Empathy over Pleasure: Higher Education as an Experience Machine
em·pa·thy /ˈempəTHē/ noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
——— Introduction ———
If the Covid-19 Pandemic has taught me one broad lesson about America, it’s this: empathy must become a core value in our society. Not just collectively, but also individually. Collectively, we need to raise leaders and institutions who hold empathy as a guiding principle. Individually, we need to act with empathy, both in crisis and during more normal times, to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of our society as a whole. The coronavirus has shown us what happens when we do not. Over 350,000 Americans are dead from a preventable disease as of this writing. This is not even to mention the other casualties attributable to a lack of empathy, such as the many needless BIPOC and LGBTQIA deaths in the United States each year due to violence and neglect.
The required cultural shift towards empathy will not come quickly or easily, but must come all the same. I propose a place for it to begin: in higher education, in the institutions dedicated to opening the minds of future generations. But even those institutions, colleges and universities, require a conscious shift in perspective. If the American failures of the Covid-19 pandemic are to be avoided in the future, empathy must become fundamental. Re-imagining how colleges and universities foster empathy in their students is essential to that goal. To help in envisioning this new paradigm, consider the philosophical concept of the experience machine.
——— The Experience Machine ———
Originally devised by philosopher Robert Nozick in the 1970s, the experience machine is a thought experiment designed to critique certain Utilitarian positions, including hedonism: that right actions should be judged by how much happiness or pleasure they produce. The experience machine was a hypothetical technology that humans could link to their brains and thereby experience anything they desired as if they were actually doing it; from the adrenaline rush of running in the Olympics, to the lightheadedness of falling in love. Nozick argued that even though we have the hypothetical choice to plug into the experience machine and gain immediate happiness and pleasure for as long as we want, there are very good reasons for why we usually wouldn’t choose to do so. Thus, right actions must be judged by some other moral imperative.
Douglas Groothuis’s recent article in the philosophy journal Think revises the typical experience machine thought experiment — sometimes referred to as the pleasure machine — to imagine its possibility as an empathy machine.[1] Groothuis’s empathy machine is the same as the pleasure machine in design but with a difference in emphasis in the experiences produced. According to Groothuis, the experience of an empathy machine would not be particularly pleasant, often requiring us to understand the pain and suffering of others. The pain of the empathy machine is not physical, and one can leave at will. However, Groothuis argues, the challenging experience of the machine is worth it, as developing empathy is a necessary moral epiphany for future altruistic action.
You certainly don’t need to be a hedonist to prefer the promise of the pleasure machine over the empathy machine. I think most of us would most of the time. However, if we consider the traditional four-year undergraduate college institution as an experience machine itself we may want to be more thoughtful in how such a machine is calibrated.
——— The College Experience ———
The experience machine offers a facsimile of reality as a means to experience what reality might otherwise make difficult for us to experience. It is something from which we can potentially gain both pleasure and empathetic insight. The experience of being an undergraduate for four years can be framed in a strikingly similar way. Colleges offer experiences that prepare students for the reality of adulthood — e.g. social independence, personal responsibility, job skills — in a semi-controlled setting with lower stakes than in the “real world.”
The adolescent brains soaking up college experiences are extremely malleable and impressionable, making higher education fertile ground in which to root a cultural movement toward empathy. For better or worse, however, most college-aged students are burgeoning hedonists. With neurological pathways built for pleasure-seeking behavior, many young people enter college to party, play, graduate, and get a job. This does not mean they do not also want to learn, but learning often involves the discomforts of uncertainty, stress, hard work, and lack of excitement, qualities that young brains often prefer to avoid. Cognitive research has shown that pleasure-seeking as the basis of behavior and reasoning does not tend to subside until around the age of 24, with neural development continuing on even after that.[2]
This reality has deeply impacted colleges and universities across the nation. Amid decreasing state support and increased competition, higher education institutions have decided to capture applicants and tuition dollars by catering to the hedonistic tendencies of their customers. Shiny new athletic centers, state of the art entertainment hubs, and increasingly Instagram-able university-sponsored events cry out for student attention. Particularly, the installation of lazy rivers at schools like Louisiana State University and the University of Iowa have been highlighted as overt ploys to attract students.[3] Colleges have gladly adopted the role of a pleasure machine.
To be clear, none of the aforementioned amenities are inherently bad things. In fact, they can bring real value to the college experience for many students, which is important for their happiness and development.[4] But they also soak up money which might otherwise be destined for educational purposes, and signal that pleasure, not empathy, central to the higher education experience machine. By the time they graduate, some students undoubtedly do embody an empathetic perspective, but it is more often than not a credit to dedicated educators, and not the purposeful outcome of the college experience as a whole.
——— Re-calibrating for Empathy ———
Re-wiring the college experience from a pleasure machine into an empathy machine requires interruptive action in the culture of higher education. Given that the institutional inertia of colleges and universities has been historically difficult to divert, this is no easy task. Nevertheless, here are three suggestions to kickstart the process.
First, colleges should encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration; especially between STEM, business, and humanities faculty. My background is in the history of science, technology, and medicine where engagement between the humanities and STEM is common and fruitful. While many academics in the humanities are used to communicating complex and compelling stories about people that encourage students to consider perspectives other than their own, this is less frequently the case in fields where learning specific techniques, formulae, or procedures is paramount. More frequent inclusion of humanities insights in non-humanities courses would not only inject information about real human experiences — the building blocks of empathy — in otherwise technical disciplines, but could also give the humanities themselves a renewed mandate for existing within twenty-first century universities. Increased collaboration between disciplines also inherently prioritizes listening, another crucial facet of empathy, rather than competition.
Second, at the end of each semester colleges and universities should require each student to write a reflection on how the courses they took changed their perspective on other people and the world around them. Empathy is not just about acknowledging suffering in extreme circumstances, like a pandemic, rather it is a worldview that needs to be practiced and built over time. These reflection papers need not be formally graded, but should be required as a final portfolio of sorts built slowly over a student’s career and completed upon graduation. In my experience as a student and educator, assignments dictate which material students work hardest to learn. By simply emphasizing the need to build an empathetic perspective each semester with a simple reflection paper, students will begin to internalize the importance of empathy and will become more thoughtful about their life in relation to others.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, colleges and universities should insert language of empathy into their mission statements and administrative discussions at the highest level. Education will always be a good in and of itself, but without a mission to specifically generate a more empathetic populace, higher education institutions are only doing half of their job. For example, though both of the mission statements of my alma maters — The University of Minnesota (a large public land-grant university) and Macalester College (a small liberal arts college) — feature language emphasizing civic responsibility, good citizenship, and the personal transformations offered by education, neither include the word empathy, nor feature building empathy as a goal.[5]
An emphasis on impressive buzz words, like progress, discovery, and innovation, have fueled corporate donations to higher education and contributed to the monumental efforts in developing a Covid-19 vaccine. However, placing a higher priority on empathy from the the very beginning could have mitigated the need for such drastic efforts. The culture change that builds a more empathetic society can begin with how we re-imagine the experience machine of higher education. After that, building a better world will be a much less academic pursuit.
[1] Douglas Groothuis, “The Empathy Machine: A Thought Experiment,” Think (55), vol. 19: Summer 2020, 85-86. (85-94).
[2] Gregory S. Blimling, “New Dimensions of Psychosocial Development in Traditionally Aged College Students,” About Campus (5), vol. 18: November-December 2013, 13. (10-16). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/abc.21132
[3] “As States Cut Funding for Higher Education, Universities Use Lavish Perks to Compete for Students,” CBSNews.com, October 14, 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-states-cut-funding-for-higher-education-universities-use-lavish-perks-to-compete-for-students/. Jack Stripling, “The Lure of the Lazy River,” Chronicle.com, October 15, 2017. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-lure-of-the-lazy-river/.
[4] Loren Rullman, “Lazy Rivers and Learning,” InsideHigherEd.com, January 17, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/17/improving-value-campus-facilities-opinion
[5] The complete mission statements can be read here: https://regents.umn.edu/sites/regents.umn.edu/files/2019-09/policy_mission_statement.pdf. https://www.macalester.edu/about/mission/.
