Viewing entries tagged
empathy

The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

March 21, 2024

It might seem strange that AI can even attempt to offer this kind of assistance. But millions of people are already turning to ChatGPT and specialist therapy chatbots, which offer convenient and inexpensive mental health support. Even doctors are purportedly using AI to help. Some experts say this is a boon. After all, AI, unhindered by embarrassment and burnout, might be able to express empathy more openly and tirelessly than humans. “We praise empathetic AI,” one group of psychology researchers recently wrote.

Tags: empathy, artificial intelligence

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How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life

September 8, 2021

Empathy is one of many skills that help us build better relationships. But empathy can sometimes feel like a lofty concept. While it may be good for us and others, what does it actually look like in real life, and how can we cultivate it? Findings from lab studies don’t give us the full picture, often suffering from narrow definitions of empathy and not reflecting people’s everyday empathy experiences. To fill this void in the research, Greg Depow at the University of Toronto and his colleagues Dr. Zoe Francis and Dr. Michael Inzlicht conducted a study on people’s experience with empathy in their everyday lives, to find out how it affected their actions and well-being. Their findings shed some interesting light on how small moments of ordinary, everyday empathy work to benefit us all.

Tags: empathy, compassion, perspective taking, wellbeing, experience sampling

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I feel your pain (or not)

July 30, 2020

Empathy—the ability to relate to and understand the perspective of others—is sometimes completely absent and at other times difficult to sustain. “There’s a school of thought that suggests that empathy is automatic and effortless,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Yet according to a new study led by Inzlicht, this conception might not be accurate. People, it turns out, may opt against empathy if the mental effort needed is too high. In other words, empathy could be an on-off switch that’s easier left in the off position.

Tags: empathy, effort

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People avoid feeling empathy toward others because it is too mentally taxing

April 25, 2019

The Independent covers a new paper from the lab examining empathy's intrinsic costs. Our study suggests that people avoid feeling empathy because they think it requires too much mental effort. Defined as the ability to understand the feelings of another person, empathy can facilitate positive social or helpful behaviours in an individual. However, our research suggests that people often don’t want to feel empathy, even if the feelings it produces are positive.

Tags: empathy, effort

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Collaborators

Joshua Aronson, New York University
Avi Ben-Zeev, San Francisco State University
Elliot Berkman, University of Oregon
Kirk Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University
Daryl Cameron, Penn State University
Belle Derks, Utrecht University
Jennifer Gutsell, Brandeis University
Greg Hajcak, Florida State University
Eddie Harmon-Jones, University of New South Wales
Jacob Hirsh, University of Toronto
Cendri Hutcherson, University of Toronto
Sonia Kang, University of Toronto
Michael Larson, Brigham Young University
Lisa Legault, Clarkson University
Ian McGregor, University of Waterloo
Marina Milyavskaya, Carleton University
Sukhvinder Obhi, McMaster University
Liz Page-Gould, University of Toronto
Travis Proulx, Cardiff University
Blair Saunders, University of Dundee
Brandon Schmeichel, Texas A&M University
Zindel Segal, University of Toronto
Alexa Tullett, University of Alabama

The psychology of getting high--a lot

Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has sold 35 million albums across the globe and has collaborated extensively with numerous other successful celebrities, including domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. He’s hardly alone in his cannabis hobby. In Canada, where I live and work, about 9 percent of residents use cannabis three or more times per week.

Why do people find "bed rotting" so hard?

‘People would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts’ — could you handle the ‘bed rotting’ trend?

Over the past few years, wellness advocates have championed “niksen” (the Dutch art of doing nothing) as an antidote to burnout. Before that, we had il dolce far niente, a 200-plus-year-old Italian phrase that refers to the pleasures of doing nothing: a romantic concept that enjoyed a little comeback when it was name-checked in the 2010 movie “Eat, Pray, Love.” “Actually doing nothing is something a lot of people find aversive,” explained Michael Inzlicht, a professor in the University of Toronto’s department of psychology. “People associate doing nothing with boredom, which is an emotion most people try to avoid.”

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The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life

I feel your pain (or not)

People avoid feeling empathy toward others because it is too mentally taxing

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