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Smartphones Destroy Empathy
When I’m at a social event, I never tell anyone I’m a doctor, because I don’t want to talk about medicine when I’m trying to relax. But we went to a party last night in our neighborhood here in Hilton Head, and all our friends of course know what I do for a living. So Mrs. Jones comes up to me and says she hurt her shoulder, and it’s not getting better, and what should she do about it? I couldn’t just glare at her and leave, because I was in her house drinking her Scotch. So I politely listened to her complaints.
But I didn’t answer. I just pointed across the room: “Why don’t you go ask Bob? He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Surely he’d know more about this than me. I’m just a humble primary care doc.” Her face lit up, she thanked me, and she hustled right over to Bob, who had been enjoying her Scotch until that moment. She started talking to him, he smiled at her, and then he looked across the room at me and gave me the stink eye. I smiled and raised my glass to him. I’m a giver.
There are a few reasons I deferred. First of all, I really try to avoid giving medical advice to people who aren’t my patients. I don’t know the case, I don’t know the background – that’s an easy way to say something stupid. Second, it’s true, Bob would know more about this than me. As it happens, her condition is one with which I have a lot of experience, and I probably could have answered her question. But Bob is obviously more qualified. And the third reason is that I try to avoid looking like a fool. What if I answer, then she asks Bob, he gives a different answer, and I look like a fool? No. I try to avoid looking like a fool. But then Tom came over, struck up a conversation with me, and proved that not everyone tries to avoid looking like a fool.
Tom is an airline pilot who has developed an interest in nutritional supplements, essential oils, acupuncture, and God knows what else. At a party last year, he said that curing MS was easy by altering your diet and taking high dose vitamins or something, and that doctors knew this, and that they refused to use this cure because they couldn’t profit from it.
So, I inferred, apparently my job is to earn money by intentionally killing people.
I blew up in his face. Great entertainment for everyone. My wife guided me out the door. Forcefully. Holy crap I was angry.
I apologized to him the next time I saw him. I don’t think he recognized what a profound insult that was to someone like me, who believes that he serves God by devoting his life to healing the sick. Or at least doing the very best I can. Tom was just chatting about his hobby. To me, this is no hobby.
So I made nice, and we moved on.
On the other hand, the only way that Tom would not recognize what a profound insult that would be to me is that he lacks empathy. He can’t see things from anyone’s perspective other than his own, so he didn’t realize that what seemed like a casual statement to him would come across as a vicious attack to me. I’m sure he was surprised when I jumped down his throat.
If you lack empathy, other people become mysterious creatures. ‘What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they see the truth?’
Anyway, so Tom sits down next to me last night. I immediately start saying to myself, over and over, “…don’tsayanythingdon’tsayanythingdon’tsayanything…” as Tom starts to talk.
He talked about COVID. Now, if someone is a big enough conspiracy theorist to honestly believe that doctors are intentionally killing MS patients for profit, you can imagine what he thinks of the COVID mess. He’s an anti-vaxxer, and he spent 30 minutes telling me the dangers of the COVID vaccines.
Now, these vaccines are new, and perhaps we’ll discover problems as we go forward. I think they’re probably a good idea, but honestly I’m not really sure yet. Just like on most other topics, the more I read the less I know for sure. And I’ve read a lot on this topic. It’s just too soon to say. I think it will be years before we really know if the vaccines were a good idea. I think they are. Probably. But we’ll see…
Which brings me back to my conversation with the lady with the bad shoulder. I was reluctant to answer her question, because I knew there was someone in the room that knew more about it than me, and if he somehow became involved in our conversation, I might look stupid. So I shut my trap and deferred to the guy who has spent his life studying the question at hand.
That was not Tom’s approach last night. He sat right down next to someone who he knows does this for a living, and gives a 30-minute dissertation on something that he knows very little about. An amateur telling an expert how to do his job. And he seemed perfectly comfortable doing so. Tom did not ask me a single question. He lectured me. About my field. He wasn’t concerned about me publicly pointing out that he was wrong. Because he knew he wasn’t wrong. He believes.
Or, perhaps, he lacks sufficient empathy to understand that there may be perspectives other than his own which may have some validity.
It would be like me telling him how to fly a plane. Ok, maybe I’ve flown a Cessna before. Maybe I read about aviation as a hobby. But he flies passenger jets for a living. Why would I try to tell him how to fly a plane? Why would that thought even cross my mind? “You know what I’m going to do at this party? I’m going to go over there and tell that pilot how to fly a plane. This should be fun!”
Why would I do that?
As I sat there trying to be nice, it occurred to me that Tom wasn’t exactly lecturing to me. He was preaching. He was preaching with the confidence of someone preaching to the choir. Because in his world, everyone is in the choir. They all believe. Which got me to thinking about smartphones and social media.
Tom may have been the only one in the room last year that actually believed that doctors intentionally kill people for profit. And he was probably surprised that I reacted to his casual comment with such hostility.
He was surprised because he hangs out on websites that confirm his biases. He’s the only one in the room who thinks that, but he can pull out his iPhone and instantly connect with a virtual room full of like-minded individuals. And that’s where he lives. So his occasional excursions out into the real world probably feel sort of odd. ‘What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they see the truth?’
Politics is getting more and more tribal and hostile because we’re no longer fellow Americans discussing tax policy or immigration laws or something. We identify more and more with smaller and smaller subgroups online to such an extent that we’re losing the ability to communicate, and more importantly to empathize, with nearly anyone else.
So every debate just turns into a shouting match. Even if it’s about something as boring as scientific research.
I’m convinced that Tom is a nice person, and he means well. He’s just so far down some rabbit hole that he can’t even see out anymore. That describes a lot of Americans, these days.
We’re losing the ability to see things from the perspective of others. We’re losing empathy.
Is it possible that smartphones are destroying our society by destroying our empathy? What if that’s true? What should we do?
I love my smartphone. I really do. But I’m starting to think they’re dangerous.
Published in General
Years ago my wife and I attended her office Christmas party. Her fellow employees knew I was a police officer. One young man, perhaps after too many drinks wanted to tell me how disappointed he was that the police didn’t arrive as fast as he wanted them to arrive when someone was breaking into his girlfriend’s car.
He told me that he called 9-1-1, but rather than wait for the police he confronted the thief himself. He was stabbed about seven times before the police arrived. I asked him if the thief ran when he saw him come out the front door. He said no. I told him that should have been a clue that the thief was willing to stand his ground, and he would fight. My next question was what was in her car that was worth serious injury, or the loss of your life. That ended the conversation, a conversation I didn’t want to have.
Broken windows. If thieves were confronted more often, fewer would dare to try. But your point stands.
The old country standard was (in popular myth, perhaps) that a thief on your property could be shot regardless of what he was trying to steal. What property is equal to a man’s life? None. But the wicked should fear to harm.
In a fallen world, we don’t always have satisfying options.
Experience like yours yields clarity of thought under fire.
One of the advantages of being a concrete estimator is that people rarely ask you about your work.
I disagree. The man stealing my property is stealing that portion of my life that I worked to earn it.
And can you trust a thief not to take what remaining life you have?
Probably not.
We are becoming a nation of philosopher-cab drivers.
Empathy: We should try to understand each others’ perspectives.
Not-Empathy: You will recite my perspective as your own.
Srsly, Basty, how come you never tell us those 5 Secrets?
I think all those things are learned responses, and therefore susceptible of improvement either by decision (in an adult) or a different style of upbringing (in a child).
I am fascinated by it, probably only because, over the years, it’s many times been necessary for me to estimate the amount of concrete, or just of gravel, that will be required to fill a void. Horses for courses, I guess.
Amen.
Reminds me of my mother. She’d already birthed children in the UK and in darkest Africa by the time my brother turned up in 1968 in a Pittsburgh hospital. She was massively less-than-gruntled by the sort of care she received, the dismissiveness of the doctors, and especially that she was–at the time–the only breastfeeding mother on the unit, and so was constantly being gawked at by residents and nurses who were brought on rounds to view this unusual phenomenon (I think it was just a sign of the times).
The day after my brother was born (this was at a time when women who’d given birth were regularly kept three-or-so days in the hospital), she was visited by the officious “B” responsible for filling out the paperwork and insuring proper follow-up. At some point the supercilious and patronizing Nurse Ratched asked, “and who is your family pediatrician?”
My mother had never heard of such a thing. “My pedia-what-chan?” she replied.
The nurse clarified, speaking slowly and distinctly, as though to a mental defective: “Who. Is. Going. To. Take. Care. Of. Your. Baby?”
“I AM!” yelled Mum. And promptly got out of bed, dressed herself, collected the baby, discharged herself from the hospital, found a payphone, called Dad, and ordered him to come and collect her.
I write often about what a pistol my Dad was. My mother wasn’t a piker in that regard either. I suppose I’m saying I come by it honestly from both sides.
I’m not sure about your thesis, Doc.
I think that DJ EJ first mentioned humility in these comments, but the discussion has been limited on this issue. If we take the example of your pilot friend Tom, and his opinions about alternative medicine and Covid, the problem seems to be more a lack of humility, rather than a lack of empathy.
He has attributed bad motives to the medical profession, because their opinions differ from his. Of course, their opinions are informed, though still possibly wrong, while his are uninformed. Due to a lack of humility, he thinks that he’s figured everything out, in an area well outside his expertise.
This doesn’t look like a new phenomenon, to me, so I’m skeptical about the assignment of blame to smartphones. From what I’ve studied of the past, it seems that there were always a number of soldiers grumbling that the generals were all idiots. There were always a number of socialists and union organizers who thought that they knew how to run a factory better than the industrialist who had built it.
You probably notice this regularly in opinions about medicine, your area of expertise. I notice it more in opinions about the law, which is also rather complicated.
The process is probably natural and unavoidable. We have to have a model of the world in our minds, in order to act. The more accurate the model, the more likely that an action will be effective. We have to start this process as children, when we are unavoidably ignorant and inexperienced. We don’t like to change our opinions, probably due to a combination of pride and the destabilizing feeling that we experience when we realize that we were wrong.
This problem may be exacerbated by the underlying assumptions of a democratic society. I occasionally see someone make the assertion that “everyone is entitled to his opinion.” Something like this idea does seem to be implicit in the idea of voting.
In addition to a lack of humility, it also seems to be true that people are ignorant, and many of them are not very bright. It is difficult to properly evaluate any complicated issue or system.
L x W x D x .064. Units are feet; output is tons. It includes waste. Concrete is a bit different.
He’s dead, Jim.
Next OP 🤗
Right.
I’ll get right on it…
Dammit!
Yes, but the brain forms up to age 21 or so. Constant stimulation does effect the neural pathways from what I understand and alters regulation of neurotransmitter function. I would like to know what permanent effects, if any, 60-year-olds who’ve been on SSRIs for 30 years may experience once the SSRI is stopped. I would expect that this could or should be known.
Is this accidental waste, or discard?
I specialize in drive-by philosophy. But the meter is broken.
I sometimes visit Ricochet on my smartphone. Do you? For me, it is usually when at a lonely meal on solo business trips. Ricochetti are my tribal subgroup, and they are but a swipe or a tap away.
Is that the same as freelance philosophy? Because we have another here at Ricochet.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities.
The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize—that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Neither. It’s based on the fact that you can’t dig holes absolutely accurately.
I love concrete. At every house we owned I have added sidewalks, widened driveways, added retaining walls, added patios.
Actually, that’s probably not quite true. It’s probably some of all three. That’s why it’s 15%. Waste is ordinarily figured at 10%.
Don’t let them add water to the concrete at the jobsite.