Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross

and took one. Suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, the tracking system began to record signals from neurons that were identical to those it tracked when the monkeys were eating the peanuts themselves! The researchers named these “mirror neurons.” They were later identified in humans by a UCLA professor, Marco Iacoboni.^[4]

      The discovery has been somewhat controversial in the twenty years since it was published, but many people have begun to see in it as a doorway to our understanding of human empathy. V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of San Diego, has become one of the strongest scientific advocates of the importance of this discovery to our understanding of empathy. He has called mirror neurons “the basis of civilization,” because they may explain why it is that we feel such a deep connection and both physical and emotional reaction to the experience of others, and in particular, pain. He also has suggested that an understanding of mirror neurons may provide a window into our understanding of human self-awareness.^[5]

      Others have attributed this capacity to a phenomenon that has its roots in the philosophical debates of René Descartes and others and is called “theory of mind.” Theory of mind is the ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, wants, and knowledge to others, and to understand when others have beliefs that are the same or different from our own. While empathy and theory of mind are often used interchangeably, it is unclear whether these are exactly equivalent because theory of mind seems to be more of a function of the brain’s temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, and empathy relies more on the sensorimotor cortices as well as the limbic system. Nonetheless, both speak to the ability to sense the feelings, needs, and circumstances of others. It appears that most people have some capacity for theory of mind and, interestingly, women seem to have a stronger capacity for it, on the whole, than men.

      Still, there are other times when we may feel so distant from that experienced by people, even those to whom we are the closest. It seems that our brains may be selective in their ability to be empathetic, depending upon whether we see another person as “them” or “us.” Xiaojing Xu, Xiangyu Zuo, Xiaoying Wang, and Shihui Han, researchers in psychology and radiology at Peking University, found that the empathetic neural responses in the anterior cingulate cortex decreased significantly when participants viewed faces of other races.^[6]

      Mina Cikara, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Emile Bruneau, a postdoctoral fellow with the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Rebecca Saxe, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, have written that “these tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an out-group member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help ‘the other.’” They went on to say that “out-group member suffering elicits dampened empathetic responses as compared to in-group members’ suffering.” They even suggested that when faced with out-group suffering, people may feel schadenfreude, or pleasure gained from another’s pain.^[7]