On Compassion: AR/VR emotional storytelling for social good
There is an abused urban legend called “The Boiling Frog”. Put a frog in boiling water and it will try to jump out. Place the same amphibian in a beaker where water is gradually brought to a boil and it will wait inert for its death.
While modern science has long discredited this theory, the story stays as a powerful metaphor. Our inability to be fully aware of danger hampers our ability to react: we will only take actions against perils we can understand.
Think climate change, for one. Our inability to act has been linked to powerful political and economic interest. But the boiling frog paradigm is also to blame. We perceive change as so gradual — a 0.02 degrees Celsius yearly increase in temperature anomaly — that we are unable to concern ourselves. Greta Thunberg’s message “our house is on fire” is so effective because it compresses the time-to-danger to mere seconds.
Zooming out, I believe that we — individually or as a community — can’t organise a reaction to economic or social problems that we can’t fully be aware of or comprehend.
I like to move beyond ‘awareness’ and introduce the stronger concept of compassion. Today this term has a quite bland connotation. Yet its etymology — a late Latin adaptation of the Greek ‘pathos’ (suffering) with the prefix ‘cum’ (together with) — suggests almost physical active involvement in someone else’s pain. It is this semantic drift that I want to address here. I believe that our inaction on sustainability — social, economic, and environmental — is partly due to our structural inability to comprehend emotionally (compassion) people affected by our unsustainable individual and collective behaviours.
Why are we so bad at feeling compassion?
I am convinced that our capacity to being emotionally aware of each other has been structurally diminishing as complex socio-economic change accompanied the development of civilisation. Urbanisation, population growth, the ethics of work, the great migrations, the high-tech revolution, all contributed to a massive increase in what I call our context. By that, I mean the set of human beings, institutions, objects, events, and all other non-human-made things that affect each individual’s life and that we can change with our actions. These are the things and people we should care, and who care for us.
If we look back at the history of humankind, we can clearly see how our individual context has increased over time. At the onset of humanity, it was ourselves and then our families. As increasingly complex societies were formed, our sphere of action also grew: our villages, our guilds, our cities, our nations. Then spectacular progress came to completely overhaul our lives: in the last 20 years, our context grew to include our megacities and, through the internet and social media, the whole world.
Now, as context grew that fast, our capacity to comprehend and share the passions of the people and things in it has not developed at the same pace.
Physically, our brain did not grow in the short lapse of time I am considering here. The last great period of human brain size growth dates back 800,000 years ago. There is even evidence that our brains have been shrinking during the last 10,000 years. Scientists have linked brain size — particularly a region called amygdala — to our capacity to feel and process social emotions. As a result, our physical potential for compassion has remained more or less the same in the last 2,000 years.
At the same time, maybe also in part as a consequence of this, people’s ethics have started to include less and less ‘others’. Well-being, happiness, and life realisation have been increasingly defined by what happens to each of us as individuals. I have written about this change elsewhere reviewing a book by Charles Taylor.
The result of all this is emotional frustration. We have never been so much informed about people, things, and events globally. And yet, evolutionary and socio-economic reasons, made us increasingly unable to feel them. We share less and less at an emotional level the joys and sorrows of other human beings. Our potential for compassion is very low.
This does not bode well for sustainability. If the need to take corrective actions does not transfer from the cognitive to the emotional level then we won’t act. Especially if these actions would partly disrupt our way of living.
Since we can’t get back in time how do we solve this problem?
First, reason in term of impact. Second, visualise it to create compassion.
Environmental activists are starting to do this very well. It is one thing to know — cognitively — that temperature will increase by many degrees in the next few decades. Or to be aware that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased by more than 30% since the 1960s. It is another message, an emotional one when we are shown how these changes will affect our context. How the life of our loved ones will worsen, the places of our childhood disappear.
The recent news that Indonesia wants to change its capital could have passed unnoticed to the casual reader. But because authorities justified the change via an impact — climate change and soil erosion will sink Jakarta in 30 years — the story stuck in our minds.
But our problems as a society are not confined to the environment. Very rarely we use this emotional storytelling for economic and social unbalances. What about income inequality? or social injustice, gender, age, ethnical discrimination?
We know what it means to face a house eviction, to be poor in a town of rich, to be fired two months after being back from maternal leave. But we don’t feel it. If we want to pursue social sustainability, we need to elicit compassion on all the ills that cause the decline of our society.
I believe that the digital age of data and deep learning offers us a golden opportunity to do that: through AR/VR visualisations.
There are some first encouraging attempts to do so. Stanford University has created its Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Teams of psychologists, designers, and developers build immersive experiences of the distress of social and economic exclusion. One of their projects, “Becoming Homeless” is a first-person VR experience developed by the Lab. In there, users impersonate somebody being fired. They feel what it means to sell beloved objects, daily necessities. They experience the pain to receive an eviction notice and the hardship of sleeping in night buses, under bridges, begging for food.
We should run more of these scenarios, one on every issue that threatens social sustainability. Even better, these experiences should also include counterfactual scenarios. They should give us the opportunity to feel how our individual and collective actions can change those stories.
This is the second time, in less than two decades, that we are given a technology-driven opportunity to save the world through compassion. The first, social media, we passed up, making it a weapon of hatred instead. Let’s act to make this second chance an instrument for social progress.
Berlin, May 2019
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On Compassion: AR/VR emotional storytelling for social good
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