YuYeong Park

Dr. Andrzej Baranski

Fairness Colloquium
September 4, 2019
Reflection 2
The main subject of this week’s reading was empathy, and this is how I define it. Although
Can research on the social brain and economics inform each other? suggests that it is hard to analyze
the brain responses because of its complex mechanisms, I believe the MRI model of The neural basis
of empathy does a great job in proving that empathy is a neuroscientific response caused by visual
stimulations. Here is my own experience that can support the statement. I personally love watching TV
drama because it arouses in me different feelings in a small amount of time. For example, I feel an
extreme embarrassment as a female character trips down over a stone in front of her crush. Only by
looking at it, it reminds me of how shameful I felt in my similar experiences. It establishes an emotional
connection between the character, who I have not seen before in my life, and observer, which I define
is an act of “empathy.” However, we cannot rashly judge that empathy can only be reached by flashing
back to our past experience. My younger sister is a direct example, opposing what Bernhardt, Boris C.,
and Tania Singer claim that empathy is developed through social stimulations. It was when my younger
sister was three years old. Watching my friend attacking me, she cried in sorrow as if she feels the pain.
Noting that she had not gone through or involved in similar affairs before, it can be reasonably inferred
that empathy is not a skill that humans acquire in their lives but natural instincts.
Shifting my attention back to the topic “fairness,” I came up with a question: is empathy directly
related to how people perceive fairness? I could not come up with a clear answer yet I realized that
there are more factors than empathy that could change people’s perception toward fairness. Recalling
my experience in high school, the only excuse the students could make to be absent in class was an
illness. Teachers allowed us to go see the nurse even during class time when we feel uncomfortable. I
would say such considerations were based on empathy; teachers understand how sickness makes one
miserable. If it comes to grading, however, teachers become strict and objective because they always
need to be “fair” to all students. No teacher in my life had different standards, or gave a lenient grade,
to students who were sick. This suggests that empathy might be an independent factor of human
decisions. At this point, however, another question came up in my mind : what if they were more
emotionally connected? Let us assume one of the students was the teacher’s family. Can the teacher
still be “fair” in grading the assignments, at the same time, acknowledging that it is his brother who is
sick? In this case, the standard perception of fairness can be distorted. This points out that there might
be a relationship between empathy and fairness if ‘emotional attachment’ is considered as the third
variable that defines it.