San Diego Lecture Explores How Neuroscience Can Promote World Peace

This is KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. There are ethnic, racial and religious hatreds in this world. How did they survive from one generation to the next? How to groups of people learn to hate other groups? Where is that hatred developed in the mind and how can that be changed? A neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of technology has taken on the task of how and why natural empathy is sometimes blocked in the brain. He is also said study brain imagery. Emile Bruneau, social and cognitive scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be giving a lecture at the University of San Diego tonight. He joins me now. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Good to be here. Can you to find empathy for us and does everybody have it? This is tricky. Empathy has many definitions. I think the way we commonly think of empathy, we think of it is stepping inside somebody else's shoes and thinking from their perspective. You can think of it in terms of a cognitive way of thinking approach. You can think of it as what are they feeling? That is the cognitive or affect of empathy. These are valid definitions of empathy and we don't really know which one we are supposed to be working on or cultivating. I think the short answer is that, in general, people have empathy. I think the remarkable thing about empty -- empathy is how flexible it is. You can feel deep empathy about someone or an animal that died and be brought to tears and then see someone destitute on the street and not be moved at all. Empathy has the ability to move us to do great things and it is also incredibly flexible. You began this quest after working in conflict resolution programs that did not resolve conflicts. And you talk about that? Before it was a scientist I was a teacher. I would travel during the summers. One experience was to go to to Ireland during the troubles and volunteer at a conflict resolution can't. It brought together Protestant and Catholic children for a number of weeks. I visited some of the children afterwards and they wanted to visit -- visit each other in segregated neighborhoods which was a risk to themselves. At the end of the camp, two boys got into a fight and it split the group down partisan lines. There was a full-scale 100 days 150 child brawl. I left wondering what we did wrong? Do other programs to better? How do we fix it? I realized in my research there were not any satisfying answers out there as to what the best practices were in conflict resolution. So that is part of why I am here. I want to figure out what the biases are driving conflict, how to measure them, and how to decrease them. As part of the work you describe the scenario of someone see a dog die in a movie, being reduced to tears, getting out of the theater and seeing someone destitute on the street and not giving it a second thought. I think you describe that as an empathy gap. Is that right? The empathy gap is what we think of when we're talking about groups. When you have empathy between me and you it is pretty straight forward. If you have more empathy it motivates you to help the person. When you have groups, empathy becomes interesting and problematic because it now matters who you feel your empathy for. When you go from me and youth to us and them, now when you feel more empathy for us, your own group, it might motivate you to harm the other group. Then you have less empathy for the other group and that removes a barrier to her hymen them. So I've begun to think about the most important aspect of empathy in a group situation is being the gap and how much empathy you feel for your in group versus your outgroup. Howery figuring these things out ¬? Psalmist neuroscientist psalmist through experimental psychology. Much in the way a neurologist can diagnose a stroke indirectly. They know the patterns of speech that will change when someone is having a stroke and don't need to see the brain to diagnose the stroke. A lot of work that we do and how the brain works as indirect as well. So that is what we talk about when we discussed experimental psychology. A lot of this is putting people in situations where they self-report how much empathy they feel for one group or another. That is one approach and another is with neural imaging to look at it direct. I think there is a big role in this to play. There are biases we may not be willing to admit to and so people might be unwilling or unable to admit to bias. That is because of how our brain works. A large portion of our brain is implicit and we do not have conscious control over it. So that part of your brain is responding to the outside world. If you are unaware of it then you are not able to regulate it. You found what people read differing opinions of their main group that they had empathy with, that quite often that empathy gap occurs because they can't make the connection, even if the other group's opinions are well grounded. And even if another circumstance might be accepted by an individual. But sure unification with the dominant group to shut that down. Yes. There are a number of well-known biases that prevent people from reasoning objectively. You become a subjective reason are in a situation. You see this often in politics. Democrats and Republicans will have a completely different interpretation of the exact same event. They will uncritically accept arguments in favor of their position and scrutinize argument in favor of the opposite side. So these types of biases or pandemic. It is part of who we are. It is something we seem to be potentiated for. And in these testing you found people that were able to overcome the prejudices of the group that they align themselves with. How does that happen quite That's a great question and is one of the questions that drives me. I want to know how we can systematize that. We have antidotes of why people are changing or working on behalf of another group. Light someone met who is a member of a dominant group would work for a minority group. What is it about that person that would make them care? I feel if we understand people who are working are ready for minority groups that might give us a hint of what type of processes weekend Into people to lead them in that direction. As you are explaining this to us Emile , it seems to be the question of ethnic racial religious conflict is very real. Even when you can figure out what's going on in somebody's brain and you bring that to someone they say it is hard to eradicate since it's in the brain. There is a lot of complexity. But I think we are all humans. One of the things I was struck with before becoming a scientist was my travels and different conflicts in Sri Lanka and Ireland. Different ethnic backgrounds and languages and continents. The types of biases that were driving them were eerily similar. It's not the vast differences but the incredible commonalities that are driving conflict. Number 2, finding that it is in the brain -- one thing, yes, that shows it is biological. They are actually part of us. But one of the fundamental realities of the human brain is incredibly flexible and this is what gives me so much home -- hope. Elasticity is part of the brain. Because it is in the brain that actually means it can be changed. That is really heartening. We have examples of this working. If you can make people aware of some of the biases that they are not aware of, then they can actually get past them. How do you see these working in a major conflict? Is it your hope something like this might be introduced to a long-standing conflict and have people change their mind, their hearts and minds about who they think their enemy is? I think it certainly can. We know anecdotally it happens. So it seems like if it works for an individual and you can get an idea of what works you can maybe systematize it across a group. What I am mostly focused on is conflicts that haven't yet started. Work conflicts that have politically resolved that you might have a fear might start again. Because I feel like conflicts that are going have systemic issues at play. There are a lot of politics involved. One of my favorite quotes from a former leader was that politicians make the peace but it's the people who keep the peace. And I think that's who I am focused on, the people who keep the peace. How can we mitigate some of the biases that might drive them to interpreting events in the most negative way possible? Attributing individual actions towards the entire group. So those are the types of conflicts I am most interested in. I think we is a piece-building community have the most chance of having a big impact with that. How is the piece-building community embracing the idea of resolving conflict in this way? Taking a neurobiological idea of how to look at this rather than the way it is normally done, which is just trying to appeal to someone's better half and trying to appeal to some part of their emotion that will change their minds? How are they embracing the work that you are doing? I think a number of fields have demonstrated how powerful evidence--based approaches are. Doctors can be committed to a specific therapy that they think definitely works. But if you actually do the controlled studies you might find the drug intervention is much more successful than surgery. We've seen enough examples in this in medicine to see this actually works. It is expanding now into economics. Poverty in Africa is a similar, complex endemic problem to peace building and conflict. It seemingly has the same problem. For 15 years you've been implementing programs and pouring money into it and we don't know what's really working and what isn't. They have started to examine this in controlled studies to see if each of these appealing interventions, which one actually get kids to stay in school longer. If you can quantify it, you can be sure funding on which approach works. They found the disparity is incredible. There is at least 100-fold difference in how efficient they are in keeping kids in school. You are speaking tonight at the University of San Diego about putting your science to work for peace. Gets a free lecture open to the public. It starts at 7:00. And Emile Bruneau thank you for speaking with us. My pleasure. Thank you.