked. They thought the face was a lot more threatening if they had just been presented with a polarizing issue.

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a study using a mixture of Google’s Perspective API and human intelligence to test predictions of when conversations might go sour. They analyzed 1,270 conversations in Wikipedia editors’ forums that had begun civilly enough but devolved into hostility (they used Perspective API to measure “toxicity”). They lined up these conversations with ones on the same topic that went well and found that when the first comment in an exchange used direct questions or started sentences with “you,” the conversation was significantly more likely to go awry. Comments that started with gratitude, greetings, or attempts at coordination were correlated with conversations staying on track. It wasn’t that only people who agreed were nice to one another; disagreeing seemed to be OK as long as it was done using “hedges” and prompts for opinion. The research also supported the long-held idea that using “I/we” sentences tends to keep people from getting too defensive.

A growing number of influential organizations think so. In fact, companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Fidelity, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are banking on the idea that not only will empathy training keep employees from behaving badly, it will make them more motivated and productive too. Empathy is getting so big in the business world that there are at least two massive indices—one created by the Harvard Business Review and one made by UK company The Empathy Business—that rank companies on their empathy. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Netflix regularly top the lists.

Leaders rated as having high empathy by direct reports are 2.5 times more likely to set clear performance expectations, hold others accountable for maintaining high performance, and address performance issues in a fair and consistent manner, according to data from a DDI meta-analysis. The analysis also found that among more than two thousand direct reports, the number of leaders said to frequently display empathetic behaviors six months after an empathy program rose by 25 percent.

If the threat of burnout is ever-present, the goal—in addition to doing no harm—becomes maintaining the proper level of compassion when face to face with a patient. In the world of medicine, this can be easier said than done. A 2011 review of existing research on self-reported empathy among medical students and residents found that empathy levels declined during medical school and residency. Even students who described themselves as empathetic and enthusiastic about helping patients at the beginning of medical school often ended up feeling much more jaded and burnt out by the time they finished their residencies. This decline matters because positive patient-physician communication, in which empathy and compassion are clear, has been found to actually positively impact patients’ health. Research has shown correlations between doctor-patient empathy and better outcomes in quality of life, depression, anxiety, and even blood pressure and blood glucose levels. The authors of the 2011 review, which included eighteen studies published between 1990 and 2010, analyzed the reasons that students and residents felt their own empathy recede over the years. Each study they reviewed measured things slightly differently, so there was no clear answer, but here were some suggestions: increased distress (burnout, reduced quality of life, depression) in med school; mistreatment by superiors or mentors; clinical reality (it’s not all about saving lives, unfortunately); social-support problem...

In the summer of 2017 I came across a study that showed that “visiting” a beach via Oculus Rift VR headset while undergoing dental work was such an effective distraction that it reduced patients’ anxiety and even gave them more positive memories of the experience. Yes, positive memories of a visit to the dentist. In the study, which I wrote about for VICE News’s health section, Tonic, researchers from the Universities of Plymouth, Exeter, and Birmingham in England teamed up with a dental practice to test the effects of animated VR experiences.

She thought VR seemed like an interesting idea but wasn’t sure how it would translate to the hospital setting. Then a colleague told her that his grandmother, who had dementia, had been ecstatic after walking through her old hometown in Italy via a VR headset. She had started speaking Italian again and remembering things from photos and videos that she hadn’t remembered in years. Chan thought that if VR could do that, maybe it could help sick kids too.

The concept Chan came up with is called Smileyscope. In a clinical trial published in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2019, she and her coauthors found that 252 children aged four to eleven who used Smileyscope in emergency rooms and outpatient labs experienced a 60 percent decrease in needle pain, 75 percent decrease in distress, and 50 percent decrease in the need for restraints. Smileyscope is now being used in hospitals in the United States and Australia, where kids who use the headset experience an underwater animation complete with fish and dolphins as a voiceover explains their procedure.

Bigger names in tech have taken up similar work. Google Glass launched a prototype software to help children with autism learn social skills and practice conversations. In 2017, a study published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI found that it worked pretty well—it recognized conversational prompts from the children and responded in a convincing way, so most kids were comfortable enough talking to it that they saw some improvement. Software that talks back might seem counterintuitive, but as I’ve learned, AI systems are quickly becoming normal parts of our everyday life, and they increasingly are being given not only intelligence but personality. Neuroscience and philosophy researchers at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, came together to study the use of socially assistive robots and found that as the population expands and people live longer, the demand for humanlike robot assistance will continue to grow. Some researchers have worried that we already expect too much from these bots: technical flawlessness, personality, adaptation to environments, behavioral changes based on our needs, and, in the medical context as well as others, empathy.

“humans need to feel empathy toward things in order to be more human,”

Through his own experience and access to research via his seat on the board of Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, he’s become convinced that many of us currently use social media the way a lot of people smoked in the 1960s. “Cigarettes were part of pretty much the whole twentieth

century—part of advertisements, part of pop culture, everything,” he said. “Then researchers figured out, oh, there’s some health consequences to this.” The result was legislation, litigation, and a shift in advertising from pro-cigarette to anti-smoking, even on cigarette packaging itself. But it took eighty years to get there.