The retrospective empathy gap
Listen to the podcast and then respond to the questions in an essay format; the essay should have a thesis statement and should address all the questions (in whatever order makes the most sense for your essay—be sure to create an outline to help you organize your ideas). The essay should be 3-5 pages (750-1000 words) in length and will be graded according to the rubric for written work stated below.
In The Heat Of The Moment: How Intense Emotions Transform Us (10%)
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783495595/in-the-heat-of-the-moment-how-intense-emotions-transform-us
(56 minutes; warning: this episode contains stories about sex, sex work and sexual harassment.
1) Who is Loewenstein? What is his area of study?
2) What is the ‘hot-cold empathy gap’?
3) What is the prospective empathy gap? What is the retrospective empathy gap?
4) Tell a story (featuring yourself or someone you know personally) that would fit into this podcast regarding empathy gaps; how does this podcast and Chapter 7 in S & T help you better understand your story?
5) Who is Woodzicka? What is her area of study? Describe her research. What did she ask and what did she find?
6) What does Loewenstein say about our failure to understand others?
7) Even though we may never be able to avoid the hot-cold empathy gap, how can we compensate for it?
8) How can public policies help people to make better decisions?
9) What role does compassion play in our understanding of ourselves and others?
10) How does the information in this podcast relate to what we’ve read and discussed so far in Solomon and Theiss? Be specific.
11) What connections can you make between this information about the power of emotion and interactions in healthcare? Why is this important? How will this new understanding impact your interactions with others?
Sample Solution
Physical Senses
The sensation of sound occurs when the vibrations from sounds enter our ear and cause little hair like structures, called hair cells, within our inner ear to move back and forth. The hair cells transform this movement into an electrical signal that the brain can use. How well a person can hear largely depend on how intact these hair cells are. Once lost, they don’t grow back, and this is no different for blind people. So blind people can’t physically hear well than others. Yet blind people often outperform sighted people in hearing tasks such as locating the source of sounds. The reason for this emerges when we look beyond the sensory organs, at what is happening with the brain, and how the sensory information is processed by it. In blind people, the visual cortex gets a bit “bored” without visual inputs and starts to “rewire” itself, becoming more responsive to information from the other remaining senses.
