The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.
Brain’s response muted when we see other races in pain, New Scientist
It wasn’t much of a path up from the beach this past weekend. As you could see from the pictures, it was a pretty rocky area; there was sand (just enough to push Hobbes’s crank button) but that was a fairly limited portion of the area. The rest of it was all crags and slopes and pebbles. Needless to say, we were careful going up it: I because I’m a klutz; the Guy because he was hauling an incredibly chirpy Hobbes on his back.
About halfway up the slope, we met a group of very excited Caucasian children heading down. They were running, which was stupid, but they were boys, so … see point 1. The inevitable happened. One of them fell, grabbed his knee, inspected it — he was wearing shorts — and started to wail.
His brother and sister (I presume they were related) came back to regard him with disgust. “Don’t be such a baby,” they said. I would estimate they were all between 7 and 11 years old.
I’m not particularly surprised by New Scientist’s article; in fact, I’m only astonished that they had to do an actual study, but only in that cynical, “you needed to spend money to figure that out?” way.
The Guy never paused. In fact, I think he was already past the kids when the boy fell, so he didn’t even know anything had happened.
Me, I hesitated. I wavered. There was no obvious blood, and the boy’s siblings didn’t seem to be all that impressed by his injury. On the other hand….
Such automatic neural responses don’t necessarily translate into behaviour, cautions Farah. “Just because there is this difference in ACC response it doesn’t mean that we are inevitably going to behave less empathically toward the other group.”
“Is he okay?” I finally asked.
The boy’s brother and sister looked up. “He’s fine,” the brother said, with obvious disgust for his younger brother’s dramatics.
And then paternal wrath came stalking down the path towards them — “I told you boys not to run!” — so I nodded good-bye to them and left them to reap the consequences.
For the record, I am not more or less empathic based on the injured person’s race. Based on the injured person’s age, though; that’s another story altogether.
***
We’d just started down 280S, a beautiful, 10 lane freeway that runs through some of the more attractive woodlands and pasturelands in the Bay Area, when the Guy suddenly swore.
“Holy shit!”
I had just enough time to see something black and shiny fly cartwheeling across the lanes, and then we were swerving onto the side of the road. A split second later, I saw what the Guy had seen; a silver convertible sports car was hurtling up the large hill on the left side of the freeway, out of control. It crashed. There was no other word for it, really. It crashed into the hill, right front wheel first, and only pure, insane, ungodly luck kept it from flipping completely over and onto its top. Its uncovered top.
I fumbled for the phone and called 911 while the Guy got out of the car. Hobbes, sound asleep in his car seat, missed all the excitement. I got a busy signal; a car in front of us had also pulled over, and the driver had his phone out as well. Hopefully he had more luck. When I leaned out the window to investigate, I found that yet another car on the other side of the road had pulled over, and its driver was helping the crash victim out of the car. Incredibly, the man was able to stand, though his face was covered with blood.
“Idiot,” the Guy reported, when he got back into the car. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s too dangerous to cross the road, and he has help.”
“Busy signal,” I reported bitterly, and smacked the back of my phone. Because of course, that always works when you’re trying to get through to emergency services. “What happened?”
“He was driving too fast and lost control.” The Guy pulled us back into traffic. “He tried to change lanes but he was tailgating and he would’ve hit the car in front of him, so he tried to jerk back into his own lane and lost it. He’s driving too much car for him.”
“Was,” I corrected. There wasn’t much of the car left, from what I could see.
“Not anymore,” the Guy said. “Idiot.”
He has a deep contempt for bad drivers, of any stripe. We have had arguments about this before. I am not, shall we say, one of the talented few.