entangle

[다니엘쌤]

We suggest five strategies to narrow the empathic divide. ...Fifth, entangle group memberships. Work to ensure that communities are intertwined.

공감대 단절을 좁히기 위한 5가지 전략을 제안한다.다섯째, 단체 회원들을 얽어매라. 공동체가 서로 얽혀 있는지 확인하기 위해 노력하라.

1.얽어매다, (걸어서) 꼼짝 못하게 하다 2.~를 ~와 얽히게 만들다

Guest comment: David Eagleman and Don Vaughn
Does your brain care about other people? It depends

People are hardwired to dehumanise others but we can overcome this, say David Eagleman and Don Vaughn

게스트 코멘트: 데이비드 이글맨과 돈 보너
당신의 뇌는 다른 사람에게 신경을 쓰는가? 사정에 따라 다르다.

사람들은 다른 사람들의 인간성을 말살시키도록 강요받지만 우리는 이것을 극복할 수 있다고 데이비드 이글맨과 돈 본은 말한다.

Nov 4th 2019

This is a guest contribution for The Economist’s Open Future initiative, which aims to foster a global conversation on the challenges of the 21st century. More Open Future articles are at Economist.com/openfuture

2019년 11월 4일

이는 21세기의 도전에 대한 글로벌 대화 양성을 목표로 하는 이코노미스트지의 열린 미래 이니셔티브의 제3자의 글이다. 더 많은 열린 미래 기사는 Economist.com/openfuture에서 볼 수 있다.
* * *

In the 1760s a young British nobleman, Lord George Gordon, entered the Royal Navy as a junior officer. Though born into privilege, he found himself caring deeply about the welfare of the sailors. He campaigned to improve their conditions—generating scorn and mistrust from his fellow officers. And his empathy extended beyond the decks: upon sailing to Jamaica, he was disgusted by the slavery there and berated the British governor. Everywhere he went, he sought to improve the wellbeing of those less fortunate.

| 어휘 berate 질책하다

1760년대에 영국의 젊은 귀족인 조지 고든George Gordon 경은 하급 장교로 영국 해군에 들어갔다. 특권을 타고났지만 고든은 선원들의 복지에 깊은 관심을 가지고 있다는 것을 알았다. 고든은 동료 장교들로부터 경멸과 불신을 불러일으키는 선원들의 상태를 개선하기 위해 캠페인을 벌였다. 그리고 고든의 공감은 갑판 너머까지 확대되었다. 자메이카로 항해하는 순간, 고든은 그곳의 노예제도에 넌더리가 나 영국 주지사를 질책했다. 고든은 가는 곳마다 불우한 사람들의 복지를 개선하려고 애썼다.


Why did Gordon care so much for others? And why do any of us help strangers? After all, the driving force of evolution is survival of the fittest, not the friendliest.

왜 고든은 다른 사람들을 위해 그렇게 신경을 썼을까? 그리고 왜 우리 중 어떤 이는 낯선 사람을 돕는가? 결국 진화의 원동력은 적자생존이지 가장 다정한 사람이 살아남는 것은 아니다.


Fortunately, there is another force at work. Our brains are constantly in the business of simulating the experiences of other people and under the right circumstances this leads to empathy: the experiencing of another’s emotions. Empathy counterbalances our appetite for power, tribalism and violence. Empathy is the glue that binds society together. Our species’ dominance is due in part to our empathy, which helps us to cooperate flexibly in large groups.

|어휘 counterbalances (반대되는 힘으로) 균형을 잡아 주다 tribalism 1.부족 중심주의, 부족의식 2.부족 제도

다행히도, 또 다른 힘이 작용하고 있다. 우리의 뇌는 계속해서 다른 사람들의 경험을 모사하는 일에 종사하고 있으며, 올바른 환경하에서 이것은 다른 사람들의 감정을 경험하는 것으로 이어진다. 감정이입은 권력, 부족주의, 폭력에 대한 우리의 욕구를 상쇄시킨다. 공감은 사회를 하나로 묶는 접착제다. 우리 종족의 지배는 부분적으로 우리의 공감에 기인하는데, 이것은 우리가 큰 집단에서 유연하게 협력하는 것을 돕는다.


If the story ended there, our planet would operate like a single, cooperative ant colony. But reality is more complex. Lord Gordon stood for sailors and slaves, but he held nothing but hatred for Catholics. In 1779 Gordon formed and led an anti-Catholic alliance called the Protestant Association, which worked to repeal the civil rights afforded to Roman Catholics in Britain. In June 1780 Gordon marched a riotous crowd of 50,000 to the Houses of Parliament. For a full week the mob destroyed Roman Catholic churches and pillaged Catholic homes in what came to be known as the Gordon Riots, the most destructive domestic upheaval in the history of London. Hundreds of people were killed or wounded before order was restored.

| 어휘 repeal (법률을) 폐지하다 riotous 1.(특히 공공장소에서) 소란을 피우는 2.(파티 등에서) 시끌벅적한 pillage (특히 전시에) 약탈[강탈]하다

만약 그 이야기가 거기서 끝난다면, 세상은 하나의 협동 개미 집단처럼 운영될 것이다. 하지만 현실은 더욱 복잡하다. 고든 경은 선원들과 노예들을 지지했지만 천주교 신자들에 대해선 증오만을 품고 있었다. 1779년 고든은 영국의 로마 가톨릭 신자들에게 부여된 시민권을 폐지하는 데 일조한 개신교 연합이라고 불리는 반 가톨릭 연합을 결성하여 이끌었다. 1780년 6월, 고든은 5만 명의 폭도들을 의회로 행진시켰다. 일주일 내내 폭도들은 런던 역사상 가장 파괴적인 국내폭동으로 로마 가톨릭 교회와 신자들의 집을 파괴했는데 이것은 고든 폭동으로 알려져 있다. 질서가 회복되기 전에 수백 명의 사람들이 죽거나 다쳤다.

Why did Lord Gordon, a person so capable of empathy, harbour such antipathy for his Catholic neighbors? The answer unmasks a fundamental fact of human nature: our tendency to form ingroups and outgroups—that is, groups that we feel attached to and those that we don’t. Our empathy is selective: we care most about those with whom we share a connection, such as a hometown, a school or a religion.

왜 그렇게도 공감능력이 있던 고든 경이 가톨릭 이웃들에 대해서 이런 반감을 품었을까? 답은 인간 본성의 근본적인 사실을 드러낸다. 즉, 우리는 애착을 느끼는 집단과 그렇지 않은 집단을 형성하려는 경향이 있다는 것이다. 우리의 공감은 선택적이다: 우리는 고향, 학교, 종교와 같이 우리가 서로 관계를 맺고 있는 사람들에 대해 가장 관심을 갖는다.

After the second world war, psychologists wondered how the psychological division into ingroups and outgroups could lead so easily to violence. Fresh on people’s minds were American wartime propaganda that portrayed the Japanese as subhuman, and Japanese propaganda that depicted Americans as deformed monsters, to say nothing of Nazi Germany’s vaunting of a master race and its dehumanisation of Jewish people.

| 어휘 propaganda 보통 못마땅함 (정치 지도자·정당 등에 대한 허위·과장된) 선전

2차 세계대전 후 심리학자들은 어떻게 집단과 집단에 대한 심리적 분열이 그렇게 쉽게 폭력으로 이어질 수 있는지 궁금해했다. 분명히 생각나는 것은 일본인을 인간 이하의 인간으로 묘사한 미국의 전시 선전과 미국인을 기형 괴물로 묘사한 일본의 선전이다. 이를 비롯하여 나치 독일이 게르만 민족을 우수한 인종으로 찬양하고 유대인을 비인간화하는 것은 말할 것도 없다.


To explore this, in 1954 a team of psychologists brought together a group of pre-teen boys at a summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. They randomly divided the boys into two arbitrary groups called the Rattlers and the Eagles. As the researchers watched, a prejudice formed between the groups, initially manifesting itself as light taunting and name-calling. But the partisanship quickly grew more serious. The Eagles torched the Rattlers’ flag, and the next day, the Rattlers plundered the Eagles’ cabin, flipped over beds and stole clothing. Soon, the groups became so hostile that the researchers had to physically separate them. When asked to describe the attributes of the groups, the boys offered flattering terms for their own group and insults for the other. The conclusion: antagonism can emerge from arbitrary divisions.

In recent decades, neuroscientists have begun to study the brain circuits that underlie the feeling of empathy. In 2010 scientists at the University of Zurich recruited sports fans for a brain imaging study. The fans met each other and competed in trivia. They then underwent a brain scan, during which they watched the other fans receive strong electric shocks to their hands. Viewing the pain of others activated brain regions involved in feeling pain oneself. In other words, the viewers weren’t the ones getting shocked, but they simulated the other’s pain. This is the neural basis of empathy.

A deeper dive into the data, however, revealed that the participants displayed more brain activity while watching the pain of fans who liked the same team they did. They showed less brain activity when watching fans of a rival team. Their brains simply responded more to their ingroup.

The sports fans were allowed to meet one another—but more often than not, our policies, charities and wars involve people we’ve never even met. Are we empathically biased when it comes to total strangers, simply based on our labels for them?

To answer this, we designed a study to investigate the minimum amount of information required to trigger an ingroup bias. Participants lay in an MRI scanner and looked at six hands on a video screen. The computer selected one hand at random, and then a hypodermic needle entered the picture and stabbed into the flesh of that hand. In a control condition, a long cotton swab touched the person’s hand—visually similar to the needle, but this time with no pain. By contrasting the brain’s reaction to the needle and the cotton swab, we could measure the brain networks that became active when witnessing another’s pain.

Then each hand became marked with a simple label: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Scientologist or atheist. Would a participant’s empathic brain activity be affected by a one-word label? If you’re Christian, would you have a larger empathic response when watching the needle stab the Christian hand than, say, the Muslim hand?

Indeed, that is what we found. Watching an ingroup hand get stabbed evoked more empathic brain activity; an outgroup hand triggered less. Although many participants reported that they cared for all people equally, brain imaging revealed a different story: people care about some more than others, and their subconscious selectivity was based on nothing more than a one-word label.

In fact, the difference was strong enough that we were able to use a participant’s brain activity alone to blindly predict their ingroup with 72% accuracy. Strikingly, atheists showed the same ingroup bias as religious participants, suggesting the bias is not so much about religion as it is about the degree of affiliation to a group. Labels alone can spur bias.

Of course, not everyone’s brain was the same. Some people actually did care for everyone approximately equally, while others were highly influenced by the labels. One factor that influenced the bias was a person’s self-assessed empathy. But not in the way you might expect: the more empathic a participant claimed to be, the more she was biased in favor of her ingroup.

Why? Take a moment to think about your own level of empathy toward others. Imagine that you see a 60-year-old man twist his ankle and fall to the ground. Do you feel an empathic sting? Now imagine he’s at a rally for a politician that you loathe. Is your empathy any different? And if so, does that challenge your view of yourself as an empathic person? If you had unequal responses in the two situations, you’re not alone: people generally assess their own empathy by thinking about those in their ingroup.

But if group loyalty is so embedded, why are allegiances flexible? Take for example the relationship between the Russians and Americans. In 1918, an American Expeditionary Force of 5,000 men landed in northeastern Russia and battled the Red Army. During the second world war, however, they fought as allies against a common enemy, shared cigarettes and slapped each other on the back. Soon afterward, cold winds blew and enmity returned.

To understand the flexibility of allegiances, we had our participants read a sentence about a fictional war, in which three of the religions were fighting the other three. The narrative about allegiances was enough to modify the brain’s empathic response: allies became more like ingroup members.

Of course, the roots of religion run deep, so the experiment raised a question for us: how rapidly can the brain build a brand new ingroup? We asked a new group of participants to flip a coin: heads assigned them to the Augustinian team, tails to the Justinian team. We gave each participant a wristband with the name of his team and displayed a sentence in the brain scanner: “The Augustinians and Justinians are two warring tribes.”

We then showed participants the same hand-stabbing videos, but this time, the hands were labeled as Augustinian or Justinian. Remarkably, even though participants knew they had been randomly assigned, their brains showed the same patterns of ingroup allegiance and outgroup disregard. “Us” versus “them” does not need to be predicated on deep meaning: even arbitrary labels rapidly create bias

Does your brain care about other people? It dependsPeople are hardwired to dehumanise others but we can overcome this, say David Eagleman and Don Vaughnwww.economist.com