What is Empathy? Why do we have it? What makes Empathy human? How will empathy impact the decision making of AI?

1. The Science Behind Empathy
The fact, the fiction, and realities behind how
our brain understands people around us.
Yusra Khan
Intuit Campus
August 2018

2. Yusra Khan
Cognitive Neuroscience Researcher
Podcast Producer of Gut Feeling on Creative
Disturbance
MS in Applied Cognition & Neuroscience
Human-Computer-Interaction
University of Texas at Dallas
BA in Organizational & Neuropsychology
University of Hartford
Research: HCI, Stress, Meditation
Binaural frequencies and alteration of brain waves
Thesis: Neuropsychology of the Impact of
Meditation on Stress

4. In this picture, I am interpreting for the attorney and gentleman in handcuffs. He was arrested for
burning his wife face with a gallon of hot boiling oil. I was also assigned to interpret for his wife
who at that moment was in the Yale Burns injury unit covered with bandages all of her face. She
was in extremely emotional and physical pain, and her daughters were telling me what had
happened. The doctor advised the wife over and over not to cry because every time she cried it
caused an infection to occur which would lead removal and replacement of the bandages a very
painful process.
As an interpreter it is important that you are not biased, you can not show any feelings. An
interpreter tone cannot suggest any messages. It was the extremely difficult situation for me to be
able to do that because I couldn't stop empathizing with the woman's emotional situation. I
wanted to do my job, and I wanted to do it right. I felt like a ball of emotions in my throat trying
to hold itself together. During this entire court session, I wished not to feel the emotions, the
empathy, and judgment. Empathy in this situation became my biggest obstacle.

5. Empathy
What is empathy?
Why do we have it?
Where does it come from?

7. It is a survival thing you know. Mammals have empathy because they give birth to
young that need to be protected, fed, kept warm and need love. Reptiles, on the other
hand, don't have any empathy. They lay eggs and move on. It is our evolved brain that
has empathy as a big part of the survival of our species.

9. Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus
Part of our brain which is responsible for
literally putting ourselves into the
perspective of someone who stands in
front of us blocking our view.
Saxe et al 2004, Ouden et al., Neuroimage,
2005

10. Empathy & Mirror Neurons
Premotor cortex
Supplementary motor area
Primary somatosensory cortex
Inferior parietal cortex
(Areas of the brain where mirror
neurons are present motor and
sensory areas)
Doidge, Norman, et al. The Brain That Changes Itself. CBC
Learning, 2008.

11. You can feel this. We
are imagining exactly
what part of the back is
going to get hurt. The
kind of pain…. These
are mirror neurons in
action.

12. Empathy & Imagination

13. Empathy is Physical
David T Neal & Tanya L Chartrand

14. When we are not physically able to empathize with the person we are talking to due to
botox surgery then we feel less empathy. Brain scans also show this happening in the
brain.

15. Types of Empathy

16. Empathy & Emotional Intelligence
Great sales leader understand the role of empathy
and emotional intelligence in leadership. As a
sales manager, I invested in my team by teaching
them how to engage in empathetic conversations.
My background in mindfulness helped me
develop this skill set. I used youtube as a way to
connect my team, congratulate them on their
success and teach them the skills I spent learning
to help me grow.
Majority of what I learned was from my team, so
I decided to sit down and record their experience
and share it with the entire district.

17. Empathy & Design
“A compelling design delivers a useful, usable, and delightful
experience for customers.”
Sachin Rekhi

19. Turbo Tax was a delightful experience for me. I knew this because I couldn’t stop
talking about it and I offered to do other people’s taxes.
What excited me the fact that I could see the amount of tax return I could get. It was
changing as soon as I would enter information on a page and update it. I used to get
this feeling like I was at a casino when the $dollars of my tax refund would roll up. It
was a slot machines effect. Same dopamine effect which can cause people to take
actions that they might regret later on. In this case, someone might lie about a
donation made. This design was encouraging people to do that.

20. Can you think of any examples where empathy is
not always helpful?

21. Empathy in Physicians
Doctors have learned to train their brain to
inhibit pain (insula).
Anterior paracingulate gyrus activated in
Doctors.
Bruce W. Newton
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013; 7: 233. Published online 2013 Jun 11. doi:
10.3389/fnhum.2013.00233
PMCID:
PMC3678078

22. Empathy in Healthcare
A student in my Semiotics class(Kelly Park) talked about the semiotics of pain in the
healthcare industry. We currently have a very poor pain assessment system.

23. Empathy in Conversational UI
For informational Architecture class,
my classmate (Elwyn Crawford) and I
put together a workshop on UX
strategy.
This workshop focused on developing
conversational UI for sexual health.
We created three personas for them.
The persona that was most popular
amongst them was Fatima.

25. Empathy is Complicated
From this workshop we learned that empathy is complicated. Some of the questions
that the groups asked while they were developing their strategies were:
● Are people of certain cultures more empathetic and expect more empathy from
others?
● Do we need to have different personalities for the conversational UI?
● Do people expect the conversational UI to be empathetic?

26. Empathy is Human
Empathy can adjust..
Empathy can adapt…
Empathy can be trained...
Empathy ages....
Empathy autocorrects…(right supramarginal gyrus) Max Planck
Empathy isn’t perfect….it is human

27. Are there times where you’d rather not deal with a
human?

30. Empathy is Biased
An experiment done by Don A
Vaughn et at., at the University of
California suggests that we feel
more empathy towards our group of
people. It doesn't have much to do
with religion but more with whose
team are you on.

31. Machines & Judgement
People are more honest to google
than they are to god.
It's nice to have machines that are
non judgemental.

32. Empathy & AI Decision Making
We have become very obsessed with the
idea of humanizing robots. We need AI
to be empathetic because we would need
AI to take care of us especially when we
are older.
Technology has mastere IQ and now we
are helping it master EQ.
What are some of negative impacts of
making technology just like us?

33. “College students today are approximately 40 percent less
empathetic than they were just ten years ago.”
Dr. William Axinn

34. How will empathy in AI impact its decision
making?

35. Sources
Doidge, Norman, et al. The Brain That Changes Itself. CBC Learning, 2008.
“Do Mirror Neurons Give Us Empathy?” Greater Good, greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/do_mirror_neurons_give_empathy.
Paul, Pamela. “Botox Reduces the Ability to Empathize, Study Says.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 June 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/fashion/botox-reduces-the-ability-to-empathize-study-says.html.
“The Neuroscience of Empathy.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers,
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201310/the-neuroscience-empathy.
Walking a fine line: is it possible to remain an empathic physician and have a hardened heart?
Bruce W. Newton
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013; 7: 233. Published online 2013 Jun 11. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00233
PMCID:
PMC3678078

36. http://saxelab.mit.edu/resources/papers/current_pubs/Saxe,%20R.,%20&%20Wexler,%20A.%20(2005).%20Making%20sense%20of%
20another%20mind-%20the%20role%20of%20the%20right%20temporo-parietal%20junction%20(Neuropsychologia).pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-T2GsG0l1E
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17534011
http://time.com/3562863/5-ways-to-be-more-empathetic/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201310/the-neuroscience-empathy
https://thesalesblog.com/2010/02/03/empathy-and-emotional-intelligence-the-ability-to-connect/
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/i-feel-your-pain-the-neuroscience-of-empathy
https://rootsofempathy.org/research/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPlwoFRSq_0&t=1089s
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/98d9/4fa28b72f308bc8f9d0753f91b45a305100a.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X7fZoDs9KU