This document is a slide deck for a talk on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy and how it relates to DevOps. It discusses how empathy involves sharing others' feelings, understanding their perspective, and being motivated to help without cost-benefit analysis. Empathy allows understanding different viewpoints and avoiding misattributions. Selected references on the neural basis of empathy and its role in prosocial behavior and reducing prejudice are provided.

2. Dave Mangot
DevOpsDays Vancouver 2016
@davemangot
tech.mangot.com
The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Empathy: You’re a DevOps Natural
rev 2 x 100

3. Cognitive Science

11. “Empathy represents the perfect storm of
sympathetic sharing of another’s feelings,
understanding what is likely being
experienced and what kind of help or comfort
is needed, and having the prosocial
motivation to act on behalf of others without
necessarily weighing the costs and benefits to
oneself”
- Matthew Lieberman

14. FUNDAMENTAL
ATTRIBUTION
ERROR

17. It is useless to attempt to reason a man
out of a thing he was never reasoned into
- Jonathan Swift

21. Thank You

22. Thank you!
Sylvia Morelli, PhD
John VanMeter, PhD
Barzel Segal
Alan Caudill
Vadim Friedberg
Patrick Debois

23. Selected Bibliography
● Brain Rules by John Medina
● The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of
Human Nature by Christian Keysers
● Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni
● Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect by Matthew Lieberman
● http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/how-to-avoid-empathy-burnout by Jamil Zaki
● Moran, J., Jolly, E., Mitchell, J., 2014. Spontaneous Mentalizing Predicts the Fundamental
Attribution Error. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 26:3, 569-576.
● Spunt R., Lieberman, D, 2012. An integrative model of the neural systems supporting the
comprehension of observed emotional behavior. NeuroImage 59, 3050-3059.
● Rameson, L., Morelli, S., Lieberman, M., 2011. The Neural Correlates of Empathy: Experience,
Automaticity, and Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24:1, 235-245.
● Zaki, J., Ochsner, K., 2012. The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise. Nature
Neuroscience 15:5. 675-680.
● http://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/FSL
● http://www.mccauslandcenter.sc.edu/mricro/mricron/

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25. ● Morelli, S., Rameson, L., Lieberman, M., 2012. The neural components of empathy: Predicting daily prosocial behavior. SCAN, 1 of 9.
● Waytz, A., Young, L., 2012. The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off:Attributing Mind to Groups Versus Group Members. Psychological Science 23
(1), 77-85.
● Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Saxe, R., in press. Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy.
● Cikara, M., Eberhardt, J., Fiske, S., 2011. From Agents to Objects: Sexist Attitudes and Neural Responses to Sexualized Targets. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 23:3, 540–551.
● Contreras, J. M., Schirmer, J., Banaji M., Mitchell J., 2013. Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during
Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25:9, 1406-1417.
● Hackel, L., Looser, C., Van Bavel, J. J., 2014. Group membership alters the threshold for mind perception: The role of social identity, collective
identification, and intergroup threat. Journal of Experimental Psychology 52, 15-23.
● Gutsell, J., Inzlicht, M., 2012. Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: neural evidence of an empathy gap. SCAN 7, 596-603.
● Waytz, A., Gray, K., Epley, N., Wegner, D., 2010. Causes and consequences of mind perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, 383-388.
● Falk, E., Morelli, S., Welborn, B., Dambacher, K., Lieberman, M., 2013. Creating Buzz: The Neural Correlates of Effective Message
Propagation. Psychological Science XX(X), 1-9.
● Morelli, S., Lieberman, M., Zaki, J., in press. The emerging study of positive empathy. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
● Morelli, S., Torre, J., Eisenberger, N., 2014. The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood. SCAN, 1-7.
● Rameson, L., Lieberman, M., 2009. Empathy: A Social Cognitive Neuroscence Approach. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3/1,
94-110.
● Klimecki O., Leiberg S., Lamm C., Singer, T., 2012. Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion
Training. Cerebral Cortex 23 (7), 1552-1561.
● Vollhardt, J.R., Staub, E., 2011. Inclusive Altruism Born of Suffering: The Relationship Between Adversity and Prosocial Attitudes and
Behavior Toward Disadvantaged Outgroups. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81:3, 307-315.
● Aberson, C., Haag, S., 2007. Contact, Perspective Taking, and Anxiety as Predictors of Stereotype Endorsement, Explicit Attitudes, and
Implicit Attitudes. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 10(2), 179-201.
● Capozza, D., Vezzali, L., Trifiletti,E., Falvo, R., & Favara, I., 2010. Improving intergroup relationships within and outside the contact situation:
The role of common ingroup identity and emotions of empathy and anxiety. Cises 17:1, 17-36.
● Martin et al., 2015, Reducing Social Stress Elicits Emotional Contagion of Pain in Mouse and Human Strangers, Current Biology 25, 326–
332.
● Margittaia, Z., Strombacha, T., van Wingerdena, M., Joëlsb, M. , Schwabec, L., Kalenscher, T. A friend in need: Time-dependent effects of
stress on social discounting in men. Hormones and Behavior Volume 73, July 2015, 75–82.
Additional References

26. ?
@davemangot