Page 316 - The Social Animal

298 The Social Animal

turned green. But what happened when the pedestrian was on
crutches? Apparently, seeing a person on crutches evoked an em-
pathic response; the feeling of empathy overwhelmed the desire to
be aggressive, and the percentage of people honking their horns de-
creased dramatically. 111
Empathy is an important phenomenon. Seymour Feshbach 112
notes that most people find it difficult to inflict pain purposely on
another human being unless they can find some way of dehumaniz-
ing their victim. Thus, when our nation was fighting wars against
Asians (Japanese in the 1940s, Koreans in the 1950s, Vietnamese in
the 1960s), our military personnel frequently referred to them as
“gooks.” We see this use of dehumanization as a way of justifying acts
of cruelty. It is easier to commit violent acts against a “gook” than it
is to commit violent acts against a fellow human being. As I have
noted time and again in this book, this kind of self-justification not
only makes it possible for us to aggress against another person, but
it also guarantees that we will continue to aggress against that per-
son. Recall the example of the schoolteacher living in Kent, Ohio,
who, after the killing of four Kent State students by Ohio National
Guardsmen, told author James Michener 113 that anyone who walks
on the street barefoot deserves to die. This kind of statement is
bizarre on the face of it; we begin to understand it only when we re-
alize that it was made by someone who had already succeeded in de-
humanizing the victims of this tragedy.
We can deplore the process of dehumanization, but at the same
time, an understanding of the process can help us to reverse it.
Specifically, if it is true that most individuals must dehumanize their
victims to commit an extreme act of aggression, then, by building
empathy among people, aggressive acts will become more difficult to
commit. Indeed, Norma and Seymour Feshbach 114 have demon-
strated a negative correlation between empathy and aggression in
children: The more empathy a person has, the less he or she resorts
to aggressive actions. Subsequently, Norma Feshbach developed a
method of teaching empathy and successfully tested its effects on ag-
gression. 115 Briefly, she taught primary-school children how to take
the perspective of another. The children were trained to identify dif-
ferent emotions in people, they played the role of other people in var-
ious emotionally laden situations, and they explored (in a group)
their own feelings. These “empathy training activities” led to signif-