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Yesterday it was reported that a 29-year-old pilot taking selfies likely contributed to the cause of a small plane crash that killed him and his 31- year-old passenger. A GoPro camera mounted on the windshield showed passengers and pilot snapping selfies in a series of flights leading up to the crash.
Millenials or the “Me Generation”, those roughly 18-34 years of age, have been criticized for being everything from selfish, narcissistic, entitled, lazy, over-confident, and even a bit delusional. Anecdotes like this plane crash remind us all of the growing toll of a preoccupation with self and cell phone. And social scientific studies appear to back some of the stereotypes. But before we blame 80 million Americans for their lack of empathy, we should consider that there is something more fundamental in play here. And it helps to explain this phenomenon en masse—while pointing to a surprisingly quick fix.
Our ability to empathize happens automatically with limited control. We don’t choose to feel pain or sorrow, for example, when we observe someone suffer a misfortune. The sharing of these feelings happens automatically at deeper level than rational thought. That’s because our social brains were not designed to work in isolation but rather in a back and forth looping process with the minds of other individuals, unconsciously inclining us to transcend the boundaries of our own being. The conscious mind thinks “I.” The unconscious feels “we.”
And social media and selfies are shadowy substitutes for real life experiences. In other words, when we stop staring at our smartphones and begin gazing into the eyes of another we become automatically conditioned to understand and appreciate their point of view. We augment our intellectual understanding of another’s perspective through the direct simulation of their feelings in our body.
The power and pervasiveness of this process of brain looping and body mirroring is illustrated by a remarkable example. Couples who live happily together in a continual state of emotional alignment come to resemble each other, resulting from the parallel sculpting of facial muscles over years of conditioning, reinforced by their shared emotions and similar expressions. They actually mold the same ridges and form similar wrinkles, furrows, and folds as they smile or frown in empathetic accordance. Studies have revealed that the happier couples are, the greater their facial similarity.
So being born digital is double-edged. Today’s Millenials have unprecedented access to education and information online. But true empathy isn’t an intellectual process. Millenials are among the first generations to displace headlong the physical realms with the virtual through social media. But our brains were never designed to live life online.
After the inception of the genus Homo around 2.4 million years ago, our ancestors lived for approximately 84,000 generations as hunter-gatherers. By comparison, the digital age has been with us for a mere two generations. We have gone from aim-and-throw hunters and gatherers to point-and-click shoppers and socializers. Our species lived for well over 99 percent of our evolution in hunter-gatherer societies.
We sat around campfires sharing stories not selfies among close-knit tribe members many of which were kin. As evolutionary psychology pioneer John Tooby explains, “In hunter-gatherer societies... there is a real feeling of closeness, but in market societies though the absolute welfare goes way up... it creates a deep insecurity; do these people really care about me or not?"
Our minds were designed to solve the problems hunter-gatherers faced, not the problems of today. Life for these early humans was like being on a camping trip, although a lot more arduous, one that lasted a lifetime without the ability to buy much-needed supplies at REI.
So it should come as no surprise to find that a recent study by UCLA scientists found that going on a camping trip without access to smartphones or computer screens significantly improved the social skills of preteens. Sixth-graders who spent only five days offline at camp sans selfies were significantly better at reading the emotions of others compared to sixth graders from the same school that remained attached to their digital devices. Both groups were evaluated before and after the study on their ability to recognize the emotions of people in photos and videos. As lead author Yalda Uhls puts it: “You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication. If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.”
Comedian Louis C.K. speaking with Conan O’Brien brilliantly explained the distinction between when kids text someone as opposed to talking in person. “They look at a kid and say, you’re fat. And they see the kids face scrunch up and they go that doesn’t feel good to me…but when they write, ‘ur fat’, they just go mmm, that was fun.” Without the direct feedback loop we become numb to the feelings of others—and servants to the hit of dopamine we get when putting others down just to make ourselves feel a little bit better."
So stop blaming millenials and start roasting marshmallows. Turn off the smartphones while you’re at it. And share feelings for a change instead of selfies.
If you would like to learn more, check out my book:
Unconscious Branding
