Are you the kind of person who rushes to help when someone falls? I once mistook the height of a curb in suburban Darwin and fell flat on my face on the footpath. People crossed the road to help me get up and supply Band-Aids. A couple left their coffee on an outside table of a nearby café to give support.
I was not badly injured fortunately. More embarrassed than anything. Though in the split second before my face planted, I had already imagined our long-awaited trip south on the Ghan train to Adelaide cancelled by a hospital admission.
The by-stander effect
Would I have been so quick to help a stranger as these people were? In that isolated setting, probably. But research shows that the more people who are around at the time, the less likely we are to intervene or report incidents. It’s called the bystander effect. Leave it to someone else! Look at all those others who have seen this happening! Don’t get involved! It may prove personally costly! Just “walk by on the other side”.
There is condemnation in that “just walk by” expression, even for those who don’t know it is from Jesus’ story. We know that story lauds an unlikely character (the Good Samaritan) caring for an injured stranger on an isolated road. Jesus heightened the point of his story by contrasting the intervention of this first responder with the indifference of two previous passing high officials.
Not my responsibility!
Research some years ago showed that when an incident happens in the sight of many observers, they take longer to respond or not at all. The by-stander effect is heightened. It reminds me of the time in a crowded train none of us moved to stop a child apparently about to run out the open door. We are aware that many people were seeing the incident and left it to someone else to intervene. This was a diffusion of responsibility, to use the researchers’ words. Perhaps also in this instance we also assumed there was a parent or carer somewhere in the carriage who would, or should, grab the child. That’s ambiguous responsibility. So we too often opt out.
Empathy needed
But many of us on that train knew from personal experience how wearing caring for children is. There are moments we are too tired to do what is required.
So what was necessary for us was empathy. The personal response learnt from walking a mile in the other’s sandals. Not sympathy because that implies superiority, but empathy.
Unfortunately, inaction in the face of need got some high-level support in America recently. Empathy only encourages weakness, these leaders argued. Let people learn to be strong, take care of themselves.
Some years ago, when I was in the middle of a struggle to be recognised as a pastor, a group of friends got together for an evening to celebrate and present me with a specially designed “trophy” for my effort in that struggle. It was great encouragement to persist. No diffusion of responsibility there. No ambiguity. No by-stander effect. Together they were demonstrating empathy though it was not their struggle. I much appreciated it.
Finding others who have experienced what we experience is a strong source of connection and energy to persevere. Alcoholics Anonymous is a good example, with each member holding the others accountable. And earning the welcome to do that by their own vulnerable sharing.
Empathy the last frontier?
I’m currently trying to fathom the impact AI will have on our understanding of what it means to be human as God intends for us.
In 1987 I wrote a column in Zadok Perspectives titled “What is Human?”, wrestling with the wonderful gift from the Creator of our humanity. More recently (in 2022 – only a few years ago), I put it on the website I had at the time because it still read well. But not now!
So much is happening in the AI field that makes us rethink our understanding of what can be duplicated at extraordinary speed and complexity by machine and what is uniquely human. AI is not just walking robots coming for us or Hal the computer going rogue as we previously imagined it! It is the prospect of all cognitive abilities so outperforming us we won’t be needed. Nor wanted.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Deep Mind, has said that their goal is to imitate all human capacities, up to and including empathy and creativity. Empathy?
Empathy may be the last, along with creativity, to be conquered, but will AI get there? I find that hard to accept. But meanwhile, let’s hang on to our wonderful humanity. And not be by-standers by practising empathy in all our relationships.
Jennifer Turner
