Theory as behaviour: Why empathy research needs horizontal,mutualistic habits of seeing

Abstract

I propose that theory, typically understood as a mere intellectual position, is also a habit of seeing (in the Deweyan sense). It is a form of behaviour organized through person–environment collaboration that reshapes both person and environment, facilitating and constraining subsequent potentials for action. I discuss two of psychology’s habits of seeing and their effect upon empathy research: (a) the vertical worldview, a habit of searching for reality at higher or lower levels, which neglects the empathizer’s context and (b) dualism, a habit of treating organisms as distinct from environments, which creates the problem of other minds. I present two alternative habits of seeing: (a) van Dijk and Withagen’s horizontal worldview, which looks outward to empathizers’ contexts and (b) organism–environment mutuality, which approaches organisms and environments as processes rather than entities. These latter habits, I conclude, better afford psychologists the possibility of addressing the practical problem of nonempathetic behaviour.

The term empathy first originated around 1910 as a translation of Einfühlung, a late 19th-century German word used to describe the kinesthetic, whole-body experience of art (e.g., pulse racing with music, body drawing upward with a sweeping line). Empathy as a way of understanding others’ emotions began to emerge around the World War II era from person-centred therapeutic approaches pioneered by Jessie Taft, Carl Rogers, and others (Lanzoni, 2018), which emphasized “lay[ing] aside your self” and “enter[ing] another’s world without prejudice” (Rogers, 1975, p. 4). Today, Carolyn Pedwell (2016) says, most Westerners regard empathy as an end in itself, “an emotional competency” that is “part and parcel of being a self-managing and self-enterprising individual within a neoliberal order” (p. 34). Few now ask “what happens after [emphasis added] empathy,” but, instead, “how can we cultivate it?” (Pedwell, 2016, p. 28).

For the past several decades, psychologists have tried to address the so-called empathy deficit in society; however, to quote Thomas Szasz (1961/2010): “In the history of science, thinking in terms of entities has always tended to precede thinking in terms of processes” (p. 1). Some psychologists have proposed that so-called nonempathetic people are psychopaths, narcissists, and so forth, people whose brains and bodies do not permit them to empathize naturally. For instance, Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) writes:

I am going to argue that some people are at the low end of this empathy dimension in a potentially permanent way, and that some (but importantly not all) of those at this extreme end are whom we might call “evil” or cruel. That is, they never had much empathy and they may never. (p. 21)

Admittedly, some people do behave in psychopathic, narcissistic, and even “evil” ways; nevertheless, reducing a lack of empathy to brains and bodies alone is a thorny approach for three reasons. First, it makes biology the basis for rejecting those who get in the way of whatever sort of world we are trying to make, leaving pathologized persons vulnerable to stigmatization (a particular concern for those included in Baron-Cohen’s (2011) “but importantly not all,” p. 21). Second, it excuses institutions and other social systems from responsibility for the disordered behaviours they engender, shifting the burden of blame to individuals whose power to address such behaviours may be limited. Third, if behavioural differences are the result of hardwired “nature” rather than acquired ways of being in the world, then we have nowhere to go. Arguably, an imperfect world may be made better by subjecting the so-called nonempathetic to medication or empathy training (Block-Lerner et al., 2007; Roswell et al., 2020), but this runs into an ethical dilemma: If differences are largely a matter of biology, by what right do we tell someone that their brain and body are wrong?

Psychopathy and narcissism are not the subject of this article, nor do I oppose empathy training. Rather, I wish to call attention to the far-reaching consequences of the theories that guide psychological study and practice. Compared to labels in the natural sciences, psychology’s labels are far more likely to influence the subjects they classify or even to act as self-fulfilling prophecies (Brinkmann, 2004; Hacking, 1995). It makes no difference to Pluto, for instance, whether astronomers classify it as a planet or dwarf planet. Telling a woman she has “low empathy,” however, cannot help but influence her behaviour toward herself and others, especially if we tell her she was born that way.

“A psychological theory,” Svend Brinkmann (2004) states, “is not valid when it correctly represents an independent object or process, but when it succeeds in solving practical problems that people are faced with” (p. 6). To address the practical problem of a lack of empathy in human society, then, the first step is to move away from theories and models that habituate us to see human beings as essential rather than processual, static rather than dynamic. Empathy, I will argue here, is not a property either of the brain or the body, though both participate when the behaviours we call empathy are occurring. These related activities are all too often taken for empathy itself, or at least its explanation, but the real explanation is more complex. To empathize means to “coexperience . . . another’s situation” (Breithaupt, 2017, p. 10)—that is, to perceive the other in context, just as we experience ourselves in context; however, to again quote Szasz (1961/2010): “The context in which the observation is made is part of the observation” (p. 83). To coexperience with another necessarily includes not only their context, but also our own, a context which characterizes our empathetic perceptions of them. As a result, one person’s empathizing may not look the way that another person expects. I will address these different faces of empathy in a moment. To begin, however, I will address another context, the one in which psychology’s study of empathy occurs, the pressures of which shape what we are able to see and not see. These pressures, as much as empathy itself, are the subject of this paper.

Theory as behaviour: John Dewey and habits of seeing

We typically think of theory as an abstract concept—an intellectual position from which to view evidence. Indeed, most of us were explicitly taught some version of this definition in our first-year psychology courses. One introductory psychology textbook, for instance, defines theory as “a well-developed set of ideas that propose an explanation for observed phenomena,” ideas that are “repeatedly checked against the world” through scientific research (Spielman et al., 2020, p. 42). In this understanding, theory belongs to the realm of thought, research to the realm of action. The value of a hypothesis or scientific investigation, therefore, is that “it bridges the gap between the realm of ideas and the real world” (Spielman et al., 2020, p. 42), helping to keep theories grounded in reality so that we know which explanations are useful and which we may safely discard.

This, however, is not the only understanding on offer. Why should we assume, as Alan Costall (2004) once put it, that “‘reality’ excludes us” (p. 190)? In another approach, it is possible to understand theory as something already embedded in and actively engaged with the real world. We do not typically think of theory as behaviour. Here, however, I will argue that theory, though indeed a perspective, is not a mere intellectual position, but also an active, productive, world-shaping habit of seeing, using the word “habit” in its Deweyan sense.

For John Dewey (1922/2007), a habit is not the mere repetition of particular acts, but a “working adaptation of personal capacities with environing forces” (p. 16)—one which emerges from the interrelation of organism and environment, including the social environment of our fellow humans:

A society or some specific group of fellow-[people], is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a [person]; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist. Even letting a [person] alone is a definite response. (pp. 16–17)

Deweyan habits represent not only how a person handles the world, but also how the world handles the person. They are ways of being organized by individual and environment together.

Dewey (1922/2007) offers the example of a habitually angry man who murders someone in a rage. Rage is a behaviour the man’s environment has hitherto approved—perhaps by bowing to his will or by affording him the satisfaction that others fear him. It has cultivated (or at least not resisted) his angry behaviours. As these behaviours are nurtured, the man gains a “special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions” (Dewey, 1922/2007, p. 42). He actively searches for more things to be angry about, and unless he has other intersecting habits that conflict with this one, he may become very good at finding them—even creating them. Though habit is often presented as dead or inert, it often has remarkable generative powers. Dewey (1922/2007) refers to habits as “arts” (p. 15)—acquired, skillful ways of interacting with the environment, reshaping it into meaningful forms, and finding oneself reshaped in the process. In this way, an “artist” of anger collaborates with his environment to transform it into a niche in which his anger can flourish more comfortably—one in which angry behaviours are more readily afforded.

Those who focus solely upon this active, even creative, component of habit will also focus upon the individual when it is time to break unwanted habits. Many expect themselves or others to summon willpower to reverse undesirable behaviour or control undesirable actions. According to Dewey, however, this approach neglects both the habit’s collaborator (the environment) and its consequences (the niche shaped from habit, which, in turn, facilitates more habit). Habit, Dewey (1922/2007) says, successfully breaks only when the “environment obstinately rejects it” (p. 125), when something in the organism–environment relation changes such that a lack of fit between angry ways of being and the environment results. Perhaps a changing world pushes back so hard against the man that angry behaviours are no longer afforded, and he is compelled to adopt new, more appropriate behaviours—new habits of seeing. Or perhaps he takes every opportunity afforded him to seek new environments and new influences that will break down his habit. Until this happens, however, anger is his habit of seeing the world—his theory of life—and will remain so for as long as behaviour–environment fit persists.

Throughout their careers, scientists, too, develop habits that shape their ways of being in the world of science. As they engage in scientific behaviours and interact with scientific environments, they form habits of seeing that select from their field of experience whatever affords them curiosity, interest, certainty, credibility, and so on. Further, they inevitably bring into the scientific realm their preexisting, nonscientific habits—habits often formed long before they became scientists, habits that serve them in other environments and may continue to serve them in this one, but which do not necessarily serve science. Through the practice of these Deweyan “arts,” they actively transform their scholarly environments, shaping them into comfortable niches that more readily afford their habitual ways of being. These niches, in turn, both facilitate and constrain what the scientists within them can see. Over time, with enough influence, these niches may even become the institutional atmosphere for other, newer scientists who enter and “grow up” within them—niches as little questioned as the air they breathe.

Unlike the angry man in Dewey’s (1922/2007) example, however, the threshold at which environment pushes back against habit is supposedly much lower for scientists. They are duty-bound to reject their habits of seeing whenever the evidence begins to suggest a lack of fit between theory and reality. Unfortunately, a lack of fit between theory and reality may not correspond to a lack of fit between scientist and research environment. Institutions, bureaucracies, competition, personal pride, and so forth also have their say, and the louder they speak, the more likely the human will cling to a habit of seeing long after the human-as-scientist should have called it into question. As such, dominant yet outdated habits of seeing tend to give way only when academic environments alter dramatically, usually through a change of the institutional guard. Even then, as John Kenneth Galbraith says, such changes usually become possible only when pressures upon the existing environment (exerted by other niches in which the current one is nested) have mounted to such a degree that the resulting revolution is simply “the kicking in of a rotten door” (Galbraith, 1977, p. 96). Until this happens, niches constructed to facilitate some habits of seeing will actively limit others, and habits of seeing that work in one field (or at one time) may create problems in another.

This article will begin by addressing two habits of seeing that currently permeate Western psychology’s understanding of human beings and how we empathize: the vertical worldview and dualism. Neither of these habits is usually overt or intentional. The vertical worldview, van Dijk and Withagen (2014) state, is implicit rather than explicit, while Costall (1995) jokes that psychologists may be divided into those who are aware they are dualists and those who are unaware. Nevertheless, both of these habits are troublesome for empathy, which presupposes context and connection. I propose that a better course may be found in theories that take a more processual approach to organisms (e.g., ecological psychology, 4E cognition), which encourage horizontal, mutualistic habits of seeing that aid rather than impede psychology’s understanding of how we empathize.

Two habits of psychology: The vertical worldview and dualism

The vertical worldview

The vertical worldview, as discussed by van Dijk and Withagen (2014), presumes that the world we see is not the world as it really is—that ultimate truths lie waiting for us amidst the lower order variables. Tables are not really tables, but atoms (van Dijk & Withagen, 2014); romantic love is not really love, but hormones; behaviour is not really behaviour, but the outward effect of some inner impelling; empathy is not really empathy, but (for instance) mirror neurons. We peer inside the brain not because we wish to understand the less visible components of experience, but because we mistake these components for the essence of experience:

The objects of psychology are treated roughly like one would physical objects. We have thoughts, much like we have brains. Considered as states or as processes, thoughts or other mental states are equally compounded and built up from simpler elements like sensations, values, and memories. (van Dijk & Withagen, 2014, p. 4)

A vertical worldview invites us to reify mental states and behaviours and to speak of emergent phenomena as belonging to the organism rather than emanating from the interaction of organism and environment. Empathy research can be particularly vulnerable to such errors, with grave consequences for real-world problems.

When we approach empathy with a habit of seeing vertically, empathy becomes not something we do (or do not do), but something we have (or do not have). It is the property of a particular kind of brain. From this, it follows that a society’s level of empathy is not a consequence of that society’s structure, but the sum of its empathetically brained individuals. Brains are plastic, so empathy remains mutable to some extent, but plasticity has limits, which means that “human nature” has limits, too. Gillian Barker (2015) refers to such reasoning as biofatalism, “a broad pessimism about the prospects for social change . . . based on a particular set of presumptions about the biological underpinnings of human behaviour” (p. 3). Mistaking “trait averages” for human nature, biofatalists believe human plasticity is too limited to do away with such things as warfare, oppressive gender roles, and so forth, yet they overlook the enormous variation these trait averages conceal. For instance, Gillian Barker (2015) says psychologists might look at consistently higher mean scores on boys’ versus girls’ mathematics tests and decide that boys are naturally better at mathematics, ignoring the diversity of scores within these two groups and failing to account for differences in the ways boys and girls are socialized. These assumptions, in turn, are used “to support prescriptive conclusions” about innate differences in mathematical aptitude (p. 8), and when these conclusions are reported to the public, the habit of seeing boys as “naturally” better mathematicians than girls is reinforced in the general population. Existing ways of teaching and socializing go on, and biofatalistic “natural truths” about gender appear validated.

Gillian Barker’s (2015) example has parallels in empathy research. Singer et al. (2006), for instance, found that male participants who played a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma against confederates who cheated were more likely than female participants to demonstrate both a diminished “pain-related empathic response” and an increased BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) signal in reward-related brain regions when watching the cheaters receive painful electrical shocks to their hands (p. 466). These findings, Singer et al. (2006) stated, could indicate that men are more vengeful and concerned with justice than women. They concluded that co-operative behaviour (playing fairly) “nourishes” the empathetic link between humans, while selfish behaviour (cheating) “compromises” this link, at least in men (Singer et al., 2006, p. 467). These conclusions, however, are not necessarily supported. While it is true that the male participants did experience satisfaction rather than distress in response to the cheaters’ pain, they were still coexperiencing that pain. As Baron-Cohen (2011) defines it, empathy is the “ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate [emphasis added] emotion” (p. 18). The word appropriate presupposes a context, not only for the empathetic target and their situation, but also for the empathizer. While the context of the male and female participants was not recorded in this study, other research has demonstrated that men in postindustrialized countries are socialized to value power and self-direction more than benevolence, while the reverse is true for women (Schwartz & Rubel, 2005). Within this context, then, the satisfaction Singer et al.’s (2006) male participants displayed while coexperiencing the pain of the cheating individuals was as “appropriate” to their culture as the nonvengeful response was for the female participants. Both experiences were endorsed by an environment that actively helped to organize the participants’ differing habits of seeing. The women’s cultural context afforded them behaviours consistent with altruistic compassion, while the men’s cultural context, as Singer et al. (2006) themselves suggested, afforded them behaviours consistent with altruistic punishment. The difference is one of character, not quantity.

This difference becomes critical when we assume that empathy or understanding is lacking in an individual or group and try to apply remedies intended to cultivate or increase it. For instance, Keith Barton and Alan McCully (2012) tell of a 3-year program in Northern Ireland that attempted to break down cultural barriers between Catholic and Protestant school children (Grades 6–8) by teaching the students Irish history from the perspective of both groups. The students were taught about the experiences Protestants had historically suffered and why the Catholics supported home rule legislation (Breithaupt, 2017). The students performed well academically; nevertheless, the researchers concluded that “identification with community historical perspectives actually became stronger” (Barton & McCully, 2012, p. 377). The students gained semantic information about the other side, but this information did nothing to induce a lack of fit between their existing habits of seeing and the environment that nurtured them. Commenting on the study, empathy researcher Fritz Breithaupt (2017) stated that “the pressure from the social milieu in which the students lived, with its widespread cultural divisions, was simply too strong to give the students any real choice” (p. 119). The students’ immediate context continued to inform their habits of seeing and deem their behaviours toward the other group appropriate.

The horizontal worldview

van Dijk and Withagen’s (2014) alternative to the vertical worldview is the horizontal worldview—a “flat attitude” in which psychologists “look more closely at the concrete situation in which a phenomenon occurs . . . rather than abstracting away from it by searching for its cause at a lower or higher level of description” (p. 5). In other words, context matters. Certainly tables are atoms (van Dijk & Withagen, 2014), but from the horizontal worldview, they are also tables. They are built by humans of a certain size with particular habits of sitting, eating, writing, working, and other actions for which tables are useful—humans of different cultures with unique tastes about how tall, how ornamented, and of what material tables should be. These things, too, are what a table is. Without denying the existence or importance of the so-called higher or lower levels of analysis (van Dijk & Withagen, 2014), the horizontal worldview removes the hierarchy of values that says these higher or lower order truths are necessarily truer than others, regardless of the question at hand. Further, it leaves room for emergent phenomena that do not “belong” to organisms alone, but emanate from their collaboration and interrelation with their environments.

When we approach empathy with a habit of seeing horizontally, empathy becomes not something we have (or do not have), but something we do (or do not do). Empathizing is based not only upon the kinds of organisms we are, but also upon the contingencies of the environment in which we live and through which we organize our empathetic habits. These habits, in turn, can reshape society in ways that more readily afford what we would call “empathetic” (i.e., compassionate, accommodating) behaviours. From this, it follows that a society’s level of empathy is not fixed, but variable. Society is a dynamic, living system, more than the sum of its individuals, capable of giving rise to emergent phenomena found in none of its components. Its structure and institutions are far more powerful forces to encourage or discourage behaviours than a single person’s own (almost certainly ineffectual) willpower. Unlike the vertical worldview, in which empathy training is sometimes an uphill struggle against biofatalistic “human nature,” the horizontal worldview distributes responsibility and blame more evenly. It acknowledges that the empathy trainee who fails to see long-term behavioural change may not be encountering the limits of biology or moral fortitude, but the resistance of an environment that endorses (at best) or evokes (at worst) their nonempathetic behaviours.

Studies by Michael Kraus and colleagues, for instance, demonstrate the impact of socioeconomic status upon empathizing. Kraus et al. (2010) found that American participants with lower socioeconomic status had greater levels of empathetic accuracy than those with higher socioeconomic status, while Kraus and Mendes (2014) found that this was particularly true when people with lower socioeconomic status were observing people with (outwardly) higher socioeconomic status. These studies suggest that when empathizing occurs within hierarchically structured groups, it tends to flow up the hierarchical ladder. Such a conclusion is consistent with Sergey Gavrilets’s (2012) report that egalitarian societies are more closely associated with benevolently altruistic behaviours than are despotic societies. Nevertheless, from a horizontal worldview, there is no reason to believe that people in less egalitarian systems cease to coexperience with others. Indeed, their survival may depend upon their ability to attune themselves to the people “up the ladder” who have the most power to do them good or harm, much as children in dysfunctional or abusive households must continuously feel their way into the moods of unpredictable parents.

For empathy researchers with a “flat attitude” (van Dijk & Withagen, 2014, p. 5), then, empathy training has value, but only when we give its practitioners a chance to succeed by looking horizontally to their contexts, addressing not only individuals, but the many environments in which these individuals are nested, including the institutions that are a formative part of the concrete situations in which they daily behave.

Dualism

The second habit of seeing that permeates psychology’s understanding of human beings and how we are in the world is dualism. Most psychologists today readily deny Cartesian dualism—Descartes’ assertion that a soul or spirit-like mind exists separately from the body, with no adequate explanation as to how they might influence one another. Nevertheless, many of these same psychologists also treat organisms as if they existed separately from their environments, with no adequate explanation as to how they might influence one another. Louise Barrett (2011) explains:

Nowadays, “substance dualism” . . . has fallen by the wayside in favour of materialism (basically, the position that the mind is the brain, and therefore of essentially the same physical stuff as the body), but we still retain the idea that we possess “minds” with which we look out at a world that is completely external to us and that we can access only indirectly via our representations of it. This is itself a form of dualism because it makes a clear demarcation between an organism and the world in which it lives, and . . . this form of dualism is just as misleading as substance dualism. (p. 149)

An external world accessible only through representations is the unwitting legacy of the cognitivist model of perception, a habit of seeing that dominated psychology research in the latter half of the 20th century. Cognitivism began as a multidisciplinary movement of psychologists, philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, and others (Watrin & Darwich, 2012). Its intent, Jerome Bruner (1990) explains, was to restore meaning to the centre of psychological research. Unfortunately, cognitivists’ emphasis shifted from the “construction of meaning to the processing of information,” a switch Bruner (1990) attributes to the adoption of the computer as the central metaphor for cognition (p. 4). In this metaphor, the human organism became an information-processing machine: sensory inputs and behavioural outputs were how it interfaced with the environment, but these were only the “entrance and exit doors of what really mattered: the inner processing” (Heras-Escribano, 2019, p. 2). Cognition, the between, held the answer to the question of who we really are; thus, for many psychologists since the cognitivist era, the answer to this question has been simple: you are your brain.

Such metaphors are not mere tricks or ornaments of speech (Nicholson, 2018). They are habits of seeing and engaging with our environments that both facilitate and limit what we are able to perceive. Indeed, for our purposes, the machine metaphor had two important consequences for psychologists today. First, rather than treating “mind” as a colloquial, catch-all term for everything contextualizing behaviour (bodily processes and environmental ones), many psychologists now equate the concept of “mind” with the structure of “brain.” All things that “mind” does, they assume, “brain” has first generated (Barrett, 2011). As a result, much that emerges from the organism’s processual relations with the environment is presumed to be the work of this inner processing. To explain emergent behaviours, then, constructs have to be invented, and many of these, including empathy, are now treated as properties of the organism rather than characterizations of the organism’s way of being in its environment. In short, the horizontal, processual nature of the organism has been lost, and a vertical, essentialist habit of seeing has taken its place.

Second, by rejecting the view of the organism as a set of processes arising from the interrelation of body and environment, the machine metaphor demarcates inside from outside, internal from external. The boundaries of the organism become the boundaries of its physical form, while the boundaries of the so-called “mind” shrink to the circumference of the skull. The organism becomes not a mutualistic collection of body–environment relations, interacting directly, but a dualistic arrangement in which the inside brain can communicate with the outside world only indirectly through the medium of the senses. The world is binary—not only inside and outside, but thinking and behaving, theory and practice, self and other.

Such a model of cognition is particularly troublesome for empathy because it creates the problem of other minds. If organisms are detached from their environments, then they are detached not only from objects in nature, but also from other organisms. How can I, isolated from my environment, reach across to you, similarly isolated? Psychology’s answer to its own problem is theory of mind, the ability to mentally represent other people’s ability to mentally represent (Costall & Leudar, 2007). Theory of mind, Alva Noë (2009) explains, presents a world in which people are “real for us only as a kind of theoretical device to help us manage our dealings with others” (p. 30). We account for the behaviour of their bodies much as astronomers account for anomalies in the orbital behaviour of planets. Astronomers can deduce from a planet’s behaviour that a yet-undiscovered planet exists nearby, interfering with the first planet’s trajectory (Noë, 2009). In theory of mind, similarly, we deduce from other people’s behaviour the undiscovered states of their unseen minds. In this case, however, the undiscovered planets are undiscoverable. As Costall and Leudar (2007) point out, the very gulf that theory of mind purports to bridge also splits mind from behaviour: If behaviour is only arbitrarily related to mental states, how can it provide much useful evidence for them?

Organism–environment mutuality

The alternative to the dualist habit of seeing complements the horizontal worldview discussed earlier—organism–environment “mutuality” (J. J. Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 4). It is by no means a novel position. Throughout the history of psychology, researchers such as William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, James J. Gibson, and others have used and argued for the mutualistic approach (for a brief overview, see Still & Good, 1992). From a mutualistic perspective, organisms are not in their environments as coins are in a box, but as plants are in soil (Dewey, 1922/2007). You can remove coins from a box and they will still be coins, but if you remove a plant from soil, the plant will die; moreover, without the plant, the soil will erode, losing access to the sugars the plants produce that enrich it and provide food for soil microbes. Organisms and environments have a similar interdependent relationship, as Dewey (1922/2007) describes:

Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs; digesting is an affair of food as truly as of tissues of [the] stomach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs; speech demands physical air and human companionship and audience as well as vocal organs. (p. 14)

In short, environments provide context for behaviour, but not as mere containers. Environments are cocreators of behaviour, and, indeed, of organisms themselves.

Daniel J. Nicholson (2018) suggests that a more appropriate metaphor for organisms than machines or computers is Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s stream of life conception, which proposes that organisms are less like entities and more like happenings. Bertalanffy compares organisms to rivers whose currents are in a continuous state of change. In the same way, he says, “living forms . . . are the expression of a perpetual stream of matter and energy which passes the organism and at the same time constitutes it” (as cited in Nicholson, 2018, p. 148). A river is an event, defined not only by its water molecules, but also by the way those molecules respond to the contingencies of an environment that compels them to move and to flow in a particular way. Less visibly, the river is also the riverbank, which constrains it on either side, determining its habitual form, channelling its currents and being eroded by them. The movements of the waves are how the river “behaves,” rough or calm, and this behaviour, too, occurs in concert with the contingencies of the environment. The river is not only in its environment, but of its environment.

In the same way, the form of an organism’s body and the form of its behaviour and habits are a confluence—a flowing together of bodily and environmental processes that cannot be separated as long as the organism remains alive. Unlike machines, organisms must “constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings in order to maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium [i.e., death]” (Nicholson, 2018, p. 144). If we do not maintain this continuous exchange throughout the course of our lives, we will cease to have a life. Even our physical bodies, then, are not closed, static systems like machines, but open, dynamic ones. They are collections of environmentally embedded processes, a flow of matter and energy in continuous exchange with the world around us. This exchange is not like that of a machine, which takes in fuel from its operators and gives off energy without being materially changed. What we consume as breath or food or drink transforms us both at the level of cells and at the level of behaviour. A mutualistic approach to organisms, then, encompasses not only the material substance of brains and bodies, but also processes, behaviours, and habits, each of which is embedded in the environment at every level, and all of which, taken together, comprise an organism’s way of being in the world. This way of being is what an organism is.

The past several decades have seen the rise or reinvigoration of processual theories of cognition that encourage such horizontal, mutualistic habits of seeing, including 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended; Gallagher, 2017) and ecological psychology (R. G. Barker, 1968; J. J. Gibson, 1979/1986; Heft, 2001). These theories reject the brain-as-computer metaphor in favour of a brain-in-context understanding:

Cognition and emotion are not realized in the brain but with a brain; that is, to think and to feel, we need more than a brain. Brain regions work in concert, but they are never alone; rather, they are always parts of broader systems extending beyond skin and skull. (Malafouris, 2020, p. 4)

Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson’s (1979/1986) explanation of vision illustrates. Ecological vision, he says, arises not just from an eye connected to a brain, but from eyes in a head on a body on the ground—a set-up in which “the brain [is] only the central organ of a complete visual system” (as summarized by Mace, 2015, p. xiii). In such a perceptual system, other sensory modalities participate. So do eyeglasses and binoculars if we happen to use them. So does locomotion. For instance, if I look at a table and see an object on it, but cannot quite make it out, I move closer (J. J. Gibson, 1979/1986). I may even manipulate it with my hands, picking it up and turning it over to see it from other angles. At the ecological level, my body and its position, the object and its position, and the relationships that arise between us form a “constellation of relations” (Heft, 2001, p. 28), apart from which behaviour cannot be understood. From these interconnections, “relational properties” (Mace, 2015, p. xxii) emerge that do not properly belong either to organism or environment alone. The air, for instance, affords breath-ability for dogs, but not fish. Trees afford climb-ability for chimpanzees, but not bison. Water affords swim-ability for dolphins, but walk-ability for water strider insects. Books afford read-ability for literate humans, but eat-ability for termites. Breath-ability, climb-ability, and so on are examples of what J. J. Gibson (1979/1986) calls affordances, potentials for action that emerge from the interrelation of a particular environment and a particular organism’s way of being. Like Deweyan habits, they arise from the fit or lack of fit between organisms and their environments (E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000).

For psychologists with such horizontal, mutualistic habits of seeing, constructs like theory of mind are unnecessary. Brain, body, and behaviour alike are part of a wider stream of open, dynamic, environmentally embedded processes. This includes the brains, bodies, and behaviours of other human beings. They are embedded in the environment as we are, and these relations can be directly perceived as they intertwine with our own. This view accords with the direct perception theory of empathy, which states that “we already have immediate experiential access to the minds of others” (Kiverstein, 2015, p. 533). Other people are not bundles of inferences or theoretical constructs for our interpretation, but directly perceivable “swarm[s] of participations” (Bruner, 1990, p. 122), bundles of organism–environment relations like ourselves.

The practical problem of nonempathetic behaviour

This returns us to the practical problem with which this article began: If our coexperience of one another is so direct and unmediated, why do we not understand each another perfectly? Why do humans still have misunderstandings and miscommunications? From a vertical, dualistic worldview, the answer lies in our “psychological encapsulation,” as Harry Heft (2001) expressed it, recalling Tennessee Williams’s (1940/2000) Battle of Angels: “We’re all of us locked up tight inside our own bodies. Sentenced—you might say—to solitary confinement inside our own skins” (p. 224). From a horizontal, mutualistic worldview, however, the answer lies in our aforementioned niches—the sets of affordances available to each person’s way of being within an environment that accommodates or resists their Deweyan habits. Just as we experience the same noise completely differently when we hear it while reading safely at home or while walking outside alone after dark (Dewey, 1896), so coexperiencing with another includes a context that characterizes the experience—not only their context, but also our own. To the extent that the niche of one organism actively excludes affordances of another, effective coexperiencing may be limited. This is not to say that coexperiencing ceases to occur; however, our knowing of the other may be incomplete.

Anthony Abraham Jack (2019) offers an excellent example of this while recounting his days as a low-income, first-generation student at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Despite Amherst’s status as a Little Ivy institution, Jack’s enrollment did not automatically grant him equal access to what that institution afforded its more privileged students, nor could these students’ more privileged environments have prepared them to detect the set of affordances Amherst offered Jack. Jack describes scrambling to find food during holidays when meal services shut down, confusion over concepts like office hours, emotional disruption when calls from home about traumatic events kept him rooted in his old life, and the need to work multiple jobs where more advantaged students needed none. “I would get messages [from home]” he says, “announcing that someone needed something: $75 for diabetes medicine or $100 to turn the lights back on” (Jack, 2019, para. 16). His story effectively illustrates Kat Holmes’s (2018) criticism of the assumption that diversity problems in workplaces can be solved simply by hiring more women and minorities, increasing ingress-ability without affecting accessibility:

If we increase diversity of a team but don’t also evolve the cultural elements that surround that team, it can place an extra burden on people to navigate the “metagame” of exclusion in their work environment while also delivering successful solutions for the business. (p. 49)

This is not, however, a return to biofatalistic ideas of human nature. Niches can be reshaped, and organisms’ ways of being within them can be altered. In this respect, cultures (the Deweyan habits of entire groups) operate on the same principles as people. Just as Deweyan habits change with consistent pushback from the environment, so cultures can change when niche-wide (occasionally cataclysmic) pressures push against them.

Difficulties may arise, however, when well-meaning psychologists, therapists, counsellors, and others attempt to address these pressures with vertical, dualistic habits, exacerbating a niche-wide problem by redirecting its pressures to individual members. For instance, the past several years have seen rising levels of employee burnout in corporations and other institutions (Purser, 2019). Such a work environment, filled with exhausted people, exerts pressure upon an organization’s daily functioning, compelling changes in its usual way of being. Unfortunately, as Ronald Purser (2019) explains, many companies are attempting a more vertical, dualistic solution to the problem, introducing mindfulness training to their employees and effectively outsourcing organizational stresses to them. Such an approach, even when well-meaning, may suggest that burned-out workers’ inability to bear the tensions of failing systems and toxic environments is a result of their own failures of self-care. The assumption, Purser (2019) argues, is that “society . . . needs therapy, not radical change” (p. 34). The environment that coconstitutes employees’ burned-out state escapes responsibility, and the burden of fixing the organization’s practical problems falls upon the individuals who may be least capable of addressing them.

As Dewey described, to reshape habits cannot be accomplished by targeting individuals alone. The relationship between the organism and the environment must be changed so that fit with desirable behaviours and lack of fit with undesirable behaviours is encouraged. Until a lack of fit is induced, existing organism–environment relations will go on affording what they have always afforded. In other words, as long as a so-called nonempathetic person’s perceptions continue to occur within the context of their existing niche, then, even if we found a way to make their coexperience of another person’s pain more salient, we would only alter that coexperience in intensity, not in kind. Much like the Irish schoolchildren in Barton and McCully’s (2012) study, we would simply turn up the volume on the response they are already having.

Conclusion

Most people agree that behaviour has a moral dimension. Theory often escapes this classification. When we understand theory as behaviour, however—as the collective habits of seeing and practicing of an entire group of researchers—the moral and ethical complexity of psychological research becomes more apparent. As Brinkmann (2004) points out: “How can Psychological theories be objective if they change the world they are concerned with?” (p. 6). To deal effectively with the world as it is and to be capable of addressing its practical problems, empathy researchers must adopt provisional theories and flexible models that take the processual character of human beings and the complexity of their environments into account, resisting those that essentialize organisms or interiorize their behaviour. Rather than setting prescriptive limits to human potential, such theories and such models would be responsive to organisms’ fluid, dynamic relationships to their environments and the continuously shifting bounds of their ecological niches.