Empathy and Technology: Study Guide for Life Reflection

Reflections on how we use technology (with solutions!)

Overview

This is a reflection based on a mind map that I drew for a class at CU Boulder: ATLAS 5244–Empathy and Technology. As I looked through my notes and was creating my mind map, I noticed three distinct phases:

1. Habits we (as humans) developed throughout evolution.
2. The current technological landscape, and how it emphasizes (rightly or wrongly) some of our evolutionary pressures in empathy and connection.
3. Current solutions focusing on experiences that are closer to how we evolved.

Evolutionary Pressures

I think human nature can be explained pretty succinctly when we consider our ape ancestors; specifically the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The chimpanzee is known for being territorial, calculating, and sometimes ruthless. The bonobo, on the other hand, is known for being much more loving, and has extreme sexual proclivities, both for reproduction but also to release stress, to bond, etc. In humans, I see the chimpanzee manifest in our eagerness of flashing the threat of thermonuclear weapons, and the bonobo in the countless number of times we hear of notable people having affairs. Something that underlies both of these ancestors (and therefore us), is social behavior. We, quite literally, evolved to be social. It is necessary for us to survive. Because of this, each of us has a baked-in and deep desire to connect with each other. That’s not even beginning to mention the evolutionary pressure to reproduce, which also reinforces our social aspects.

One subtlety here is the relatively small number of individuals in groups as we evolved. Unlike today, our ancestors didn’t have a necessity to form extremely large groups. Survival was possible with (by today’s social media standards) small, tight-knit groups. This led to connection being formed in small groups, where things such as context are easy to come by, as the group is small enough that contextual conversations can be had. This made me think of Dunbar’s Number, which states that humans are able to have a maximum of about 150 stable relationships. While it has its flaws, I think viewing Dunbar’s Number as a theoretical upper limit to our social connections (and thus our empathy budget) is and important guide for the rest of this conversation.

So that leads us to some of our evolutionary pressures that frame our empathy budget for the remainder of the discussion. Specifically, we evolved to live and thrive in small groups (Dunbar’s Number), which allowed us to be connected with many people (but not overwhelmed), and still maintain enough emotional bandwidth to feel empathy. Another important point is all of this social exposure was limited strictly by the social tribe itself. There was no such thing as an infinite scroll during evolution as our small social tribes only had so much going on at one time. Because of that, I think it’s logical to assume that we evolved to have a finite empathic bandwidth due to the finite number of events happening within our social circles.

Another important point to consider here is these pressures were reinforced over thousands of years. Because of that, these are ancient desires and habits that can’t be easily undone (if at all) within a single lifetime. I think an apt metaphor is that of puberty. Puberty happens when it does because we used to have significantly shorter lifespans than today. While medicine has advanced significantly, puberty still lags behind simply because biological change of this scale is slow. This creates a tension between the evolutionary pressure to procreate young by today’s standards due to the pace of medical advancement being higher than that of biology. In short, there is a misalignment between our biology (puberty) and our technology (medicine leading to increased lifespan). This tension will be important in the next section.

Personal Anecdote

When I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in May of 2024, some of my closest friends and I took a trip to a friend’s lake cabin in Wisconsin. There were about nine of us total, and for a few days we barely looked at our phones, instead fishing, going to local bars, riding ATVs on local trails, and just generally spending a lot of quality, focused time together. I’m unsure of how to describe this experience other than deeply human. It felt as though a very deep part of me was returning back to my social roots, in a way. And that makes sense! The entire trip was in line with how I evolved: small groups, intimate connection, shared experiences, story telling, good food, constant nature, and so on. The trip caused me to re-evaluate my personal priorities significantly. I had started to think about the fruits of my work more from the financial and prestigious side (hello PRIME), but after this trip that all went away. All I care about now is having enough money to be able to replicate trips like that. Being able to take the time and have the resources to connect with those closest to me, the way we are meant to. And I’m not alone in thinking this; my friends and I have decided that we’ll all take a trip like this at least once a year, no matter where in the U.S. we are, even just for a weekend. It affected us that significantly.

Current Technologies

I don’t need to explain the negative impacts on the current state of technologies, specifically social media. We all know how much of a time-suck it is, how addicting it is, and its negative impacts on our health. On the empathic front, it is quite clear how little current social media is aligned with our evolved empathic tendencies.

The main issue is that of empathy at scale. Like mentioned in the previous section, we evolved in small groups, and our empathic budgets evolved to match. However, the introduction of large-scale social media networks make managing such an empathic budget impossible at scale. I’ll take my own Instagram profile as an example. I have 202 followers, above Dunbar’s Number (not by much though), and those are all people that I consider to be close-ish. While there are people I’m closer to, all of the people that follow me I’ve had some kind of personal interaction with.

But the problem of empathy at scale rears its head when we shift to consumption. Not only did we evolve to have less social connections than we do via social media, our exposure to those social connections was also limited relative to today. One of the biggest examples of this was the entire year of 2020. Not only was there constant coverage on the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the George Floyd protests. While these are important events, I found myself quickly getting saturated with information. It was honestly hard for me to feel constant empathy for those who suffered at the hands of COVID-19 simply because I was exposed to so many of them. Every single time I opened a news or social media app, I learned of a new person or area beset by the virus. The empathic overwhelm was real. While I didn’t have the vocabulary or knowledge at the time, the reason why makes sense. Put simply, the onslaught of empathy required of me by news and social media is not what I had evolved to handle. I felt immense more empathy for my third-grade teacher when he got COVID, as well as my local independent bookstore (Powell’s, freaking love Powell’s) than I did the entire state of New York, which made me feel guilty.

But returning back to our evolutionary pressures, my reaction makes sense. When I heard of my third-grade teacher contracting COVID, my entire neighborhood and community rallied around him to ensure that he received the help he needed during his recovery. That is directly in line with how we evolved. There was a small community around him that I was a part of and knew personally.

For Powell’s, they operate the largest independent bookstore in the world, taking up an entire city block and three stories (it’s one of my personal favorite places). But because of the pandemic, the number of books they sold decreased significantly, even though they have an online presence. Because of that, my entire hometown (Portland, Oregon) banded together to order books online, even to the point where Powell’s had the fortunate problem of struggling to fulfill orders fast enough. While this was something that was city-wide, it was still something that my community was involved in, again in line with the evolutionary pressures discussed from before.

On the other hand, hearing about the constant nightmares from hospitals battling COVID-19 and the reports of many people dying caused me to feel numb. The George Floyd protests, similarly, caused me to feel numb. For both of these, the constant influx of new information caused my empathic budget to be drained consistently. Again, this makes sense as the constant stream of information is misaligned with evolutionary pressures.

This is to say nothing of algorithmic mediation and engagement metrics. At the end of the day, companies that offer free products sell ads to turn a profit, meaning that maximizing my time became the product. Going one step further, Big Tech companies spend billions in R&D annually; with a significant portion going towards selling ads. For example, Google’s most recent 10K earnings report mentions they make approximately $224 billion in revenue from ads. That’s about 80% of their annual revenue. So of course they are going to dump significant amounts of capital into R&D focusing on boosting engagement, it’s literally how they keep the lights on.

Solutions

Like I mentioned at the top, many of the solutions I’ve found tend to focus on moving us back to how we evolved. Like with puberty and medicine increasing lifespans, our biology might be lagging behind our technology, but that doesn’t take away the agency we have in aligning our social and empathic habits closer to that of how we evolved.

The first solution that I’ve found helpful is that of intimate social connection. For me, this has mostly looked like having small groups of friends over for dinner. It’s a relatively small thing, but it also feels deeply human and satisfying. Not only does this promote intimate connection, but with that intimate connection comes an increase of context, one of the things that is missing in the current technological landscape. Because I’m engaging with a few people, the conversations we have can be nuanced with as much context as we want. It’s a change that has been one of the most impactful. I have no sources, no psychological papers, no studies, to support this claim. But part of me wonders the need to invoke science to justify feelings that are so universally healing and human, both within myself and among friends.

The second general solution is that of diet, exercise, and sleep. These are the three non-negotiables that, in my experience, solve 95% of most people’s problems. Not compromising on any of these is the key. I firmly believe that it allows people to be more focused, energized, and generally engaged with their own lives as well as the decisions they make that impact others.

A third general solution is largely the goal of the university, and that is exposure to different ideas and perspectives. Whether the academy accomplishes this goal today is debatable, however I have found this to be one of the hidden joys in life. Notice that I did not say agree with those ideas and perspectives, but to simply be exposed to them and to engage with them. Not only does this lead to greater conviction in one’s ideas and worldview, it reinforces the first solution (intimate social connection). I have done this in many ways. One of which is having respectful discussions with people I disagree with politically. Not to berate them or to start a fight, but to be able to disagree with someone, then know that person is a close friend and go get ice cream afterwards. I also enjoy meeting people that have had vastly different life experiences than I have, whether that be talking to someone from Kyrgyzstan in my freshman dorm to talking to a bartender in small-town Wisconsin, sharing life experiences and exposure to different people has been one of the best ways I have found to increase my own empathy. I am consistently surprised at how different my life can be to another’s, but how similar our desires, passions, and goals can be.

Musical Anecdote

Writing this has reminded me of Air and Simple Gifts, composed by John Williams.