Scientists search for specific brain activity patterns that may hold the answer

Jan 23, 2012 15:37 GMT  ·  By
Empathy and compassion break down just before and during conflicts, and MIT researchers are determined to find out why
   Empathy and compassion break down just before and during conflicts, and MIT researchers are determined to find out why

Investigators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say that empathy and compassion, two traits that usually bring people closer together, oftentimes fail unexpectedly between opposing groups in a conflict. Their work proposes a series of reasons why this happens.

The team was led by postdoctoral researcher Emile Bruneau and associate professor of cognitive neuroscience Rebecca Saxe. Both have had a knack for observing conflicts and the psychological foundations on which they are built, for years.

They decided to start by focusing their attention on empathy, the behavior that enables people to relate to other individuals' suffering, and resonate with that. Evolutionarily, empathy evolved in order to stave off conflicts, and to enable the formation of large social groups.

But evolution may have also played a part in spawning the cognitive and neural processes that can lead to a significant decrease in empathy right before and during conflicts. Opposing groups tend to display a lot more sympathy for members of the in-group than those in the other group.

“What are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?” asks Bruneau. Finding the brain activity patterns that underlie compassion may be useful in learning the answer to these questions.

“We’re interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that. This is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning,” says Saxe. She holds an appointment as an associate member of the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

One of the most interesting discoveries the team made was that the brain appears to be more sensitive to perceived importance of the conflict group. In other words, whether or not members of the study group actually liked people in the group they were opposed to did not really matter.

Researchers also discovered in a brain scan study that areas of the brain known to code emotional suffering were almost the same as those determined to play a role in identifying another person's thoughts of feelings.

Details of the work appear in the January 23 issue of the esteemed journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Science.

“It’s a really fascinating study because it’s the first to examine the neural basis of people’s behavior in longstanding conflicts, as opposed to groups that are distant and don’t have a long history of intergroup strife,” explains Northwestern University assistant professor of psychology Joan Chiao, who was not involved with the current research.