Jillian Lee Meyer 4-4

Otter.ai Summary  

Jillian Lee Meyer, a dual PhD student in social psychology and cognitive science, presented her model of empathy, "Exercising Empathy," at the Empathy Summit. She discussed the deficit and excess of empathy, referencing Aristotle's golden mean. Meyer highlighted the importance of finding a balanced amount of empathy, akin to training muscles, to avoid cognitive biases and maintain moral and social well-being. She also introduced her research substack, "The Inner Workout," which explores moral cultivation through empathy and character development, inviting contributions from the audience.

Action Items

• [ ] Explore Jillian's blog after the session to learn more about her work on empathy.

Outline

Introduction and Background of Jillian Lee Meyer

• Janna Weiss introduces Jillian Lee Meyer, a dual PhD student in social psychology and cognitive science, focusing on moral psychology, viewpoint diversity, and empathy.

• Jillian expresses her passion for moral psychology and curiosity about the topic.

• Jillian shares her background as a dual PhD student and her connection with the idea of empathy.

• She mentions her part-time work as a group fitness instructor and how it connects with her research on empathy.

Overview of Jillian's Empathy Model

• Jillian introduces her model of empathy, called "Exercising Empathy."

• She explains the deficit of empathy and its negative consequences.

• Jillian discusses the concept of excess empathy and its associated biases.

• She introduces Aristotle's golden mean and practical wisdom (phronesis) as the foundation of her model.

Deficit of Empathy

• Jillian elaborates on the deficit of empathy, including apathy and anti-social behaviors.

• She explains the concept of "einfalung," the German origin of empathy, which means feeling into.

• Jillian highlights the importance of true empathy over mere sympathy.

• She mentions the research on sociopaths and the lack of full empathy.

Excess of Empathy

• Jillian discusses the concept of excess empathy and its negative effects.

• She references various academic works on the dark sides of empathy, including Paul Bloom's "Against Empathy."

• Jillian explains the evolutionary advantages of cognitive biases in empathy.

• She provides examples of how spotlight empathy can lead to cognitive biases and disadvantages in politics.

Defining Empathy

• Jillian talks about the multiple definitions of empathy and the challenge of defining it accurately.

• She references her advisor, Fritz Brighthope, and other leading researchers on empathy.

• Jillian introduces Aristotle's virtue ethics and the golden mean as a framework for defining empathy.

• She explains the importance of finding the situational correct amount of empathy.

Exercising Empathy Model

• Jillian compares training muscles to training morality, emphasizing the need to find the right balance.

• She explains the concept of "Exercising Empathy" and the importance of not under or over-training empathy.

• Jillian introduces her research substack, "The Inner Workout," which explores moral cultivation and character development.

• She invites contributions to the substack and encourages participants to share their insights on empathy and related topics.

Conclusion and Call to Action

• Jillian concludes her presentation by inviting participants to connect with her through various platforms.

• She expresses her enthusiasm for exploring the physicalness of empathy and its connection to fitness.

• Janna Weiss thanks Jillian for her presentation and expresses her passion for morals, ethics, and embodied virtue.

• Janna highlights the importance of tempering empathy with kindness and discernment.

Otter.ai Transcript

Janna Weiss  0:02  

Let's see Gillian Lee, Mayer Meyer, I have the joy to introduce you welcome to the empathy Summit, a dual PhD student in social psychology and cognitive science, studying moral psychology, viewpoint diversity and empathy. And Julian's topic will be exercising empathy and strengthening the empathy movement. And thank you. I look forward to listening. I'm passionate about the idea of moral psychology, and curious to hear more about it. Thank you.

Speaker 1  0:39  

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Get this pulled up. Yeah, I have loved these conversations so far. They've been really cool. I have recently started doing some work on empathy, like you heard. I'm a dual PhD student in social psychology and cognitive science, and I've always really connected a lot with the idea of empathy. I've always felt like a very empathic person, for better and for worse, you know. And so getting getting into this virtue a little more specifically, has been fun as I've started to go in a more character education route with my moral psychology work. And also, this is the first time that I'm kind of giving this presentation and officially presenting my model here with empathy. 

And so I want to thank Edwin for giving me the platform to do that, and all of you for being here and listening. So yes, my name is Jillian Lee Meyer, and I'm going to be talking about my model of empathy, which I call exercising empathy. I work part time as a group fitness instructor for things like Jazzercise type classes, bar fitness, step aerobics, water aerobics, lots of fun stuff. And so this combination of, kind of my research, with empathy, with thinking about the physical manifestation of performance and play, and a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today, I really am passionate about that connection. I'm excited to explore that with you. So just a little overview of the model, and what I'll go a little deeper into is, first of all, the deficit of empathy, the part that I don't really need to convince you guys of, what happens when we don't have empathy or enough empathy. What does that look like? 

Then, on the flip side, some people have kind of hinted at this in the presentations and in the chat, but the idea almost of an excess of empathy, where we have so much empathy that we're prone to biases outside of what we're being empathetic to or for. And then finally, the important part of my model, it's a virtue education inspired model where I'm going to talk about Aristotle and the golden mean, which is where he sees phronesis, or practical wisdom when it comes to being a good, flourishing person, as the ability to find that middle ground between the deficiency or the excess of a virtue. Great.

 Okay, so the part that we're all going to really like, right? Barack Obama has a famous quote, it seems like we got an empathy shortage and empathy empathy deficit. And again, that's something we've been talking about this whole presentation. I totally agree with that, that in a lot of situations, we are just lacking the ability or even the desire or motivation to understand other people. And I see that as a really big problem in our politics and our social and cultural lives, all of that. So what do I mean by deficit? 

We have the obvious. You have no empathy, the inability to empathize with the unwillingness to empathize, apathy, and that can be problematic, linked to all sorts of anti social behaviors and outcomes, things like that. So, yeah, don't want to not have empathy. But then we also, kind of, we get into, like, not enough empathy, which is that deficit, you know, where you just you we talked about einfalung Earlier, the German origin of empathy, which means feeling into so there's a sense of, like almost getting at that physicalness of empathy, where it's not just like separation and it's sympathy, where you're just, you know, kind of imagining, but really like getting deeper into that feeling. 

And I think that is an important part of what sting distinguishes true empathy from just kind of a deficit of it. And so even these deficits, you know, not just completely, like there's research on sociopaths or people lacking empathy completely, but also just not getting quite to that full empathy that we're really talking about, if that makes sense. So deficit of empathy kind of looks like that in my model. 

And then someone mentioned this earlier, too, so I was so excited the whole time today, because I was like, Yep, I'm going to talk about that. Going to talk about that. So I'll talk about connecting at the end. But would love to hear all your thoughts on this. This is something that academics have started to focus on really heavily. So Elon said the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, which, you know, just that statement, like, it's just what in the world? Like, can you imagine saying that empathy is the fundamental weakness of our civilization? Like, one of a strong statement to think about. But academics have started to think about that, and they've started to say, Okay, well, you know, what does that mean? What does that mean? Like, over empathize.

Speaker 1  5:00  

Seen. I'll talk about that here. So excess, we talked about deficiency. What happens when you don't have enough empathy. But what do these academics mean by like, dark sides of empathy or bad empathy? There's lots of books out there now. Paul Bloom and against empathy. Fritz, bright hop, dark sides of empathy. Ali best suckley, she has toxic empathy. Gadsad talks about suicidal empathy. 

So if any of those sound interesting to you, definitely go look up those books for more information. But the way that Paul Bloom describes it, I think, is really good, where he talks about spotlight empathy. So over empathizing with a particular individual or group or something like that, and that can lead you to lots of cognitive biases when it comes to seeing the outside world, seeing the people kind of in opposition to who your spotlight empathizing with. And this comes with a lot of evolutionary advantages when we have these cognitive biases to people outside of our empathetic circles. So you think like having a prioritization for family members when it comes to protecting them versus protecting a stranger, you know that's a good thing. 

Like you're protecting your family, you're protecting the ones close to you, and it's okay to instinctively feel that it's not wrong. Or should question, like, should I be empathizing with my kid more than I am a total stranger? Like it's intuitive, and I, I think that is a good thing. Another thing you know, when you're presented, there's lots of research on this. When you're presented with a story about 1000 children who are starving in Africa, versus you see a video of one child, and they center on the the video of the child and their life story and what they're going through and what they need and all that stuff, we have more of a pull of empathy there, that, again, gets to that, like, physical, like, it's more of an a moral emotion, versus just Like a cognitive or like you're just kind of thinking about feeling for the child, and that often motivates us into action. 

You know, if you tell about, if you tell people, there are 1000 people in this city in Africa who are starving, how much would you donate? They're less likely to donate money and willing to donate, so much less than if you focus on that one child or that one individual. So in this sense, there's that spotlight empathy you're focusing on that one person, and that could lead you to cognitive biases, you know, around that individual or that group or whatever, and you can see how kind of transferring that into politics, then that could be a disadvantage, or an evolutionary mismatch of the moral intuition or emotion that connects us to empathy where we're focusing so hard, or an individual or a group that we feel like everyone else in the world totally lacks empathy, and so in toxic empathy that book, this is what she talks about a lot.

 Like, if you if you're centered, you're like, I am empathizing with this group. I am the one that has empathy. It's so much harder to see the people on opposing sides of you as being empathetic people. So that's where I think this excess becomes really important, and that they're focusing a lot in academia. Now I'll go into this in a second of whether I think that is actually empathy or whether it's something else, which is something Edwin and I have explored a lot this defining empathy idea, because I totally agree.

 There's so many different definitions out there and models. A bunch of academics, including my advisor, Fritz brighthopped, they recently got an article accepted, getting published soon. I think on it's like all the leading researchers and empathy, the psychologists and everything on defining empathy, and they come up with, like, I think it's 11 different definitions of empathy. So when I say there's a lot out there right now, there's a lot out there, what do we actually mean by empathy? So this is where my model comes in. 

How are we defining empathy? What is empathy? What is not empathy? And this goes back to Aristotle and virtue ethics. Like I said something taught in character education a lot. It's not a matter of picking a virtue like honesty or courage, and maximizing that virtue, how do I be the most honest person, the most courageous person? But about finding that phronesis, that practical wisdom in the middle where you're saying, Okay, in this situation, this amount of honesty is appropriate, or this amount of bravery, in this sense, the perfect amount of empathy, or the, you know, range of a good amount of empathy. 

So that's what he's describing here. Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency. It reminds me of Goldilocks a lot, like not too much or not too little. So this balance, this middle ground of the situationally correct amount of empathy. So I in the way that I see it, when we talk about this golden mean and virtue theory, we talk about honesty. And on one end, you don't have honesty, you're a liar, or you're deceptive or something. But then on the farther end, you can imagine, like, could be a little too blunt, like honest when you don't, you know, necessarily need to situationally.

 You kind of have to navigate that, and that's where you find true you know, possibly moral or pro social behaviors more human flourishing when you're able to navigate these situations and find the best way to act. So another one is bravery. So you have no bravery, you're a coward, but if you're just completely brave, maybe you're impulsive or you're reckless. But my point here. Is that I don't, I don't think that I would consider bluntness or recklessness to be honest or brave, you know.

 So we say like, if we're talking about the ends of the spectrum of like, of not honest at all, or way too honest, not honest at all, I see as lying and too honest. I see as bluntness. You see what I mean. So when it comes to talking about empathy, the way that it's defined, there's like, cognitive empathy relating to problems, rational compassion. But where do you draw that line between empathy and sympathy? You know? Like, there's a cognitive difference there, where you're not feeling into, you're almost just kind of imagining into or thinking about, you know?

 And so I don't know that I would consider that empathy. And then on the far end, when they talk about spotlight empathy, or dark sides of empathy, when you're over empathizing with a particular group and you're experiencing cognitive biases for your opposers, I don't know that I would call that empathy, either. And so when, when I consider empathy, I'll talk a little about the sports metaphor here that you can see. I think a lot about training muscles as similar to training morality, and so we've heard that language a couple times today, which I found exciting.

 But when you train a muscle, you know, you don't want to under train it. If you under train it, you're never going to get that growth. If you you know, stop immediately every time something feels hard, but you don't want to overtrain it either, because then you get injury and fatigue and all these other negative consequences.

 But training your muscle like really true exercise is about finding that middle ground and and that middle ground can shift. So maybe you can do a lot heavier weights when you do bicep curls versus delt flies, you know, like finding that, where am I over exercising. Where am I under exercising? I think that's really important when we consider virtues like empathy, that that kind of analogy. I think it works really well, both with the philosophical theory it relates to, and then also just imagining that physicalness again. 

And so that's why I call it exercising empathy model, because you're you want to exercise it kind of the right amount. Something else I wanted to bring up that I thought you guys might found, might find it interesting, is a sub stack that my research assistants and I are now running. It's called the inner workout. 

So this is comparing those ideas of moral cultivation or muscle cultivation. I've written a couple pieces on empathy, so I talk about this exercising empathy model, as well as group exercising empathy. Like I said, I'm a fitness instructor, so I talk about some of the research of things like dance movement therapy and, you know, people dancing together or kind of mirroring each other's actions and performance or acting, how that can lead to increased feelings of empathy and connection, and things like that.

 So that one was a really fun and personal one to write. I like that. But then there's other things that my research assistants write about, like highlights on certain sports athletes, and you know what they do to develop their character? I'm working on one right now about Bobby Knight and why he's so controversial in his character development. 

If you know IU football, go Hoosiers, but, or IU basketball rather, but anyway, yeah, so I'm always looking for contributors to this, and so with a lot of the stuff that I heard today, I was excited at the prospect of some of you sharing your ideas with us on the substack short form writing. And so it's like 1000 words, something like that, and it can be a little more blog Posty, so I find it a little more fun than academic writing, but it reaches a lot of people, and I think that talking about this kind of stuff, this connection and empathy and like that, that physicalness of empathy, I guess I'm really enjoying exploring that, and I love to hear your guys' thoughts on my model and other insights that you have. But please do connect. We also run a psychology Tiktok. We've got our sub stack, but LinkedIn, my website, again, I would love to chat with you. Thank you so much.

Janna Weiss  13:47  

Wow. Julian, thank you. Thank you for your beautiful presentation, for what you're investigating, and I see that much more will come from your work. I am passionate about morals, ethics. I call it embodied virtue or kindness and discernment. When you talk about honesty versus and bluntness, it has to be tempered with kindness, empathy, not being empathy. Edwin definitely agrees with that and many of us here. So yeah, what is biased is not is not empathy. So thank you very much for sharing all that and for your wonderful tips. And I don't know how you say that. GIFs, thank you. A equals A. I like that one. Tell you where to find it. I'll go explore your blog. So thank you so much so we can now.