The Human Mind and the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

Prior research has shown that people mispredict their own behavior and preferences across affective states. When people are in an affectively “cold” state, they fail to fully appreciate how “hot” states will affect their own preferences and behavior. When in hot states, they underestimate the influence of those states and, as a result, overestimate the stability of their current preferences. The same biases apply interpersonally; for example, people who are not affectively aroused underappreciate the impact of hot states on other people’s behavior. After reviewing research documenting such intrapersonal and interpersonal hot– cold empathy gaps, this article examines their consequences for medical, and specifically cancer-related, decision making, showing, for example, that hot– cold empathy gaps can lead healthy persons to expose themselves excessively to health risks and can cause health care providers to undertreat patients for pain. -- George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon University, Health Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 4(Suppl.), S49 –S56, 2005 [1]

The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

An NPR broadcast of Hidden Brain, discussed research on strong physiological (hunger, sexual arousal, pain) and emotional states (fear, anger, disgust) that can move people's minds from cold states to hot states. In hot states, physiology and/or emotions control, and at the same time memory of cold state knowledge and logic or reasoning are unavailable to shape behavior. In hot states, things just happen, and sometimes (usually?) they are bad or dumb things.

The comments below are mostly based on the broadcast from the start to about 20:40 and ~50:00 to 53:00. Maybe most people here will already understand all of this. Nonetheless, it should help to keep this important aspect of the human mind in easily accessed memory.


People in a cold state tend to misjudge what their behavior would be when they are in a hot state. Men's behavior when sexually aroused changes compared to when not aroused. When arousal passes people appear to have forgotten and downplay the intensity of the hot state. Studies show that after experiencing a hot state and returning to a cold state, people are generally worse at predicting what their behavior would be if they returned to the hot state.

The data indicates that the hot-cold empathy gap works two ways across time, prospective and retrospective. The prospective gap leads people to misjudge their future behavior if they re-experience a hot state they have experienced before, such as sexual arousal. The hypothesis here is that the memory that people have of their own hot state experience is softened or distorted, leading them to misjudge themselves in the past and their future hot state behavior.

The retrospective empathy gap is also hypothesized to involve the same memory tricks, which can happen literally within a minute or two of a hot state situation such as feeling pain. People who experienced pain and then had the pain source withdrawn, immediately misjudge and overestimate their ability to handle the same pain again. The same phenomena applies to hunger, addiction and depression. The cold state mind and what it knows is unable to access the hot state mind, making the hot state version of a person incomprehensible. The hot state mind cannot access the cold state logic. One woman, Irene, in a cold state said about this about her own hot state sexual arousal experiences: "I don't know that girl."

That was cold Irene talking about hot Irene.

This phenomenon also applies to other people. The empathy gap can literally blind us to how other people feel and why they do some of the things they do.

The Empathy Gap and Politics

Maybe this restates the obvious, but it still is worth saying. When politicians, special interests, ideologues and others use dark free speech (lies, deceit, emotional manipulation) (collectively 'bad people') to create false realities, leverage flawed reasoning and win support, they are generally trying to push listeners into a hot state. Fear is probably the most powerful emotion that bad people have in their dark free speech arsenal. Anger, bigotry, disgust, distrust and intolerance are other powerful emotions that bad people play on to try foment hot states and irrationality.

People in hot states are more susceptible to lies, deceit and flawed reasoning, including logic fallacies. That is why it is important to at least try to maintain emotional control when engaging in politics. And when control is lost, it is usually best to walk away until control is regained. The cooling off period can be very useful to help maintain rationality, even if it requires backing away overnight.


Footnote:
1. Lowenstein also writes:

"Affect has the capacity to transform us, as human beings, profoundly; in different affective states, it is almost as if we are different people. Affect influences virtually every aspect of human functioning: perception, attention, inference, learning, memory, goal choice, physiology, reflexes, self-concept, and so on. Indeed, it has been argued that the very function of affect is to orchestrate a comprehensive response to critical situations that were faced repeatedly in the evolutionary past (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000)."