Empathy: The Contribution of Neuroscience to Social Analysis 3031388593, 9783031388590

Table of contents :
Foreword
Contents
1: Introduction
Bibliography
2: Empathy: A Theoretical Starting Point
1 The Concept of Sympathy as Origin
2 Verstehen in Weber’s Idea
3 Schütz’s Critique of Weber’s Conceptualization: The Einfhulung
4 Lived Experience as an Element of Empathy: Simmel and the Erleben
5 Empathy from the Late Twentieth Century to the Present, Rifkin and de Waal
6 Empathy from de Waal’s Point of View
7 Toward an Applied Sociology, Empathy at the Center of Neurosociological Reflections
Bibliography
3: Trans-disciplinary Approach: Methodological Preface for an Applied Sociology
1 The Difference Between Various Approaches: Transdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary
2 Transdisciplinarity Between Sociology and Social Neuroscience
3 The Trans-disciplinary Approach as a Tool of Inquiry Between Neuroscience and Sociology
4 Hardware and Software: Attempts at Laboratory Sociology
5 Problems and Questions About the Use of These Tools
6 The Trans-disciplinary Error in Empathic Conception
7 Transdisciplinarity, from Risk to Opportunity
Bibliography
4: Possible Integrations Between Sociology, Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience
1 How Social Neuroscience Can Contribute to Social Analysis
2 Transdisciplinarity Between Economics and Sociology
3 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Psychology and Sociology
4 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Neuroscience, Cultural Sociology and Sociology
5 Neurosociology as a Response to Transdisciplinary Discourses
6 Neurosociology in the Analysis of Empathy
Bibliography
5: Possible Applications of Empirical Research: The Subdivision of Empathy
1 Possible Methodological Approach of Applied Research
2 Setting Up the Research Environment
3 Research Methodology
4 The Theory of Embodiment
5 Some Practical Examples, from Empathy as Care to Virtual Empathy
Bibliography
6: Conclusions
1 Empathy and Emotion Analysis from Transdisciplinary Networks: The Example of IRNSN
Bibliography
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Empathy

The Contribution of Neuroscience to Social Analysis Vincenzo Auriemma

Empathy “What is empathy? This book can help you rethinking this popular and taken from granted idea today. It is an inquiry into the history of the concept, using a strong trans-disciplinary approach at the crossroads of neurosciences, psychology and sociology. Useful to scholars but also to people outside the academia, since the author provides insights of possible application of the empirical research.” —Prof. Gabriele Balbi, University of Italian Switzerland, Switzerland

Vincenzo Auriemma

Empathy The Contribution of Neuroscience to Social Analysis

Vincenzo Auriemma University of Salerno Fisciano, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-38859-0    ISBN 978-3-031-38860-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Iris, to the pure love you gave me. We will meet again in our most beautiful dreams.

Foreword

Vincenzo Auriemma’s book is about empathy, that is, the ability to put oneself in the shoes of others in order to understand their meaning and intentions and feel the emotions felt by those being observed. The work that follows is to be inscribed within the theoretical strand of the sociology of emotions, an increasingly important field of research in contemporary theoretical reflection and one that has developed consistently since the 1970s (Kemper, 1990). This strand has been formed by variously combining different perspectives and research groups: evolutionary sociology, scholars of the structural-functionalist paradigm, sociologists of culture, followers of microsociological theories, exchange theory and symbolic interactionism. For this reason, some scholars such as Turner and Stets (2005) believe that the study of emotions represents the vanguard of contemporary microsociology. However, the field of emotion research is not a recent one. Already classical authors have dealt with it to some extent, one thinks only of Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence (1912) or even more precisely of Weber’s concept of versthen, on which Auriemma dwells. But originally, the study had an organicistic approach, as it was inspired by the works of Charles Darwin, William James and Sigmund Freud, who treated emotions as a purely biological fact and, for that reason, universally prevalent. Later, social research broke away from the mechanistic scientific model and affirmed a relational approach to empirical studies, vii

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inspired by the works of John Dewey, Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mills and Erving Goffman. As Arlie Hochschild points out, these authors while recognizing a biological basis for emotions, social factors interact before and after with the emotions one feels (1983, p. 221), in the sense that emotions vary according to cultural norms and social context. The centrality of the emotions to social theory is also offered by the more recent theory of affect, which is an extension of post-structuralist and post-modern theory, but also takes elements from queer theory and natural science and technological studies. With all these approaches, affect theory shares an interest in the deconstruction and decentering of the subject, but differs from them in the weight accorded to the biological factor in the social construction of reality. Specifically, affect theorists are concerned with the ways in which bodies offer and receive affect (Blackman & Venn, 2010, p. 9). For these authors, affect is interrelated to emotion, in that the former refers to the indeterminate, vital biological basis, while the latter is the expression of this force when it encounters the socio-cultural processes that make it explicit, conscious and expressible. Affect theory therefore deals with the process from the biological origin (affect) to the social expression of it (emotion). These theorists refer to the new knowledge derived from research in the life sciences, such as biology, genetics and neuroscience and represent a move away from post-modern approaches that reject any dialogue with the natural sciences. Indeed, a leading exponent complains that cultural and social theory has wrongly distanced itself from and ignores important findings of the natural sciences. In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi denounces the need to rework the concepts of nature and culture and to their relationship (2002, p.  39). The problem, then, is to understand how nature and culture interact in new ways without the reductionist temptations of one over the other and vice versa. Vincenzo Auriemma’s work on empathy is to be inscribed in this cultural frame. Indeed, in social dynamics and human interactions, the empathic capacity of subjects is central, an aspect that often goes unnoticed but plays a crucial role in understanding and answering the fundamental question, ‘why society?’ and ‘how we can understand the dynamics of social structures, conflicts and relationships therein?’ The book explores

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theoretically and empirically these possibilities for shaping groups and communities, the possibility of mitigating conflict and contributing to social cohesion. Empathy is an ambivalent, often complex phenomenon that can be a source of social change that pushes people toward greater understanding but can also be used for manipulative purposes. This book sheds light on these different facets, presenting case studies, empirical research and sociological theories that help us understand the centrality of this aspect in the social and personal life of communities. A centrality is recovered mainly because of two influential factors: the first is the technological development related to social, Internet and digital networks, which allow empathic communication and the sharing of emotions and states of mind; the second concerns the new frontiers of neuroscience development. Auriemma reports the acquisitions of Rizzolatti’s research on mirror neurons. These neuroscientific researches offer a new argument to sociological theses on the social construction of society. They bring a new season of greater integration of knowledge and interdisciplinary research. The book explores empathy in a new light that also contemplates recent findings in various disciplinary fields. We hope that through this perspective readers will gain a more comprehensive understanding and appreciate the complexity of human empathy, thus contributing to our ongoing effort to discover what makes us truly human and unique in the world of life. This is the substantive goal that the work Auriemma set out to do with unprecedented and satisfying results. Fisciano, Italy ottobre 2023

Gennaro Iorio

Bibliography Blackman, L., & Venn, C. (2010). Affect. Body & Society, 16(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X09354769. Durkheim, É. (1912). Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, un siècle après. L’Année sociologique, 62(2). Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

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Kemper, T. (1990). Themes and variations in the sociology of emotions. In Research agendas in the sociology of emotions. Kemper. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, J. H., & Stets, J. E. (2005). The sociology of emotions. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819612.

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 Bibliography  5 2 Empathy:  A Theoretical Starting Point  7 1 The Concept of Sympathy as Origin  10 2 Verstehen in Weber’s Idea  16 3 Schütz’s Critique of Weber’s Conceptualization: The Einfhulung 22 4 Lived Experience as an Element of Empathy: Simmel and the Erleben  28 5 Empathy from the Late Twentieth Century to the Present, Rifkin and de Waal  32 6 Empathy from de Waal’s Point of View  35 7 Toward an Applied Sociology, Empathy at the Center of Neurosociological Reflections  39 Bibliography 43 3 Trans-disciplinary  Approach: Methodological Preface for an Applied Sociology 49 1 The Difference Between Various Approaches: Transdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary  50 xi

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2 Transdisciplinarity Between Sociology and Social Neuroscience 52 3 The Trans-disciplinary Approach as a Tool of Inquiry Between Neuroscience and Sociology  57 4 Hardware and Software: Attempts at Laboratory Sociology  60 5 Problems and Questions About the Use of These Tools  62 6 The Trans-disciplinary Error in Empathic Conception  66 7 Transdisciplinarity, from Risk to Opportunity  72 Bibliography 83 4 Possible  Integrations Between Sociology, Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience 89 1 How Social Neuroscience Can Contribute to Social Analysis  90 2 Transdisciplinarity Between Economics and Sociology  96 3 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Psychology and Sociology 99 4 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Neuroscience, Cultural Sociology and Sociology 101 5 Neurosociology as a Response to Transdisciplinary Discourses106 6 Neurosociology in the Analysis of Empathy 119 Bibliography127 5 Possible  Applications of Empirical Research: The Subdivision of Empathy141 1 Possible Methodological Approach of Applied Research 146 2 Setting Up the Research Environment 154 3 Research Methodology 157 4 The Theory of Embodiment 163 5 Some Practical Examples, from Empathy as Care to Virtual Empathy 168 Bibliography174

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6 C  onclusions177 1 Empathy and Emotion Analysis from Transdisciplinary Networks: The Example of IRNSN 188 Bibliography196 B  ibliography201 I ndex243

1 Introduction

The intent of this paper is to consider empathy as a bridging element between sociology and social neuroscience. This path is driven by recent discoveries in neuroscience, as well as research that increasingly pushes to consider empathy as a biologically given element in humans. However, assuming this statement as true and empirically given, it is by no means possible to exclude the cultural aspect and the attached cultural implications that underlie the empathic aspect of each person. Therefore, it may be important to provide a different point of view, a reading that is able to hold together several points of view, starting with the birth of the concept of empathy, which, as we shall see, has philosophical foundations, moving on to the sociological analysis of the same concept, trying to compare empathy with concepts dear to Weber, Simmel and Schütz for example, and ending with the more recent theoretical implications related to psychology, neuroscience and social neuroscience. Before proceeding, it is necessary to keep in mind that the text remains a proposal that does not consider changes of direction, rather than the emergence of cultural rather than biological universalisms, nor does it reflect the idea that empathy is a purely cultural element; rather, it fits into a transdisciplinary context capable of holding together, through empirical research proposals and sporadic analyses that have emerged to date, cultural, biological and, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6_1

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above all, new technologies aspects. In fact, after the pandemic that has affected us, it has become necessary to rethink the concept of being a community, even before the idea of social interaction, which is why reflecting empathy even through the mediation of a screen, rather than the analysis of the media that allow us to interact directly or indirectly with society, could be the main key to initiate empirical research in a sociological key. It will be necessary, therefore, to consider empathy in a relationship between sociology and social neuroscience, corresponding to a path that is not only theoretical, but can propose experimental research hypotheses in order to understand whether empathy underlies human and social relations. So, an intellectual endeavor that has been attempted on several occasions, but has often only found its way into biological-­ medical reflections, where some scholars, including Rizzolatti, have tried to make discourses on empathy the preserve of a single discipline. However, it should not be forgotten that such research supports sociology in the observations made of it by the classics, who analyzed culture symbolically (Auriemma, 2022a, b). Therefore, the text has been reflected through a transdisciplinary approach, that is, an approach that does not limit itself to recognizing interactions or reciprocities through specialized research, but rather identifies those connections within a total system, without stable boundaries between the disciplines themselves (Piaegt, 1971; Ammassari, 1985). This allows, on the one hand, a critical evaluation of the thought and analyses of authors belonging to disciplinary fields, seemingly, far from each other, and, on the other hand, to learn from previously conducted research aimed at understanding empathic attitudes and reshape them for sociological goals. Consequently, this is a type of work that draws from multiple points of view, without presuming to propose changes of course in reflections, bringing out a cultural universalism in favor of a biological universalism, rather trying to highlight how empathy can be a transdisciplinary topic that offers considerable opportunities for dialogue and comparison between different disciplines. As anticipated, the starting point was an analysis of the reflections on the connection between empathy, neuroscience and sociology beginning with Weber’s Verstehen; thus, from the German sociologist’s discourses of sociological understanding of it as opposed to positivism. In this way, the element that links understanding to neurosociology is, predominantly,

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the reinterpretation of Verstehen from the perspective of an “understanding of the emotional conditions of the other,” whose existence can give new strength to interactions, going on to study experience, mind and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind (Ibid.). In light of these reflections, the need arose to incorporate a new point of view for sociology, integrating the studies on mirror neurons and, therefore, the neurosociological discourses that followed, by reflecting on possible experimental research to be applied in sociology. Seeking, within an applied and transdisciplinary sociology, a meaningful understanding of emotions in interactions, capable of working in concert with other social sciences (Ibid.). In particular, this pathway has been useful in going deeper into two aspects: the first is the interactional aspect, which is fundamental to stimulating empathy in actors; the second is related to the intrinsic aspect of interactions, that is, related to the process through which interaction occurs. In the light of these reflections, the possibility of a connection between Sociology and Social Neuroscience, that is, the contributions that the one can make to the other, was analyzed. The attempt has been to look for this connection in a single science: Neurosociology, understood as the meeting of social neuroscience and sociology (Sperry, 1993; Ward, 2017). The latter, which emerged in the 1970s, was quickly sidelined, as it used evolutionary psychology in its first approach to science. It should be emphasized that today Neurosociology must understand the innovations had in different disciplinary fields, above all the discovery of mirror neurons, but at the same time, it must start from and incorporate the fundamental assumptions of Weber, Simmel and Schütz, so as to attempt to develop new lines of study that see empathy, love, respect and care, as the basis of the individual’s behavior and interaction. The text should be seen as consisting of three sections, sociological aspects, methodological aspects and neurosociological aspects, and consists of four chapters. It is a summary of a course that has undergone a series of necessary remodeling, generating analysis and critical reinterpretation of the classics, as well as hypotheses on future experimental research to be applied. Analyzing, first and foremost, all the remodulations of the concept of empathy over the years. In this regard, starting from the philosophical conception, Hume’s Sympathy, arriving, through German sociology, at the thought of Weber, Simmel and Schütz,

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it was possible to trace a sociocultural line on how empathy has been symbolically constructed and showing how today, it is culturally considered. The basic assumptions were, on the one hand, the concept of interpretation considered a key point for all research and, on the other hand, the methodology used by the various authors in their theorizing; certainly, the proposal is not based on the set of methodologies of the classics, but it is thanks to the classics that we can today integrate much of what they highlighted. For example, Weber’s encompassing sociology could be an excellent starting point for experimental research on empathy. Rather than, building on Schütz’s critique of Weber, using his phenomenological discourses in order to ascertain which actions might fall under the concept of empathy and which might not, but more importantly how to make a distinction between them. Therefore, more emphasis was placed on phenomenological concepts aimed at clarifying how the acting subject constitutes his or her complex of experiences and consciousness, tying everything to acting and emotions, for example. This allowed for the inclusion of a commentary on the four contemporary authors who to date have considered empathy as a key element in their discourses, namely Rifkin, de Waal, Ten Houten and Franks. This allowed for a review of the conceptualization of the transdisciplinary approach, highlighting, in particular, the motivation behind the choice of this approach, rather than the use of the more common and more widely used multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary aspect. Generating, as a result, an in-depth study that enabled a full understanding of the reasons for this choice. In that, unlike what many think, it is not merely a difference in the name of the approach, but rather it is a formal difference that makes the trans-disciplinary approach more appropriate for this work. Through this transition, it was possible to establish points of connection and strengths that can culminate in ethnocultural heterogeneity, emphasizing the relationship of this approach in sociology, with social neuroscience. Moreover, given the complexity of the elements and specifications within the text, the necessary step was to highlight, through a critical rereading of the present literature, the concept and research on mirror neurons. This allowed the presentation of a brief historical overview of their discovery by Rizzolatti’s team. In this way, using all the empirical studies that have been published since 1995, it was possible to put forward a

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proposal for reinterpretation that allowed to mitigate the view of the mirror neuron from an element predisposed to empathy, as argued by several authors, to a neuron capable of bringing out the principle of imitation/ learning. Finally, it consists of an in-depth study of the concept and discipline called “neurosociology.” Specifying that this discipline should not be the preserve of only one science, but should be characterized by transdisciplinarity, so as to return, through empirical research, a broad view. The next step was to define the object of study of this discipline, that is, it must be able to analyze social interactions and socialization in relation to the structures and functions of the nervous system. Therefore, it must emphasize the cultural and symbolic aspects underlying social interactions. A key element of this chapter will be dynamic interaction, which frees neurosociology from mere biological reductionism, inserting the latter concept as a cognitive element and belonging to each person, useful for understanding one of the points of view, contrasting it with what is the great novelty of neurosociology, namely the analysis of social interaction.

Bibliography Ammassari, P. (1985). Validità e legittimità dell’analisi causale. Annali di Sociologia, 91–117. Auriemma, V. (2022a). Empathy as interaction as well, from Weber to neurosociology. Quaderni di Sociologia Clinica. Auriemma, V. (2022b). Empathy. The contribution of neuroscience to social analysis. PM Edizioni. Varezze. Piaegt, J. (1971). L’épistémologie des relations interdisciplinaires. Archives de Philosophie, 141–144. Sperry, R. (1993). A mentalist view of consciousness. Social Neuroscience Bulletin, 15. Ward, J. (2017). The student’s guide to social neuroscience. Psychology Press.

2 Empathy: A Theoretical Starting Point

The concept of empathy is polysemous in nature; it has been and is being analyzed in different disciplines, in different contexts, and, most importantly, it has been given different meanings. However, the concept of empathy has its roots in the classical and philosophical concept of sympathy. Before coming to a detailed analysis, it is useful to pose a definition, as general and broad as possible, to a concept that in recent years has become closely linked to discourses of all kinds, from neuroscience (thus biology) to neuromarketing (economics and finance), via economics and politics. Even, some have used the concept to explain what to avoid in the crypto world, that is, to avoid being empathetic in a world that requires rationality and coldness. So, empathy is the ability to place oneself in the emotional condition of another person, so as to understand his or her actions/reactions that he or she activates, through a process of understanding his or her lived experience, perhaps based on life narratives and, above all, through identification with the other person’s situation. To date, the biological basis of empathy is studied, however, its multiple manifestations1 say that it presents an anthropological-cultural and  They are attested by anthropology, the history of religions, and the soil of attachment in the mother-infant relationship, sexuality, and numerous mental illnesses (Rifkin, 2011). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6_2

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historical dynamic, corresponding to the different ways of valuing it, of actively managing it, of following, without completely destroying its instinctual basis, its development towards complex expressions. Questioning the importance of empathy for the individual and his or her social life implies overcoming the idea that it is an innate feeling or an automatism in the brain, to emphasize instead how much it can also be a relational competence developed through social interactions (Auriemma, 2022a, b). Two opposite poles converge in the rediscovery of empathy: on the one hand, knowledge of human nature and biological functioning, and on the other, anthropological and cultural knowledge. Indeed, the continuing quest for knowledge of the neurological and neurobiological mechanisms thought to underlie the functioning of this fundamental human capacity raises the basic question about the existence of “enabling capacities” for coexistence, interaction, caring for the weak, and pooling of activities or interests? Or perhaps this “capacity” is culturally “learned” and, therefore, its existence calls into question many other elements, including historical, social, cultural and spiritual ones? A question that, from a sociological point of view, could be easily answered, but that, in recent years especially, this concept has become the preserve of bio-medical disciplines, which assert that it is an inherent capacity in the brain and returns an enabling ability to adapt to society. An explanation, the latter, that has several flaws, as well as several forcings. This is because, in today’s age, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, empathy assumes considerable importance on several levels, on the ethical-­political level, especially in issues such as ecological crisis, on the global economic-­ financial level, and in the analysis of social relations. To give an explanation of why empathy has returned, forcefully, to the social scene, we might use Churchland’s words from 2011 referring to the loss of values and the change of morality within society, who argued that in an age of great moral confusion, empathy returns as a “new foundation” of ethics because of its social implications (Churchland, 2011). At this point we need to take a step back, so as to understand why empathy has become what we know today. Empathy has its roots in the original meaning of sympathy, first analyzed and deepened by Hume and

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Smith and, only later, reinterpreted from a sociological perspective, allowing it to take on two significant strengths, understanding and empathy. This was made possible through the works of Weber, with his setting of the concept of Verstehen, as well as through the works of Schütz, especially with the setting of his doctrine on Einfhulung. In addition to these strong and general meanings, we find another that sounds almost like a derivative of these two, but which bases its origin in Weber’s Verstehen, namely Simmel’s Erleben. The latter concept belongs to a different category from the principles of knowing the other, but, as anticipated, it sounds almost like a derivative of them; in fact, it falls under the concept of experience. This element was useful in Simmel’s time, to complement his study of actions and groups, but, in one of the rereadings we might make of it, it becomes even more important as the meeting point between understanding and empathy. However, in the last twenty years, the concept of empathy has been used by several other disciplines, bringing out its polysemous and multidisciplinary capacity. Indeed, in psychology, a discipline in which it has almost exhausted its debate, it has taken on a particular meaning, namely that of contact. Moreover, it has been used by economists, clinical psychologists and neuroscientists to refer to social evolution in nature. For example, both Rifkin and de Waal point out how we have lost the empathic relationship we once had with nature, going about exploiting the planet more and more without rendering anything back to it (Auriemma, 2022a, b). Clinical psychologists and neuroscientists, for their part and following the discovery of mirror neurons, treat empathy as that element, inherent in people’s minds, aimed at understanding actions and connections that individuals perform with and toward others. Each of these meanings, however, falls fully within a much broader concept and, more importantly, within the meaning we give it today. Empathy, therefore, is a key element of human relationships, changing the disciplinary point of view with which it is analyzed. The idea in this paper is that the hybridization of meanings could open up avenues for new topics and, why not, new debates. For some, like economist Rifkin, for example, empathy underpins societies and relationships. The same is true for de Waal, who as an ethologist point to different

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topics but at the core of his thinking is empathy as the foundational pillar of relationships. So, empathy at the basis of social relationships (de Waal, 1996; Rifkin, 2011).

1 The Concept of Sympathy as Origin The philosophical conception of Sympathy, which from the eighteenth century onward developed through the reflections of Hume2 (1740) and Smith3 (1759), although it would be necessary to wait until the early nineteenth century for the necessary insights into the concept and to  David Hume, who was born and lived in Edinburgh, grew up within a culture traditionally characterized by the unquestioned dominance of Presbyterian clergy. Made except for Hume, the culture of the time was dominated almost entirely by clergymen. What challenged this dominance was the division created within the Scottish Church between renewers and conservatives. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two camps were formed, the dogmatic and the progressive, where there was a “victory” for the progressives. Between 1755 and 1756 there was a dialectical clash that occurred within the annual general assemblies of the Scottish Church in Edinburgh. With skill and firmness they succeeded in appeasing attempts to take serious sanctions against Hume, who was considered a “notorious skeptic and atheist.” For his part, the philosopher, considered himself a stranger to the Church and therefore indifferent to any sanctions. He was influenced not only by the culture of the Renovationists, where, outside of him, many of his friends embraced their ideas, but also by Newton (1720) evident in the introduction to the Tractatus; by the Glasgow Professor of Moral Philosophy, Hutcheson (1739) one notices from his in-depth study of moral issues; and, by his friend Home (1770). As is evident from the various citations within the “Treatise on Human Nature” of the December 2, 1737 letter, “New Letters of David Hume,” that Hume sent to Home (Biasiori, 2019). 3  Adam Smith was born in the county of Fife in the hamlet of Kirkcaldi in Scotland. In 1740, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, he moved to Oxford. The atmosphere there is not appropriate, however, for a young man open to new views. The faculty is very strict and unwilling to introduce different readings, such as those of David Hume. Smith was caught reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature”; he was so fascinated by it but the text was seized, which caused Smith to leave Oxford. Smith’s conception follows that of the mercantilists, tending toward an explanation of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. In modern terms, one would say that Smith was a macroeconomic theorist, interested in the forces that determine economic growth, although the forces he spoke of were far broader than the scope of modern economics: his economic model is rich in political, sociological and historical considerations. Smith’s thought originates from different sources mediated by the teaching of Francis Hutcheson (1735), who already tried to synthesize the law and natural law of Hugh Grotius (1622), the empiricism of John Locke (1689) and the typical idea of Scottish philosophers that man is moved by the passions rather than by reason. Adam Smith achieves a personal synthesis of these influences, to which are added those of Montesquieu (1730), David Hume (1740), eighteenth-century French philosophers such as Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau (1758), the Physiocrats and Turgot (1754), whom he met during his trip to France. However, Smith’s thought is not limited to a synthesis of the different existing currents of thought: his merit is that he brought in new arguments and theses, differentiating himself from the teachings of Francis Hutcheson (Hanley, 2016). 2

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have the first transformation of Sympathy, and it is recognized as the form closest to the modern concept of empathy. Although Sympathy today is understood as compassion, affection, participation and support, its eighteenth-century form took on quite different definitions. Indeed, Hume’s 1740 concept of Sympathy emerged with different meanings, in the first instance, as a distinction between biology and mind and, therefore, as a force that unites the various elements of nature and as a sympathetic affinity that makes the organs of the human body harmonious (Berrios, 2014; Auriemma, 2022a, b). Subsequently, the said concept is enriched, reflecting it as a psychological mechanism underlying the human faculty of sharing the feelings of other individuals. Given the resonance this concept received, it re-entered discourses inherent in the constituent elements of human morality, thus as the glue between individuals, laying the groundwork for a use of the concept in Sociology. Hume and Smith approached the topic from a philosophical perspective, providing elements that could give it a psychological direction, so much so that first Simmel (1893) and then Theodor Lipps (1913) were inspired by their writings and set their doctrine on Erleben and Einfühlung. Thus, the development of the concept derives from a general philosophical and psychological insight, which characterizes the thought of many authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bertocchi, 2016). Some current reflections depart from these notionalistic concepts of the late eighteenth century, for example, we can agree with Rifkin when he argues that “only when man has reached a stage of evolution in self-perception such that he has begun to reflect on the nature of his innermost feelings and thoughts, in relation to those of others, has he been able to recognize the existence of empathy, find the metaphors to discuss it, and probe the deep recesses of its multiple meanings” (Rifkin, 2011, pp. 12–13). Within the “Treatise on Human Nature,” Hume analyzed the sphere of morality, within which the author introduced the concept of sympathy. The core of his thought was based on the idea that a simple rational intuition could not be able to direct the will in any direction and, he went so far as to assert, that reason in itself did not have the necessary force to direct a passion in a certain direction (Bertocchi, 2016).

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Considering the period in which it was debated, this conception had a great resonance, so much so that it prompted other authors to base their own doctrines on this definition. In particular, Smith, within the 1759 text Theory of Moral Sentiments, develops his own version of sentimentalism. He analyzes, first of all, the question of “morality”; according to his thought there was a need to deepen this concept, refining the analyses advanced earlier by Hume through the notions of duty, obligation, self-control, and conscience (Smith, 1759). The focus of the work is characterized by the use of sympathy, as “the faculty of human beings that provides them with the ability to put themselves in the shoes of others” (Ibid., p. III). From this point forward we begin to see the true role for which Sympathy is intended, namely the meaning of modern empathy. However, this explanation is certainly not enough to be able to give credence to an element that is as complex as it is vast, so the analysis from a phenomenological perspective had to receive insights in terms of added value, starting with the question of ethics and overcoming human selfishness. It is as if Smith wanted to introduce a psychological connotation to his definition or, at least, an element of a primordial psychology, considering that at that time psychology had not yet been conceived. So, what Smith identified as human faculties involved well-defined psycho-social stages, namely (a) encounter; (b) interaction; and (c) understanding. Here, however, Sympathy took on a different connotation from what empathy is today, namely, a process of approval or disapproval of the other. So, it has become the starting point of moral research and is considered the source of social utility as well as an object that can lead to the sanitization of conflicts. These elements were able to give Smith’s thought a different meaning of Sympathy, moving it away from compassion and closer to understanding through empathy.

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The analysis of Sympathy, between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continued with several exponents, such as Lotze,4 Fechner5 and Titchener,6 who analyzed Sympathy with a philosophical-psychological meaning, emphasizing morality, psychology and the connotations of being, hypothesizing that the psyche composed with the same physical force, social phenomena.  Rudolph Herman Lotze was a German philosopher and logician. Possessing a solid background in medicine he was also thoroughly familiar with notions of biology. His works on medicine led him to pioneering achievements in the field of scientific psychology. He is one of the central figures in nineteenth-century German academic philosophy traditionally related to teleological idealism, as he called his doctrine, and panpsychism. He sought to associate scientific mechanism with the principles of idealism, believing that the cause-and-effect automatisms governing the universe could have no valid understanding except by referring them to the finalistic action of a higher spiritual entity (Tertulian, 1987; Besoli, 1992). He was born in Bautzen, Germany and attended the University of Leipzig as a medical student. Lotze’s early studies were governed by two distinct influences and interests: the first was scientific, based on mathematical and physical studies under Erns Heinrich Weber (1860), Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1842) and Gustav Fechner (1860). His other interest was artistic and aesthetic, and developed under the care of Christian Hermann Weisse (1834). He was attracted to both science and the idealism of Johann Gottileb Fichte (1798), Friederich Schelling (1809) and Georg Hegel (1807) (Tertulian, 1987). 5  Gustav Fechner was a German psychologist and statistician, founder of psychophysics. In 1860 he believed that he had identified an equation that could accurately quantify the relationship between physical stimulus and sensation (relationship between soul and matter), known as “Fechner’s formula” (Fechner, 1860; Sukhmani et al., 2018). He was born in Germany in 1801 and graduated in medicine in Leipzig in 1822. He is credited with founding “psychophysics,” conceived, in his work Elemente der Psychophsik (1860), as an “exact doctrine of the functional or dependent relations between body and soul: more generally, between the corporeal and spiritual, physical and psychic worlds” (Fechner, 1860). Fechner entrusted psychophysics with the task of establishing, through a formula, the relations between mind and body, conceived as aspects of one and the same reality. His thinking was influenced by Schelling (1809) and took up the results obtained by Erns Heirich Weber (1860) in 1860 with the so-called Weber’s Law. Fechner set out to determine the “threshold” that stimuli must cross to arouse a sensation (“absolute threshold”) or to modify an already given sensation (“differential threshold”). He thus identified the “barely perceptible difference” between two sensations as the required unit of measurement in the field of psychology, which can be determined indirectly by the stimulus that provokes it. 6  Edward Bradford Titchener born Chichester, UK graduated from Leipzig under Wundt (1896). The direction he advocated was characterized, as opposed to functionalist, as structuralism, in fact he is considered its father. In his research on the phenomenon of attention Titchener dwelt in particular on the degree of “clarity” of its sensory contents, on feelings using Wundt’s three-­ dimensional classification, and on thought, in radical polemic with some contemporary trends postulating the existence of so-called image-free thinking, of the Wurzburg School (first decade of 1900), Alfred Binet (1903) and Robert Sessions Woodworth (1918) (Klautke, 2013). He was a British psychologist and philosopher belonging to the current of structuralism; he was the one who exported Wilhelm Wundt’s theories to the United States. He asserted that the mind was the structure resulting from the sum of multiple elements: structuralist philosophy wants, in fact, to study the basic elements that make up the psyche. 4

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In particular, the three authors, attached greater importance to what was the psychological meaning of the individual, arguing that only through the psyche was the individual able to generate Sympathy toward the other. For example, Titchener attempted to attach a psychological connotation, so much so that he defined empathy as learning through action (Titchener, 1898; Simonetti, 2009). As argued by Bertocchi, by this he wanted to state how visual representations could fulfill this role only to the extent that they were accompanied by kinaesthetic representations. That is, visual representations can only exist if one experiences sensations caused by the movement and contraction of involuntary muscles. In this sense, the empathic act emerges from the intertwining of mental representation and the resulting kinaesthetic representation (Bertocchi, 2016). The second time Titchener referred to empathy is in the discussion concerning the Ausfragemethode7 i.e., that method of examination which Wundt8 condemns as a mere parody of experimental procedure (Ibid.). Moreover, in the final part of the text, Titchener dwells on the nature of the feeling of relationship, asserting that the feeling of relationship is due to the combination of a mental image that is created in consciousness as the bearer of meaning and an empathic attitude, at the basis of which lies that combination of visual and kinaesthetic representation mentioned earlier (ibid.; Wundt, 1896). Or again, Lotze, analyzes empathy through representations, recognizing its decisive role in the cognitive process, indeed in the introduction to the Logic (1874) he writes that “the psychic life of the human being is pervaded by the course of representations (Vorstellungsverlaufes), which is formed from the continuous stimulation to which the external world subjects the senses” (Lotze, 1874, p. 44). For a time, he was mistakenly pointed to as the author of the translation of the term Einfühlung into English empathy, this because of his explanation of the German concept understood as the modern conception of empathy. Picking up on Bertocchi’s historical analysis, Fechner, unlike Lotze, had as his primary goal to reconcile the idea of a soul as a primary motor  Ausfragemethode is a mental method or process (Wundt, 1896).  Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German psychologist, physiologist and philosopher. He became for the history of psychology “the founding father” of the discipline, thanks to his theoretical and experimental contributions, extended to the field of Sociology. 7 8

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(Bertocchi, 2016). He also argued that although there was the problem of measuring sensations, there was the possibility of measuring the physical stimuli that caused sensations, as well as identifying the threshold of those that generated greater impulses. Fechner’s work, Elements of Psychophysics, although never analyzing empathy, represents a point of no return to which some psychologists later analyzed empathy (ibid.). This is because with this work the sunset of the idealist worldview was sanctioned, where the abandonment of the idealist worldview favored the birth of phenomenology. In fact, phenomena began to be analyzed independently of external physical reality, this shift in perspective was necessary, as the positive results toward the investigation related to the phenomenon of empathy were manifold. In this new context, the analysis of empathy was possible thanks to the tradition headed by Brentano9 (1911), Husserl’s teacher and major scholar of intentional in-existence, understood as the existence of intentionality within the subject. In fact, the philosopher argued that consciousness was always directed to an object and that by object we must also mean states of mind, therefore, only through the intentionality inherent in the subject, it is possible to understand the objects and emotions, of the other subject (Bertocchi, 2016). From here, arguments and concepts more referable to the subject of empathy were developed. However, the notions that followed from these studies, especially those derived from the analyses of Weber, Schütz, and Simmel, will lay the foundation towards an entirely different reflection, although at their basis we find the definitions of Sympathy. In particular, through the use of the Versthen, Weber will analyze what has been called the sociology comprising, through the Einfühlung, Schütz will analyze the stage of empathy, and through Simmel’s work experience will be analyzed, thanks to his doctrine on Erleben. The paragraphs to follow will provide an explanation on each of these concepts, leading to an initial theoretical process that can fit what will be the methodological hypothesis for an applied sociology.

 Franz Clemens Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist, teacher of Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong. 9

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2 Verstehen in Weber’s Idea The concept of Verstehen, or understanding, is closely associated with the work of German sociologist Max Weber.10 This concept takes on different meanings, for example, in anthropology, Verstehen stands for a systematic interpretive process in which an outside observer of a culture seeks to relate to it and understand others (Weber, 1922a, b; Auriemma, 2022a, b). Verstehen, in sociology and by Weber, is seen as a method central to the

 Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1864, graduated from “Berlin, and later, under the influence of Mommsen (1817–1903) switched to Roman agrarian history, and then received his doctorate in law in 1889 in Göttingen, with a thesis on the history of commercial societies in the Middle Ages. In 1903 he took over with Jaffé (1874–1973) the editorship of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Politik, in which appeared the two famous essays Uber die Objektivitat sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnisse and Uber die Protestantische Ethik und den Geist des Kapitalismus, which inaugurated his most original and fruitful activity” (Weber, 1926). The German sociologist’s thought came to be formed in the tradition of German historicism by being influenced mainly by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936). His theoretical positions are thus quite different from those of positivism that his contemporary Durkheim (1858–1917) was inspired by and, in particular, appear critical of the idea that social action must be explained from the functional needs of the social system (Crespi, 2002). In the second half of the nineteenth century there was, more so in Germany, a strong reaction to positivism and the way of understanding the human sciences. The terms Historicism and Hermeneutics were used to refer to this movement. The positivists regarded the natural sciences as the model to which the humanities should be adapted and believed that the same scientific method should be applied in every field of knowledge (from physics to history). They thought, moreover, that scientific research, both in the human and natural fields, served to discover general laws and to reconstruct the mechanisms inherent in reality and to explain and predict events (ibid.; Giordani, 2018). The German historicists, on the other hand, began to think that the study of human affairs was a completely different field from that of the natural world, that is, that they were two different orders of science. Dilthey used the expression spiritual sciences to denote the domain of human facts, as opposed to the domain of physical events pertaining to the natural sciences. So, each fact is an event completely on its own and must be understood as such (ibid.). Max Weber studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin; he was, therefore, immersed in the intellectual climate of German historicism. Thus, he could not escape the influence of criticism of Positivism. However, instead of simply espousing historicist theses, he tried to reconcile positivist and hermeneutic tendencies, merging the valid aspects of both into an original approach. He thus created the current that goes by the name of encompassing sociology (Calabrò, 2005). From historicism he derived the lesson of the relevance of subjectivity. He rejected the idea that social science can stop at the description of details, reducing itself to a collection of understood events. According to Weber, Positivism was wrong to look at human facts from the outside, excluding the subjective point of view, but it was right to look for general laws and explanations. Thus, it was useful for sociology to understand human experiences in their particularity, but also to derive general patterns from them. For Weber, the building blocks of sociology are individual actions, and research always begins with understanding what individuals do (ibid.). 10

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rejection of positivist social science, referring to the understanding of the meaning of action from the actor’s point of view. In subsequent reinterpretations, several authors, including Gadamer, have understood this concept as “stepping into the other’s shoes,” allowing the actor to be treated as a subject, rather than an object of observations. Such an understanding also implies that, unlike objects in the natural world, human actors are not simply the product of the drives of external and internal forces (ibid.). Individuals are seen as beings capable of creating the world by organizing their own understanding of it and giving it meaning (Gadamer, 1975). So, to research actors without taking into account the meanings they attach to their actions or environment is to treat them as objects. The term Verstehen has been roughly translated as “meaningful understanding,” so much so that we define the sociology of interpretation, or Verstehende Soziologie,11 as the study of society that focuses on the meanings people associate with their social world. The sociology of interpretation strives to show how reality is constructed by people in their daily lives. It differs from positivist sociology in three ways: (a) it is concerned with the meaning attributed to behavior, unlike positivist sociology, which focuses on action; (b) it sees reality as constructed by people, as opposed to seeing an objective reality; and (c) it relies on qualitative data, as opposed to tending to make use of quantitative data (Macionis & Gerber, 2010; Smelser, 2005). Max Weber and Georg Simmel introduced the element of interpretive understanding as “a systematic interpretive process in which an outside observer of a culture”, such as an anthropologist or sociologist, “refers to an indigenous people or cultural subgroup in his or her own terms and from his or her own point of view, rather than interpreting them according to his or her own culture” (Macionis & Gerber, 2011). The term Verstehen, then, should be reread through an empathic understanding of social phenomena. It refers to how people make sense of the world around them and, therefore, how the social scientist observes and evaluates this perspective. Therefore, several scholars define it as the means by which researchers in one culture examine and explain components of the other. However, although this concept has been popular among European sociologists, it 11

 German Society of Sociology (Adair-Toteff, 2016).

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should be noted that it was introduced in the United States by Talcott Parsons (1937), who used his structural functionalism to incorporate it within The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1937). Despite the different meanings the concept took on, Weber valued understanding meaning, not only through intuition or sympathy, but also through systematic and rigorous research into human actions. Which led to interpretation as a possibility of observable events, so as to have a broad explanation that was not only limited to individual actions but also expanded to group interactions. Weber believed that this was an advantage for the sociologist over a natural scientist in that through this practice it was possible “to achieve something that is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely, the subjective understanding of the action of component individuals” (Weber, 1922a, b, p.  15). The concept of Verstehen was introduced into philosophy by the German historian and philosopher Johann Gustav Droysen12 (1904), emphasizing that the method of history was understanding, and, later, it was used by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1922) to describe the first-person participatory perspective that agents have on their individual experience as well as on their culture, history and society (Elwell, 1996). In this sense, subjectivity is developed and its products are analyzed as effects of natural and impersonal forces in the natural sciences and social structures in sociology (Dilthey et al., 1883; Paget, 1930). The concept of Verstehen also became part of Edmund Husserl’s 1929 analysis, when describing the “world of life,” he “uses this expression to denote not only a pre-scientific type of knowledge of the world, but that type of knowledge which lies at the foundation of all others and which is arrived at by intuition (prelogical way)” (Negri, 1991, p. 2016; Husserl, 1936). So, the world as subjectively experienced in everyday life, as distinct from the objective “worlds” of the sciences, which employ the methods of the natural sciences, including individual and social experiences. In this regard, phenomenology attempts to show how the world of theory and science originates from the world of life, attempting to discover the phenomena typical of the world of life, trying to prove how the  Johann Gustav Droysen was a German historian and politician.

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experience of life in the world belongs to the analysis of time, space, body and experience (Pecchinenda, 2018). The concept of Verstehen is also central to the thought of Jürgen Habermas (1981) and Karl-Otto Apel (1973), who transformed the concept of Verstehen, within a pragmatic and communicative process Verstehen became part of the Social Science Dictionary in the late 1990s, and in 2002 there was the latest revision to the term, according to which “Verstehen is seen as a concept and method central to a rejection of positivist social science [although Weber seemed to think the two could be united]. It refers to understanding the meaning of action from the point of view of the actor. It means stepping into the other’s shoes and adopting this research position requires treating the actor as a subject, rather than as an object of your observations. It also implies that, unlike the objects of the natural world, human actors are not simply the product of the stresses and strains of external forces. Individuals are seen to create the world by organizing their own understanding of it and giving it meaning. To research actors without considering the meanings they attach to their actions, or their environment is to treat them as objects” (UCSB Library, 2019). Verstehen, thanks to the studies of Karl Jaspers13 (1913), takes on a psychological connotation, at times even belonging to psychopathology, that is, as the content of people’s ideas. In fact, the German philosopher and psychiatrist believed that it could not be fitted into any methodological perspective as presented by, at the time, current knowledge and introduced an entirely new concept, that of inner transposition. That is, a psychological displacement of feelings; the analysis was carried out on feelings such as love and affection; however, it is possible to apply this explanation to other feelings as well. In the case of empathy, transposition could have an affective cultural derivation, that is, shifting the empathic focus from a past relationship to a present relationship (Bertocchi, 2016). So, he analyzes Verstehen more as a feeling than as a transpositional abstraction of that feeling, present only in certain situations, if everyone can give some degree of legitimacy to his or her actions. Within this  Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German philosopher and psychiatrist. He gave considerable impetus to thinking in the fields of psychiatry, philosophy, theology and politics. 13

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conception, Jaspers’ explanation is useful in understanding the motivations through which Verstehen, a kind of immanent thinking, philosophically speaking, phenomenal sociologically speaking, is grafted, to highlight its distinction into two different methodological perspectives, represented by the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences (Jaspers, 1913). “The former explains phenomena by going backwards along the deterministic chain, which links causes and effects. The latter would not guarantee an adequate categorization of what takes place at the psychic level, and precisely in this sense the plane of Verstehen becomes crucial, pointing to a kind of intuitive vision of the spirit, an understanding understood as an inner transposition into others, that is, that only through the subjectivity of the individual can one understand the other and, therefore, comprehend his or her emotional states” (Arogna, 2013; Mishna et al., 2021). This idea was not exempt from criticism, such as those made by Mikhail Bakhtin14 (1973) and Dean MacCannell (1992) of the very concept of Verstehen, who had to say that it is simply impossible for a person born of one culture, to completely understand another culture, and that it is arrogant and presumptuous to try to interpret the meaning of a culture’s symbology through the terms of another culture. Such criticisms, however, did not consider that Verstehen does not necessarily imply a “complete” understanding of another’s actions to give a timely explanation, but rather limited their interest only to the abstraction of the concept given by Jaspers. In fact, the concept of “verstehen” as conceived by Weber, commonly regarded as the key concept in his approach to sociological method, is used to deploy a type of sociology, avalutative and inclusive. In his production, it makes its first appearance in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie (1913) within the chapter Kategorien (1913), which was deepened and dealt with in the subsequent text, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre of 1922. Within the text, it is clear from the outset that the concept of Verstehen will not be used by the author with a single meaning, but several times,  Michail Michailovič Bachtin was a Russian philosopher and literary critic. He was the author of highly influential works on aesthetics, theory of literature, literary criticism and epistemology of the humanities. Bachtin is considered one of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century. 14

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at least in the original German text, different derivations of it will be used. In particular, Weber will progressively make use of the terms Deuten, Sinn, Handeln, and Verhalten, all derivations of the original, general, and better-known concept. Deuten was used to refer to “interpretation,” specifically the interpretation of actors’ subjective states of mind. Sinn was used to refer to “meaning,” specifically meaning always referring to the psychological states of actors, analyzing, accordingly, the meaning that actors performing an action give to it. The terms Handeln and Verhalten are directly related; it is used as “understanding” but specifically refers to the understanding of the action performed by others and not by the actor performing it. All these derivations mean that to each specific type of action Weber adapts a concept, although in most of his studies, the general concept used to understand understanding will be Verstehen. Such understanding, however, had little in common with the immediate understanding of the other, or of the emotional states of the other, belonging more to empathy and lived experience, however, in the literature, the use of verstehen as empathy is often. The error in reporting a translation of understanding as empathy belongs to early English translations. Indeed, although corrected and explained in the years to follow, the idea that verstehen can mean empathy has remained. Perhaps criticisms of the concept of verstehen could have been corrected with some specifics, perhaps terms other than verstehen could have been used, but this made a major contribution to sociology as a science. As of today, therefore, it is not necessarily necessary to resolve this error, as through the re-reading of Weber’s thought, this could be a help in the analysis of empathy. Indeed, empathy bases its activity in understanding the emotional states of the other, giving both an interpretation of what we are observing and a meaning. Surely, it will be necessary to match two steps to this re-reading, namely, empathy and explanation on understanding, i.e., lived experience. Proceeding with Einfhulung and Erleben, we could combine the three concepts to have a rereading of the thoughts of the three authors.

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3 Schütz’s Critique of Weber’s Conceptualization: The Einfhulung The term Einfühlung, which in Italian has been repeatedly translated as empathy, represents, perhaps, only the modern conception of the term, but it is certainly a necessary stage for empathy itself. In its specific meaning it stands for what we generically call “empathy,” that is, the ability to establish an emotional relationship with people, things, environments, situations and animals (Geiger, 1911). This term, we can analyze it in two separate languages, as Schütz did not use derivatives of the term, which explains why it became “empathy” in its translation into other languages as they return a common basis. The Greek term “empatheia,” composed of en, meaning “within,” and a derivative of pathos, affection, and the German Einfühlung, which, as we can see, is formed by the prefix ein, again indicating “within,” and Fühlung, meaning emotion (Jorland & Thirioux, 2018). Einfühlung constitutes not so much the basis of empathy as the action necessary for one to speak of empathy. Indeed, this concept immediately became part of the language of several disciplines, from Vischer’s aesthetics to Lipps’ theory via Freud. Initially, until Schütz analyzed the concept phenomenologically, it was understood as an understanding of feeling, art and aesthetics. Still, Freud studied it to refer to “identification” bringing to psychology, a fundamental contribution with the introduction of identification, representing the primary manifestation of an emotional bond (Freud, 1905). So, until Schütz’s analyses, Einfhulung was considered an equivalent of Verstehen, albeit with dutiful specifications in particular fields. However, through Worringer,15 the concept began to take on a connotation of its own by assuming another meaning, namely that of symbolic sympathy (Worringer, 1908). Subsequently, hybridizing with other research directions, beginning with phenomenology, Einfühlung exerted influence on studies that valued the emotional component of perception (Ales Bello, 1999; Auriemma, 2022a, b). Since the early twentieth century, the understanding of  Wilhelm Worringer was a German art historian. Known primarily in relation to expressionism, through his influence on T. E. Hulme, his ideas had an effect on early English modernism, particularly so-called Vorticism. 15

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e­ mpathy, has been the focus of debate, becoming part of the discourses of cognitive science (Franks, 2010). Only through the works of Schütz,16 however, was the concept to be able to understand human action as the realization of a predetermined “project,” and through the critique of Weber, linking his thought to phenomenological philosophy began to use the concept of Einfhulung to describe identification (Turner, 1970). Specifically, Schütz reflected on the individual as part of society, thus as a social actor, which implied being bound by rules, norms and values. So, as much as a social actor has a project in mind, it will have to take into account the constraints that bind it. In this regard, Schützian phenomenology emphasized not so much the passivity of the actor who, because of the constraints, had to shape his or her actions, but as an active actor, able to react to society. Schütz argued that individuals make choices on  Alfred Schütz was born in Vienna in 1899 to a Jewish family and conducted his studies in law, economics and sociology at the University of Vienna, earning a degree in philosophy of law in 1921. He later worked as a lawyer and obtained a position as executive secretary at Reitler and Company in Vienna in 1927. Parallel to this activity, he worked as an independent researcher and participated in the Privatseminar founded by Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), where he formed friendships with Felix Kaufmann (1895–1949), Fritz Machlup (1902–1983) and Erich Vogelin (1901–1985). His marriage to Ilse Heime brought him considerable support in the production of his seminal work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie, published in 1932, in which Schütz through the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl laid the philosophical foundations for the first time for the social sciences and in particular for sociology (Hans, 1959; Bourgeois, 1976). He was a student of Husserl in Freiburg and in 1939 moved to the United States where he taught, until his death, at the New School for Social Research in New York. Schütz’s intent was to apply the phenomenological method to the social sciences, which he always understood as the study of the everyday reality of the individual and his world of relationships. Despite his allegiance to the Husserlian school in constructing his phenomenology of the social world, Schütz also takes up themes from Weber’s “encompassing” sociology, emphasizing the importance of the Weberian approach as an attempt to understand the objective meanings of the individual’s action and as the elaboration of models appropriate to the specific object of study. The result is a sociological theory that tends to integrate the phenomenological and Weberian approaches, also approaching, in some respects, the positions of the symbolic interactionism school of Mead (1863–1931), Cooley (1864–1929) and Thomas (1863–1947), emphasizing social action, on the various motives, ends and dispositions, that lead the individual to act, on his modes of relating, on his social aspects as possibilities of self-knowledge through others, proposing schematizations of the forms of everyday life in terms of “ideal types” (ibid.). Schütz was influenced, in addition to the encompassing sociology of Max Weber that we have just seen, by the theses on choice and temporality of Hneri Bergson (1859–1941) and, above all, by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Max Scheler (1874–1928). In addition, after his immigration to the United States, the influence of the American pragmatism of Wiliam James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) and with the logical empiricism of Alfred Whitedead (1861–1947) helps to consolidate in him an interest in an empiricism, which takes the form of a focus on the concrete and lived world (Dictionary of Philosophy, 2009). 16

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the basis of their unique experiences and the specific characteristics of the situations in which they operate and that this uniqueness must be taken into account (Schütz, 1932). According to Schütz, all true understanding of the other is based on acts of self-interpretation by the one who understands: “we must study first the authentic understanding of extraneous human action devoid of communicative intention and then the understanding of notifying action, which includes a new dimension not exhaustively dealt with, namely, the position of signs for notifying purposes and their interpretation” (ibid., p.  161). Within the work The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), the Austrian philosopher and sociologist developed the well-­ known critique of Weberian theory, reproaching Weber for having elaborated the acting endowed with meaning by having in mind only the specific model of rational acting with respect to purpose, others to having confused the meaning attributed to a specific mode of acting, with the motive of this very acting (Crespi, 2022). He observed, moreover, that Weber made no distinction between “acting in its course and acting as completed action, between the sense of producing and the sense of the product, between the sense of one’s own action and the sense of the action of others, or of one’s own experience and that of others, between self-­ understanding and hetero-understanding” (Schütz, 1932, p. 12). At this point, Schütz posed a series of distinctions designed to explain action in relation to meaning, departing from Weber’s definition, but more importantly to lay a solid foundation for this problem (Crespi, 2002, 2022). His distinction was characterized by the meaning the action takes on for the agent and the meaning of the action as understood by the other; in fact, “the meaning the same action may have for an external or disinterested observer such as the social scientist, who is not involved in the relationship between the agent subject and his interlocutor” (Schütz, 1932, p. 13). So, within the interpretation of acting the temporal dimension becomes fundamental, as does the difference of positions between agent, interlocutor and external observer (Crespi, 2002, 2022). Acting endowed with meaning, according to Schütz, is to be understood, as a project where “the meaning of acting is the designed action that precedes […] such acting is to be distinguished from mere behavior, which concerns

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involuntary and unplanned reflexes, behaviors merely reactive to external stimuli” (Schütz, 1932, p. 77–82). As also emphasized by the reinterpretation made by Crespi in 2002, acting thus understood encompasses awareness and voluntariness, developing, at first, as mere anticipation or inclination toward what is about to be done; only later, it is constituted by the actual experience during the actual course of action. Finally, the third stage, represents the completed action, which is subject to multiple interpretations arising from both the subject carrying it out and other interlocutors and observers (Crespi, 2002). Schütz, moreover, also distinguishes between attitude relations and efficacy relations, where the former occurs in the case where the interaction produces reciprocal modifications of attitudes; the latter occur when the final motives of one become the causal motives of the other (ibid.). From these elements, Schütz would develop his theory of the social world, characterized by the intersubjective presence that unites the Ego and the Thou (Schütz, 1973). Today, a reinterpretation of the Schützian social world could be brought to attention, as it becomes an important element in the explanation we are giving to empathy in this text, due to its intersubjective character. The postulate formulated by Schütz could be taken up in neurosociological discourses, setting up the theoretical/methodological hypothesis of the double intersubjectivity, that is, the social world is characterized by a double intersubjectivity, represented by the emotional intersubjectivity that resides in the relationship between people and the social intersubjectivity that resides in the person-world relationship. Picking up on what Schütz argued, namely, that the process of the social world is evident when relationships with others are developed, as the only way in which various people experience simultaneous and reciprocal relationships, we could argue that this feature, over the years, has been implemented, to be led to insights in various fields. The last one, in chronological order and not in importance, is the empathic analysis through embodiment, that is, the process of embodiment through new hardware and software tools, such as virtual reality viewers, which allow for human-machine interaction, making it closer and more and more sophisticated, and, above all, the transposition of the body into an avatar, through VR, which guarantees an expanded and dual intersubjectivity,

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both in the comparisons of other people in the off-line world, and with other people in the on-line world in the form of the embodiment of the virtualized mind in an avatar. So, the difference with Schütz’s analysis, in a hypothesis of rereading his texts to actualize them, lies in his description of a given world, therefore unique and capable of becoming the common environment characterized by intersubjective communication (ibid.). This aspect today cannot exist, but only co-exist with other realities. Let us hypothesize our simultaneous presence in two given worlds, one represented by the real world, characterized by physicality and con touch, as well as physical interpersonal relations; the other world, on the other hand, characterized by what for convenience we will call the Metaverse, the online world, composed of abstractions, mediated contacts and mediated interpersonal relations. The two worlds co-exist; we cannot reason as separate entities; neither overrides the other; on the contrary, they complement each other most of the time. With respect to this, Schütz introduced the distinction between the ambient world and the world of contemporaries.17 The former refers to “the set of direct relations that the subject has with his fellow human beings […] and the latter as the sphere of the broader relations that the subject establishes with other members of the society to which he belongs” (Crespi, 2002, p. 177). This distinction, today, could fall away, the co-­ existence of existences would allow, accentuating, multiple interactions, the ambient world recognizing itself with the world of contemporaries to the extent that the world of contemporaries almost vanishes into the ambient world. Again, a co-existence of lives and experiences. Thus, the social world, just as highlighted by Schütz, as well as the experiences of consciousness of the other, are always grasped through the mediation of already codified patterns of meaning or typifications of acting.18 What changes from the late twentieth century are the codified patterns; there  In the ambient world it draws the I-you-you distinction, in the contemporary world we-you-they relationship (Schütz, 1973). 18  Typifications or typifications are generalizations that facilitate our relationship with particular aspects of our surroundings (De Lellis, 1965). “Typifications are the product of all that we know about the contemporary world, not only from our own experiences, but also from what we have learned, in communication with others, through language, examples, teaching, reading, etc.” (Crespi, 2002, p. 178). 17

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are an infinite number of them and, therefore, one will always be able to grasp the experiences of consciousness. The set of interpretive patterns, assimilated in the social environment, constitutes the background of individuals’ experiences concerning the social world in general (Schütz, 1973). Thus, it is understood as an experience that relates to typical experiences, outside the subjective and their internal temporal dimension, a kind of externalization of experience and consciousness of experience (ibid.). The latter element is vivid in some virtual environments, such as role-playing games rather than life simulators. Therefore, as Schütz points out, subjective sense nexuses, therefore, are replaced by objective sense nexuses, in a highly complex system of meanings characterized by a high degree of anonymity, where «acting develops, only because there are preconstituted interpretations and expectations of others’ actions, which allow me to predict their manifestations with a reasonable degree of certainty» (Crespi, 2002, p. 178). In this regard, the Austrian sociologist introduces typifications as a sense of interpreting not only the world of contemporaries, but also that of predecessors. As much as the presence of typifications makes it possible to leave out reference to acting as a unity of an internal experience of our consciousness and “the connection that is thus established between subjective and objective sense of acting, while necessarily constituting a reduction in complexity of the actual acting intended by the individual, makes it possible to develop a science comprising about the actions of a set of individuals” (ibid., p. 179), it could not hold today. Indeed, the continued co-existence of people in multiple environments, while certain that the conscious presence is chosen based on the interest of the moment, it could be verified that the sense intended by the individual does not allow for understanding the actions of the set of individuals. Perhaps, they will continue to objectively direct social action, but the co-existence of individuals would allow a set of objective intersubjectivities of social actions. Schütz, therefore, explained the degree of reliability-predictability of social action as «the subjective possibility that the action consequent upon my contemporary attitude will be followed by an appropriate reaction on the part of the partner is the greater the more standardized the interpretive scheme I attribute to the partner» (Schütz, 1932, p.  290). Today, the degree of reliability-predictability, most often, especially in the Metaverse, is by do’s

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and don’ts, limiting the options of choice not because they are bound to social norms and values, but to virtual codes and numerical strings. A different limitation, to which the person does not react, passively accepting the situation. With this by no means exhausts the amount of problems involved; therefore, “subjective meaning cannot be apprehended either by the mere intuition we make use of in daily life, or by means of direct understanding, i.e., motivation; but rather only the objective presence of the discourse of acting is an index for the existence of subjective meaning and that any nexus-of-meanings cannot be given to us except as objective” (Schütz, 1932, p. 38–45). The final piece of this reinterpretation belongs to Simmel, the latter of whom, through Erleben, was able to carve out importance for a concept fundamental to empathy, namely lived experience, subjectively and objectively understood.

4 Lived Experience as an Element of Empathy: Simmel and the Erleben George Simmel19 analyzes the understanding from Max Weber’s explanation of the concept of Verstehen and, just like the latter, rejects the notion of understanding society as a pre-existing organ; therefore, he also rejects its Durkheimian model of sui-generis society (Crespi, 2002). So, for Simmel, society is the result of the mutual relations of individuals, which encapsulates a concept, present within the text The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892), namely Erleben, experience. He analyzes it as a fundamental moment of very strong theoretical tension, which occurs between the knowledge an individual has and his psyche, which is constructed by experiences (Lenarda, 2005). The concept of Erleben, then, could be simplified from Simmel’s idea of interactions, namely, that the categories by means of which we access sensible experience and construct our concepts are variable in time and space and that they have a  Georg Simmel was a German sociologist and philosopher. To this day he is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. His thought has inspired many people in different ways, not least because of the breadth of his work. Through the mediation of Robert Park he became a leading author for the Chicago School; his sociology was juxtaposed with the social psychology of George Herbert Mead. 19

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practical origin, that is, they arise from our vital needs and the initial experience of our relationship with reality (Crespi 2002). Paraphrasing his writings and applying them to this study, we might think that he comes very close to the primordial conception of empathy or, at least, its genesis. This is because, the starting point for arriving at understanding and empathy lies precisely in the concept of lived experience. So, the determination of the historical fact, which in this text could serve as a preparation for our discourse on empathy, is based not only on the spatiotemporal process, but on processes of relationship construction, a fundamental element for this text, as it falls under the concept of Simmelian timelessness (Borsari, 2012). Taking up his text, in fact, we can argue that “the content affinities of the processes that are held together by a certain external framework, their functional relations, the possibility of their teleological ordering,—all this gives rise to the projection of a unity characterized in a certain way, which now decides for itself whether to accept or reject the claim of homogeneity advanced by other moments. The psychic cohesion, the margin of deviation, the integration of the various moments into an overall picture, in short: everything we call unity of personality-individual or social-is evidently a methodical presupposition without which the comprehensibility and unity of the historical data would not be arrived at. It is an apriori that makes history possible” (Simmel, 1892, p. 28). Simmel falls into that current of thought called “methodological individualism”,20 analyzing the phenomena that can be found in society and the institutional entities present, as if they were a complex of individual actions in relation to each other (Del Monaco, 2019). What we have read so far is useful to the analysis of Simmel’s theory, thus, to the foundation of his thought on modern society; however, we will dwell only on the first part of his text. In fact, the thread capable of reciprocally linking what we have read above with what we will see in this paragraph can be found in one of the pivotal themes of his sociology and beyond, namely the transition from community to society. Effectively, it is  Methodological individualism is a paradigm; he refers to collective concepts, such as “society,” “church,” “people,” to which no reality corresponds; what really exists are individuals acting on ideas, with intended outcomes and producing unintended consequences (Giudici, 2014). 20

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the combined action of these elements, the result of the inherent relationality of the social, that induces that radical shift in systems of social relations that allows man to access the community group to lead him within the open but indeterminate universe of modernity (Porcu, 2003). “Modern society, formed by an almost infinite series of social circles in which individuals can act and move freely, is characterized by a gradual increase in the individual’s autonomy and possibilities for self-­determination, at the expense of normative constraints: individual freedom is not only considered by Simmel as a result of the change in associative forms, but also, and above all, the emblem of the ambivalent and contradictory features of contemporary life” (ibid., p. 259). Because of this, and here we find the second fundamental element for Simmel’s sociology, individuals can no longer attribute specific meaning to their experiences, to Erleben meaning to their experiences, to Erleben (Haferkamp & Smelser, 1991). This discourse is evident in The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit, he, in fact, understood the individual as the object of his experience, conceiving it as the fact of continuous living (ibid.). In addition, Simmel emphasizes other concepts, derived from Erleben, that can fully restore his concept, the first being that I depict the social shock, which he identifies as the moment when the rapidly transforming individual, encounters the transforming society, i.e. the Nervenleben, the latter interfaces with the understanding of thought, Verstand, and which is muffled by the consciousness of the individual, the result of which takes on the role of the lived experience Erlebenis. This type of experience is deepened by the philosopher through the concept of adventure. In this regard, adventure is described as that experience which takes the subject far away, comparable to the dream experience “adventure is a part of our existence which is closely connected with the other parts placed before and after it: but, in its deepest sense, it flows outside the continuity of life” (Simmel, 1919, p. 15). So, for Simmel, the classical opposition of subject and object takes on in modernity the double face of individual life on the one hand and objective and advanced culture on the other (Morgione, 2014). Getting to the crux of our discourse, thus to the meaning that experience has in modernity, we must first emphasize the individual-society relationship, where the latter is “the unceasing product of intersubjective processes of representation through which the codified forms of

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reciprocal relations are consolidated over time” (Crespi, 2002, p.  70). Within this relationship, an ambivalent process is generated, whereby on the one hand the individual is self-oriented, even though it is originally intersubjectivity-oriented; on the other hand, that self-orientation enters the metropolis by becoming an active part of it (Bloor, 1976). So, Simmel showcases an individual capable of distancing himself from society even though the consciousness generated and, more importantly, the lived experience one has is markedly greater than life outside the metropolis. Indeed, therein lies the crisis of modernity. “The man in the metropolis is grappling with a daily routine dense with swirling, shifting, rapidly succeeding, often mutually contrasting images and impressions, a condition that for Simmel is summed up in a process of ‘intensification of nervous life’ (Steigerung des Nervenlebens)” (Morgione, 2014, p. 138). Re-reading Simmel we could point out, in contrast to the unidirectional view of the crisis of modernity, that the individual certainly recognizes himself in a marked individuality unlike in the past, capable, moreover, of generating a greater lived experience and falling back into this cultural atrophy, but we could imagine this phase as a phase for the sake of it, not a condition of new social static (ibid.). This period, characterized by strong intersubjectivity, regress of culture in terms of intelligence, gentleness and generosity, becomes only a small portion of it, capable perhaps of conditioning its future one, but certainly not a permanent condition. We need only think of the reflection a few pages earlier of the interception of three fundamental directions from the thought of the three pivotal authors of this work, Weber, Simmel and Schütz, lived experience could be the starting point to enable understanding first and then identification, or vice versa, in a dense intersection of symbolic interactions, within which to develop and expand the lived experiences of a broad group of individuals. We might reflect on the pandemic conditions we are currently experiencing, for example. Trying to paraphrase what has been said, it becomes clear that the context of social distancing in which we are forced to live certainly generates an atrophy in interpersonal interaction, but at the same time it generates an experience of lived experience that is so strong that new modes of symbolic and interpersonal interaction can be developed alongside the “classic” ones that currently exist. So, yes, an atrophy of the social, as Simmel points out, but a momentary atrophy, as if one were in a period of drastic and sudden

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change, Durkheim’s anomie, to which man must become accustomed, and to do so he needs time. Certain it is, that the permanence of extreme conditions could lead to a “new normality” and thus permanent intersubjectivity, but only under this condition. Therefore, the experience of living as understood by Simmel, remains one of the cardinal principles of interpersonal relations and, in this context, a fundamental part of a discourse that reconnects and intertwines with understanding and identification.

5 Empathy from the Late Twentieth Century to the Present, Rifkin and de Waal As a matter of completeness of this first chapter, since the evolution of empathy has been analyzed from a theoretical and theoretical point of view, it is necessary to include the thought of two authors who, in the 2000s, began to think about empathy from a new point of view, that is, referring to the environment, the first is Jeremy Rifkin,21 the second is  Jeremy Rifkin was born in Denver in 1943, graduated in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Becoming an activist in the U.S. peace movement in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded, in 1969, the Citizens Commission with the intent of publicizing war crimes committed by Americans during the Vietnam War. He is the founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET) and chairman of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation. His involvement as an activist in the peace and environmental movement has seen him frequently engaged in the United States, including politically, in support of the adoption of “responsible” government policies in a variety of areas both related to the environment and to science and technology, and such public engagement is reflected in several of his essays and works. In addition to his involvement in the United States, Rifkin has also been active in Europe as an adviser to a number of statesmen and heads of government and, in particular, acted as a personal adviser on energy issues to Romano Prodi at the time of the latter’s tenure as President of the European Commission. He has been an adviser to the Italian Republic’s Ministry of the Environment and has worked with Alfonso Pecorario Scanio’s UniVerde Foundation since 2008. In Apulia, Rifkin together with the Ministry of Environment, the Apulia Region and the University brings to life in 2008 a three-year project costing €5 million with the construction of hydrogen, methane and hydromethane distributors, a mixture of hydrogen and methane. The hydrogen is obtained from on-site renewable sources. In addition, a cab service will be operated throughout the region based on hydrogen, fuel cells and electric motors. The first of these facilities was activated in 2010, and it supplies public transportation and service cars of public agencies in Bari with hydro-methane (Nuovo Mondo, 2020). 21

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Franz de Waal.22 Within the text The Civilization of Empathy, Rifkin provided an interpretation of human history as a progressive evolution of our ability to feel empathy toward our fellow man. “And empathy, […], is the means by which we participate in deeper realms of reality, because reality is the shared understanding, we create about the world by virtue of the relationships we enter” (ibid., p.  528). Accompanying this is the increasing entropic disorder given by increasingly invasive technologies and population growth “[…] empathy against the backdrop of increasingly rapid entropic destruction of the earth’s biosphere” (ibid., p. 4). The economist, therefore, focuses on optimistic thinking in cofronts of life, as he calls it within the text “bright side of life,” literally “the bright side of life,” understood primarily as the empathy at the foundation of societies; thus, he interprets it with increasing optimism. According to Rifkin’s idea, man’s primary drive would then be the desire for sociality, the basis of which is the capacity for empathy. Civilization tends to assume increasingly complex and structured forms, especially in relation to its empathic relationships. On the psychological level, Rifkin has received a number of criticisms, especially from those who, in agreement with the Freudian idea, link these discourses to libido and the continuous  Franz de Waal was born in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, in 1948 and studied at the Radbound University of Nijmegen and the University of Groningen. In 1977 he received his PhD from the University of Utrecht with a thesis on aggressive behaviors in macaques. At the same time he began a project studying chimpanzees in captivity, which ended in 1981, when he transferred to the United States as a researcher at the National Primate Research Center, in the Wisconsin Regional Research Center. In 1991 he began his collaboration with Emory University. He became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. In 2007 Time Magazine included him in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Frans de Waal’s scientific activity is aimed at investigating primate ethology. In particular, his studies have focused on conflict resolution systems in the species Common Chimpanzee and Bonobo. As mentioned, between 1975 and 1981, he conducted an observation of a group of captive chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo. Once in the states he continues his observations at the San Diego Zoo. These observations lead him to formulate some important hypotheses concerning the behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos, which won him the Times Book Award. de Waal later studied primate behavior from an evolutionary perspective, comparing these primates to humans based on a current of thought known as anthropomorphizing. In particular, by observing bonobos, he believed that he could recognize a range of behaviors and feelings, such as altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience and sensitivity, hitherto associated exclusively with the human species. With his book “Our inner bee” (1997) (de Waal, 1997), de Waal carries forward the parallelism between humans and the bonobo, recognizing in this primate the root of the most complex human behaviors, which he therefore believes must have already been present, albeit sketched out, in the common ancestor linking parents Homo and Pan (Salvini, 2013). 22

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search for sociality. However, Rifkin in agreement with Bowlby, takes up some of his reflections, chief among them that the empathic relationship exists in almost all mammals. As we read from Rifkin’s text, an immature animal will bond with a mature adult, almost always a mother, usually for protection, and this behavior is different from feeding and sexual behavior (ibid.). It could be seen from Browlby’s research that primates spend about 20 percent of their time caring for each other, and the sufficiently capable parent provides the child with a secure base and encourages the child to explore from this very base (ibid.). Similarly, to Browlby’s argument, primatologist Frans de Waal, whom we will discuss later, also goes so far as to hypothesize that empathy in primates is the original, prelinguistic form of interindividual connection that only secondarily came under the influence of language and culture (de Waal, 2006). However, following Rifkin’s suggestions, empathy could arise from recognizing in everyone the same bewilderment at life and pain, given by one’s mortal condition. Where feelings such as freedom would also turn out to be empathic. “We are both a cooperative and a competitive animal. But it is the first sensibility that is connected to our biology and that sets the ground rules. We are, first of all, a social species” (ibid., p. 120). Freedom is not a personal thing kept within one’s own enclosure where one does not cuminate with others, it would be a lonely and sad freedom, but it is realized in the exploration of one’s talents and aptitudes, much of which is necessarily social. Even if we look at the general development of human history we trace a progressive expansion of empathy, along with the birth and development of the concept of self. “Child development researchers have become increasingly adept at identifying stages of cognitive development and empathic maturation” (ibid., p.  126). In fact, Rifkin highlights milestones such as the shift from nomadism to agrarian settledness; the transition from an oral culture, whose center was the collective narrative, to a more individualizing and personal written culture; the recognition of the citizen as a single entity by the Roman state; and Christianity, which prompted self-analysis and an unprecedented empathy with one’s neighbor; the emergence of the modern mercantile economy during the Renaissance and the importance given to the individual by the Lutheran Reformation; the invention of printing; the emergence of nation states; and finally, a great leap was made with Enlightenment rationality and the abandonment of a theological conception where

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everyone had his or her own well-determined place in the world and the affirmation of a conception where everyone was individual and sovereign. So, the expansion of empathy, according to Self, goes hand in hand with entropic disequilibrium. To confirm his thesis, Rifkin uses an example, namely the death of Princess Diana in 1997, on which occasion there was a wave of mourning and empathy, but also empathic concern for her two children, involving hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. Millions of people who had followed her wedding found themselves at the same time before live TV coverage of her funeral, and to paraphrase McLuhan, “the global electronic embrace ‘defeated’ the central nervous system of billions of human beings and turned the world into a global village, at least partially and for brief moments of time” (ibid., p.  392). Today, we could repot several examples, just think of Covid-19 in 2020, of the casualties it has taken, at the time this chapter is being written there are about seven million deaths of the fear and empathy people have shown to feel toward one another. However, Rifkin adds, as human progress has required a continuous increase in entropy to develop ever-deepening empathic sensitivity, this means that our species is destined to disappear, in a final planetary catastrophe, just as we are reaching biospheric consciousness (Efron, 1990). This seems to be the path we are on toward extinction, where this may be our final signature (ibid.). The hope, however, is that we will realize that we share the same planet, that we are all affected, and that the suffering of our neighbors is no different from our own. Only concrete action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere can secure our future.

6 Empathy from de Waal’s Point of View Within Franz de Waal’s 2009 text, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a kinder society, he emphasizes the presence of empathy in the animal world, aimed at comparing the capacity as not only human, but also animal, capable of being the engine of relationships in all species. de Waal dwells on the global crisis that, in his view, has been generated by the greed of financiers and bankers accustoming us to the idea that humans are greedy and selfish. In fact, he begins the text with this sentence, “I

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objected to this title, not because I thought there was nothing to complain about, but because animals do not necessarily leave each other behind. My lecture was about that very topic, how we have an ‘inner monkey’ that is not as callous and unpleasant as advertised, and how empathy is natural to our species. I was not stating that it always finds expression. Thousands of people with money and cars had fled New Orleans, leaving the sick, the old and the poor to fend for themselves. In some places corpses were floating in the water, where they were eaten by alligators” (de Waal, 2009, p. 9). The author, in this context, makes the results of his studies available to the reader, highlighting multiple pro-­ social behaviors in the animal kingdom. This made it possible to show how evolution has “produced the glue that holds communities together” (ibid.). According to de Waal there is interesting new research on the origins of altruism and fairness, both in ourselves and in other animals. “Yet somehow we seem to be moving ever closer to a society devoid of solidarity of any kind, one in which many people can expect the end of the stick” (ibid., p. 14). The fundamental question de Waal asks is: why has natural selection designed our brains to be attuned to our fellow humans, feeling anguish for their anguish and pleasure for their pleasure? If exploitation of others was all that mattered, evolution should never have entered the world of empathy (ibid.). In nature, de Waal argues, there is not only empathy, but also violence and, most importantly, bloodshed, which is often used as “evidential matter” the absence of empathy. As if empathy, side by side with kindness, were the only characteristic an animal or individual could have. “If it were, we would obviously be the first to disqualify ourselves as an empathic species” (ibid., p. 82). Indeed, there is no obligatory connection between empathy and kindness; of the same opinion is Donise, whom we will discuss later, who argues that empathy can be negative, analyzing it in certain contexts such as abduction and torture. Broadly speaking, we could bring several examples to support this thesis, the latest, in chronological order, being the war that Putin unleashed against the Ukrainian people, using empathy to understand how to hurt the other and, indeed, hurting them. According to the ethologist’s words, returning to a theoretical discourse and leaving the practical discourses to later chapters of this text, empathy did not begin in the highest regions of the imagination, let alone with complicated neuronal

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entanglements. Rather, it began in a much simpler way, with the synchronization of bodies in a cultural process, perhaps based by imitation, but still cultural. In the history of sociology and the social sciences more generally, several authors agree with this. For example, Lipps defined empathy as an “instinct,” meaning that we have been socialized to it, rather than being born with it. Probably, such an “instinct” began with the birth of parental care (ibid.). The difference de Waal makes, which is substantial for another, is the already obvious one between sympathy and empathy. As we saw at the beginning of this paper, whether through mistranslations or side-by-side concepts (as with Hume), they take on quite distinct characteristics. Defining empathy as the process by which we gather information about someone else, sympathy, in contrast, reflects concern for the other and a desire to improve the other’s situation. According to de Waal, it is time to move away from the idea that individuals move within the cost/benefit idea in helping those in need. In as much as cultural aspects and interspecies socialization plays a crucial role. The fact that empathy is more likely to be elicited by familiar partners ensures that assistance flows primarily to those close to the actor. Occasionally, it may be applied outside this inner circle, as when monkeys help ducklings or humans, but generally primate psychology is designed to care for the welfare of family, friends, and partners (ibid.). Humans are empathic with partners in a cooperative context, but “counter-empathic” with competitors; we will return to this shortly by analyzing Professor Donise’s thinking with the text Critique of Empathic Reason (Donise, 2019a, b). Instead of smiling when the other person smiles, we grimace as if the other person’s pleasure disturbs us. When the other shows signs of distress, on the other hand, we smile, as if we take pleasure in their pain. Thus, human empathy can be turned into something unattractive, especially when the well-being of the other is not in our interest (de Waal, 2009). All this is defined by de Waal as selfish reactions, which are exactly the opposite of empathic engagement. One derives pleasure from helping others, but since this pleasure reaches us through the other, it is only through the other that we can perceive it; therefore, it is genuinely other-oriented (ibid.). Therefore, his description brings empathy very close to agape, unconditional love without the desire to receive anything in return (Iorio, 2014). At the same time, there is no single answer to the eternal question of what

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“altruism” looks like if mirror neurons erase the distinction between self and other and if empathy dissolves the boundaries between people. If part of the other resides in us, if we feel each other, the improvement of their lives automatically resonates within us. It is hard to understand why a monkey would systematically prefer pro-social rather than selfish outcomes if there were not something intrinsically rewarding about the former, perhaps they also feel good by doing good (ibid.). Empathy could really change the world and one example, also reported by de Waal, referring to when, in 2004, the Israeli justice minister, Yosef Lapid, was touched by images of a Palestinian woman on the evening news. Therefore, quoting him, he describes that “when [he] saw the picture on TV of an elderly woman on all fours in the ruins of her house, looking for her medicine under some floor tiles, [he] thought, what would I say if she were my grandmother?” (ibid.). Although Lapid’s sentiments infuriated the nation’s supporters, the incident showed what happens when empathy expands; in a moment of humanity, the minister had drawn Palestinians into his concern (ibid.). The promotion of empathy is not made any easier by the entrenched view among jurists, economists and politicians that we are essentially competitive animals. So, empathy is not a skill, it is a cultural and social process belonging to the interactions we have, based on the process of identification/understanding/experience that is part of our ability to remember and interact with others. “If empathy had been purely biological, a product of our prefrontal cortex, the author of Harry Potter would have felt nothing special about hearing the man’s scream, nor would she have remembered it throughout her life. But empathy goes a thousand times deeper: it touches parts of the being where screams do not just register but induce fear and disgust. We literally hear a scream” (ibid., p.  369). This is to emphasize how empathy is an enormous force, which we decide to use, most of the time, to do good, however, this does not mean that it is only pre-purposed to do good. In fact, it can serve destructive purposes, suffice it to say that crimes against humanity are based on this very capacity (ibid.). The war Putin has waged against Ukraine, just to mention the latest historical event, could be an example. He is certainly not without empathy, but he decides to use it for ends opposite to the good. Torture, for example, requires a recognition, mental and physical, of what others are thinking

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or feeling. To attach electrodes to prisoners’ genitals, to hang them upside down for extended periods of time, to simulate drowning during so-­ called “waterboarding,” they rely on our ability to assume their point of view and realize what will hurt them physically and morally. This is able to exploit the bond that one person feels with another. Cruelty is also based on the empathic perspective. In this regard, de Waal sets the example in the economic compartment of society, with a Russian doll “possessing all of its external cognitive layers, enabling them to understand what others want and need, as well as what their weaknesses are, but they could not worry about how their behavior will affect them” (ibid., p.  371). However, the difficulty today in spreading empathy is economic, at least according to de Waal’s words almost in contrast to Rifkin’s words.

7 Toward an Applied Sociology, Empathy at the Center of Neurosociological Reflections Several authors have attempted to apply sociological paradigms within research using the experimental method. Some of these initiated laboratory research, others classic research aimed at understanding levels of empathy in individuals, using specially created tests, rather than research that included the breakdown of emotions. Most of the authors we will meet in this section, we will explore in more detail in the chapter devoted to neurosociology, as a discipline apt to bring together sociology and social neuroscience. Among the prominent authors in this field, we certainly find Warren Ten Houten,23 who is considered as the father of the neurosociological paradigm, born in 1939, thus at a time when mirror  Warren TenHouten born in 1939 is a sociologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.He is the author of nearly 100 publications, including Time and Society (TenHouten, Time & Society, 2005) and A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life (TenHouten, 2007), which we will discuss seuito. His interdisciplinary research interests have embraced the sociology of time, neurosociology, creativity, and social-historical and historiometric research methodology. His current work concerns emotions and the foundations of human rationality (Nussbaum, 2017). His studies fall within the field of Neurosociology of which he is called the founding father in America (Franks & Turner, Handbook of Neurosociology, 2013), oral history analysis, sociology of emotions, sociology of time, sociology of knowledge and affective spectrum theory. One of his latest research is based on life history project with Australian Aborigines placed in a context of time consciousness and social relations. 23

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neurons had not yet been discovered and, on several occasions, attempted to initiate studies that had a theoretical background in sociological paradigms, as described within his text A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life. Within the text, the sociologist presents a general theory linking emotions and rationality, thought to social relations, posing an innovative sociological vision; in fact, he presents an encyclopedic classification of emotions and offers one of the most original and multilevel contributions of emotions and social life developed to date. So, a new sociology of emotions, referred to precisely as neurosociology or neurocognitive sociology. Most of these authors, for ease of use of concepts and, more importantly, for convenience within empirical research, divide emotions into primary and secondary. For example, the American sociologist in 2007, divided emotions and empathy into primary dyad, secondary dyad and tertiary dyad. Primary dyads involve emotions such as Love and Friendship that fall under the acceptance of Joy and Acceptance. Secondary dyads are composed of the mixture of Joy and Fear and fall under Sadness. Finally, tertiary dyads are composed of the mixture of Joy and Surprise and fall under Anticipation and Envy. As reported by Ten Houten himself, some authors argue that the number of emotions, which they see as arbitrary cultural creations, is impossible to determine. But if there are a number of existential problems, the number of possible emotions can indeed be determined (TenHouten, 2007). Another example concerns the studies of Plutchik,24 for example, show that there are four basic problems of life, therefore, there are exactly eight primary emotions. So, 28 secondary emotions. Moreover, up to 56 tertiary emotions can be contained, as there are 56 distinct subgroups of three items that can be selected from a set of eight items. Thus, if Plutchik’s model of primary emotions is correct, there can be a maximum of 92 emotions, including eight primary, 28 secondary and 56 tertiaries. Analyzing the work of Bach and Goldberg (1974) we see that they analyzed these aspects, within the text Creative Aggresion, highlighting how children try to excite adults through a series of gestures and actions to  Robert Plutchik was an American psychologist, professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University (TenHouten, 2007). 24

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empathize with their parents (Bach & Goldberg, 1974). Authors such as Morsbach and Tylor, have questioned the very existence of primary emotions, describing emotional phenomena that exist in one culture but not in another. For example, they cite the Japanese notion of amae, which can be described as a tendency to depend on, presume or persuade love, kindness and indulgence, to be treated gently and loosely with great empathy, like a dependent child, in family contexts where intimate communications are largely nonverbal (Morsbach & Tylor, 1986). Again, Jonathan H. Turner25 along with David Franks,26 within their careers have analyzed and deepened the meaning that mirror neuron research has brought to sociology. They argue that empathy is a physical form and that the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes is part of us, becoming the center of social life. Social and interpersonal  Jonathan Turner born in 1942, is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1968, he has been at UCR since the 1969–1970 academic year. He has been a Faculty Research Lecturer at UCR and in the profession has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association and the California Sociological Association. He is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has lectured worldwide and has been a visiting professor at Cambridge University, UK, University of Bremen, Germany, Bielefeld University, Germany, Shandong University and Nan Kai University, People’s Republic of China. He is known as a general theorist in sociology, although he has a number of specialties: the sociology of emotions, ethnic relations, social institutions, social stratification and bio-sociology. Turner was awarded the 2008 Outstanding Recent Contribution Award by the American Sociological Association along with co-author Jan E. Stets for their book Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. In this context we are interested in his studies on emotions and neurosociology, carried out since the 1990s, so that we can understand his concept of empathy. Publications of major interest include The structure of sociological theory (1974), Herbert Spencer: a renewed appreciation (1985), Handbook of the sociology of emotions (2006) and Handbook of the neurosociology (2013), the latter two of which will be the subject of this paragraph. 26  David D. Franks is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; in 1972 he received a grant from NIE to study the various effects of “open” and traditional Kansas City high schools on self-esteem and personal autonomy development. He served as chair of the faculty grievance committee and as chair of the Faculty Senate. In the summer of 1977 he accepted a position as chairman of the VCU department. In the early 1980s, after writing on the utility of symbolic interaction in the study of understanding social systems of partner rape and abuse, he worked to develop a new sub-species in the Sociology of Emotions. He did this by writing articles that supported the social nature of something that until then had been considered exclusively psychological. To this end, he was also involved in editing journal issues for Social Perspectives on emotions, as well as numerous other volumes demonstrating the usefulness of the subfield. He was also a member of numerous steering committees and offices chaired in the early days of the subfield. In the early 1980s and early 1990s, he was vice president of the National Symbolic Interaction Society. He presented papers at national meetings with Dr. Lyng of this department on the importance of maintaining a consistent idea of objectivity in our approaches to the social construction of reality and applying sociology to real-world problems. 25

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relationships are primarily served by our ability to open ourselves to the other, and only perception and action are determined by mirror neuron systems. The mirror neuron system enables us to connect with others through empathy, stepping into the shoes of others. Even Obama in 2008 focused a political campaign on empathy, so as to fully enter into Turner’s discourse of “Real Life and Political Life”. The latter, in fact, writes that the science behind neural social science is sufficiently well understood to be taken seriously, positing several examples born out of studies following the discovery of mirror neurons. In fact, as Cozolino argues, trying to apply these discourses to social relationships it is possible to say that mirror neurons are among the best known for their ability to imitate between at least two organisms, playing a vital role in the direction of behavioral goals (Cozolino, 2006). However, it is possible to add to this analysis that in addition to imitative technical behavior, learning and transformative learning is also about culture, which strongly affects mirror neurons involved in the process of empathy and the development of a theory of mind (ibid.). Mirror systems have helped us understand how our brains connect with each other in synchronizing group behaviors such as hunting, dancing and emotional “tuning.” They are most likely involved in learning manual skills, the evolution of gestural communication, spoken language, group cohesion and empathy (ibid.). But on their own they could not achieve all this; in fact, the cultural aspect becomes of paramount importance with regard to their transformation, or rather, in the transformation of their imitative process. Even empathy, as a result of adaptations to other cultures, could change its initial function, becoming something extreme, as seen above. For example, without the discomfort that is part of compassion and empathy, we would not need altruistic cultural rules. So, we rationalize these rules into abstract moral systems (Gazzaniga, 2005). Work on mirror neurons, Simulation Theory (ST) theorists argue, is indirect and depends on differences in blood flow from areas rather than direct examination of individual neurons or synapses in their own location. However, Gazzaniga points to EEG (electroencephalography) studies as the only ones that can give accurate answers, but this could render the results obtained as biologically instrumentable. Therefore, as we will see later in this text, the path that could be taken by neurosociology, seen as the discipline that can hold together, with detailed

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specifics that we will see shortly, sociological studies and neurosociological studies, is that of Embodiment theory. Last, chronologically speaking, of the authors who allowed for a thorough analysis of sociology face-to-face mirror neurons is David Franks. The latter exploited the wake of mirror neuron studies by describing empathy through symbolic interaction. Specifically, he argued that compared to the complexity of the connections between mirror neurons and language, that between mirror neurons, emotion and human connectivity are relatively simple. We must recognize, however, that we can also be bound together in social relationships by emotions of hatred, fear, and rebellion, although empathy clearly is not the whole story of human connectedness; without mirror neurons there could be no sadism, for example, and we are perfectly capable of knowing that someone is suffering while not feeling empathy or sympathy for them. Therefore, the visceral sensation that dictates the recognition of pain, given through mirror neurons, is not sufficient for the occurrence of sympathy, empathy or compassion and depends on many relational, cultural and cognitive factors other than mirror neurons. As Franks himself argued, there is no doubt that mirror neurons attest to our deep connectivity, but there are several doubts about the focus on the relationship between empathic and nonempathic processes. Moreover, Franks’s symbolic interactionism, within neurosociological discourses, is quite similar to the basic assumptions of classical symbolic interactionism, thus, reality is the result of an interpretation of actors but, thanks to mirror neurons, it is possible to develop a kind of collective consciousness, the one analyzed by Durkheim, which is the only one capable of generating intersubjectivity, that is, the ability to recognize oneself and others as distinct interacting subjects.

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3 Trans-disciplinary Approach: Methodological Preface for an Applied Sociology

Within this chapter, a methodological preface of fundamental importance for a scientific approach capable of making sociological paradigms applicable and proceeding in the research work towards empathy will be placed. In particular, we will discuss the trans-disciplinary approach, the motivation behind the choice of the transdisciplinary approach lies in its uniqueness in returning to the dialogue between the sciences those concepts that currently belong to scientific universalisms. In fact, transdisciplinarity is a scientific and intellectual approach that aims at the full understanding of the complexity of the present world (Benard & de Cock Buning, 2010; Cerulo, 2010; Auriemma, 2022a, b). The term transdisciplinarity was introduced by pedagogue and philosopher Jean Piaget in 1970. Piaget, for example, was enthusiastic in the confornts of a transdisciplinarity of the sciences, so much so that he hoped to “see in the future the development of interdisciplinary relations toward a higher stage that could be referred to as ‘transdisciplinary,’ which will not have to be limited to recognizing interactions or reciprocities through specialized research, but which will have to identify those connections within a total system without stable boundaries between the disciplines themselves”

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(Piaegt, 1971). Later, in 1985, theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu1 (2014) added to and expanded Piaget’s definition, pointing out that the earlier formulation could lead to transdisciplinarity becoming a super-­ discipline. Nicolescu, therefore, introduced the concept of “beyond disciplines” and developed his idea, described in La transdisciplinarité, Manifeste (Nicolescu, 1996). His elaboration started from his experience in quantum physics and not just from a simple etymological adaptation of the prefix “trans” (ibid.). It might seem a paradox that from quantum physics came the timely conceptualization of transdisciplinarity, yet he explains that “it is not a new discipline in the strict sense, but a new ‘attitude,’ a new intellectual, cultural, and operational approach to building a better reality for future generations. It is not about the establishment of a “discourse above discourses,” nor is it about a new science that stands as a new epistemology of disciplines as we know them in the present” (ibid., p. 34). Transdisciplinarity is defined by Basarab Nicolescu with three methodological postulates: (1) the existence of different degrees of reality, perception and knowledge; (2) the logic of the third included; and (3) complexity.

1 The Difference Between Various Approaches: Transdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary In common parlance, there is a tendency to use these three concepts interchangeably, but it should be emphasised that they belong to three different categories of meaning. Therefore, in order both to clarify the reasons for choosing this approach and to clarify that they belong to specific categories of meaning, it is necessary to detail the three approaches. The multidisciplinary approach: this is an approach that emphasises the sharing of individual expertise to solve a problem or add knowledge  Basarab Nicolescu is a theoretical physicist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is also a professor at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (Nicolescu et al., 2013). 1

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to a research project. This type of approach tends to be used in biomedical disciplines, i.e. in the context of teamwork. Interdisciplinary approach: this is an approach that includes expertise from different scientific fields or disciplines within the same scientific field. This approach emphasises the integration of expertise, which is often necessary to tackle research or solve problems. This approach is most often used by technical and professional sciences. Transdisciplinary approach:2 created in 1996 by Nicolescu, who explored the substantial differences between the approaches, describing how transdisciplinarity differs from multidisciplinarity, as well as from interdisciplinarity, because it is at a different level of communication. It goes beyond the different disciplines and crosses them at the same time; its research cannot be inscribed in a discipline proper, with a defined object and method (ibid.). It crosses and transcends all disciplines, with the aim of understanding the complexity of the modern world through an encyclopaedic approach that restores to human knowledge its unity in diversity. One should ask oneself what language one can communicate with in this context (ibid.). One could say, in line with Nicolescu’s description, that “transdisciplinary language is both logical and analogical”. Analogies, like entropy, allow, with due care, the use of common sense terminology. “One must, however, beware of the risk of reductionism and excessive semantic vagueness, because the use of “nomadic” concepts, however rich in potentiality, requires great epistemological precautions, lest it produce the opposite effect, i.e. make communication between different fields of knowledge even more difficult” (ibid., p. 36). The dangerous effect of the misuse of nomadic concepts has often been observed. But it goes without saying that this functional epistemological nomadism of certain concepts is a constant in the history of the evolution of science. When the use of nomadic concepts is done correctly, scientific development benefits greatly, as the case of Darwin, who used concepts from horticulture to construct the theory of evolution, demonstrates. “Another element of legitimisation, if this is what it is about, is the project of constructing a “scientific Esperanto”, a new language that has  By interdisciplinarity we mean here the collaboration of different disciplines to achieve common goals (Gallo, 2020). 2

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among its various aims also that of giving birth to a new “autonomous knowledge”, with its own new objects and its own methodology. A true “scientific utopia”, transdisciplinarity presents itself more as a new paradigm, or as a new knowledge of the paradigms common to the different disciplines, than as a discipline in its own right” (ibid.).

2 Transdisciplinarity Between Sociology and Social Neuroscience To describe the possibility of using such an approach within a discourse that can hold together the discourses and research between sociology and social neuroscience, one must start from the neuroscientific turn that has been initiated in several disciplines. Indeed, many of them, such as economics and psychology, have been able to integrate neuroscientific studies from the emotional analyses of markets and products, or the cognitive developments of anger. Sociology, on the other hand, has only partially undertaken this turn. Surely this is due to the risk of seeing irrelevant fields of enquiry being crossed, rather than seeing the emergence of research that tends to be biological in a social field. But, to date, few attempts have been made to ensure that this encounter can take place. One of these is related to neurosociology. The interchange between neuroscience and sociology has only arisen in recent years, but this approach to “neurosociology”, composed precisely of the encounter between sociology and social neuroscience, should be supplemented with a greater focus, going deeper into key theoretical aspects and concepts in sociology and social theory in general (European Science Foundation, 2020). The neuroscientific turn, previously seen in various disciplines such as economics, philosophy, anthropology, law and psychology (Churchland, 1989; Camerer, 2008; Duque et al., 2010) could be useful as an example; although this turn is still limited to specialised disciplinary branches, its impact on key concepts and theoretical reasoning in these disciplines is already considerable. The transdisciplinarity that could be integrated could start with laboratory-type analysis techniques. The idea could be to complement field research in sociology with laboratory-type research.

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Within a kind of applied sociology, aimed at understanding, through hardware and software used by neuroscience, certain characteristics of behaviour. It would be interesting to analyse empathy through technology, through the use of visors, for example, but in order to do so, the techniques of investigation and, above all, the methodologies associated with these techniques would have to be investigated in depth. As Franks and Ten Houten have argued on several occasions, it may seem surprising that neuroscience, especially the “new brain sciences” such as social neuroscience, have been studying key concepts of sociological thinking for some time now; for example, cooperation, norms and intersubjectivity, and have managed to apply them, albeit limited to conclusions that only highlight biology, as in the case of fear, the emotions analysed in the laboratory. While other disciplines are more or less actively engaged in a lively discussion with these branches of neuroscience and have established collaboration on a theoretical, empirical and occasionally even institutional level, it is difficult to find such a fruitful and reciprocal engagement between neuroscience and sociology (Von Scheve, 2013). As von Scheve points out in 2013, on closer inspection, however, this is less surprising, because the reasons for this lack of collaboration, in sociology, can be framed in the lack of interest between the two disciplines in collaborating, perhaps because each tends to emphasise one aspect rather than the other, rather than holding together the two potentially emerging expects. Such an approach to “neurosociology” could have interesting implications, considering also that the path society is taking is one of ubiquity, metaverse and life in presence. Some attempts, so far, are only emerging in institutionalised contexts, such as within the European Neuroscience and Society Network3 or the Critical Neuroscience4 initiative, whose main interest is to examine the multiple implications and consequences of neuroscientific research on culture and society in general. One could follow up on these aspects, considering them to be of broad interest. “Traditionally, the sociology of neuroscience, as part of the broader  The ENSN is a European network that aims to establish a multidisciplinary forum for timely and necessary engagement with these issues through the development of research strategies (European Science Foundation, 2020). 4  Critical Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary textbook initiative that seeks to analyse the sociocultural implications of recent advances in neuroscience (Choudhury & Slaby, 2012). 3

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interdisciplinary endeavour of science and technology studies (STS), has been concerned with the social and cultural embeddedness of scientific knowledge production and its ramifications in various areas of society, e.g. institutions, politics, markets, organisations and social relations (Collins, 1983; Shapin, 1995; Hackett et al., 2007). In pursuing this agenda, STS usually employs well-established social science methods, such as discourse analysis, ethnographic observation and interviews” (Von Scheve, 2013, p. 4). Today, the emphasis could be placed not only on the social construction of scientific knowledge and analysing the conditions under which this knowledge is produced (ibid.; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Lynch, 1993), but also on the concrete possibilities of analysing inner phenomena of the individual, such as the ability to feel emotion and empathy, through the encounter of sociology and neruosciences (ibid.). To make this possible, it would be necessary to start with a cultural exchange a-priori, sociology will have to provide the necessary tools to be able to analyse social aspects through the texts of the classics of sociology, starting with the authors that have been highlighted within this text and, for their part, neurosciences will have to provide the physical tools to sociology to be able to initiate laboratory-type research. Not only by identifying hardware and software, but ways to refine investigation techniques so as to allow an integration between the biological interest, which is part of the person, and the social aspect. This is because, in addition to studying the production of scientific knowledge, sociology is also concerned with assessing the social impact of this type of knowledge, something that neuroscience tends not to do. This line of investigation is well known with regard to scientific disciplines closely linked to technological advances and innovations, for example, biology, engineering and information technology. Here, the focus is not primarily on the production of scientific knowledge, but on the consequences for a general and public understanding of the respective subjects and their implications for policies, economies and social relations (Turkle, 1997; May, 2002). Critics of the various neuro-emergent disciplines, including von Scheve, Rees & Rose, (2004), Reichertz (2006), Rose (2006), Abi-Rached (2008), Rinaldi (2009), have recently argued that the new brain sciences, cognitive neuroscience, may still be too premature for their findings to

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overturn theories and concepts of the more established disciplines of the social sciences and humanities or, even, to be integrated into disciplinary debate (Von Scheve, 2013). However, at the same time, cognitive neurosciences are considered the greatest intellectual resources for the humanities and social sciences (Pinker, 2013). The ever-growing pool of cognitive sciences, drawing from the rich sociological cultural background, especially within the new brain sciences, is becoming conceptually inseparable from the social, cultural and familial contexts in which it developed, despite the emergence of technologies to measure the functioning of the nervous system: biology, Maurizio Meloni points out, “has become porous to social and even cultural signals to an unprecedented extent” (Bird, 2007; Hyman, 2009; Niewohner, 2011; Cooter, 2014). In the results of these research studies, however, the sociological potential never emerges; instead, there is a tendency to emphasise and dwell on the ability of neuroscience to empirically verify, through scientifically reduced explanations, all those emotions that people experience. As a recent editorial in Nature pointed out: “Sociologists have been studying the human environment for decades and have calculated the social damage that stresses such as poverty or child abuse can cause. Biologists are now able to benefit from their insights” (Nature, 2012, p. 143). It seems indisputable that there is something important that social scientists could offer even more for mutual development, and that, already in some cases, they offer to neuroscience. As Ilina Singh points out, “the emerging disintegration of the nature-­ education divide from within the biosciences offers a new space for social scientists to collaborate” (Fitzgerald & Callard, 2014, p. 7; Singh, 2012, pp. 316–317). There is still a lot of effort to be done, but in some contexts, albeit sporadic and contained, there are initiatives to take the path of openness. For several years now, the terms ‘interdisciplinarity’ and “transdiciplinarity” have entered common and international academic usage. One of the obvious examples is that of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, which I met almost by chance during my visiting period, and which in collaboration with other European scientific institutions has set up a Network for Transdisciplinarity in Sciences and Humanities. In practice, it has set up a prize to encourage transdisciplinary research, generating a constantly updated database, so as to disseminate in a timely

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manner all that is transdisciplinary in the humanities. To date, there are over 500 titles, many of them based on methodological rather than practical interest. It would be interesting to see this tool grow even more with empirical research. Within the last two chapters of this book, we will explore hypotheses of techniques, borrowed from social neuroscience and neuromarketing, that could be used to take new steps within sociological research, all of which starts from the theory of embodiment, but we will see this later. The University of Stockholm has also opened up in this sense, establishing the Transdisciplinary Research Institute. The division of knowledge into clearly separated disciplines is a fairly recent fact in the history of science, which has ended up taking on forms that are sometimes excessive (Gallo, 2020; Biagi, 2021). It should not be forgotten that scientific and disciplinary hybridisations have always existed, in some cases leading to the emergence of new disciplines, such as biochemistry, computer science and neuroscience, are just three of many examples that could be cited. In the field of computer science, the case of artificial intelligence is particularly significant (ibid.). One of its founders is Herbert H. Simon5 (1994), a personality who is difficult to enclose within the narrow confines of one discipline: in addition to the area of artificial intelligence, he has made significant contributions in the area of management sciences, was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, and even made a brief appearance in the area of “operations research”6 when this discipline was in its infancy (ibid.). However, while in some cases, this leads to the emergence of new disciplines, in several others, it is essential to maintain and consolidate a transdisciplinary systemic approach. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine (1987), we can say that ‘in the nineteenth century, fragmentation played an important role in the emergence of separate disciplines for biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, psychology, sociology, etc.’. But when we consider the great challenges facing humanity today, we realise that we need a transdisciplinary  Herbert Alexander Simon was an American economist, psychologist and computer scientist. His research spans the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, economics, management and philosophy of science. 6  Operations research is the branch of applied mathematics in which complex decision-making problems are analysed and solved using mathematical models and advanced quantitative methods as decision support. 5

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approach. Therefore, at this historical moment, I believe it is really very important to emphasise the end of fragmentation, or at least its overcoming’ (Prigogine, 2004). The world today is faced with new challenges that are global in scope, in the sense of time and space, but also in terms of their involvement in all aspects of life and the need to draw on all the knowledge and know-how that humanity has developed over the centuries, with a focus on social neuroscience. These challenges are in front of everyone’s eyes, even if they appear neglected or forgotten when it comes to defining, through concrete choices, the political agenda at national and international level (Gallo, 2020).

3 The Trans-disciplinary Approach as a Tool of Inquiry Between Neuroscience and Sociology In order to be able to best analyse transdisciplinarity not only as a methodology but as a real instrument of investigation, capable of bringing together two disciplines that are distant in terms of basis and knowledge, a necessary introduction must be made. For such an analysis in sociology, applied to the study of empathy, it is good to know what is meant by emotional feelings, from a social point of view, and how they are supported by the brain, from a neuroscientific point of view. Technically, emotional feelings occur as intense affective reactions brought about by an external, presumably environmental stimulus and ‘its occurrence causes a change at the somatic, vegetative and psychic levels. Physiological reactions to an emotional situation affect vegetative functions such as circulation, respiration, digestion and secretion. Visceral reactions occur with a momentary loss of neurovegetative control resulting in a temporary inability to abstraction from the emotional context (Soriano & Valenzuela, 2009). Expressive reactions concern facial expressions, body attitudes, and habitual forms of communication. Psychological re-actions manifest themselves in reduced self-control, difficulty in logically articulating actions and reflections, and diminished capacity for critical method” (Galimberti, 2018, p. 76). As argued by several scholars,

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including Immordino-Yang, emotions and drives have evolved as extensions of survival mechanisms to keep us alive. “Humans experience basic emotions such as fear and disgust to keep away from cliff precipices and to avoid bad food. We have social emotions such as love that allows us to affiliate, procreate and care for our children. Thanks to our intelligence, the plastic brain, we can also develop emotions that colour and direct our intellectual and social endeavours, such as curiosity that drives us to explore and discover” (Immordino-Yang, 2017, p. 92). However, the attempt to analyse this type of emotion has been addressed within the field of education, more specifically in neuroeducation.7 The foundation of neuroeducation is brain plasticity, i.e. the brain’s ability to physically change in order to adapt to stimuli and habits in a way that is useful for the individual. Every time a form of learning is established, it leaves a trace in the way neurons in the brain connect to each other. Neuroeducation examines the traces that educational processes leave in the brain and traces the relationships between these and the way the individual behaves (Yestherapyhelps, 2019). One of the great discoveries made through neuroeducation is that learning and emotions are not two worlds separate from each other. We do not learn by storing data with the coldness of a robot, but in our nervous system, memories and emotions go hand in hand. In this way, meaningful learning becomes a fundamental aspect in education, as in it important data are linked to feelings and pleasure-­ related feelings that lead us to internalise them first, in this way neuroeducation emphasises the need to use an emotional approach in any educational context and in informal settings (Bravetta, 2019). Philosopher and educator John Bruer stated that this bridge between neuroscience and education “is too long” and connects distant worlds. “From an evolutionary and ontogenetic point of view, emotions and learning are inextricably intertwined: we learn by coping with situations that the goal of survival loads with emotional meanings (evolution) and we learn deeply only what stirs emotions and affects (ontogeny)” (Cattaneo, 2018, p. 28;  Neuroeducation is, in short, a bridging discipline between neurology and educational science, in which educational psychology plays a key role. It is a scientific development project in which we want to combine the knowledge we have about how the brain works with what is known about educational processes in the field. Normally, the field in which neuroeducation is focused is school and academic education (Yestherapyhelps, 2019). 7

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Tyng et al., 2017). Psychoanalytic approaches, as we have seen earlier in this paper, have historically tried with various attempts to combine emotions, affects, knowledge and learning, working on concepts such as: desire, lack etc. However, the real revolution within the neuroscience of education is one that overturned earlier theories that emotions negatively interfered with learning, revealing instead that emotion and cognition are supported by interdependent neural processes. From a neurobiological perspective, it is literally impossible to build memories, engage in complex thinking or make sensible decisions without emotion. In fact, the brain is a very expensive metabolic tissue and evolution would not have supported wasting energy and oxygen to think about unimportant things. In short: we think better about the things we care about, we eliminate what does not matter (Immordino-Yang, 2017). What has been said opens up questions about how, when and why students learn in a meaningful way (Waxman, 2018). We can explain the most boring subject in the world, but the teacher and the relationship he/she forms with his/her pupils make and can make a difference if they move horizons of meaning and affection. So the discourse we engaged in raises “questions about how technology, new media, culture and the web, social, AI models shape learning. Teachers have new hopes for motivating students, producing deep knowledge and enabling the transfer of school skills into the real world, leveraging everything that makes sense and is emotionally meaningful to children” (Cattaneo, 2018, p. 29). In this regard, to reconnect with the discourse developed in this paragraph, we could hypothesise that one of the investigative tools aimed at understanding the power of the emotions felt by each person could start from the concepts of neuroeducation. In particular, transdisciplinarity makes it possible to investigate, through neuroscientific techniques combined with sociological knowledge, the derivations of emotions, the intensity of emotions and the distinction of the intensity of each emotion felt by each person. This could lead to confirming the levels of empathy propounded on several occasions by various authors, including Ten Houten, rather than using ad hoc investigative tools to calculate their actual placement within idealistic macrocategories. Leaving aside for a moment this latter aspect, the subject of the next chapter, another fundamental aspect must be recovered,

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namely technology, the only element capable of providing a real methodological contribution in this field. Indeed, understanding the structural transformations and the large-scale increase in communication technologies will serve us to implement the empirical phase of the research.

4 Hardware and Software: Attempts at Laboratory Sociology Thanks to technological advancement and, above all, to the refinement of investigation techniques aimed at integrating technological advancement, we are able to have a real starting point. Of course, one must be aware of the complexity of adopting these tools, however, there are companies that can provide all the necessary support. In particular, we are talking about those tools, used within the new communication processes, to generate immersive realities: virtual reality viewers and eye-tracking glasses. The visors, which are currently used to enter ‘new worlds’, especially realities created within the Metaverse, or within video games, are able to generate real methods of analysing emotions. A visor is a helmet in which screens close to the eyes cancel the real world from the user’s view. They often have integrated headphones, which can generate an additional level of immersiveness, distancing the user from the offline world. The visor may also contain systems for motion detection, so that turning the head to one side, for example, results in the same action in the virtual environment. This device, to date, is used in numerous researches, especially in social psychology and neuromarketing. Relevant, in this sense, are two researches, the first entitled “Virtual Reality for Aggression Assessment: The Development and Preliminary Results of Two Virtual Reality Tasks to Assess Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Males” and the second “Testing the Effects of a Virtual Reality Game for Aggressive Impulse Management (VR-GAIME): Study Protocol.”, by Lobbestael & Cima and Smeijers & Koole, respectively, performed in 2021 and 2019. Both researches were performed with the use of a VR and in research fields outside of sociology, i.e. Brain Sciences and Psychiatry.

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In the first case, we are dealing with research aimed at measuring aggression. Everyday realities were created within a game and, within these realities, other players were placed, who cheated in a series of tasks to complete them, which were to stimulate anger in the VR user and trigger the reactive condition. Aggression levels and changes on people’s faces were measured (Lobbestael & Cima, 2021). In the second research, however, the ability to reduce the effects of anger on people was examined from exercises designed to calm them down. Again, a virtual reality game was generated, thus a laboratory-type research that could highlight levels and expressions. Anger was assessed through the analysis of aggressive impulses, comparing the results with a test self-selected by the participants in the different game sessions. In this context, VR is a potentially promising tool for experimentally inducing and assessing different types of emotions, as it has the potential to provide researchers with a realistic and modifiable assessment environment. For the same reasons, there is another tool that can help researchers in these types of laboratory investigations, namely eye-tracking. This tool is useful for eye-tracking and allows for the detection of aspects on which an individual’s attention is focused. This is possible through gaze monitoring, for example, while viewing an advertisement. So, it is characterized by two lenses connected to software in the PC that allows it to detect gaze reaction times and understand points of interest. There is little research integrating this technique, mostly belonging to neuroscientific research, whose purpose, however, is to integrate the results acquired by this hardware with heart rate results and reduce emotion to just biology. Unlike VR, which uses qualitative data, eye-tracking uses quantitative data, in the form of seconds, to be integrated with other data, as by itself it could only give us how often one dwells on an image and for how long. So, two tools that are certainly useful, perhaps to be further explored later, but still allow researchers to initiate noninvasive laboratory research. Moreover, they are the only two tools that can allow a perfect transdisciplinary integration between the two sciences, it is also possible to place alongside these tools classical survey techniques, to be used as control tools aimed at containing error, such as questionnaires. There are a

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number of them; we will elaborate on two of them later; among the best known are the Hogan Evaluation Test and the Incipit Association Test. Before proceeding with the concept of neurosociology and, more importantly, with the analysis of the possible methodology to be applied in this field, it is useful to point out the difficulties that exist and the error into which several neuroscientists have fallen, including Rizzolatti. To conclude this paragraph, it is good to highlight the latest advertisement that Meta decided to send, which reads “The metaverse will have a positive impact in the field of education, which is why we are helping to develop it. The metaverse is a virtual space but its impact will be real”. It is clear that these tools, in addition to being possible means through which to analyze outcomes, must be investigated as social objects. We will need to be ready to respond to these new challenges, analyzing all objects that arise, both the overt and the covert, generating new analyses that are beyond mindless attacks but are projected toward openness to new knowledge.

5 Problems and Questions About the Use of These Tools What we have seen so far, however, concerns the ‘positive’ aspects of the use of this instrumentation, certainly hardware and software capable of helping the researcher towards the challenges that the virtual and non-­ virtual world suggests to us, but we must not forget that there are not only these elements. In fact, the use of these instruments could bring with it a series of problems, linked above all to the use of the data that are collected. In fact, most of the research using this hardware belongs to the biomedical and neuroscientific fields, so, in addition to the data that they manage to detect through the visor and eye-tracking, variation in heart rate and variation in blood pressure are added. These two data, according to the scholars, are the only ones that give an idea of the subject’s situation at a precise moment in time. However, the setting of this research is strongly influenced by biological legacies, so they are not able to return the cultural aspects, but only the biomedical aspects. Thus, the first

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problem lies in how to use the qualitative data that VR and eye-tracking tools manage to return. A first hypothesis, insofar as there are no certainties, is that these tools can contribute to developing new awareness in social researchers, especially due to their ability to be transformable and constructible. Specifically, their high functionality will enable researchers to recreate ideal-typical situations, which will allow users to freely express themselves in another world with given-world situations. In this way, it will be possible to observe actions and responses during encounters in the metaverse. This could certainly provide insight into the processes of social transformation, but it would be difficult to generalise data without it being accompanied by other means of verification. Therefore, the idea could be to accompany open-ended interviews, e.g. using Grounded Theory, or tests of image association with one’s own culture. This could limit errors and generate a hypothesis for the first issue. The second issue, however, concerns the context. In fact, generating research in the laboratory, for sociology, could be quite unusual and above all risky. First of all, the context in which one finds oneself, which has always been fundamental for social studies, would be constructed ad hoc, simulating settings and situations, as well as possible role assumptions and interactions, but always constrained within a room. This could compromise, on the one hand, the actions performed by the user of these tools and, on the other, generate a sort of awe and sense of constraint in participating in a forced interaction. For this reason, one could opt, once again, for Grounded Theory. Thus, not forcing any interaction, but rather waiting for the eventual interaction, so that where it takes place it will be analysed, as important data, in its entirety, on the contrary, should the interaction not take place due to embarrassment or refusal on the part of the users, this will still be a fundamental data to be investigated with the same interest. Obviously, those listed here are only two of the innumerable problems that could occur, interested is certainly the possibility of applying these hypotheses. In fact, the third problem, outside the field and outside the investigation itself, concerns costs. It is not always possible to meet the excessive costs involved in equipping a real laboratory. Not so much for the purchase of the equipment, but for their programming. Most probably we will need a person who has the ability to programme virtual rooms to be adapted to a VR, just as we will need a lot of time to be able

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to make a working virtual prototype. Certainly the road is long and winding, but at the same time it is our duty to attempt it, as has happened in other disciplines, knowing how to integrate neuroscientific studies with sociological knowledge. A note in the margin of this paragraph, to be underlined, is offered to us by two studies, the first is an exploratory survey by De Silvio, investigating the negative implications that this technology could have on people and, consequently, on research (De Silvio, 2018; Ventura et al., 2017). The second is offered by ISTUD, in the publication of the proposal to use VR as a tool to support hospitalised patients and to be activated within the Italian National Health Service. So, on the one hand a warning, on the other a hypothesis of help. Beginning with the negative aspects, it should be emphasised that De Silvio brilliantly outlined a number of negative aspects, including social isolation; sensory isolation; overestimation of one’s abilities; desensitisation and, finally, commercial manipulation (De Silvio, 2018). Social isolation could cause a sense of alienation and isolation due to the excessive immersiveness of visors and eye-tracking. Even, the effects that Covid, during the lockdown, left behind could be reflected in society. In other contexts, and to expand on what De Sivlio argued, there could also be an excessive fidelity with these machines, generating a real search for the ‘other world’, the virtual one to be precise. Sensory isolation, an even more complex element than the first, concerns the physicality of the person. In fact, the eyes and hearing are completely occupied by the visor, so the user will not be able to perceive the reality of real life, generating a real isolation, disconnecting from one world and connecting to another. The overestimation of capabilities includes all those actions that a person can perform in the virtual world. These, of course, will be simplified with respect to reality, they will not involve fatigue, nor a sense of tiredness, thus a real cancellation of physical sensations, in order to turn on and amplify psychological sensations. This exposure, if prolonged, could generate an erroneous perception of reality, overestimating one’s physical capabilities and believing one can do in the real world what one does in the virtual world, with extreme ease.

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Desensitisation implies a gradual loss of sensitivity in the real world. For example, one gets used to certain actions, such as war scenes, becoming less sensitive in reality by not perceiving the real physical and emotional pain that a real situation brings. Not so much for the purchase of the equipment, but for their programming. Most probably we will need a person who has the ability to programme virtual rooms to be adapted to a VR, just as we will need a lot of time to be able to make a working virtual prototype. Certainly the road is long and winding, but at the same time it is our duty to attempt it, as has happened in other disciplines, knowing how to integrate neuroscientific studies with sociological knowledge. A note in the margin of this paragraph, to be underlined, is offered to us by two studies, the first is an exploratory survey by De Silvio, investigating the negative implications that this technology could have on people and, consequently, on research (De Silvio, 2018; Ventura et al., 2017). The second is offered by ISTUD, in the publication of the proposal to use VR as a tool to support hospitalised patients and to be activated within the Italian National Health Service. So, on the one hand a warning, on the other a hypothesis of help. Beginning with the negative aspects, it should be emphasised that De Silvio brilliantly outlined a number of negative aspects, including social isolation; sensory isolation; overestimation of one’s abilities; desensitisation and, finally, commercial manipulation (De Silvio, 2018). Social isolation could cause a sense of alienation and isolation due to the excessive immersiveness of visors and eye-tracking. Even, the effects that Covid, during the lockdown, left behind could be reflected in society. In other contexts, and to expand on what De Sivlio argued, there could also be an excessive fidelity with these machines, generating a real search for the ‘other world’, the virtual one to be precise. Sensory isolation, an even more complex element than the first, concerns the physicality of the person. In fact, the eyes and hearing are completely occupied by the visor, so the user will not be able to perceive the reality of real life, generating a real isolation, disconnecting from one world and connecting to another. The overestimation of capabilities includes all those actions that a person can perform in the virtual world. These, of course, will be simplified

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with respect to reality, they will not involve fatigue, nor a sense of tiredness, thus a real cancellation of physical sensations, in order to turn on and amplify psychological sensations. This exposure, if prolonged, could generate an erroneous perception of reality, overestimating one’s physical capabilities and believing one can do in the real world what one does in the virtual world, with extreme ease. Desensitisation implies a gradual loss of sensitivity in the real world. For example, one gets used to certain actions, such as war scenes, becoming less sensitive in reality by not perceiving the real physical and emotional pain that a real situation brings.

6 The Trans-disciplinary Error in Empathic Conception One of the biggest mistakes, not in terms of concepts but in terms of modalities, made since 2010 has been to bring the sociological concept of empathy into a reductionist key. The reason for this lies in Giacomo Rizzolatti’s words given during an interview and which became part of his book “Specchi nel cervello” (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2019). In fact, after describing mirror neurons and their functionality, he states that: “mirror neurons would also underlie empathy, that is, the ability to relate to others, to understand them, to sympathise with their sufferings and joys. In every action, beyond what one does, what counts is the intention, why one does it’ (Rizzolatti, 2018; Kosasi et al., 2019). Almost as if the sociological concept of empathy had been transformed into ‘stepping into the shoes of others because our brain tunes into that of those around us’. Undoing the emotional compartment behind it. In this regard, Rizzolatti asserts, in the same interview, that ‘you don’t really empathise with everyone around you. You can, be generous to the poor and put black people into slavery. Treat your fellow citizens with consideration, and barbarically kill foreigners. Be an exemplary husband and father, and rape other women’ (ibid). In this regard, the spontaneous question is, do mirror neurons work intermittently? The answer to this question, for Rizzolatti, can be read as yes, but under certain conditions,

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and he answers this question in a broad sense, starting from the concept of criminality: ‘one must distinguish between two different types of criminality. That which occurs by impulse, and in this case mirror neurons usually have nothing to do with it, the cause is in the underdeveloped frontal lobes, which are unable to curb violent impulses (Pizzo Russo, 2009; Rizzato & Donelli, 2013; Schamsa, 2020). On the other hand, there are people who take pleasure in doing evil, in killing, and this may be due to a lack of empathy, due to indifference towards the suffering of the other, who is not experienced as equal, as a participant of the same human species. The mirror neuron tells me: you and I are the same thing (Neiman, 2002; Schamsa, 2020). “But if for various reasons, which can also be cultural, the other loses the connotations of a human being, becomes a thing, an animal, then you can exterminate him without remorse, without even considering that you are doing harm, as you would kill a mosquito that bothers you” (ibid.; McMahan, 2002). Another example of a transdisciplinarity that does not belong to Sociology, and consequently to Neurosociology, is that based on certain calculations of various mental elements. For example, Billeke, in the text Neuroscience and Social Science. The missing link (Billeke et al., 2017), argues that, in the same way that behavioural economics has used insights from psychology to develop more “realistic” models of individual decision-­making, in which people often did things that were not in their best interests, evidence from neurobiology presents an additional challenge to the standard of economic and social assumptions. Thus, evidence from neuroeconomics indicates that decision-making is far from being a unitary process (a simple matter of integrated and consistent utility maximisation), suggesting instead that it is driven by the interaction of multiple systems or processes (ibid.). This ranges from the basic dual-process approach that has influenced our general understanding of human cognition and behaviour beyond Descartes Error (fast/hot form and slow/cool processes, automatic vs. controlled) to more complex multiple-systems approaches to social behaviour and social decision-making. Steinbeis (Steinbeis et al., 2012), for example, shows that behavioural inhibition, modulated by the neuroanatomical development of cognitive control systems, plays a crucial role in the implementation of fair behaviour in bargaining games (ibid.). The authors argue that one of the most relevant

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facts of the neurobiological state that has a decisive influence on decision-­ making is human development. The maturity of different brain systems in different timelines generates different behavioural manifestations that are characteristic of a specific age. “This is true not only during childhood and adolescence, but also for the elderly where pathological neuronal degeneration is expected. As far as early research on human development is concerned, one of the most intriguing human social phenomena is the ability to read the minds of others, known as “mentalization” or “theory of mind”” (Billeke et al., op. cit. p. 27). This ability has been described as one of the main landmarks in social development because it enables children to handle more complex social interactions. Where, the ability to attribute and ultimately understand the thoughts and feelings of another person is described as a distinctive human trait, it is clear that we are in the midst of biological theory. However, the authors add, the mechanism by which this capacity emerged has been the subject of much controversy. Developmental analysis of human social functioning is a useful tool for understanding how social skills are structured. This analysis reveals that the development of social skills is not an all or nothing type of outcome (ibid.). Arguing, even, that it is instead an interactive specialisation involving both the association of a skill with a brain system and the specialisation of this function in interaction with others. In this context, one of the main drivers of this idea is the need to anticipate and predict the behaviour of others, which is crucial for both primates and human survival. “Certainly, the neonatal ability to discriminate a relevant biological agent seems to be co-ordinated with, firstly, a guarantee that the partner is actually a living being and, secondly, that this living being is actually human. Since human children are born prematurely, their extreme dependence puts them at greater risk; therefore, they must draw the attention of the partner directly to them in order to modify the performance of others to obtain what they need to survive” (ibid., p. 28). It almost seems, that the path taken is that of the possibility of a human ability to ‘read minds’, which would derive from all those earlier stages of social development as a guarantee of survival, since it constitutes a specialised competence in social prediction. Within the essay, the authors go on to argue that the early stages of social development are the building blocks in which further social skills are grown. Certainly, the only way a

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human child can survive is in the existence of another being who can provide food, water, etc. One of the tests carried out is on infants, whose trials have shown that young children are able to discriminate the different perceptual signs that indicate the existence of a social agent. For instance, they are able to identify points that emulate coherent biological movement, face-like patterns and direct gaze as opposed to lying faces and can even mimic the basic movements of another human being (ibid.). Claiming that “from 2 months of age, infants show a preference for looking at the eyes rather than at the mouth or body. This preference also describes a process of specialisation in 3-month-old children, who prefer eyes only when they are accurately positioned in the upper part of the facial configuration rather than positioned in another facial position. All these results are showing that there is an ontogenetic orientation towards social agents, which seems to be in an increasing process of behavioural and neural specialization” (ibid., p. 30; Kristen-Antonow et al., 2015). All these results, according to the authors, are showing that there is an ontogenetic orientation towards social agents, which seems to be in an increasing process of behavioural and neural specialisation. Indeed, comparative studies between premature and full-term infants and between subjects of different ages underline the role of experience in the refinement of brain functions. From biological movement detection to imitation and face-like stimuli and direct gaze preference in infants, human social development appears to be organised to detect, understand and ultimately predict and manipulate the social agent. There is currently a broad interest in combining evidence from different fields to better understand complex social behaviour. However, the studies just seen show that not all integrations between the social and natural sciences can be taken into account by Sociology. For the authors, however, such research can justify as many as five conclusions, namely: 1. Social decision-making can be understood as an algorithmic process that must necessarily be contrasted with real decision-making data. 2. In this algorithmic process, human beings take into account multiple motivators (parameters), in which self-interest (well-being/survival) and the preferences of others (valuing others’ processing) are the most relevant.

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3. The ways in which these motivators are finally integrated depend heavily on the neurobiological organisation of multiple (non-­ unitary) systems. 4. The neurobiological system (understood as neurophysiological states and traits) implies both a general and a variable organisation. 5. Variations in these neurobiological systems (not just a black box) depend at least on ontogenic (evolutionary) states, contextual constraints and individual predispositions (ibid.). Finally, we argue that there is currently a great need to work on the definition of common concepts in order to bring together dispersed perspectives. Through this chapter, we intend to generate a conceptual bridge between knowledge inputs from psychology, neuroscience and economics. This is by no means a comprehensive theoretical framework, but rather a starting point for building common conceptual framings in order to enhance an interdisciplinary dialogue. In this way, we expect to be able to address difficult and unanswered questions about our surprising and, at the same time, conflicting social behaviour (ibid.; Astington & Gopnik, 1991). The fear of trans-disciplinarity between sociology and neuroscience lies entirely in these, few, jokes. And indeed, one should not be complacent, a new ‘socio-biology’ could be generated, but one must also consider the other side of the coin. Today, sociology is ready to take on a new discipline, characterised by sociological cultural background and the advancement of studies on mirror neurons. In this regard, reformulating Rizzolatti’s conception of empathy, we could say that empathy is the basis of social life. It is, as Martin Buber8 (1925) argued, that which enables the I-Thou relationship,9 i.e. between two different but equivalent subjectivities, to be realised, as opposed to the I-Bone, where the other is a mere object. We should, therefore, ‘act’ as soon as possible, helping neuroscience and bringing back a concept as important as it is necessary, to sociology, or rather neurosociology. Perhaps before the new reductionist studies, on which  Martin Mordechai Buber è stato un filosofo, teologo e pedagogista austriaco naturalizzato israeliano. 9  Ossia il rapporto che unisce il singolo individuo agli altri (Crespi, 2002). 8

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Rizzolatti is working, can circulate the notion that mirror neurons could be activated or deactivated by cultural factors. Therefore, thinking, for example, of the attitude towards animal movements, which have changed our perception of the suffering of mammals and fish, we could try to explain how this mechanism occurs and how culture acts on mirror neurons. The first attempts in this direction were made by David Franks, who provided a solid philosophical framework for recent developments in trans-disciplinarity, starting precisely between neuroscience and sociology (Franks, 2010). He writes: ‘Among Mead’s close allies at the University of Chicago is the preeminent American pragmatist of the first half of the twentieth century, John Dewey. Dewey’s conception of philosophy is both naturalistic and transdisciplinary. These two aspects of his thought provide a solid anchor point for addressing this significant cultural problem of the conflict between the humanities and the sciences’ (Franks & Turner, 2013, p. 84). This is a problem that shows itself in different forms. The conflict between the sciences and the humanities is at root a social and educational problem about communication. This conflict is implicated in a broader philosophical question of how to reconcile the image of individuals in the world produced by science and the image produced by the humanities (Sellars, 1963; Arendt, 1963). This reconciliation process, however, has mainly been treated as a linguistic problem, paying little attention to the experiential contexts in which the specialised language in a field such as sociology, where it has developed, been used and modified (Franks & Turner, 2013). When considering the experiential context, this conflict between neuroscience and sociology is seen as cultural and/or social. The problem of reconciliation is a consequence of inadequate representationalist theories that aim for absolute truth. Once the experiential context is incorporated, as in the pragmatic theory of truth, the reconciliation problem is overcome through a transdisciplinary reconstruction project of phenomena (ibid.). Dewey’s approach suggests that our actions have much to do with how we perceive ourselves and those around us. But the transdisciplinary approach becomes crucial, especially in answering questions about the mechanisms of our brains. For example, what mechanisms in our brain enable us to fit smoothly into a social group? The only answer, which goes beyond simple interdisciplinarity between sciences, is that the field of cognitive

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neuroscience, combined with sociology, has provided new insights into understanding social exchanges. Although many networks are involved in social understanding, one important neural network is the mirror neuron system (ibid.). This discovery has prompted a widespread effort in understanding how our actions play a role in understanding the actions of others. This line of research is in fact immersed in a broader theory, known as embodied cognition, in which higher cognition and our own thoughts are rooted in our bodily actions and experiences (ibid.). However, except for this example of Franks, who uses a transdisciplinary approach in his literature, the other examples would be misleading. Inasmuch as, increasingly the transdisciplinary approach between various sciences and sociology, they result in a reductionism that historically has created great problems for the sociological branch, just think of the example of sociobiology. So, the key thing is not to merge two sciences, seemingly far apart, but to draw useful insights from them to understand what one can give to the other, going to investigate and not to assert with absolute certainty, without eagerly seeking that absolute truth that is the object of other sciences. The examples of transdisciplinary errors are many, and the road taken with Neurosociology has not yet fully started. Obviously, the work to be done will be long and arduous, but the certainty is that continuing with a true transdisciplinary approach, and not the result of a mere amalgamation of sciences to make sociology abandon its original field, is the best way forward to date. Sociology is mature enough to reap great benefits, and neuroscience is mature enough to reap useful insights. In the following, we will take a closer look at one of the few important works on transdisciplinarity, which Elisa Magrì and Dermot Morgan (2018) have done starting with Edith Stein (Magrì & Moran, 2018).

7 Transdisciplinarity, from Risk to Opportunity What has been analysed in these last pages, however, should not discourage. On the contrary, it is necessary to build on this in order to create new awareness of these instruments. In particular, the underlined risk can

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become an opportunity if applied within a trans-disciplinary process, which does not imply the affirmation of one discipline over another, but rather unites and goes beyond the various reductionisms. To do this, we need to examine the literature of the philosophy of Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl, in fact, it is possible to find a large number of articles on the transdisciplinary relationship between the sciences starting from the analysis of communities. Rereading it all from the perspective of the relationship between sociology and social neuroscience. Husserl, together with Adolf Reinach,10 gave Stein a phenomenological framework within which he could develop his unique treatments of empathy, intersubjectivity and social and political ontology (Magri & Moran, 2018). Community is a central theme for both, and Scheler elaborates on many of Stein’s claims during his early social ontology (Stein, 2000). Unlike Husserl and Reinach, Scheler addresses Stein’s work directly in his books, particularly in the 1923 text The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler, 1923, p. 18). Stein sees community as developing from a particular experience of meaning or significance, namely solidarity, in which an individual lives and grasps the life of another person: individuals collectively have an experience, an experience that we, Stein, call Gemeinschaftserlebinis. Scheler, on the contrary, argues that Stein’s view of community is too rooted in understanding, ultimately ignoring the role of the feeling of comrades, which he conceives of as a vicarious feeling of togetherness that makes both ethics and community possible (Magri & Moran, 2018). For Stein, the lived experience of community is related to but distinct from the intersubjectivity rooted in empathy. Empathy is a sui generis mental act that allows one to understand the mind of another (Stein, 1917). The gist of Stein’s discourse is based on the principle that an individual, through internal and external perception of himself, others and reality in general, forms an understanding of himself in relation to himself, others and the world (ibid.). Stein, in this context, gives the example of the encounter of several disciplines, an open transdiscipline. In the analysis of internal and external perception, she provides insight into what joy is in general and how it appears, for instance, especially when expressed in front of another person. Although it is not 10

 Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach was a German philosopher, phenomenologist and legal theorist.

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overtly mentioned, transdisciplinarity is strong, at least what emerges from it today. Indeed, it is intertwined with various studies, philosophy and sociology being the overarching subjects, but we may even find links with current neuroscience. A number of recent works have emphasised precisely this aspect, including Matthew Ratcliffe’s11 “Rethinking commonsense psychology” (Ratcliffe, 2007), in which he rethinks commonsense psychology, offering a detailed critique of the widespread philosophical dogma that humans understand each other through “folk psychology” (ibid.). Drawing on a range of traditions, including Stein’s rich cultural conjunctures, and recent findings in psychology and neuroscience, Ratcliffe not only refutes the dogma, but replaces it with a novel vision. It will be necessary to rethink common sense psychology for philosophers of psychology, developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists. Furthermore, empathy is analysed as playing a central role in aesthetics, in understanding our engagement with works of art and fictional characters. Thus, a clear understanding of empathy is offered, which starts from the transdisciplinarity of scientific and humanistic research. Maibom’s12 work (2014, 2017) is another example of this. Already as a lecturer, Maibom takes a transdisciplinary approach by working on discourses of popular psychology within which sociological studies of empathy, including Stein’s, and psychopathy from clinical psychology converge. For example, within Empathy and Morality, Maibom analyses the centrality of empathy to morality, which is hotly debated. Many religious and philosophical traditions have favoured empathy, sympathy or compassion as the key to moral thought, conduct or motivation. David Hume, for example, thought that the pains and pleasures of others moved people only because they could feel what they felt through communication. In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the idea that empathy or sympathy is fundamental to judgement and moral motivation, but the view is increasingly attacked. Empathy is so morally limited, some argue, that researchers should focus their attention  Matthew Ratcliffe is a researcher in philosophy at New York University Ratcliffe, 2007).  Heidi L. Maibom is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. She studied at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna, and University College London, and has held fellowships at Cambridge and Princeton Universities. He works on folk psychology, empathy, responsibility and psychopathy (Maibom, 2020). 11 12

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elsewhere (Cohon, 2004). However, it is difficult to deny the importance of the human capacity to feel with and for others. Finally, another approach that emphasises the strong transdisciplinarity implied by Stein, lies in Zahavi’s 2014a work in which we find accounts of empathy found in Lipps, Scheler, Stein and Husserl: Zahavi argues that the latter three scholars offer a model of empathy that is not only markedly different from Lipps’, but also differs from the current dominant model, inherently having a current transdisciplinary approach, despite the years of their publication. Empathy, however, firstly allows one to understand what it is to the other, so as to experience joy internally and psychically, and secondly, it allows one to understand the relationship between cause and effect that determines the psychic experience of joy, for example, a particular event that produces joy (Stein, 1917, p. 49). In the text Phanomenologische Psychologie, Husserl writes: “The intentionality in the ego that leads to the extraneous ego is so-called empathy” (Husserl, 1913a, b, p. 321). This is also the view of Stein, who repeatedly argues that empathy rather than being a distinct and specific emotion (such as embarrassment, shame or pride) is the name for a form of sui generis generality directed at other living subjects (Stein, 2000, p. 68). Thus, for Stein, empathy is generally the chosen term for the experience (Erfahrung) of foreign consciousness (ibid., p. 10). It is the basic cognitive source for our understanding of foreign subjects and their experiences, and it is what more complex types of social cognition are based on and presuppose (ibid., p. 4). One of the recurring questions that continued to preoccupy both Husserl and Stein was how to understand the intentional structure of empathy. The answer given by both Husserl and Stein is that empathy is both similar to and different from perception. Empathy is different from perception in that it does not give us its object, the empathic experience, originally. There will always remain, and by necessity, a difference in sensitivity between what I am aware of when I empathize with the other and what the other is experiencing (Zahavi, 2014a). “Indeed, what distinguishes empathy is precisely that the empathized experience is given as belonging to the other. However, although empathy differs from perception by not giving us the object originally, it resembles perception insofar as its object, say, the empathized pain or anguish, is given directly, unmediated, and non-inferentially as present here and now” (Stein, 2000,

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p. 5; ibid.). Accordingly, Stein contrasts empathy with a more cognitive understanding of the other’s experience that understands the foreign experience without grasping it directly. “This might happen, for example, if someone wrote to me and informed me that they were sad (Zahavi, 2014a). On the basis of this information, I could then grasp his state of mind, but his sadness would not be perceptually given to me” (ibid., p. 92). In the latter case, “we would be dealing with an indirect understanding of the other that is derived from and refers back to empathy understood as a basic experiential understanding of the other’s experience” (ibid., p. 26; Zahavi, 2014b). “Not surprisingly, in Husserl we find rather similar considerations. In Ideen II and elsewhere Husserl distinguishes two different attitudes we can take toward the other, one naturalistic and one personalistic. In the naturalistic attitude, the other is given in a twofold step as a composite entity” (Zahavi, 2014a, p. 135). First, the body of the other is given to us as a material unit and functionally dependent and situated in this material object, the experiential life of the other is then placed as a grounded layer. Husserl then contrasts this attitude, which is prevalent in the psychological sciences, with the personalistic attitude, which is the attitude of our everyday life and which is the one he assumes to be the most fundamental (ibid.; Zahavi, 2014b). In this attitude, the other is from the outset given in a unified way as a person, rather than as a composite of two externally intertwined or causally related entities (Husserl, 1913a, b). “When I meet the other in the personalistic attitude, when I see the other dancing, laughing or discussing something, I do not see a conjunction of two realities, but an expressive unity. I do not see a mere body, nor through the body do I mean an attached mind. I see a human being” (ibid.; Zahavi, 2014b). More specifically, Husserl talks about how the other’s mentality, thought, feeling, desire, are intuitively present in gestures, intonation and facial expressions. Indeed, the other’s expressiveness is imbued with psychological meaning from the very beginning (Husserl, 1913a, b; Maibom, 2017), and, according to Husserl, it is precisely empathy that enables us to comprehend and understand this psychological meaning (ibid.). In places, Husserl writes that empathy is a distinct and direct type of empirical experience, one that allows the empathic ego to experience the consciousness of the other (Husserl, 1907, p. 187). Husserl further states that

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empathy is what allows the other to be present to us, perceptually present (Husserl, 1973, p. 514), and that the other is originally given to me in empathy, because what I see is not a sign, not a mere analogue, but rather the other (Husserl 1907, 1913a, b). Similarly, Husserl speaks of how the other is given in its being-for-me (fur-mich-sein) in empathy, and how this counts as a form of perception (Husserl, 1973, p. 352). At the same time, however, Husserl also insists that even the most perfect perception of another’s psychic life lacks the originality of self-perception. Empathy cannot give us the empathic experience itself in its original presence (Zahavi, 2014a). However, Stein’s analysis of empathy reveals two important facts. First, there is a fundamental experience of properties that are constitutive of the person. Christof Betschart13 notes that Stein distinguishes two types of personal individuation: numerical and qualitative, or material (Magrì & Moran, 2018). The first is the property, or more simply the self (Selbstheit) that belongs to the realm of the pure ego, or subject. Consciousness is structured in such a way that it is always around a zero pole of fundamentally egoic orientation. It can distinguish itself as here and not there and as separate and distinct from other objects and persons. The latter type of individuation occurs within and through the development of the personality core: Stein is a strong advocate of psychic individuation (as was Scheler). Here, the psyche is not only influenced by internal and external circumstances, but also develops a character and uniqueness of the person that comes to express itself in the world and with others. Betschart notes: “Two individual streams of consciousness of two human persons can never be identical because it is impossible for two people to have the exact same position in space at the same time and, consequently, each person has a unique and personal history” (Betschart, 2015, p. 76). Secondly, “empathy reveals, as we saw earlier, a body-­ psyche-­spirit unity that constitutes the human person. This unity can only be experienced from within and is highly individuating: the unity does not transcend the space and embodiment of a single person, although one can see the unity operating in others through empathy” (Magrì & Moran, 2018, p. 157). Internal and external perceptions, knowledge of  Christof Betschart is Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Teresianum Theological Faculty in Rome (Betschart et al., 2020). 13

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self and other, acquired through empathy and all collective experiences are manifested within the basic structure of the ego (ibid.). Stein criticises Scheler’s notion of a neutral flow of experience from which the individual flow of the ego crystallises. She observes: “If we take [Scheler’s] discussion of a neutral stream of experience seriously, we cannot conceive how differentiation can occur in this stream. But such a flow of experience is an absolutely impossible notion because every experience is by nature an experience of the “I” that cannot be phenomenally separated from the “I” itself. It is only because Scheler fails to recognise a pure “I”, always taking “I” as a “psychic individual”, that he speaks of an experience present before the “I” is constituted” (Stein, 1917, p. 28; Polak, 2023). We may not be aware of the functioning of the pure ego or personality, especially in natural attitude, mass imitation or intense emotional experiences, but the ego continues to serve as the foundation of all experience, a foundation that continues to function even though we may not be fully aware of it (Magrì & Moran, 2018; Scalambrino, 2020). “To see his work, we need epoché and phenomenological reduction, both of which Scheler is very reluctant to admit. As evidence of the fundamental property of all experience, we can discuss the individuated body of each person. The lived body is not a theme that Scheler develops significantly in his own work, but it is fundamental to Stein” (ibid., p. 158). From what emerges, it is clear that there is a great deal of important transdisciplinary work in Stein’s rich analysis, but, as Magri and Moran also point out, there are, in this regard, two fundamental experiences of the body and sensations, which indicate the irreducibility of the course and the ego, unifying psyche and spirit. Almost as if we wanted to emphasise this strong transdisciplinarity, bringing together sociology-psychology-philosophy, today we could easily add social neuroscience to this list. “The living body (Leib) is not given to me by external perception. Rather, the material body (Körper) is given to me in this way, because when I turn my head and look at my hand, I see a hand extended in space that possesses certain dimensions. As long as I can see and touch, my material body is given to me as an object. “As long as my eyes are open”, it is constantly there with a constant intrusiveness, always having the same tangible closeness that no other object has. It is always “here” while other objects are always “there”” (ibid.; Overall, 2017; Calcagno, 2023). Thus, in the words of the

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two authors, sensations are peculiar in that they do not radiate from the pure ego as in the case of acts of judgement, will and perception, as sensations do not take the form of a cogito in which the ego turns towards an object. Sensation is, therefore, localised in a certain space somewhere at a certain distance from the ego. One can never find the ego in this space through reflection; however, this space is not an empty space (ibid.). “As long as my eyes are open, it is constantly there with a constant intrusiveness, always having the same tangible closeness that no other object has. It is always “here” while other objects are always “there”” (Stein, 1917, p. 42). Stein, without the use of modern neuroscience, was able to affirm, confirmed by some modern studies by Rizzolatti although she does not speak of consciousness but of mirror neurons, that in sensation there is a distance between the ego and the space in which the sensation is located in consciousness. This distance is mediated by the ego as the zero orientation point. In the cogito, the ego is immediate, pure, whereas in the sensation of coldness, the sensation of coldness is not rooted in the ego as the zero point of orientation; it is rooted elsewhere like the foot, the leg, etc. (Magrì & Moran, 2018). Thus, we know the experience of ‘hardness’ specifically localised and more general. Stein’s analysis of the ego, the lived body and how it experiences sensations, indicates a brilliant example of transdisciplinarity, as well as a fundamental property that can never be set aside in future studies. Even the idea of solidarity could be analysed in this way, e.g. feeling a sense of solidarity, being in solidarity, with another, through the construction of a collective sense, of an experience of deconstructing the classical communitarian processes, although never being able to fully identify, remaining in a kind of Weberian idealtype. Scheler’s reluctance to deal with the lived body and the individuation it presupposes, as discovered in Stein’s treatise on empathy, demonstrates the impossibility of an authentic identification, without the necessary tools and without the deepening of this transdisciplinarity, but revealed, not due to the authors’ demerits, but rather due to the absence of a term to identify this, the entire process of empathic experience. Before concluding, however, it is useful to dwell on one last passage. We analysed, earlier in this text, how Franks’ Theory of Mind was modified for a reductionist, biologically-based approach, but the discussion now leads us to reflect on this theory from an empathic point of view. Indeed, starting from the

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assumption that there is currently no consensus among the sciences as to what empathy is, what we find in contemporary debate is only a multitude of competing definitions. One way of mapping some of the central options was provided by Heather Battaly14 (1969) in a 2011 article. In her reconstruction, the three main positions are as follows (Zahavi, 2014a): 1. “Some conceive empathy as a sharing of mental states, where sharing means that the empathiser and the target must have more or less the same kind of mental state” (Battaly, 2011, p. 290; Zahavi, 2017). For this reason, empathy does not imply knowledge of the other, it does not require the other to have the mental state in question. Various forms of contagion and mimicry accordingly count as prime examples of empathy. 2. “Others argue that empathy requires both sharing and knowledge. Thus, it is not sufficient that there be a correspondence between the empathiser’s mental state and the target, the empathiser must also cognitively assign or attribute the mental state to the target” (ibid.). Insofar as empathy in this sense requires a certain cognitive understanding and differentiation of self, low-level simulation such as mimicry and contagion are excluded. 3. “Finally, there are those who emphasise the cognitive dimension and argue that empathy does not require sharing, but simply refers to any process by which one comes to know the other’s state of mind, regardless of how theoretical or inferential the process might be” (ibid.). As far as one can judge, Battaly’s tripartition does indeed capture the currently dominant positions, phenomenologists, however, give a fourth option: for phenomenologists, empathy is not simply about having the state of mind (as in contagion), nor is it about literally sharing the state of mind with someone else (which they consider something beyond the empathic recognition of one’s own state of mind of the other), nor is it simply about abstractly attributing a certain state of mind to another. “Rather, and I repeat, for phenomenologists empathy is quite generally the term of choice for the experience of extraneous consciousness. It is  Heather Battaly is a philosopher (Battaly, 2011).

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a distinctive form of intentionality directed towards the other, distinct from both self-consciousness and ordinary object intentionality, that allows foreign experiences to reveal themselves as foreign rather than as one’s own” (Zahavi, 2014a, p. 139; Cameron et al., 2019). Contrary to some current proposals, none of the phenomenologists would accept the claim that we can only empathise with affective states, rather they would use empathy to refer to our general ability to access the life of the mind of others in their expressions, expressive behaviour and meaningful actions (ibid.). We can see the other’s elation or doubt, surprise or attention in their face, we can hear the other’s trepidation, impatience or amazement in their voice, feel the other’s enthusiasm in their handshake, catch their mood in their posture and see the determination and perseverance in their actions. Therefore, we should not forget that we also express or manifest our mental states by acting on them (ibid.). Empathy, in the theory of mind, must be understood as experience, the experience of the embodied mind of the other, an experience that, rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other-experience, considers asymmetry a necessary and persistent existential fact. Consequently, one cannot empathise with unfamiliar experiences. The meaning of empathic experiences differs from the meaning of first-hand experiences. Empathic experiences are given as belonging to another; they are given as being experienced in the first person by that other. “In this sense, the phenomenological analysis of empathy is in perfect accord with that tradition’s focus on and respect for the primordial character of Consciousness” (ibid.; Ingerslev, 2020). Indeed, there may be a certain affinity between the phenomenological account of empathy and what Philip Robbins and Anthony Jack have referred to as adopting the phenomenal attitude, i.e. viewing the other as a locus of phenomenal experience (and not simply as a system of intentional states) and having some appreciation of the qualitative and hedonic character of the other’s phenomenal states (Robbins & Jack, 2006). One way to further emphasise the distinctiveness of the phenomenological proposition is with the so-called simulationist proposition, according to which empathy implies a simulation rather than a projection routine, i.e. empathy is regarded as a projective process that centrally involves the imaginative adaptation of another person’s point of view, or at least some form of inner

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imitation (Goldman, 2006; Stueber, 2006). As we have already seen, phenomenologists explicitly and repeatedly reject the idea that imitation is the paradigm of empathy. Goldman’s view might argue that such an account merges empathy with other types of interpersonal understanding and, in the end, due to an incomprehensible Cartesian inheritance, disregards the fact that we can experience feelings from other minds. Interestingly, empathy is taken to play a role when it comes to answering both types of questions. What is particularly highlighted by Husserl and Stein’s analyses is that empathy operates along a continuum. At one end of the scale, empathy is understood as a basic sensitivity to the mentality of others. However, it can also provide us with a more specific experiential understanding of the other’s psychological life. The main objective was to highlight some of the insights that can be gleaned from a transdisciplinary exploration. Such insights are relevant to the contemporary discussion on social cognition. These include an emphasis on the multifaceted nature of interpersonal understanding, a recognition of our basic sensitivity to the mindset of others, and, of course, a highlighting of our experiential understanding of the foreignness of the other’s consciousness (Zahavi, 2014a). Consequently, we should be wary of any theory that claims that our understanding of others is merely a matter of biological input. Sociology needs as much transdisciplinarity as possible in this field, keeping the aim to cover the variety of skills and strategies we draw on and employ to understand and make sense of others. In other words, phenomenologists do not claim that all forms of social cognition involve or can be explained by empathy. They do not deny that, in some cases, we rely on imagination, memory or theoretical knowledge when attempting to understand others (ibid.). Indeed, if we really want to understand what other sciences are doing, we should go beyond a narrow focus on the interaction between other sciences and sociology. As, the risk of reductionist contamination would be high. In short, no one disputes that we must go beyond what is directly available if we wish to reach deeper levels of interpersonal understanding (ibid.). In the contemporary debate on empathy, one can encounter distinctions between mirror empathy, motor empathy, affective empathy, mediated perceptual empathy, reactive empathy and cognitive empathy, to name but a few. Given the polysemous character of the notion of empathy

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(and also the fact that not all phenomenologists were equally happy using the term) one might naturally wonder whether it would not be better to simplify the meaning of empathy into a single explanation, so as to encapsulate it all under one definition.

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Billeke, P., Soto-Icaza, P., Aspé-Sánchez, M., Villarroel, V., & Rodríguez-Sickert, C. (2017). Valuing others: Evidence from economics, developmental ­psychology, and neurobiology. In A. Ibáñez, L. Sedeño, & A. García (Eds.), Neuroscience and social science. The missing link (pp. 20–45). Springer. Bird, A. (2007). Perceptions of epigenetics. Nature, 447, 396–398. Bravetta, H. (2019). Your brain on learning. Taken from chief learning officer: https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2017/04/06/37963/ Calcagno, A. (2023). Building a meaningful social world between human and companion animals through empathy. In O. Christine (Ed.), Pets and people: The ethics of companion animals (New York, 2017; online ed.). Oxford Academic, 16 Feb. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780190456085.003.0003. Accessed 19 June 2023 Camerer, C. (2008). Neuroeconomics: Opening the gray box. Neuron, 60, 416–419. Cameron, C. D., Hutcherson, C. A., Ferguson, A. M., Scheffer, J. A., Hadjiandreou, E., & Inzlicht, M. (2019). Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 148(6), 962–976. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000595 Cattaneo, S. (2018). Neuroscience and education: The role of emotions. EAS, 25–30. Cerulo, K. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38, 115–132. Choudhury, S., & Slaby, J. (2012). Critical neuroscience: A handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience (Edited jointly with S. Choudhury). Wiley-Blackwell. Churchland, P. (1989). Neurophilosophy. Toward a unified science of the mind-­ brain. MIT Press. Cohen-Chen, S., Pliskin, R., & Goldenberg, A. (2020). Feel good or do good? A Valence–Function Framework for Understanding Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(4), 388–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0963721420924770 Collins, H. (1983). The sociology of scientific knowledge, studies of contemporary science. Annual Review of Sociology, 265–283. Cooter, R. (2014). Neural veils and the will to historical critique: Why historians of science need to take the neuro-turn seriously. Isis, 105, 145–154. Crespi, F. (2002). Sociological thinking. il Mulino. De Silvio, A. (2018). Realtà virtuali: Aspetti positivi e implicazioni negative. Università degli Studi di Bologna.

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Duque, D., Turner, J., Lewis, R., & Egan, E. (2010). Neuroanthropology: A humanistic science for the study of the culture-brain nexus. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 138–147. European Science Foundation. (2020). ENSN. Taken from European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN): http://archives.esf.org/ coordinating-­research/research-­networking-­programmes/social-­sciences-­soc/ current-­r esearch-­n etworking-­p rogrammes/completed-­e sf-­r esearch-­ networking-­programmes-­in-­the-­social-­sciences/european-­neuroscience-­and-­ society-­network-­ensn.html Fitzgerald, D., & Callard, F. (2014, January). Social Science and Neuroscience beyond interdisciplinarity: Experimental entanglements. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(1), 3–144. Franks, D. (2010). Neurosociology the nexus between neuroscience and social psychology. Springer. Franks, D., & Turner, J. (2013). Handbook of neurosociology. Springer. Galimberti, U. (2018). New dictionary of psychology, Psichiatria Psicoanalisi, Neuroscienze. Feltrinelli. Gallo, G. (2020). Transdisciplinarity and global challenges. Taken from Transdisciplinarity. http://pages.di.unipi.it/gallo/ScienzaePace/Transdiscipli narity.html Goldman, A. (2006). The simulating mind. Oxford University Press. Hackett, E., Amsterdamska, O., Lynch, M., & Wajcman, J. (2007). The handbook of science and technology studies. MIT Press. Husserl, E. (1907). Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen (Trad. In. 1972 ed.). Springer. Husserl, E. (1913a). General introduction to pure phenomenology. Biblioteca Einaudi. Husserl, E. (1913b). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Trad. 2002 ed.). Einaudi. Husserl, E. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Springer. Hyman, S. (2009). How adversity gets under the skin. Nature Neuroscience, 241–243. Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2017). Affective neuroscience and education. Raffaello Cortina Editore. Ingerslev, L. R. (2020). Inhibited intentionality: On possible self-understanding in cases of weak agency. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 558709. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.558709 Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981). The manufacture of knowledge. An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Pergamon.

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Kosasi, S., Kasma, U., Vedyanto, V., & Susilo, B. (2019). The mediating role of intention to use e-commerce adoption in MSMEs. IEEE, 29–34. https://doi. org/10.1109/ICORIS.2019.8874923 Kristen-Antonow, S., Sodian, B., Perst, H., & Licata, M. (2015). A longitudinal study of the emerging self from 9 months to 4 years of age. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 789. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00789 Lobbestael, J., & Cima, M. (2021). Virtual reality for aggression assessment: The development and preliminary results of two virtual reality tasks to assess reactive and proactive aggression in males. Brain Sciences, 11(12), 1653. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11121653 Lynch, M. (1993). Scientific practice and ordinary action, ethnomethodology and social studies of science. Cambridge University Press. Magrì, E., & Moran, D. (2018). Empathy, sociality and personhood. Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations. Springer. Maibom, H. (2014). Empathy and morality. Oxford University Press. Maibom, H. (2017). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge. Maibom, H. L. (2020). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge. May, C. (2002). The information society. A Sceptical view. Cambridge University Press. McMahan, J. (2002). Killing, in the ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life. Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/0195079981.003.0003 Nature. (2012). Life stresses. Nature, 490–143. Neiman, S. (2002). In heaven as in earth. Philosophical history of evil. Laterza. Nicolescu, B. (1996). La transdisciplinarité, Manifeste (Trad. it. 2014 ed.). (E. Bambara, Trad.). Éditions du Rocher. Niculescu, A., van Dijk, B., Nijholt, A., Li, H., & See, S. L. (2013). Making social robots more attractive: the effects of voice pitch, humor, and empathy. International journal of social robotics, 5(2), 171–191. Nicolescu, B. (2014). Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Indisciplinarity, and Transdisciplinarity: Similarities and Differences. RCC Perspectives, 2, 19–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26241230 Niewohner, J. (2011). Epigenetics: Embedded bodies and the molecularisation of biography and milieu. BioSocieties, 279–298. Piaegt, J. (1971). L’épistémologie des relations interdisciplinaires. Archives de Philosophie, 141–144. Pinker, S. (2013). Science is not your enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians. Tratto da Science Is Not Your Enemy. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-­not-­ enemyhumanities

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Pizzo Russo, L. (2009). I know what you feel. Mirror neurons, art and empathy. ETS. Polak, R. (2023). Values: A controversial concept. Outline of the problem and interdisciplinary approaches. In R. Polak & P. Rohs (Eds.), Values - politics religion: The European study of values. Philosophy and politics - critical explorations (vol. 26). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31364-6_2 Prigogine, I. (2004). Interview with Ilya Prigogine (P. Odifreddi, Interviewer) Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking commonsense psychology. A critique of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulation. Palgrave Macmillan. Reichertz, J. Z. (2006). Akteur Gehirn oder das vermeintliche Ende des handelnden Subjekts, Eine Kontroverse [The brain as social actor – or the alleged end of the acting subject. A controversy]. VS-Verlag. Rinaldi, A. (2009). Homo economicus? EMBO Reports, 823–826. Rizzato, M., & Donelli, D. (2013). Io sono il tuo specchio. Neuroni specchio ed empatia. Amrita. Rizzolatti, G. (2018, Maggio 2). Giacomo Rizzolatti: Mirror neurons and empathy (V. Kasam, Interviewer). Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2019). Mirrors in the brain. How we understand others from the inside. Raffaello Cortina Edizioni. (Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Robbins and Aydede, op. cit. In P. Robbins & M. Aydede (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition (pp. 35–51). Cambridge University Press. Robbins, P., & Jack, A. (2006). The phenomenal stance. Philosophical Studies, 59–85. Rose, S. (2006). The future of the brain: The promise and perils of tomorrow’s neuroscience. Oxford University Press. Scalambrino, F. (2020). Ambivalence and the borderline position in the existential-phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: On being and having a body-in-theworld from primal ambivalence to intersubjective ambiguity. In B. Brogaard & D. E. Gatzia (Eds.), The philosophy and psychology of ambivalence: Being of two minds. Routledge. Scheler, M. (1923). The nature of sympathy (Trad. It. 2008 ed.). Transaction Publisher. Sellars, W. (1963). Philosophy and the scientific image of man. In W. Sellars (Ed.), Science, perception and reality (Trad. It 1991 ed., pp. 1–40). Ridgeview Publishing Company. Shapin, S. (1995). Here and everywhere, sociology of scientific knowledge. Annual Review of Sociology, 289–321. Shamsa, T. N. (2020). Consapevolezza. L’equilibrio tra l’anziano e il mondo sociale. SUPSI.

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Singh, I. (2012). Human development, nature and nurture: Working beyond the divide. BioSocieties, 308–321. Soriano, C., & Valenzuela, J. (2009). Emotion and colour across languages: Implicit associations in Spanish colour terms. Social Science Information, 48(3), 421–445. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018409106199 Stein, E. (1917). Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Reprinted München: Gerhard Kaffke Verlag, 1980) (W. Stein, Trans.), On the problem of empathy (3rd Rev. ed.). Springer. Stein, E. (2000). Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 27–30. Steinbeis, N., Bernhardt, B., & Singer, T. (2012). Impulse control and underlying functions of the left DLPFC mediate age-related and age-independent individual differences in strategic social behavior. Neuron, 1040–1051. Stueber, K. (2006). Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology, and the human sciences. MIT Press. Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen. Simon & Schuster Tyng, C. M., Amin, H. U., Saad, M. N. M., & Malik, A. S. (2017). The influences of emotion on learning and memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1454. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454 Ventura, V., Urbano, V., Ferraro, E., & Cianciaruso V. (2017). La realtà virtuale come supporto per lo sviluppo della sostenibilità dell’efficienza del SSN. ISTUD. Von Scheve, C. (2013). Sociology of neuroscience or neurosociology? Advances in Medical Sociology, 2–28. Waxman, S. (2018). Sage Pub. Taken from The Neuroscientist (NRO): journals. sagepub.com/home/nro Yestherapyhelps. (2019). Neuroeducazione: apprendimento basato sulla neuroscienza. Tratto da Yestherapyhelps: https://it.yestherapyhelps.com/neuroeducationneuroscience-based-learning-11444 Zahavi, D. (2014a). Empathy and other-directed intentionality. Topoi, 129–142. Zahavi, D. (2014b). Phenomenology of empathy, in self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199590681.003.0010 Zahavi, D. (2017). Phenomenology, empathy, and mindreading. In The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge.

4 Possible Integrations Between Sociology, Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience

For decades, there has been a clash between the sciences, with numerous attempts to assert themselves over the other on issues such as morals, ethics, emotions and actions. Today, on the contrary, it is noticeable how the sciences, more often than not, work in concert, with the aim of achieving a result, which is as broad and defined as possible. Within this chapter, we will attempt to explore various points of connection that the sciences have and could have. Various previously conducted research will be used as examples and, above all, a way of integrating different data from different sciences will be proposed. Admittedly, this is a complex piece of work to explain in one chapter and would certainly deserve more in-depth study, but it is an attempt to highlight the difficulties and try to overcome them. This is because, at least until a few years ago, a number of sociologists were convinced that neuroscience was incompatible with sociology. This is certainly due to what happened in the middle of the last century, when sociology’s greatest battle was waged against the reductionism of sociobiology. But recently, a new type of approach has been found, one that does not embrace scientistic universalisms, but rather different sciences. At first glance, this new approach has found fertile ground in neuroscience, which has very frequently dialogued with cognitive psychology, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6_4

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capturing the attention of academia and beyond. At this point, the question that arises is, but is such a dialogue possible in sociology? In what fields and, above all, how could social neuroscience make contributions to sociological studies? In this chapter, therefore, we will try to give some answers, and identify the mistakes that have been made in the past, e.g. by sociobiology, not to be repeated.

1 How Social Neuroscience Can Contribute to Social Analysis In order to answer the question posed in the introduction to this chapter, it is necessary to emphasise that, in addition to the study of empathy, disciplines such as social psychology, sociology of health and medicine, economic sociology and cultural sociology are, at first glance, the subjects most involved in a preliminary process of transdisciplinarity. Although, thanks to the interactions that general sociology has with each of them, the entire sociological field constantly benefits from them. However, before proceeding, it will be useful to review the words on Empathy and Ethics, from a sociological perspective, uttered by David Franks (1963) within the aforementioned Handbook of Neurosociology, in order to understand how the interaction between the disciplines can take place and how to avoid the mistakes made in the past (Franks & Turner, 2013). He argues that “in the mid-1970s, Amitai Etzioni (1929) upset much of sociology by arguing that a culture could be detrimental to human nature and thus to its people. The idea that human beings had no nature and were infinitely flexible had become axiomatic since the popular writings of anthropologists such as Clyde Kluckhohn (1944) and Ashley Montagu (1967). It was thought that making such negative judgements about a culture was nothing more than parochial ethnocentrism. Behind this statement was the old Enlightenment idea that the human mind was a blank slate written by experiences that differed fundamentally from culture to” (Haferkamp & Smelser, 1992; Franks & Turner, 2013, p. 99). Universal ethical issues, to specify this concept, focus on which forms of murder are considered murder and which forms of sexual intercourse are

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considered incest. Other universal issues concern the obligations of childcare, what constitutes telling lies and what it means to break promises, and the elements of family loyalty. Regardless of the variety of interpretations a culture may make, every culture deals with ethics. For a more positive approach, we can turn to Frans de Waal and his arguments in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009). Here we find more direct tendencies, not only in us but also in mammals and primates in general. Indeed, the ethical part of our empathic nature emerges not only from the fact that we are social subjects to the core. However, he takes great care to balance empathy with the dark side of animal and human behaviour. Into this balance comes Jonathan Turner’s argument that people derive from a grumpy and relatively isolated ape who had weak bonds with others (Turner, 2000). As has been established, sociology and neuroscience have largely evolved independently of each other, with little or no cross-reference to each other’s problems, models, research, empirical findings or even terminology. This lack is understandable given the disciplinary focus, although there are several examples, at the time multidisciplinary, that we could cite, they range from Durkheim and Simmel to Mead to Goffman and Giddens, who were modelling the social causes and intentional contexts of individual and collective behaviour (Gerhardt, 1971; Appelrouth & Edles, 2012; Calhoun & Virk, 2012); Kolb’s1 (1984) and Whishaw’s2 (1939) critique of social psychology also extends to other sociological analyses, in fact, its focus on abstract constructs becomes a fundamental historical problem. Since psychological (and sociological) constructs were developed in the absence of an understanding of their neural mechanisms, and vice versa, the terms and concepts of the two domains are unlikely to exhibit simple isomorphism (Berntson, 2006; Kolb & Whishaw, 2009). On the contrary, the decisive agenda of neuroscientists from Galen to Vesalius and from Willis to Sherrington was shaping the

 Bryan Edward Kolb is a Canadian neuroscientist, neuropsychologist, researcher, author and educator. Kolb’s research focuses on the organisation and functions of the cerebral cortex (Kolb, 2020). 2  Ian Quentin Whishaw is a Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the understanding of cortical organisation and its relationship to stroke, Parkinson’s, spatial navigation and behaviour (Whishaw, 2020). 1

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neuroanatomy and neurophysiology3 of the central and peripheral nervous system, both animal and human (Clarke & O’Malley, 1996; Finger, 2001; Catani & de Schotten, 2012; Swanson, 2015). However, although historically social sciences and neuroscience travelled in their respective orbits, there was always a common gravitational centre around which they revolved, namely the human brain. Consequently, sociologists and social scientists in general, as well as neuroscientists, share at least one working hypothesis. Of all the various internal structures that define our neurophysiology, thinking, planning, decision-making and acting overlap with the computational and neuronal architectures of our brains. But, more recently, cognitive and social neuroscience includes social contexts in the modelling of cognition (Robbins & Aydede, 2009; Clark, 2011; Semin et al., 2013; Gianotti, 2017). The uncritical assumption that social sciences and neuroscience represent radically different disciplinary and explanatory frameworks is belied by the literature of the last decade in cognitive and social neuroscience (Cacioppo et al., 2006; Franks, 2010; Decety & Cacioppo, 2011; Todorov et al., 2011; Carlston, 2013; Schutt & Seldman, 2015). There is a serious problem with this approach, namely that of conceptual vocabulary, which in these disciplines historically, theoretically, and methodologically will most likely not share common meanings or references. Indeed, “traditionally, what constituted social cognition for sociology and psychology was operationally defined independently of brain-based models of human cognition” (Tibbetts, 2004, p. 4). Given the traditional social-scientific focus on modelling human behaviour (cognitive, motor or social), a behavioural strategy was operationally, observationally and quantitatively grounded. In contrast to introspective psychology and a priori speculation. Tibbetts himself argues that a gestalt explanatory shift has recently been made towards models of perceptual and social cognition, where ‘neuro’, behavioural and socialised variables are seen as multiple and interdependent parameters in the definition and modelling of social cognition (Tibbetts, 2014). Regarding

 Neurophysiology is a branch of biology and in particular human physiology that studies the functioning of neurons and neural networks (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 3

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these multiple parameters, Ochsner4 and Kosslyn,5 editors of the recent Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience, note that social neuroscience and social cognitive neuroscience have adopted the same kind of multi-level, multi-method constraints and convergence approach embodied by cognitive neuroscience, a kind of first step towards a common vocabulary. Moreover, each of these fields draws on and builds, at different levels, on the methods and models developed within what we can now call ‘classical cognitive neuroscience’ (de Haan & Gunnar, 2009; Ochsner & Kosslyn, 2014). In this regard, social cognition6 and the problems related to its conceptualisation need to be explored. In fact, Keenan in an article based on the relationship between neuroscience and social science argues that the latter, today, tend to focus on the complex interplay of biological and social forces. This is evident when taking into account research on self-­awareness and social cognition, which not only shed light on how we interact with others, but also offer us some insights into the deeper questions of human nature and consciousness (Keenan et  al., 2011). However, modelling social cognition is difficult given the highly abstract nature of this concept (ibid.). Furthermore, there is considerable controversy in the social neuroscience literature regarding the level of neurological architecture and information processing on which to model social cognition. Theoretically, this concept could be modelled on molecular, cellular, neural, computational, cognitive and behavioural circuits and systems, arranging these different levels hierarchically from micro (molecular) to macro (behavioural) (Ochsner & Kosslyn, 2014). “In a sense, translating explanations from one level to the level immediately below, for example, social cognition into computational language, is a relatively conservative conceptual move” (Keenan et  al., 2011, p. 322). The real problem is the complexity of the concept at the moral level, where social cognition is only mapped onto the supposed neural architecture at the micro level. A possible clue to ‘unpacking’ this concept  Kevin Ochsner is Professor of Psychology at Columbia University (Ochsner, 2020).  Stephen Kosslyn is an American psychologist, neuroscientist and learning science expert (Kosslyn, 2020). 6  Social cognition currently corresponds to the most accepted scientific paradigm in social psychology and consists of the mental activity by which we come to know the social world (Bertoux, 2017). 4 5

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can be found in the neuroscience literature. For example, Ochsner and Kosslyn (2014) note that neuroscientists have learned to “fractionate the processes that give rise to specific subtypes of abilities”. “That is, instead of mapping the memory of the general category, neuroscientists map sub-­ types such as short- and long-term memory, declarative memory, episodic memory, semantic, working, motor and so on” (ibid.; Dickerson & Eichenbaum, 2009; Camina & Güell, 2017). An interesting issue, as well as intrinsic to the phenomenon just described, is the extent to which the neurological modelling of sociological concepts depends on certain factors, such as symbolic, explanatory and question-related context. For example, models of social behaviour range from the dynamics of interactions located in individual and small groups, families, neighbourhoods, communities, to local, national and global organisations (Tibbets, 2015). With the possible exception of individual behaviour and dyadic or even triadic interactions as Simmel describes them, it is far from obvious how the social dynamics of larger units can be mapped neurologically. Furthermore, there is the complex problem of modelling the intentional and social contexts of social cognition, one example being body movements. From a sociological point of view, but not only, it makes little sense to analyse this behaviour only in neurological and physiological terms without reference to intentional and social contexts. Neuroscience can map motor control, rather than the spheres of the brain that are activated when one acts, but this context alone would not be able to explain what an action symbolises, such as the meaning of a greeting, a farewell, a military salute, a question or a request for help, all of which fall within contexts of intentions and social cognition (ibid.). Moreover, in mapping socio-cognitive enquiry onto that of social cognitive neuroscience, one must first decide which level of analysis is appropriate and, this, depends entirely on the questions asked and explanations sought. But under no circumstances should we forget that social cognition is only partly dependent on the physical and computational architectures of the brain, as the brain does not compute in a cultural, social or environmental vacuum. Indeed, Semin, echoing Robbinson and Aydede in part, argues that “while computational architecture and processing algorithms may well be genetically programmed in all animals, in humans what the brain is

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processing depends largely on the broader historical, intellectual, cultural, and material contexts of social cognition” (Semin et  al., 2013, p. 640; Robbins & Aydede, 2009). Thus, neurology is joined by a missing dimension derived from traditional sociological models of social cognition. For Brother, rather than talking about social cognition, we could define it as closed, understood, as the author himself points out, as a dynamic entity defined by its transactions with the rest of the world. Like industrial regions, theatre districts and seaports, minds are best characterised by reference to the broader forms of life in which they play a role (Brothers, 1997). At the intersection of contemporary neuroscience, Tibbets asks a very profound question: how do brains create minds? This question, for obvious reasons, cannot be answered given the deep historical affinity of the conceptual mind with Cartesian rationalism, as we saw towards the end of Chap. 1. Ryle7 (1949) concluded that, ‘on the model of Descartes, the mind is simply a “ghost in the machine”, a relic of mind-body, mind-brain dualism. However, the dimension of consciousness of this Cartesian mind, i.e., perceptions and thoughts are my perceptions and thoughts, and it is an I or self that thinks, continues to baffle some neuroscientists’ (Ryle, 1949, p. 79). Tibbets himself argues that if the conceptual issues associated with self-awareness were of interest only to historians of seventeenth century philosophy, then we could ignore them here and move on. However, with the neurosociological turn and in contemporary neuropsychology, the self is again a pivotal concept. For example, as self-evaluation, self-­ awareness, self-deception, self-esteem, self-recognition, self-awareness, self-referral, self-regulation, etc. However, there is another discipline that participates in this contemporary dialogue regarding the concept of the self, a discipline that encompasses that identified by Tibbets, i.e. the philosophy of mind, but of a more general nature, namely neurosociology. In fact, this science focuses on aspects dear to Mead, on the one hand, and aspects related to cultural development in relation to the sciences of the brain, on the other. A transdisciplinary character aimed above all at understanding, on a large scale, what the individual does, as well as what he thinks about doing, in a circle that includes associationism, groups  Gilbert Ryle è stato un filosofo britannico (Ryle, 2014).

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and, above all, interaction. The latter is a key element in initiating empirical research in neurosociology. In Tibbets’ brilliant text, it is pointed out that there is also a Cartesian Theatre metaphor advanced by Dennett, in which perceptual inputs are supposed to be projected onto an internal screen in the head, a kind of ‘mental observation’ of oneself. Thus the Cartesian theatre can be a comforting image, as it preserves the reality/ appearance distinction at the heart of human subjectivity (ibid.; Dennett, 1991). Dewey (1938) anticipated the, aforementioned, theatre metaphor in his critique of Descartes. In fact, he argued that mental life is ‘not a theatre for the display of independent autonomous faculties’. Hence, by employing the metaphor of cognition as art, Dewey characterised ideas as intellectual tools and, in turn, cognitive processing as a bodily activity based on problem-solving, a physiological anticipation of what might occur when this or that idea is implemented (ibid.; Dewey, 1938; Gallagher, 2009). However, as evident in the cited literature, a growing number of sociologists are extending bridges of dialogue with other sciences (Decety & Cacioppo, 2011; Decety & Christen, 2014). “As sociologists and social scientists, perhaps it is time for us to explore our current assumptions and explanatory models in light of the multidisciplinary framework of a social neuroscience” (Tibbets, 2015, p. 10; The Forecasting Collaborative, 2023). Perhaps, precisely, through Neurosociology. Another element, aimed at fully understanding this discussion, is to introduce the contribution of economics to sociology.

2 Transdisciplinarity Between Economics and Sociology One of the most successful transdisciplinary aspects in the history of sociology, though never highlighted in these terms, is the continuous dialogue that economics has had. Economic sociology, born in the early twentieth century, has two moments of particular importance, one in the thirty years between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the other after the 1970s. The goal of economic sociology is to combine analyses of economic interests with that of social relations. In the 1980s,

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economic sociology had an increase in interest, thanks mainly to the work of Mark Granovetter’s8 (1985). The problem of embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985). According to Granovetter’s thought, economic sociology must deal with the fundamental topics of economics and not limit itself to the marginal aspects. The embeddedness approach to the problem of trust and order in economic life, therefore, makes its way between generalized morality and the subsocialized one of impersonal institutional arrangements, following and analyzing concrete patterns of social relations. “Unlike either alternative, or the Hobbesian position, it does not make sweeping (and therefore unlikely) predictions of universal order or disorder, but rather assumes that the details of social structure will determine which one is found” (Granovetter, 1985, p. 493). The paradigm of modern economic sociology, however, according to the work of Richard Swedberg9 (1987), is the theory of embeddedness. He argues that all economies are embedded (embedded) in social relations, we will therefore speak of strong embeddedness. Another important element is the distinction between relational embeddedness (the ties close to the social actor) and structural embeddedness (the ties far away). The concept of interest is used as a key to economic sociology, analyzing, both the macro aspect, how institutions represent the interests of relational networks, and the micro aspect, how individual interests can be directed and satisfied through the economy. However, without falling into scientistic approaches, we could safely argue that the new era of economic sociology is neuroeconomics. Approached, for the past few years, with various research present. So, while economics studies economic choices and decisions of large groups of individuals or individual households or firms, neuroeconomics analyzes the mental processes that accompany personal choices (Camerer et al., 2005). “In the present day, neuroscience, is that set of disciplines whose object is the study of the brain and central nervous system in  Mark Granovetter is an American sociologist who started the New Economic Sociology. He is currently the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences while previously teaching at Northwestern University, Stony Brook University, and Johns Hopkin University (Granovetter, 2021). 9  Richard Swedberg is a Swedish sociologist. He has worked in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University since 2002 (Swedberg, 2021). 8

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humans, and which has begun to provide the first tools for directly measuring people’s thoughts and feelings. Through a series of increasingly sophisticated and less and less “invasive” measuring instruments, we are now able to “observe” signs of brain activity in experimental subjects during the performance of both cognitive and motor tasks, and also during the imagination of particular motor or cognitive acts” (Babiloni et  al., 2007, p.  5). So, we might think that Neuroeconomics could fully fall under neurosociological topics, just as economics is for sociology. To best analyze this discipline it is useful to specify the two approaches that seem to excel in it, on the one hand the behavioral approach and on the other the experiential approach. The behavioral approach argues that consumer behavior is induced by environmental stimuli and denies relevance to the individual’s mental and cognitive processes: it merely relates the stimulus to the response and proposes tools for managing this relationship (ibid.). The experiential approach analyzes the affective and emotional component of consumption processes, however, has not yet produced unified models or interpretative schemes (Dalli & Romani, 2000). According to such models, we can see how each individual is subjected to thousands of daily stimuli, where “a large part of the messages to which the individual is potentially exposed is not received either because they are dissonant or because they are too weak or endowed with little perceptual emergence; a part may not be decoded and therefore be without consequence; a part finally is decoded and becomes part, at least temporarily, in the form of learning, of the psychological field” (Fabris, 1968, p. 72; Babiloni et al., 2007). One should know that there are filters, barriers, to entry that reject most of these signals. These latter, identified as “external stimuli, are from the 5 senses. […] If they arouse interest or are consistent with the individual’s codes, they pass into sensory memory, where the stimulus has a very short duration, a few seconds. In the presence of attention and interest, sensory memory stimuli then pass into short-term memory also called working memory where they can last for about 20–30 seconds” (Babiloni et  al., 2007, p.  38). These techniques, used for the most part in the advertising field, increase what is conditioning toward a product. However, these mechanisms can also be applied to emotions, an example being associating a product with an event, something that for the consumer has strong affective

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resonances. Obviously, conditioning requires strong repetition of stimulus-­response associations. “But keep in mind, that the stronger a stimulus is the more quickly it exhausts its effectiveness and must be replaced with an equivalent stimulus” (ibid., p. 40). This happens depending on the outcomes of the activated behavior.

3 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Psychology and Sociology That said, the next step within this work is to understand how empathy, understood as the transformation of our emotions into altruistic actions, can fit into this discourse, avoiding falling into error as has happened in many other disciplines. In addition to the ability to understand the mental states of others, it is possible to empathize with others, that is, to share one’s feelings and emotions in the absence of any emotional stimulation directed at oneself. Humans can feel empathy for other people in a variety of contexts: for basic emotions and feelings such as anger, fear, sadness, joy, and grief, as well as for more complex emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, and love (Keen, 2006; Jankowiak-Siuda et  al., 2011). Influenced by models of motor behavior perception and imitation, Preston and de Waal (Preston & de Waal, 2002) proposed a neuroscientific model of empathy, suggesting “observation or imagination of another person in a particular emotional state automatically activates a representation of that state in the observer with its associated autonomic and somatic responses” (Singer & Fehr, 2005, p. 4). The term “automatic,” in this case, refers to a process that does not require conscious and strenuous processing, but can still be inhibited or controlled. Brain-imaging studies, conducted in the past two years, have begun to investigate the brain activity associated with various empathic responses in the areas of touch, smell and pain. Such reading, in some respects, of the mind and analysis of empathy are two lines of research that have recently emerged in social neuroscience. Although these abilities appear to rely on different neural circuits, both concepts actually share common features. Both enable individuals

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to represent other people’s states such as other people’s intentions, beliefs and thoughts, or, again, their feeling states based on emotions and sensations (ibid.). These abilities enable people to predict the behavior of others and, thus, help them achieve their individual goals. An important feature of the mechanisms described is that, these mechanisms, are primarily based on “automatic” processes. We represent the goals of others in the terms of our own goals, without even being aware of them. Without thinking, others’ perceived feelings automatically activate brain networks that also represent our own feeling states; we automatically share others’ feelings (Bock & Goode, 2008). Therefore, since our feelings and emotions are important determinants, our behavior can be automatically independent of each other unless we inhibit others’ impulses. For example, Singer’s study suggests that there are individual differences in empathic abilities (Singer et  al., 2004). Thus, the hypothesized link between empathic abilities and prediction of other actors’ motivations and actions suggests a testable prediction: people with stronger empathic abilities are better predictors of others’ motivations and actions. Empathy is, of course, a topic that has interested many disciplines, such as philosophy and psychology, and has recently attracted much attention in neuroscience (ibid.). The research undertaken by neuroeconomics attempts to clarify the theory of economic decision making. However, in economics this path has been regarded as a kind of forcing, distancing specific interests hitherto explored in depth by economists. In fact, in the latter, purely selfish or, at best, autonomous individuals are considered. Whereas in the neuroscientific relationship, agents might care about the betterment of both “others” and themselves, but their consumption or status, becomes only one of the subjects of their preferences. Sometimes preferences regarding other considerations are not simply related to the welfare of specific others, but may include more general concerns, such as aversion to inequality (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999). However, it should be noted that, in a sense, this idea is at odds with empathy as generally conceived. For, in this perspective, one is not concerned with the situation of another individual, but with the state of the population with respect to oneself (Kirman & Teschl, 2010). This, most likely, cannot be equated with the original idea of empathy; the risk would be to standardize a behavior within empirical research. However, as is well known, bias could also be

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produced. But what is important in this context is that exponents of different disciplines conducting these experiments acquire a common pool of knowledge (ibid.). Or rather, to generate a shared vocabulary and dense interfacing among the various disciplines using neuroscience.

4 Transdisciplinarity Between Social Neuroscience, Cultural Sociology and Sociology The transdisciplinarity between Social Neuroscience and Sociology, can contribute to cultural sociology, but to take advantage of such contributions, it is necessary to develop coherent positions at the ontological level and, above all, coherent epistemological visions related to transdisciplinary relations in the sciences (Edelman, 1992; Damasio, 1994; Damasio, 1999). Crucial to the relationship between sociology and cognitive neuroscience has been the delimitation and development of the sociological project since its inception. Especially was this the case in the French, British and American disciplinary branches, given their more explicit commitment to naturalism (Turner, 2007). Most of the founding figures in French and American sociology, as well as American pragmatists and institutional economists, have addressed issues relevant to the interface between sociology and cognitive neuroscience (Boudon, 2011; Clément, 2011). For example, during their careers, “Durkheim and Mauss were interested in the relationship between the social and the cognitive (Lizardo, 2009; Ignatow, 2012; Lizardo et al. 2019); Tarde used insights from psychology to understand how beliefs, desires, and practices propagate in society (Turner, 2007); Mead (1922) developed an account of the origins of meaningful symbols with a solid foundation in developmental and confrontational psychology (Mead, 1922); Veblen (1898) grappled with the implausible psychological assumptions of neoclassical economists. Using the concept of “double consciousness,” Du Bois (1897) articulated the psychological consequences of “being a problem.” Pareto, too, was interested in affective (not logical) influences in human action, and even Weber (1913) considered sociology to be

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inquiry-based, about the subjective meanings of actors and their assignment to other components of action” (Turner & Factor, 1994, p. 48–67). In cognitive science, the general trend has been to bridge the gap that traditionally separates psychological and neuroscientific models of cognitive phenomena (Edelman, 1992; Clark, 1997; Damasio, 1999; Thagard, 2008a, b). “Today, the transdisciplinary of cognitive neuroscience is the zone of exchange within which psychological research meets neuroscience; the explicit goal is the development of unified theories—intervals of vocabulary, underlying structures and processes—of the mind-brain, which would complement, and at some point replace, explanations based on psychological descriptions of cognitive phenomena by grounding them in physical (i.e., realizable) neural mechanisms” (Lizardo, 2009, p.  4; Huang et  al. 2016). Cultural sociologists, interested in whether there can be a productive transdisciplinary relationship here, need to clarify what philosophical commitments are relevant. As researchers interested in substantive issues, they may be skeptical about what is gained from philosophical reflection or from making usually implicit commitments more explicit. Lizardo argues that these reflexive considerations could be interesting, as they allow us to discover which positions are compatible with a productive exchange between the two fields, thus making the acceptance (or rejection) of relevant ideas, a matter of principle (Lizardo, 2014). The primary philosophical position underlying the cognitive neuroscientific project is the psychoneural identity hypothesis (or mind/brain identity theory), this implies that states and processes potentially describable in psychological language are (kind of ) identical to states and processes describable in neural language (Sperber, 1987). “For some sociologists of culture, allegiance to physicalism may seem stronger than it is, in that it may bring to mind the specter of materialism, an anti-culturalist position that has been the focus of much debate until it was finally superseded” (Lizardo et  al., 2019, p.  5). Modern physicalism has little to do with naive forms of materialism that claim to make cultural explanation superfluous. Instead, a modern physicalist position is perfectly compatible with consideration of a robust role for emergent sociocultural processes in interacting with cognitive and neuroscientific mechanisms (McCauley & Bechtel, 2001). The only commitment required by physicalism is fidelity to some form of naturalism (Sperber, 1996). In other words,

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explanations in the physical, biological, cognitive, and social sciences should strive to be co-extensive and draw on the same underlying ontology (Ignatow, 2014). Picking up on Thagard’s words, we could argue that “these philosophical questions as a way of signaling that any response to the relevance of cognitive neuroscience for cultural sociology involves taking positions that are consistent at the level of ontology and concerning the proper set of relationships between different scientific fields” (Thagard, 2008a, b, p.  7–8). This requirement refers to fundamental issues concerning the relationship between sociology and adjacent disciplines such as psychology, problems that have plagued the field since its inception. For example, any consideration of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to cultural sociology would be controversial if one were to maintain an “autonomist” position that sociology is independent of any “lower level” analysis corresponding to individuals, persons, interaction or minds (Black, 2000). “Our view is that research and theory in cultural sociology are dependent on cognitive neuroscience findings, but only moderately so. In principle (and in practice) it is possible to be an expert in cultural sociology without paying attention to fundamental principles concerning how cognitive phenomena are realized in the brain” (Lizardo et al., 2019, p. 7). However, scholars cannot research this field without making minimal assumptions about how human agents end up with ideas about the world or develop categories, memories, habits, frames, narratives, or worldviews (ibid.). Any influence of cognitive neuroscience in cultural sociology provides naturalistic underpinnings, which, in this case, involves admitting that the processes and mechanisms described in cognitive neuroscience are constitutive of the social actor (Turner, 2007). So, a cultural sociologist who would find himself or herself embracing cognitive neuroscience could not treat individuals as black boxes and, consequently, it would not be possible to use psychology and literary fiction as the only mode of interpretation (Lizardo et al., 2019). Rather, it would be necessary to use a transdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the interrelation or simple relationship between the sciences. As Franks notes, in Mead’s classic theory of role taking, “the actor incorporates the imagined response of the other into his or her emergent behavior” (Franks, 2013). For Mead, the medium of this incorporation is “symbolic meaning.” The mirror neuron mechanism reveals the embodied foundations of intersubjectivity, including neural self-representation, (Gallese &

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Metzinger, 2003), thus overcoming the residual scientific bias in the conceptualization of role-taking. In this account, inferences about the other’s mental state can be automatically simulated by perceptual and sensorimotor schemas acquired from worldly experience in the world (Wood et al., 2018). For example, Chartrand and Bargh (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999) refer to the automatic tendency to adopt postures and gestures through the “chameleon effect.” The fact that people can “mirror” each other and, by implication, share the same “life world” as the other person may thus depend on whether there is a common experiential history between them. The extent to which we can observe “mirroring” thus becomes an empirical question and may be related to traditional concerns with sociocultural processes that generate and perpetuate “symbolic boundaries” between groups and reinforce status hierarchies (Ridgeway, 1991; Lamont & Small, 2008). For example, Cheng and Chartrand noted that there is a greater likelihood that participants will imitate another individual if they consider him or her a “peer” rather than a “superior” (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003). This fits rather perfectly with a key observation in sociology and anthropology about the importance of ritual in producing solidarity. Certainly, Durkheim’s elementary forms are central to this tradition. In particular, he observes otherwise dispersed populations coming together, concentrating in specific places for a period, because a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without an order that allows for harmony and unison of movement, their gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity (Bellah, 2005). Similar observations are made by McNeill in Keeping Together in Time, as she refers to “muscular bonding,” in which military groups, religious groups, and social movements exploit the emotional consequences of moving “together in time” in such a way that individuals experience a “loss of boundary” or feel as if they are one body (McNeill, 1997). More recently, Summers-Effler (Summers-Effler et  al., 2014), building on Collins’10 (1998) interaction rituals, explores why social movements fail or succeed. He argues that what we tend to think of as stable groups should actually be thought of as “rhythmic patterns of organization.” The mirror system provides the neural mechanism through which to move together and in  Ronald Collins è un influente sociologo americano. È attualmente professore emerito di sociologia di Dorothy Swaine Thomas, emerito all’Università della Pennsylvania (Collins, 1998). 10

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rhythm, laying the prelinguistic foundations of solidarity (ibid.). Geertz (1973) also noted, individuals have evolved in such a way that the development of functioning neural architectures requires cultural integration. The specification of how mechanisms at the cognitive and neural levels can inform theorizing in cultural analysis, such as those mentioned earlier, are often confused, limiting it to a simple outside/inside the mind analysis. These processes, in turn, spill over into the world through bodily scaffolds; thus, proper analysis, interaction/material, generates the realization of sociocultural phenomena (Lizardo et al., 2019). For other cultural sociologists, the connections are stronger and the dependencies are clearer, such as for cultural sociologists interested in the link between meaning, action, and experience, the connection between language and cognition, or the way people are coupled through intersubjective loops of “entrainment” (Lizardo, 2009; Cerulo, 2010; Ignatow, 2012; Summers-­ Effler et al., 2014). Ignoring cognitive scientific work would, as we noted at the outset, lead to analytical pitfalls, theoretical dead ends, and misleading conclusions. This is likely to become more pressing as the boundaries between fields become more blurred and the traffic of concepts, theories and tools, in the zone of exchange between fields, becomes more intense. In this latter respect, the emerging transdisciplinarity, between sociology and neurosociology, must pose as a model of productive interchange, going to avoid any notion or attempt to become an exact science (Lende & Downey, 2012). This is an appropriate model for cultural sociologists because it is becomes a union between the pure neuroscientific side and the cultural side of sociology. Some of the leaders in the new field are qualitative sociologists, working in the field as sociological ethnographers (Wacquant, 2015). Notwithstanding the experience of neurosociology, which was relatively successful in America in 1972 but stopped there, it is important to reiterate that cultural sociology is a more complex and multifaceted area and that we could talk about multiple lines of connection with cognitive neuroscience; some of which will be stronger, others weaker (Lizardo et al., 2019). For example, it is clear that understanding the neural basis of language has implications for the growing work of cultural sociologists using automated text analysis to capture structures of meaning (Ignatow, 2015), but cognitive-neuroscientific insights may not be enough; something closer to cultural history, narrative studies, or other forms of textual interpretation of action should be

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pursued in this regard. However, to the extent that the latter, help support substantive theories about the way symbols function, the nature of meaning, language and their connection to practices (Biernacki, 2000), developments in cultural theory, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, will also indirectly influence most strands of humanistic work. In this regard, we could argue that all branches of cultural analysis, regardless of method or approach, will be affected by the neuroscientific turn, some more strongly than others. This is not bad news, since, as we noted at the outset, while not all cultural theorists or cultural sociologists need to join the social neuroscience fray, better cultural theory and cultural analysis could be the result from such an endeavor. Why not, perhaps achieved precisely through neurosociology.

5 Neurosociology as a Response to Transdisciplinary Discourses Before finally reviewing neurosociology, which has emerged several times within this text, we must ask why neuroscience, which makes up the main part of our transdisciplinary discourse, has become so important. The answer lies in the discovery of mirror neurons. To talk about mirror neurons and to analyze them is to talk about one of the most important discoveries made since the preliminary analysis in 1992 and occurred in 1995 at the University of Parma by the team of Giacomo Rizzolatti.11 The discovery of mirror neurons greatly influenced  Born in Kiev in 1937, Rizzolatti, received his medical degree from the University of Padua and specialized in neurology in 1967. He has been president of the European Brain Behavior Society and the Italian Society of Neuroscience, has been director of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Parma since 2002, and is also a collaborator at the Department of Computer Science and Neuroscience at the University of Los Angeles and at the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center of UCLA. He is believed to be the discoverer of mirror neurons, which are “motor cells in the brain that are activated during the execution of purposeful movements and also upon observation of similar movements performed by other individuals.” Rizzolatti noted their centrality both in learning by imitation and in the phenomenon of empathy. His publications include The Receptors, Somatic Sensitivity, the Thalamus, the Cerebral Cortex (1981); The Neuron, Synapses, Reflexes (1981); Lectures on the Physiology of the Nervous System (1998); I Know What You Do. The acting brain and mirror neurons (C. Sinigaglia, 2006); In the minds of others. Mirror neurons and social behavior (C.  Sinigaglia, 2007); In you I mirror myself. For a science of empathy (A. Gnoli, 2016); Mirrors in the brain. How we understand others from the inside (Meister, 2003; Carfora, 2019; Rizzlatti & Sinigaglia, 2019; Stuber, 2019). 11

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neurosociology, which we will deal with in detail in the next chapter, studies on empathy and much more. In 1995, Rizzolatti and his team demonstrated, for the first time, the presence in humans of a system of neurons very similar to that of the monkey: “Sometimes experiments produce results that deviate from researchers’ expectations. Usually the deviation is modest: the explanation of a certain phenomenon is enriched with some interesting detail, but the overall picture does not change much. If researchers are able to grasp its relevance, an extraordinary novelty emerges from the discovery born by chance, capable of opening an exciting and completely unexplored field of study” (Rizzolatti & Vozza, 2007, p. 29). The discovered system of neurons has been christened mirror neurons or mirror system, and this discovery has essentially highlighted the physiological basis of learning by imitation and, in Rizzolatti’s words above all, of empathy, as well as created new perspectives to the studies of human language (Vozza & Rizzolatti, 2007; Carfora, 2019). As stated by several neuroscientists, including Bentivoglio, mirror neurons reside in motor areas; their function is to decode the action of others, going against the idea that the motor system only produced movements. Starting from this conception and especially from the ethological approach, Rizzolatti, during his now famous research, was able to ascertain that many neurons in the motor system responded to visual stimuli (Bentivoglio, 2019). Emphasizing, precisely, that seeing a person grasp a fork makes one immediately perceive their gesture as they are neurologically programmed to do so and, therefore, an instantaneous understanding of the other occurs, without the need to bring into play higher cognitive processes. Later, denoted by the disclosed results, it was thought that the same thing could happen for emotions, e.g., disgust. Administering an unpleasant olfactory stimulus to a person, such as the smell of rotten eggs, activated certain parts of the brain, including the insula,12 a cortical area that intervenes in emotional states. The surprise was that if one looks at someone disgusted, exactly the same area of the insula is activated in them (ibid.).  The insula is a portion of the cerebral cortex that lies deeply within Silvio’s cleft between the temporal and frontal lobes. The cortical area that covers it and separates it from the lateral surface of the brain are the operculi (Latin for “eyelids”). The operculi consist of parts of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes that form a lid for the insula. 12

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In order to better analyze the mirror neuron, it will be useful to start from the research carried out at the University of Parma and then move on to an in-depth analysis of social studies. In 1995, the discovery of mirror neurons, first highlighted in the monkey, immediately suggested the idea that a similar resonance system could also be present in humans. In fact, it often happens, not only in neurophysiology, that new observations allow reinterpretation and reinterpretation of data already known in the literature. In favor of the hypothesis that the existence of a similar system was also present in humans, now known as the mirror system, were traceable in some electroencephalography (EEG) studies, conducted in the first half of the twentieth century, on the reactivity of brain rhythms during the observation of movements13 (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006; Perin, 2017). The most convincing evidence that the human motor system possesses mirror properties, however, for Rizzolatti, comes from studies of transcranial magnetic stimulation.14 TMS is a noninvasive nervous system stimulation technique and occurs when a magnetic stimulus is applied to the motor cortex, at an appropriate intensity, so that motor potentials15 can be recorded in contralateral muscles. “Since the amplitude of such potentials is modulated by the behavioral context, this technique can be used to monitor the state of excitability of the motor system under various experimental conditions” (ibid., p.  115;  Heckman, Mottram, Quinlan, Theiss & Schuster, 2009). It should be specified that these techniques did not make it possible to localize the cortical areas and neural circuits that appear to be involved and, therefore, it was impossible to identify the overall architecture of the mirror neuron system. To this end, brain  As is well known, electroencephalographic recordings make it possible to detect changes in the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain and to classify its different rhythms according to different wave frequencies: in normal adult subjects, at rest and with eyes closed, a (8–12 Hz) rhythms prevail in the posterior regions of the brain and so-called desynchronized rhythms, i.e., high-­ frequency, low-voltage rhythms, in the frontal lobe. In addition, a rhythm similar to that but localized in the central regions is often observed: the μ rhythm. This rhythm prevails when the sensory systems, particularly the visual system, are inactive: all it takes is for the recorded subject to open his or her eyes, and it disappears or fades considerably. In contrast, the μ rhythm is predominant as long as the motor system remains at rest: active movement or somatosensory stimulation is sufficient to desynchronize it (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 14  Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, TMS (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 15  Motor Evoked Potentials, MEP (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 13

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imaging techniques were used, in particular positron16 emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging,17 which make it possible to visualize in three dimensions and with considerable spatial definition the changes in blood flow determined in different regions of the brain by the execution and observation of specific motor acts, and thus to measure their respective degree of activation (ibid.). The areas consistently active during observation of others’ actions are the rostral (anterior) portion of the inferior parietal lobe and the inferior sector of the precentral gyrus plus the posterior sector of the inferior frontal gyrus. A more anterior region of the inferior frontal gyrus, as well as the dorsal premotor cortex, was also active under certain experimental conditions (ibid.). It should be recalled that as early as the beginning of the twentieth century Alfred Walter Campbell18 (1905), one of the fathers of the then nascent cytoarchitectonics, drew attention to the anatomical similarities present between the areas of the posterior sector of the inferior frontal gyrus and those of the inferior sector of the precentral gyrus, coining the term “intermediate precentral” cortex. Both electrophysiology and brain imaging studies thus confirm the hypothesis that resonance mechanisms similar to those identified in the monkey are present in humans. With some relevant differences: the mirror neuron system appears to be more extensive in humans than in the monkey, although caution must be exercised in approaching this conclusion, especially since one must keep in mind that different techniques were used for the monkey studies; on the one hand we have a recording of the activity of individual neurons, on the other hand, in humans, we find the analysis of the activation of different cortical areas on the basis of changes in blood flow (ibid.). In fact, the most important features that the mirror neuron system possesses are precisely the ability to encode transitive and intransitive motor acts and the ability to select acts, distinguishing both their type and the sequence of movements that make it up. It should be emphasized that activation of acts does not require actual interaction with objects, which are capable of activation even when the action is merely mimicked (ibid.). Experiments conducted by  Positron Emission Tomography, PET (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006).  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 18  He was considered Australia’s first neurologist (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 16

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Rizzolatti’s team have shown, moreover, that the sight of acts performed with the hand by other individuals results in an increase in evoked motor potentials recorded in the same hand muscles used by the observer to perform those acts. In fact, brain imaging research has shown that frontal lobe activations due to the observation of actions performed with hand, mouth and foot correspond to the traditional representation of the movements of those same affectors (ibid.). All this is evident in the fMRI19 experiment conducted by Iacoboni20 (1960) and colleagues, within which three different types of videos were shown to some volunteers. In the first, they were shown some objects arranged as if someone were about to consume a tea; in the second, they were shown a hand grasping a teacup with either a force or a precision grip; finally, in the third, subjects were shown the same hand with the same grips as in the second, but with the intention of picking up the cup to bring it to their mouth and drink the tea. Comparing the brain activations induced by the observation of the three scenes with respect to the baseline condition, it was found that in the case of the “action and intention” conditions there was increased activity in the visual areas and in the areas forming the parietofrontal circuits related to the encoding of motor acts, while in the case of the “context” condition this increase did not affect the regions of the superior temporal sulcus, which respond to visual stimuli in motion, nor those of the inferior parietal lobe. This was probably by virtue of the fact that the presence of “graspable” objects activated canonical neurons (ibid.; Giannasca, 2018; Rizzolatti & Fogassi, 2014; Andersen & Cui, 2009). It should be added that, as the observation of “the bringing to the mouth to drink” summarized in the third video of the experiment, results in a greater activation of the mirror neuron system than that of “the grasping to move the cup and tidy up,” for example. Of course, as with individual acts, so with intentions, motor resonance via mirror neuron system does not represent the only possible way to understand the actions of others (ibid.). As Rizzolatti repeatedly suggests, the observer’s act is a potential act, caused by the activation of mirror neurons capable of encoding sensory information in  La risonanza magnetica funzionale.  Marco Icoboni è un neurologo che ha condotto indagini sperimentali alla UCLA di New York (Iacoboni, 2008). 19 20

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motor terms and thus making possible that “reciprocity” of acts and intentions that underlies the observer’s recognition of the meaning of others’ gestures. So, by mirror (or mirror) property we mean the property that neurons have of responding both when a behavior of a certain kind is performed in the first person and when it is observed to be performed by others. Ever since the discovery of mirror neurons, the question has been raised as to whether they could be the basis of imitation, and before delving into this discussion, it is fair to point out that this term has taken on a multiplicity of different, sometimes even conflicting, meanings over time, depending on the fields of research. For this reason, it is appropriate to narrow down the range of possible meanings: the first, is the one widespread among experimental psychologists, and refers to the ability of an individual to replicate an act that belongs to his motor heritage, after having seen it done by others; the second, is a characteristic of ethologists and assumes that through observation an individual learns a new action pattern and is able to reproduce it in detail (ibid.). In this regard, we could also add the studies done in sociology, through the contribution of Tarde (1907), for example, imitation can be highlighted. Indeed, he argues that in imitation is found the formula of social life, the course of which would be regulated by invention and imitation, the two great springs of humanity, where suggestion becomes the elementary social phenomenon capable of moving the minds of individuals and, by virtue of which, the masses imitate and repeat certain attitudes, therefore, according to Tarde, from the concurrence of invention and imitation arise social forms (Tarde, 1907). All the above notions refer, albeit in different forms, to a number of questions that any theory of imitation cannot avoid addressing. Above all, those related to the so-called correspondence problem, that is, how can we do something that we have seen performed by others and what processes are activated in it. To delve into this concept, we need to separate learning from the visual system, in fact, in addition to the problem of correspondence, there is that of the transmission of novel motor skills, which are not present in our pattern of action and, therefore, in this context it will be useful for us to start from the first analysis that was made of imitation. The main theoretical models, from which to start are two, the first is the one based on a clear separation between sensory and motor codes, according to what is

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defined by this theoretical model, imitation would be possible by virtue of associative processes capable of linking elements that have nothing in common. The second, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that the observed and performed action share the same neural code, representing the prerequisite for imitation (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006; Chignola, 2020). Thanks to the work of Wolfgang Prinz21 (1942), the second model seems to have taken over, “in fact it recalls the notion of ‘ideomotor action’”22” (ivi, p. 137), analyzed by Herman Lotze (1874) as we saw in the previous chapter. In this regard, Anthony Galt Greenwald23 (2013) defined from this concept the principle of “ideomotor compatibility”24 (ibid.). The discovery of mirror neurons seems to suggest a possible redevelopment of the principle of ideomotor compatibility, and this seems to be confirmed by a series of brain imaging experiments, whose data are correlation data, within which they suggest that during a certain task a part of our brain is activated, however, they do not give us information about how important the activated area is for the function being studied. The only way to be able to resolve this impasse is to use repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation,25 since prolonged excitation of a certain  Wolfgang Prinz is a German cognitive psychologist. He is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. 22  Ideomotor effect, or ideomotor action, is an unconscious mind-generated reaction that produces a mechanical effect on the body, and is used to scientifically demonstrate seemingly inexplicable mediumistic phenomena. The term ideomotor, in fact, is composed of two meanings: the first is “idea” or of “relating to the idea,” and the second, “motor,” concerns the transmission of motion. Ideomotor thus refers to an idea generating motion, motion generated by an idea. In hypnosis, it is the process by which a mental thought or image generates involuntary movement, outside the subject’s consciousness (Iacoboni, 2005). 23  Anthony Galt Greenwald is a social psychologist and, since 1986, professor of psychology at the University of Washington. In 1959, Greenwald received a B.A. from Yale University. In 1961, he received an M.A. from Harvard University and, in 1963, completed his Ph.D., also at Harvard (Greenwald & Banaji, 2013). 24  “According to this principle, the more a perceived act resembles one present in the observer’s motor heritage, the more it tends to induce its execution: perception and execution of actions must therefore possess a “common representational schema”” (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006, p. 138). 25  Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive technique of electromagnetic stimulation of brain tissue performed by placing powerful magnets close to the skin. By means of this technique, it is possible to stimulate and study the functioning of neuronal circuits and connections in the brain, causing a rather small and transient alteration of electrical activity and mostly limited to the outermost tissues (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). 21

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area can result in its transient hypofunctionality. This technique of repetitive stimulation has been used to examine whether the mirror neuron system has a crucial function in imitation (ibid.)26: “it thus becomes clear that the mirror neuron system plays a fundamental role in imitation, encoding the observed action in motor terms and thus making possible its replication” (ibid., p. 139). At this point, we are ready to analyze the concept of Nuerosociology and we will do so from the words of Blanco, the last in chronological order, to speak of Neurosociology. Using his words, we can say that in the decade of the brain (1990–2000), the most significant discovery was that of mirror neurons. Today we know that this class of neurons allow us to learn by imitation, communicate pro-socially, and experience in us the moods of others, precisely empathy. In addition, mirror neurons are implicated in language. In Italy there is still a lot of skepticism when we start to deal with this topic in Sociology, even from direct experience we do not hear more about neurosociology, neither in Europe (both in England and Switzerland and Germany) nor in America, even at Columbia University empathy is used as an element of studies in legal and criminological studies. Almost as if, from the 1970s, with TenHouten, to today, neurosociology has disappeared from the radar. One is often skeptical because one does not believe in neuronal potential or because one is afraid that everything can be reduced to a biological explanation; what eludes, but which we will discuss in the following chapters, is cooperation between sciences. In fact, as Rizzolatti had said and as Blanco points out within his text, mirror neurons will be to the social sciences and psychology what DNA has been to biology. In this section we will lay the necessary foundation for the next chapter, trying to generate an unambiguous vocabulary within which to disentangle the various technicalities. So, neurosociology as a branch of neuroscience and, therefore, as an applied science. The motivations that may underlie wanting to consider neurosociology in this sense are dictated by the fact that, in my view, it must propose itself as a discipline applicable to everyday life. In agreement with Ten Houten and Blanco, this is not to say that we must rely on reductionism to explain human 26

 The entire study can be found within the text by Rizzolatti (2006).

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social behavior, but since classical behaviorism and cognitivism have waned, it might be interesting to start thinking about the concrete opportunities that neurobiology is offering us. Indeed, the days of Pavlov27 (1849–1936) and Neisser28 (1928–2012) are now outdated and today the human brain is being studied as never before in history (Blanco, 2016). “Attempts to explain human social behavior, based on reductionist theories, have also been implemented by sociologists. One example is that of the American George C. Homans,29 who reduced human social interaction to a simple matter of stimulus-response according to the behaviorist psychological approach” (ibid., p.  12; Sayer, 2005). Sociobiology also applies reductionist research, it reduces the interpretation of human acting and sociality to the theories of natural selection and evolution, searching for a common denominator of behavior among all social animals, including humans (Nielsen, 1994). Obviously, we cannot accept these solutions or even think that the cultural aspect does not influence and interfere with brain processes, «of course, we humans have common traits with other mammals, but similarities are found only in some basic behaviors. Stimulus-response and punishment-reward are models that can explain rat or canary learning, certainly not the complexities of human behavior or even that of other more intellectually and socially evolved mammals. Moreover, human behavior is due to brain characteristics that are not only superior to other social mammals but unique in nature» (ibid.). In this regard, neurosociology must provide for explaining, through empirical research, not the motives of behavior, but the socio-cultural-interactionist derivation of every behavior and every type of action. The contribution that sociology finds itself having to make to neurosociology, between now and the next two decades at least, is a big one. Sociology must first of all draw from the enormous cultural and   Ivan Pavlov è stato un fisiologo russo divenuto celebre soprattutto per i suoi studi sull’apprendimento degli animali (il cane di Pavlov) e per aver dato vita alla psicologia comportamentista (Blanco, 2016). 28  Ulric Neisser era uno psicologo statunitense che, negli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso, ha dato corso al modello psicologico cognitivista (Blanco, 2016). 29  George Caspar Homans è stato un sociologo statunitense, fondatore della sociologia comportamentale e della teoria dell’interscambio sociale. La Teoria dell’interscambio sociale ruota attorno a un principio fondamentale: i soggetti interagiscono tra di loro dopo aver considerato i costi e benefici passati e potenziali. 27

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research background it has, and then intertwine with neuronal, psychological, psychological-social and, why not, even biological aspects, only then can it present a clear picture, perhaps even through neuronal screening, but based on interaction and behavior, being careful not to cross the field and fall into the various reductionisms. The big problem is precisely the latter. Although most sociologists reject biological theories, a tendency amplified especially since the mid-twentieth century because of the battle against the reductionism of sociobiology, it must be remembered that sociology was born thanks to Positivism. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founding father of this current of thought born in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, is also the one who coined the term “sociology.” For Comte, mankind had passed the theological and metaphysical stage and had reached the scientific stage thanks to scientists such as Galileo and Descartes. Comte, moreover, was the driving force behind the idea that social relations can be studied in scientific terms since they are governed by natural laws, but the belief in science and scientific progress is also found in Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) (Blanco, 2016). Thanks to modern neuroscience, the concept of collective consciousness postulated by Durkheim begins to have its first physiological explanations. This fact cannot leave the world of social sciences indifferent, otherwise the great virtue of sociology being a science that studies human action and social facts scientifically, from different points of observation, would fail the theoretical framework intended by its founding fathers. On the merits of this question, we also have the reflections of George H. Mead (1934), who takes human physiology and, in particular, the central nervous system to which we must trace the elements of understanding of our acting. He wrote: A telescope, in the hands of a novice, is not a telescope in the sense in which it is to astronomers. If one wants to give an astronomer’s answer, one must go all the way back to his central nervous system, and it is there that we will find something that corresponds exactly to the way the astronomer approaches the instrument under certain conditions (Mead, 1934). An acting that does not come from learning based simply on stimuli, responses or reinforcement but on something much more complex and still unexplored (Blanco, 2016).

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Neurosociology is the discipline that studies social interactions and socialization in relation to the structures and functions of the nervous system (TenHouten, 1997). Social interactions are cooperative or competitive relationships carried out by two or more actors, called agent subjects, who direct their actions with reference to and in reaction to the behavior of other actors; as for socialization, on the other hand, it is to be understood as the process, complex, through which the individual becomes a social being, integrating into a social group or community (Franks & Turner, 2013). This definition came three decades later; in fact, the discourses on neurosociology, a science predisposed to the meeting of psychological and social disciplines, was born beginning in the 1970s by Ten Houten and Bogen, which encountered great difficulty in establishing itself due mainly to the experience of sociobiology. Only in the 1990s and throughout the following decade, recognized as the decade of the brain, was there a call from social neuroscience to develop and improve the performance of neuroscience and biobehavioral sciences. The proposal put forward by several neuroscientists, assumed that the measurement and description of brain function would offer the social sciences an opportunity to address the relationship between mind and society anew (TenHouten, 1997). It could be thought, then, that neurosociology, could become a synthesis science of different approaches, grouping it, at other disciplinary levels based on the social sciences, with neuroanthropology and ethnoneurology (ibid.). As Ten Houten himself brought to attention with his 1992 text “Neurosocology”, the U.S. Congress of Social Psychologists declared the 1990s as the “Decade of the Brain.” “The intention of this declaration was to improve the performance of neuroscience and biobehavioral sciences, Cacioppo and Berntson, in response to the Congressional call for the expanded application of brain research, advocated the development of social neuroscience by describing a multilevel, integrative approach to the study of mental and behavioral phenomena” (Ten Houten, 1992, 1999; Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992). This approach was developed in a major lecture series of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Behavioral Sciences Basic Research Branch, particularly by the Behavioral Sciences Assessment Group (ibid.; Blumenthal et  al., 1994). However, the

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doctrine of multilevel analysis has never specified the levels that should be included in any scientific account of social behavior (ibid.). Therefore, one could hypothesize to propose the existence of three levels that must necessarily be considered: the brain level, the mind level, and the sociocultural level. These three levels of analysis, identified as multilevel analysis, must be assumed and made explicit in the disciplinary concept of neurosociology. The neuro refers to the brain and the central nervous system, which exists in physical space. The cognitive refers to the mental level in general, which is not extended in space or exists in a space other than the three dimensions. Still Ten Houten, adds that sociocultural aspect (the “sociology” compartment in the term “neurosociology”) is not an independent dimension because nothing social can happen in the absence of actors engaged in the full range of higher mental activities, for example, “thinking, perceiving, and understanding” (ibid.; Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992). The neurosociologist, goes on to describe the work of Cacioppo and Bernston, explaining that the doctrine of multilevel analysis consists of three principles and a corollary: (i) target events on one level may have antecedents on the other levels; (ii) the mapping between elements across levels is greater for successive levels, but becomes complex as the number of intermediate levels increases; and (iii) properties are entirely emergent, not predictable by the parties.” Finally, the corollary is understood as the principle of reciprocity of effects; it is at the heart of neurosociology and neuroanthropology; in fact, it is through such a principle that there can be reciprocal influences between microscopic (e.g., biological, of brain functioning) and macroscopic (e.g., social) factors in determining brain and behavioral processes (ibid.; Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992, p. 1023). “The implications of brain research for social psychology, and to some extent for sociology, have led to an important interdisciplinary and inclusive field between cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and sociology. As Cacioppo and Berntson point out, the Congressional Declaration is important for all psychologists and sociologists, not just neuropsychologists, because with this declaration come the expectations of cognitive and behavioral sciences in general” (ivi p.  2; Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992, p.  1019; Gentilucci, 1992, 1994; Carter & Flesher, 1995; Gentilucci et al., 2001). But especially because the brain does not

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exist in isolation, but rather is a fundamental component of the development and aging of individuals who are themselves mere actors in the larger theater of life (Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992). Therefore, according to Ten Houten, the foundations of neurosociology and neuroanthropology start from the observation that there can be no social relationships or interactions in the absence of human mental activity; it immediately follows that, as scientists, sociologists must find ways to describe and measure such mental functions and cognitive structures. Without this understanding, any sociological theory cannot establish itself, thus having limited success; just as neuropsychology has far-reaching implications for general psychology, neurosociology also has implications for general sociology (ibid.). Picking up on Michael Gazzaniga, Ten Houten attempts to bring to attention the rationale for his research on the divided brain, thus confirming a fundamental notion of Scott and Lyman’s (1968) theory of “accounts”; their work postulates that explanations of our behavior are rarely accurate reflections of our motivations, seen as individual sources of action. Gazzaniga’s findings stem from work with patients with epilepsy resistant to drug treatment. As a treatment for these cases, the corpus callosum, which allows communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, is severed. The corpus callosum is a huge cable of 200 million fibers that allows the left brain, which is fully linguistic (in right-handed people), to know what the right brain, which is typically nonlinguistic, is doing. The right brain, which is silent, communicates only by electrochemical means (ibid.; Gazzaniga, 2005). Sensory information from the left side of the patient is processed by the right side of the brain and vice versa. The severed right side can no longer tell the conscious left side what it is doing. Therefore, a patient may be shown a message written on the left side of his face telling him to draw something. The patient is unaware of the message, as it cannot be communicated to the left hemisphere because of the severed corpus callosum (Ibid.; Franks, 2009). This places the patient with two brains, one of which is unaware of the existence of the other (Gazzaniga, 2005). The interesting part of this work is the interactionist aspect of it. Going back to Mead’s work and regardless of the current deviations of symbolic interactionism, the broader field of sociology and social psychology, it was created and developed in opposition to essentialist views that were often rooted in

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biological reductionism. These views saw human behavior as the inevitable and unchanging result of the “nature of things” that in scientific circles was attributed to instincts developed in our evolutionary past (TenHouten, 1997). Come Franks ha tenuto a sottolineare nel 2009, per il sociologo le spiegazioni sono razionalizzazioni se si basano su dichiarazioni di intenti socialmente accettabili. Per il neuroscienziato sono “confabulazioni”. Scott and Lyman (1968), being sociologists, go on to link these “Vocabularies” to concerns about identity, specifying that situational aspects emerge when actors are challenged to make such rationalizations overt in everyday life (Francks, 2019; Scott & Lyman, 1968). The human tendency to conceive of such explanations independently of any real intention, and thus to believe them wholeheartedly, is clearly established by Gazzaniga’s studies of divided brains and populations (Gazzaniga, 1985). Going beyond explaining the true motive-at least in the narrow case of the split brain research mentioned above-is something that sociologists could not do on their own, but thanks to the process of transdisciplinarity that allows mutual aid among the sciences, they might be able to analyze.

6 Neurosociology in the Analysis of Empathy Trying to actualize this discourse and apply it to the object of our interest, that is, the analysis of the sociological phenomenon of empathy, as has already been extensively pointed out, involves the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years, social neuroscience has made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms through which people experience what they experience with one another. In this section, an attempt will be made to provide a thorough and critical discussion of the data analyzed so far. Indeed, some evidence shows that sharing others’ emotions is associated with the activation of neural structures found to be active during the direct experience of that emotion (Singer, 2009). “As pointed out by Ten Houten and Singer, however, recent studies also show that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon and that the

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evidence is interpretable with respect to a number of factors, such as contextual evaluation, the interpersonal relationship between empathizers and nonempathizers, or the perspective adopted when observing the other” (Singer, 2009, p.  82; TenHouten, 2007). Future investigations will certainly be needed to provide more detailed insights into these factors and, more importantly, their neural basis. Being able to understand the emotional states of others is a key characteristic for people; in fact, this not only allows them to communicate and interact effectively, but also to predict the actions, intentions, and feelings of others. So, although the way the ability to empathize with others often appears to us only when things go wrong, such as when we are misunderstood by someone else and as a result our feelings are hurt, even in these cases, our immediate affective reaction allows the other person to become aware of the misunderstanding and the emotional consequences of his or her actions (Donise, 2019a, b). This ability to share the feelings of others eventually results in a better understanding of the present and future mental states and actions of the people around us, and ultimately enacts prosocial behavior. Before proceeding, we must emphasize how social neuroscience understands empathy and, more importantly, how it differs from what it calls “sisters,” namely compassion, emotional contagion, and personal distress. To do so, we will use the work carried out by Tania Singer and Claus Lamm of the University of Zurich and engaged within the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, “The Social Neuroscience of Empathy” (Singer & Lamm, 2009). As extensively described and pointed out, the term empathy has a relatively short history that can be traced back to its use in philosophical aesthetics, from there the English term originated as a direct translation of the German Einfühlung, a term that was originally proposed as a tool for analyzing works of art and nature, but later developed into a more general mechanism for recognizing the other as “mental creatures” (Parr, 2001). Subsequently, a great deal of social psychological research has been devoted to the question of what perceptual, affective and cognitive mechanisms enable us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. However, it took quite some time before neuroscience used its own techniques, particularly functional neuroimaging, to make the first contributions to this challenging question (Pinotti, 1997; Carr et al., 2003; Morrison et al.,

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2003; Keysers et  al., 2004; Morrison et  al., 2004; Singer et  al., 2004; Pinotti, 2014). This could be attributed to the complexities inherent in “this multidimensional psychological phenomenon, as well as the methodological challenges of bringing such a peculiar and context-­dependent phenomenon into a scientific context that requires well-­controlled and reproducible experiments” (Singer & Lamm, 2009, p. 82). This, at a basic phenomenological level, denotes an affective response to the directly perceived or imagined emotional state. So much so that we hypothesize that empathy occurs when an observer perceives or imagines “the affect of someone else (i.e., the target) and this triggers a response such that the observer partially feels what the target is feeling” (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006, p. 435; Singer & Lamm, 2009). de Vignemont and Singer, for example, state that we tend to empathize with others when we can have (1) an affective state (2) that is isomorphic (understood as a common dictionary of emotional states) to another person’s affective state, (3) that has been ascertained by observing or imagining another person’s affective state, and (4) when we know that the other person’s affective state is the source of our own affective state (ibid.). However, there are as many definitions of empathy as there are researchers in this field, so it is essential to briefly review and define the relevant key concepts and components generally associated with the broad concept of empathy, such as mimicry, emotional contagion, sympathy, and compassion. Although these concepts each refer to a different phenomenon, they usually occur in concert. In most cases, mimicry or emotional contagion precedes empathy, which precedes sympathy and compassion, which in turn may precede prosocial behavior (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Singer & Lamm, 2009;  Roodt & Wanjogu, 2015). Before proceeding, we must distinguish between mimicry and emotional contagion, both of which can contribute substantially to an empathic response (TenHouten, 2007). Mimicry is defined as the tendency to automatically synchronize affective expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person (Hatfield et al., 1994). Understanding of this role, which contributes to empathy, comes from a multitude of studies using facial electromyography. These studies show that when an observer perceives another person’s affective facial expressions, such as a smile or a grimace, the corresponding affective expressions produce the observer (Gordon, 1995;

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Dimberg & Oehman, 1996). Relying on the facial feedback hypothesis, whereby one evaluates one’s emotions by perceiving their bodily concomitants, Sonnby-Borgstrom (2002) proposed that mimicry allows one to automatically share and understand the emotions of others (SonnbyBorgstrom, 2002). His proposal also receives support from studies showing a weak correlation between the strength of the mimic response and trait measures of empathy (ibid.). However, facial responses are not only triggered when enslaving others, but also when people are exposed to negatively or positively self-rated visual stimuli without social relevance (Cacioppo et al., 2000). In addition, several investigations demonstrate the influence of top-down processes on mimicry, such as those associated with the relationship between “empathizer and target,” the affective state of the observer, or the perspective from which one views pain in others (Lamm et al., 2008; Moody et al., 2007; Niedenthal et al., 2001; Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Sessa, 2018). These observations challenge the hypothesis that mimicry represents a kind of automatic or hardwired motor resonance with another person’s affective “display.” Moreover, mimicry appears to serve a social function to increase rapport and affection between self and other, raising the question of whether this function evolved for communicative rather than epistemological reasons (Singer & Lamm, 2009; van Baaren et al., 2004; Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Emotional contagion is another process related to but distinct from empathy; it indicates a tendency to capture the emotions of others and has been alternately labeled “primitive empathy” (Decety et al., 2009). For example, children begin to cry when they hear other children cry, long before they develop a sense of self separate from others. In an fMRI study conducted in 2006 by Harrison, Singer and Rotshtein, for example, early evidence of involuntary pupillary contagion was found (Harrison et al., 2006). Participants were presented with images of sad faces with various pupil dilations; the pupil was significantly smaller when sad faces with small pupils were observed, while it was more dilated when faces with larger pupils were observed. This study also demonstrates the strong overlap between mimicry and emotional contagion, echoing previous analyses by Hatfiel, Cacioppo and Rapson (Hatfield et al., 1994). “It should be noted, however, that there are cases in which mimicry occurs without an emotional component and, in other cases, in which emotions are automatically

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elicited by observing the emotional states of others without the involvement of motor mimicry” (Singer & Lamm, 2009, p. 83; Prochazkova & Kret, 2017). At the conceptual level, however, neither emotional contagion nor mimicry can explain the actual experience of empathy, as defined by Lamm (Lamm et al., 2008). In our understanding, empathy is fundamentally dependent on self-awareness and distinction of the other person; in other words, on our ability to distinguish whether the source of our affective experience resides within ourselves or was triggered by the other person; without this ability, witnessing someone else’s emotions could, for example, result in personal discomfort and an egocentric response in the observed re (Decety & Jackson, 2004; de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2006). Therefore, Singer and Lamm (2009) view mimicry and emotional contagion as important but distinct processes that are neither necessary nor sufficient for the experience of empathy (TenHouten, 2007). With regard to indirectly felt responses, however, a distinction must be made between empathy, sympathy, empathic concern, and compassion. In all four cases, affective changes are induced in the observer in response to the perceived or imagined affective state of another person. However, while empathy involves feelings that are isomorphic to those of the other person, sympathy, empathic concern and compassion do not necessarily involve shared feelings (Singer & Lamm, 2009; Eisenberg et  al., 2010; Lamm & Silani, 2014;  Decety & Lamm, 2006). Several scholars, including Helmholtz 1852, Donders 1862, Watson 1913, Hull 1943, and Hommel 2001, have proposed that we understand the actions, feelings, and emotions of others through the activation of neural representations corresponding to those states. Inspired by previous models of perception-­action in the domain of action understanding (Asendorpf, 2002; Prinz, 2005), Preston and de Waal (2002) proposed a neuroscientific model of empathy, one that suggests that observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state automatically activates a representation of that state in the observer, along with associated autonomic and somatic responses (Preston & de Waal, 2002). Several authors, including Visalberghi, Tomasello and Fragaszy above all, have also suggested that shared neural representations play a general role in understanding other people’s mental states (Visalberghi, 1990; Richard, 1995; Whiten, 1996; Whiten & Custance, 1996; Tomasello & Call, 1997;

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Fragaszy & Visalberghi, 2001; Byrne, 2003). Other authors, such as Gallese and Goldman, however, argue that shared representations provide us with a simulation of their corresponding sensorimotor, affective or mental states, as we ascertained in the previous chapter (Gallese, 2003; Goldman, 2006; Gallese, 2013). Such accounts argue that the ability to imaginatively project ourselves into another person’s perspective, simulating their mental activity using our own mental apparatus, lies at the root of our ability to read other people’s mind projections, and the reasoning of these accounts has been extended to the domains of actions and feelings: to understand what another person is doing, we basically simulate his movements using our motor program; to understand what another person is feeling, we simulate his feelings using our affective programs (Keysers & Gazzola, 2006). Indeed, this so-called shared representation of social interaction and intersubjectivity has become the dominant explanation for the hemodynamic activation patterns observed in recent MRI empathy studies (ibid.). However, this explanation is only part of the knowledge. In that, surely an important aspect of most neuroscientific models of empathy is that the activation of shared representations in the observer mostly begins automatically and without conscious awareness. For example, in most empathy studies that have been concerned with investigating the neural basis of pain, touch, and disgust, participants are not informed that the goal of the study is to investigate empathy-related neural responses (Lamm & Singer, 2015). But, what is missing is the cultural construction of that thought and, especially of those emotions. Just as it does not explain why some subjects, are instructed to passively watch a scene or movie depicting a person expressing emotion or being touched, without receiving, emotionally, anything back (Wicker et al., 2003; Singer et al., 2004; Blakemore et al., 2005; Singer, 2006). However, the above is only sufficient to analyze the brain networks that account for the first-hand experience of affect or touch. Some authors, including Preston, de Waal, Singer & Lamm have therefore suggested that we automatically share the feelings of others, a hypothesis in line with previous perception-action models of motor behavior and imitation and their extension to the domain of empathy (Jones, 2005). Preston and de Waal’s (2002) model, for example, emphasizes the importance of automatic and perceptual processes such as emotional contagion and imitation. It should be noted,

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however, that the term automatic here refers to a process that does not require conscious processing but can be controlled (Bargh, 1994; Preston & de Waal, 2002; Welsh et al., 2003; Singer, 2006). In addition, attention to the other person’s affective state is necessary to trigger the cascade of events postulated earlier that begins with emotional contagion and eventually results in a full empathic experience (Singer & Lamm, 2009). The crucial role attributed to attention in this regard, inhibition and other executive control processes also documents that empathy is not a purely sense-driven process in which affective states are induced in the observer only through bottom-­up processes. On the contrary, even Adam Smith has long argued that contextual evaluation, cognitive processes, and topdown control are important components of human empathy (ibid.). “Decety and Lamm (2006), for example, proposed a model in which bottom-up (i.e., direct correspondence between perception and action) and top-down (i.e., regulation, contextual evaluation, and control) informational processes are fundamentally intertwined in the generation and modulation of empathy” (Decety & Lamm, 2006; Asada, 2015). As described in an in-depth study by Decety and Moriguchi in 2007, in this model, bottom-up processes represent the direct sharing of emotions that are automatically activated by perceptual inputs. On the other hand, executive functions implemented in the brain serve to regulate both cognition and emotions through selective attention and self-regulation. This metacognitive level is continuously updated by bottom-up information and, in return, controls the lower level by providing top-down feedback. Therefore, top-­down regulation through executive functions modulates the lower levels and adds flexibility, making the individual less dependent on external stimuli (Decety & Moriguchi, 2007; Von Scheve & Salmella, 2008; Decety & Meyer, 2008). The metacognitive feedback loop also plays a crucial role in considering one’s mental competence to react (or not) to the affective states of others (ibid.). Decety and Lamm’s (2006) model should be supplemented by top-down processes other than those classically associated with executive function and its associated neural structures, particularly belonging to the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; for here, again, cultural and social integration is missed, just as the experience of living, seen with Simmel, would no longer make sense in such an argument (Asada, 2015). Therefore, although mental imagery,

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for example, has been shown to result in shared representations in both the motor and sensory-affective domains without significant prefrontal activation, the reasons why different people perceive empathy, love, play, and pain differently should be investigated (Decety & Grezes, 2006; Ogino et al., 2007). Moreover, the sole assessment with textual and target in empathy-pain paradigms from a neuroscientific perspective investigated the activation predominantly of areas such as the orbitofrontal cortex or the ventral striatum, in other words, structures involved in affective evaluation, reward, and punishment, applying a scientistic reductionism that goes beyond the biological plane alone, but which we might even liken to a new utilitarianism, associating it with Jeremy Bentham’s (1820) “felicific calculus” (Baldwin, 1906; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002; Singer, 2006; Lamm et al., 2007). As suggested by Stock and Lishner’s 2012 work, in order to analyze how top-down processes help shape empathic responses and social understanding, we need to analyze so-called “perspective taking.” The latter is an example of a process that could be applied to explain how top-down processes shape empathic responses and social understanding (Bruner, 1999; Lishner et al., 2012). Although putting oneself in the other’s shoes influences one’s response to the other and affects altruistic and prosocial behavior differently, several studies in social psychology suggest that adopting a so-called “imagining the other” or, more clearly, “perspective taking,” i.e., focusing on the other’s feelings and thoughts, promotes empathic concern by orienting oneself to an altruistic view while explicitly imagining oneself (“self-image”) to be in the distressing situation of the target (Stotland, 1969; Underwood & Moore, 1982; Batson et  al., 1987, 1997; Ruby & Decety, 2004; Lamm et  al. 2007; Jackson et al., 2006; Lamm et al., 2008; Avenanti et al., 2008; Decety & Lamm, 2009; Lishner et al., 2012). The emergence of the field of social neuroscience has enabled an understanding of the neural basis of empathy, at least in the view of neuroscientists, in recent years. However, we are just beginning to understand the neural and behavioral basis of this complex psychological phenomenon, so with the help of a new science, such as neurosociology, we could try to learn and understand its transformations, through interaction, culture and lived experience, and untangle the mechanisms underlying individual differences in empathy (TenHouten, 2007). Another important question, which neurosociology should not

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shy away from answering, concerns the analysis of empathic brain responses and individual differences in empathy, attempting to explain whether they are related to prosocial behavior. The initial results are encouraging, so much so that we are hopeful that one day we will have a better understanding of why, when and how we experience empathy, whether it is possible to use that knowledge to increase prosocial behavior and an intersubjectivity that is grounded in a better understanding, through a socio-cultural-­interactionist process, of ourselves and others.

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TenHouten, W. (1997). Neurosociology. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 7–37. Ten Houten, W. (1999). Exploration in neurosociological theory. From the spectrum of affect to time consciousness. Social perspective of emotion, 5, 41–80 TenHouten, W. (2007). A general theory of emotions and social life. Routledge. Thagard, P. (2008a). Hot thought: Mechanisms and applications of emotional cognition. MIT Press. Thagard, P. (2008b). How cognition meets emotion: Beliefs, desires, and feelings as neural activity. In D.  Kuenzle, G.  Brun, & U.  Doguoglu (Eds.), Epistemology and emotions. Ashgate. The Forecasting Collaborative (2023). Insights into the accuracy of social scientists’ predictions of societal change. Nat Hum Behav 7, 484–501. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41562-022-01517-1 Tibbetts, P. (2004). Symbolic interaction and the cognitively disabled: A neglected dimension. American Sociologist, 25–36. Tibbetts, P. (2014). Where does cognition occur: In one’s head or in one’s embodied/extended environment? Quarterly Review of Biology, 359–368. Tibbets, P. (2015). Sociology and neuroscience: An emerging dialogue (pp. 1–11). American Sociologist. Todorov, A., Fiske, S., & Prentice, D. (2011). Social neuroscience: Toward understanding the underpinnings of the social mind. Oxford University Press. Tomasello, M., & Call, J. (1997). Primate cognition. Oxford University Press. Turner, J. H. (2000). On the origins of human emotions: A sociological inquiry into the evolution of human affect. Stanford University Press. Turner, S. (2007). Social theory as a cognitive neuroscience. European Journal of Social Theory, 357–374. Turner, S., & Factor, A. (1994). Max Weber: The lawyer as social thinker. Taylor & Francis. Underwood, B., & Moore, B. (1982). Perspective-taking and altruism. Psychological Bulletin, 143–173. van Baaren, R., Horgan, T., & Chartrand, T. (2004). The forest, the trees, and the chameleon: Context dependence and mimicry. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 453–459. Veblen, T. (1898). The instinct of workmanship and the Irksomeness of labor. The American Journal of Sociology, 187–201. Visalberghi, A. (1990). Pedagogia e scienze dell’educazione. Mondadori. Von Scheve, C., & Salmella, M. (2008). Collective Emotions: Perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Oxford.

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Vozza, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (2007). In the minds of others. Mirror neurons and social behavior. Zanichelli. Wacquant, L. (2015). For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 1–11. Weber, M. (1913). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie. Mohr. Welsh, E. T., Wanberg, C. R., Brown, K. G., & Simmering, M. J. (2003). E-learning: Emerging uses, empirical results and future directions. International Journal of Training and Development, 7, 245–258. https://doi. org/10.1046/j.1360-3736.2003.00184.x Whiten, A. (1996). When does smart behaviour-reading become mind-reading? Cambridge University Press. Whiten, A., & Custance, D. (1996). Studies of imitation in chimpanzees and children. In C. M. di Heyes & B. G. Galef Jr. (Eds.), Social learning in animals: The roots of culture (pp. 291–318). Academic. Wicker, B., Keysers, C., & Plailly, J. (2003). Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust. Neuron, 655–664. Wood, M., Stoltz, D., Van Ness, J., & Tylor, M. (2018). Schemas and frames. Sociological Theory, 244–261.

5 Possible Applications of Empirical Research: The Subdivision of Empathy

Before proceeding with a careful analysis of the possible methodological applications of the concept of empathy and, therefore, of the possibility of carrying out empirical research from the said concept, it is necessary to go and lay a solid foundation for the functioning of a methodological one. Basically, given the social and cultural transformations of the concept of empathy, given the specificity of the concept of empathy, and given its possible implications in different fields, considering that it should be investigated in a cross-disciplinary way among the various sciences. It will be necessary to start from the transidisciplinarity of the concept in order to be able to identify, explain and emphasize the various levels of empathy that might be present. Several authors, especially psychologists, have made many types of subdivisions of the levels of empathy, for example Goleman in 2011, within the text Emotional Intelligence. What it is and why it can make us happy, rather than Attwood within the 2019 text Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. Almost all agree that there are multiple aspects of empathy that cannot be reduced within a single sphere. In most cases, empathy is divided into 3 levels. The first is the cognitive level of empathy, that is, the ability to fully understand what the other person is thinking and to understand him or her thoroughly. We could put it side by side with the general definition of empathy that we have given. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6_5

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The second level concerns emotional or affective empathy, that is, understanding of the other person that is established at deeper levels, leading the person to feel the same feelings as the other person. The third level analyzed so far concerns compassionate empathy, what many refer to as empathic sensitivity, that is, the ability to understand the other person, feel what the other person is feeling, and, most importantly, the ability to understand how to help the other person. In these three levels, it is obvious that at least two aspects that are fundamental to a sociological analysis are missing, the first being practical-­ how do we identify the three levels in an applied sociology analysis? The second concerns the role of social empathy, considered marginal in these analyses but, as seen from the classics of sociology, fundamental to social relations. It is certainly not possible to give an exhaustive answer to these two questions, however, it is possible to attempt to explain how to curb these two issues by perhaps reshaping the subdivision of empathy by generating 4 independent levels and 4 dependent levels. First of all, social empathy, masterfully analyzed within Elizabeth Segal’s1 2018 text Social Empathy. The Art of Understanding Others, is the ability to understand others in certain situations in everyday life. So, it is not about reciprocal relationships, such as those between two individuals who confide in each other, but it is about social situations. Within the text, borderline cases, such as aggression, discrimination, and racial slurs that can give people a fresh look are reposted. Indeed, when one is socially empathetic, one not only imagines what it is like to be another person, but social, economic, and political circumstances and what has shaped them are taken into consideration. In essence, Segal emphasizes how empathy is not just a part of interpersonal relationships, but is fundamental to interactions between different social groups and can be a way to connect different people and communities. Another reference text, also for this stage of application, could be Donise’s aforementioned Critique of Empathic Reason. Therefore, starting from these two texts,  Elizabeth A. Segal, Ph.D., is a social policy analyst and professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University. Her current research concerns social empathy, or the application of empathic insights to improve understanding among diverse people and groups and, consequently, promote social policies and programs that reflect empathy and social justice. 1

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which are different from each other and rich in insights, we could hypothesize to generate a new subdivision of empathy starting, as done by Donise, from ideal-typical concepts. In agreement with the two authors, we could point out that empathy experiences different stages in people but, more importantly, is different in each member of society. Therefore, taking up the Weberian concept of idealtype, it is possible to represent abstractions of thought that exist, nuanced, in society. Preliminarily to the subdivision of empathy, as a matter of methodology and applied research, we could hypothesize a distinction into independent levels, that is, the levels of empathy capable of existing regardless in people and finding space in individual individualities, even before they are realized in social interactions, and dependent levels, which are dependent on the former but not hypostatized, but rather capable of generating the nuances in practical details of everyday life. Within the independent levels we could identify 4 types of empathy, taking up the general concepts reported by authoritative scholars so far presented. The first independent level concerns social empathy, the latter concept, as anticipated, has been masterfully analyzed by Elizabeth Segal, who stresses the importance of enhancing awareness of one’s surroundings even before we feel fully involved in a given situation. She further argues that people survive better when they emotionally understand others; therefore, social empathy is closely related to interpersonal empathy. To the point of blending in their meanings. This strong link is dictated by the context in which we are placed as people; however, the two types of empathy have characteristics that distinguish them. Interpersonal empathy is based on unconscious mirroring of the actions we see done; social empathy, on the other hand, is a form of thinking, a way of experiencing the world by fully immersing oneself in contexts and understanding, not just the situation, others (Segal, 2018). So, considering the self and the Other as part of the same experience in certain situations. The second independent level concerns cognitive empathy, investigated by Tony Attwood,2 which represents the ability to consider the perspective of others and understand their intentions, thoughts,  Tony Attwood is a British psychologist living and working in Queensland; he is considered the world’s leading expert on Asperger’s syndrome. 2

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emotions and behaviors. This level, unlike the previous one, consists of a clear distinction between Self and Other; thus, what we might call true empathy, but which, as we will see later, might turn into embodiment. The third independent level falls under the concept of empathic fusion, which is much closer to what Donise identifies as the concept of unipathy, i.e., that element preceding the distinction between self and you, “which represents the vital foundation, the instinctive, unconscious and drive ground from which spiritual life can-but need not-emerge” (Donise, 2019, p. 92). At this level we see a particular empathy, which arises in the encounter between essences, utopianly arising before the encounter between subjects. We return to that Ardigoian concept of pure empathy, which arises before two subjects physically meet and can be brought back into those a-priori categories dear to Husserl. Finally, the fourth level, concerns communal empathy, which is recognized within communal transport. This level, which logically complements the previous three, occurs when subjects belong to the same lived experience, thus same symbolic vocabulary and similar historical experiences, albeit internalized with different characteristics. This level can be associated with Mead’s form of social organization (the Society), identifying this concept as the result of the organization of separate elements, analyzed as a unitary experience and thought of as referring to a common structure (Crespi, 2002). However, these four levels, which will be further explored in the next section, cannot suffice to explain the real social scope of empathy. In this first quartet there are elements aimed at understanding the internalization of empathy and situating the different, ideal-typical types of behavior of people. It will be necessary, therefore, to analyze the four levels that are necessarily dependent on the first and that provide insight to what might be the social implications of empathy. The four dependent levels are identified as those elements that, while occurring in certain situations, depend on the independent levels. They are, in essence, identifiable as the emotional transport that occurs in individuals. The four levels, therefore, are identified as: Social transport, that is, that element that generates interaction from understanding the situation in which one lives. A sounding board that

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connects personal emotions of different egos with those of other egos, generating a kind of social ego.3 The second dependent level concerns cognitive transport, which is closely related to cognitive empathy, i.e., that element that is able to generate a full understanding of others’ intentions and situations, generating a meeting of different Me’s, i.e., social Selves, as well as the organized set of attitudes of others that an individual takes on. The third level is digital empathic transport, referring mostly to empathic fusion, and contrary to what one might think, the name does not concern only the sphere of digitized emotions, or rather those emotions that occur due to the digitization of lives, but rather that set of emotions that belong to both the real and the digital spheres. On this occasion, at least in a superficial analysis, one might think that a simple transposition would be enough to be able to analyze the new emotions. Nothing could be more wrong. In fact, it is necessary to understand the emotional transport of those situations that in reality might generate embarrassment, but on the Web might transform relationships and attitudes of the virtual square. We will return to this aspect later. Finally, group carriage, this last carriage mostly concerns the community empathic level, that is, that element in which several people who have experienced the same situation, manage to understand each other generating a single emotion, difficult to explain if separated, which carries with it a carriage. Usually, these particular emotions emerge in situations of great emotional stress, Covid-19 for example, or the war in Ukraine. People experiencing the same situation will be able to enact a generalized other that works in unison, not excluding all the nuances that may be there in its enactment, but that makes individuals part of an experienced, therefore emotionally strong story. What has been seen so far is not meant to be a structural line to be read, necessarily, within each emotion. But it could belong, idealistically, to situations that today’s society is “used to” observing, perhaps rereading Goffman and applying those analyses in a kind of emotionality of  The social self, defined by social psychology as a part of our psyche that works in order to adapt to reality, able to mediate between drives, thoughts that are not very functional to situations and relationships with the external environment (Galimberti, 2021). 3

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everyday life. It would certainly be interesting to understand, through empirical research, whether these eight levels, divided between independent and dependent, can be identified and, more importantly, are sufficient to analyze emotions such as empathy. At this point, the question that arises is “but how do you figure out which level a person belongs to and what kind of transport he or she can generate in relating to others?” To answer this question, three tests will come in handy in the section on the possible methodology to be applied in order for applied sociology research on these to work. The first is the Baron-Choen4 Empathy quotient, the second is the Hogan Empathy Scale, and the third is the Implicit Association Test.

1 Possible Methodological Approach of Applied Research I would like to focus, before hypothesizing a methodology that could be set up for applied sociology research, on the three tests so as to understand both the reasons for their choice and their function within the research. The Baron-Choen empathy quotient, summarized as EQ, is a psychological measure of empathy, developed by Baron-Choen and Sally Wheelwright, which can measure empathy exclusively. This item was useful in filling a gap in the various tests, since most of them, as we shall see with the Hogan Empathy Scale, include personality tests. So, the Empathy quotient tests the ampatization-systematization theory, which places individuals into different categories based on their empathic tendency. This test, in most cases, has been used as a screening for autism spectrum disorder. The test, available free online, consists of 60 questions, although 64-item variants are present:

 Simon Baron Choen is a British psychologist. Professor of developmental psychopathology in the Department of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, where he is also a member of Trinity College. 4

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1. I can easily tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation. 2. I prefer animals to humans. 3. I try to keep up with the current trends and fashions. 4. I find it difficult to explain to others things that I understand easily, when they don’t understand it first time. 5. I dream most nights. 6. I really enjoy caring for other people. 7. I try to solve my own problems rather than discussing them with others. 8. I find it hard to know what to do in a social situation. 9. I am at my best first thing in the morning. 10. People often tell me that I went too far in driving my point home in a discussion. 11. It doesn’t bother me too much if I am late meeting a friend. 12. Friendships and relationships are just too difficult, so I tend not to bother with them. 13. I would never break a law, no matter how minor. 14. I often find it difficult to judge if something is rude or polite. 15. In a conversation, I tend to focus on my own thoughts rather than on what my listener might be thinking. 16. I prefer practical jokes to verbal humour. 17. I live life for today rather than the future. 18. When I was a child, I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen. 19. I can pick up quickly if someone says one thing but means another. 20. I tend to have very strong opinions about morality. 21. It is hard for me to see why some things upset people so much. 22. I find it easy to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. 23. I think that good manners are the most important thing a parent can teach their child. 24. I like to do things on the spur of the moment. 25. I am good at predicting how someone will feel. 26. I am quick to spot when someone in a group is feeling awkward or uncomfortable. 27. If I say something that someone else is offended by, I think that that’s their problem, not mine.

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28. If anyone asked me if I liked their haircut, I would reply truthfully, even if I didn’t like it. 29. I can’t always see why someone should have felt offended by a remark. 30. People often tell me that I am very unpredictable. 31. I enjoy being the centre of attention at any social gathering. 32. Seeing people cry doesn’t really upset me. 33. I enjoy having discussions about politics. 34. I am very blunt, which some people take to be rudeness, even though this is unintentional. 35. I don’t tend to find social situations confusing. 36. Other people tell me I am good at understanding how they are feeling and what they are thinking. 37. When I talk to people, I tend to talk about their experiences rather than my own. 38. It upsets me to see an animal in pain. 39. I am able to make decisions without being influenced by people’s feelings. 40. I can’t relax until I have done everything I had planned to do that day. 41. I can easily tell if someone else is interested or bored with what I am saying. 42. I get upset if I see people suffering on news programmes. 43. Friends usually talk to me about their problems as they say that I am very understanding. 44. I can sense if I am intruding, even if the other person doesn’t tell me. 45. I often start new hobbies but quickly become bored with them and move on to something else. 46. People sometimes tell me that I have gone too far with teasing. 47. I would be too nervous to go on a big rollercoaster. 48. Other people often say that I am insensitive, though I don’t always see why. 49. If I see a stranger in a group, I think that it is up to them to make an effort to join in. 50. I usually stay emotionally detached when watching a film. 51. I like to be very organised in day to day life and often make lists of the chores I have to do.

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5 2. I can tune into how someone else feels rapidly and intuitively. 53. I don’t like to take risks. 54. I can easily work out what another person might want to talk about. 55. I can tell if someone is masking their true emotion. 56. Before making a decision I always weigh up the pros and cons. 57. I don’t consciously work out the rules of social situations. 58. I am good at predicting what someone will do. 59. I tend to get emotionally involved with a friend’s problems. 60. I can usually appreciate the other person’s viewpoint, even if I don’t agree with it. To these, as anticipated, in some situations four questions are added called Extra 1; Extra 2; Extra 3 and Extra 4 and which are taken from the Hogan test, they are: 6 1. E1. I would be very upset if I couldn’t listen to music every day. 62. E2. I prefer to speak to my friends on the phone rather than write letters to them. 63. E3. I have no desire to travel to different parts of the world. 64. E4. I prefer to read than to dance. So, this test, given the scope of the questions, is certainly the most suitable in a sociological analysis, as well as the only one that can fully meet the needs of those who need to detect empathy in social relationships. However, some clarifications should be made about the adaptability of the results. The significance is quickly stated, this test, used for the analysis of the autism spectrum, could provide biases and incompatibilities in the empathy levels identified earlier. Therefore, it will have to be determined, before any research and according to what one wants to analyze, which range of response should refer to the 4 independent levels analyzed. The second test, which could be used with appropriate updates, since it refers to two other tests that have been updated is the Hogan Empathy Scale, summarized as HES. The latter is a test that falls fully within the transdisciplinary nature of the analysis of the phenomenon of empathy that we have pursued, within this work, up to this point. This test,

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created by Robert Hogan5 in 1969, was described by the author himself as a test designed to identify empathy as “intellectual or imaginative apprehension of the condition or state of mind of another” (Hogan, 1969). The test features 64 items, very similar to the 64 questions in the Baron Choen test just analyzed, consisting of 31 items selected from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI; Hathaway & McKinley, 1943), 25 items selected from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1964) and 8 items created by Hogan and colleagues. Test responses are made on a scale ranging from completely agree to completely disagree, through slightly agree and slightly disagree. Such a test could provide a scale that could subdivide our sample within the various stages of empirical analysis. As a matter of summary, I will report below the questions used by Hogan in composing his test and taken from Hogan’s 1969 text published in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, titled Development of an empathy scale: From the then 520 CPI questions, all questions concerning the psychology of the individual were selected, namely: 4, 8, 25, 52, 67, 79, 81, 84, 86, 97, 98, 100, 127, 186, 191, 194, 198, 239, 247, 255, 271, 275, 287, 359, 361, 363, 364, 403, 421, 442 e 463. From the 567 questions on the MMPI, questions concerning the emotional and relational sphere were selected, namely: 15, 26, 57, 73, 78, 79, 100, 129, 170, 204, 231, 244, 248, 254, 327, 336, 355, 372, 399, 404, 407, 410, 417, 463, 478. Finally, Hogan and his colleagues, generated 8 final questions, useful to complete the empathic and general analysis, therefore, a rating scale. The additional items were: 1. As a rule I have little difficulty in “putting myself into other people’s shoes.”  Robert Hogan is an American personality and organizational psychologist known for developing socioanalytic theory, which blends psychoanalytic theory, role theory and evolutionary theory. Hogan is the president of Hogan Assessment Systems. 5

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2 . I have seen some things so sad that I almost felt like crying. 3. Disobedience to the government is never justified. 4. It is the duty of a citizen to support his country, right or wrong. 5. I am usually rather short-tempered with people who come around and bother me with foolish questions. 6. I have a pretty clear idea of what I would try to impart to my students if I were a teacher. 7. I enjoy the company of strong-willed people. 8. I frequently undertake more than I can accomplish. Finally, the third test, which will be used to confirm what is analyzed either by one of the two tests you decide to use or by the empirical part, is the Implicit Association Test. This test, among other uses, was used in 2014 by Gutierrez, Kaatz, Chu, Ramirez, Samson-Samuel, and Carnes, to analyze implicit racial bias through a video game called “Fair Play.” The video gamers assumed the role of Jamal, a black student who must obtain a degree. The hypothesis was that participants randomly assigned to the game would have greater empathy for Jamal and lower implicit racial biases than participants randomly assigned to read a narrative text describing this student’s experience. We will try to do a detailed analysis of this survey later, as it falls fully within the concept of embodiment, a key element in conducting research of this kind within metaverse and video games. Returning to the test, it merely provides associations to be made between an item A and an item B; the results bring out important information regarding different contexts, such as empathy or hatred towards people with a different skin color, disability, gender, and so on. Depending on the needs of the research, one of the tests can be initiated, which consists of replaying images on the screen, which should be associated with two items placed at the top of the screen. An example can be found in the following image (Fig. 5.1). The Implicit Association Test, although simple in administration is a test to investigate objectively the strength of association between items, tending to be an image or a word, to be associated with one of two items, (thus item A—image or word—to item B, association). This is called implicit association. In addition, by measuring the reaction time it takes for a person to respond positively to a pairing, it will be possible to infer

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Fig. 5.1  Example of Implicit Association Test. Harvard Implicit Association Test, Harvard University - Gender Science IAT

its associative strength. This test originated in social psychology, specifically first appearing as a test for understanding racial implicit associations (Greenwald et  al., 1998). Obviously, investigating these issues with explicit questions would hardly have led to a reliable and generalizable result, either because there might be a lack of sincerity on the part of the interlocutor or because embarrassment might be generated in the respondent. Therefore, Greenwald6 used an instrument that could lead to implicit responses to interlocutors. In the years to follow, such a test has been used in various fields, including marketing, sociology, social neuroscience, and medicine. Admittedly, the test has a simple operation; its measurement is twofold, on the one hand the response time of the association being made and on the other hand the ability of the respondent to make the correct association. But the type of results that this test returns needs to be delved into. It returns what in scientific jargon is called “associative strength,”  Anthony Galt Greenwald is a social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington. 6

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that is, the strength with which ideas, concepts, and categories are unconsciously linked together, providing a measure of how strong or ingrained beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes may be. In this case, an Implicit Association Test based on emotions and empathy could return the possible presence of these emotions in the unconscious, going to whether this element binds one of the other genders more strongly. In conclusion, this test returns a snapshot of the associative strength between object of analysis and value assets. The combination of explicit responses and reaction times of implicit associations represent an extremely important and reliable tool, based on social, psychological and neuroscientific constructs, as well as validated by numerous studies such as Maison et  al., 2004, Gordon et  al., 2016 and the aforementioned Gutierrez et al. So, the reader may ask, “but how do we use these three tests? In what order? How will we synthesize the data returned?” Answering these questions is by no means straightforward, I will try to do so between this paragraph and the following ones. The idea might be to run the above tests at two separate times in the empirical research. Specifically, the Empathy quotient first and the Implicit Association Test following the empirical investigation. This sequence could provide two important pieces of information, the first is the starting level of empathy quotient, which allows us to make an initial hypothesis, during the empirical research it will be possible to evaluate this first hypothesis and begin to identify any errors and biases, subsequently, through the administration of the second test, it will be possible to compare the results with the first and second and returning conclusions as generalizable as possible. In fact, similar to what Gutierrez et al. indicated, this may turn out to be the only logical sequence to be able to calculate the p-value (p)7 as an effect of empathy level and experimental condition. The complex part, however, concerns the synthesis of the results. Indeed, it will have to take into account different circumstances as well as the working environment. For this reason, a paragraph providing  In inferential statistics, particularly in hypothesis testing, the p-value, or p-data, or also observed significance level, is the probability, for a hypothesis assumed to be true, of obtaining results equally or less compatible, than those observed during the test, with that hypothesis. 7

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information regarding the creation of a virtual experimental research environment will follow.

2 Setting Up the Research Environment In order to set up a research environment that can meet both the needs of the researcher mentioned above and make the people who are the subject of our sample feel comfortable, there are two roads, not necessarily the only ones, but certainly the only ones that guarantee results following a major investment. The first path for convenience will be called “laboratory virtualization” and the second path “laboratory digitization.” Although similar in concept and identical as methodology, which will follow in the next paragraph, these two paths are totally different in their approach. In fact, in the first case, i.e., the virtualization of the laboratory, there is a real work of graphic design and development of all virtual rooms and environments. This process is achievable through the use of special software that is not overly difficult to use, such as Unity, i.e., a cross-platform graphics engine that has been developed by Unity Technologies and enables the development of 3D video games and interactive content. This software is one of the most widely used for the creation and management of virtual environments within the metaverse, a field prepared for hypothetical research. One of the questions, which often discourages anyone from creating or accessing within the metaverse, is: but how do you create your own environment? Answering this question is, seemingly, simple-just install software, as anticipated, and proceed to create what you have in mind. However, in practice this may be more complex, although there are several tutorials that can help people who are novices. The first step is to install a 3D graphics software, the most likely scenario, as it is not overly complex to use in “amateur” mode is Unity. It is free to download and you will only need to register at the Unity hub. Once this necessary step has been completed, it will be possible to generate a new project, which will require either the creation from scratch of the elements to be included in our

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world, or the use of elements generated by other users and made available on the network. Should we want to create from scratch we will need to work on vectors and codes, but if our project, involves the creation of a static world, we might consider inserting items available on the net so as to save time. At this point, we will need to choose which elements to make move, selecting them and using simple code strings available in several forums, including Reddit. When the project is finished, it will be enough to save it on one’s computer and, later, to upload it within a site that allows us to access it within a metaverse. Among the most popular, secure and functional sites are The Snadbox, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, Roblox and Spatial, each of which is available with its own peculiarities and features. All that is left to do at this point is to set privacy and restrictions, e.g., with secret word, within our virtual environment, so as to allow access only to the sample under research. A practical example of development and action within the metaverse is that generated by Paolo Granata,8 in February 2021, at the height of the pandemic. The professor, in agreement with the University of Toronto, sent VR devices to his course students to start an experiment. The latter consisted of giving real virtual lectures, but not in DAD as we have been used to. This consisted of wearing VR helmets and immersing themselves, via a platform, in a metaverse, within which a part of the University of Toronto was recreated, with attached classrooms and meeting spaces, to deliver real lectures. The development of the campus and internal facilities, such as lecterns and classrooms, took place precisely with Unity software. The lecture was a huge success, as reflected in the video presented on YouTube and available at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFr46EpHBc. These, as reported by Paolo Granato’s Twitter profile, were followed by others, the latest “experiment,” dating back to May 2022, when a workshop was done for high school educators to explore virtual reality and its pedagogical potential (Auriemma, 2023). Some might think that what is described is beautiful and available through the Second Life or Habbo platform, in fact it is not quite so. In fact, as much as the metaverse has existed for years now, precisely because  Paolo Granata is associate professor of book and media studies at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. 8

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of the technologies that have characterized the two sites, and as much as these technologies, celebrated a few years ago and ready for “revolution,” have profound shortcomings should they be compared to the idea of the metaverse today. The main difference, which marks a marked line between those types of virtual societies and the one we understand today, concerns the experience. In fact, the metaverse we are moving toward presents a different, immersive-based experience, similar to that of Second Life and Habbo, but more complete. Then again, neither platform allows virtual reality viewers and, neither of the former platforms uses blokchain technology for transactions. So, immersiveness generating a transformation from virtualization to immersive virtualization. What has been described is the most difficult aspect to achieve, certainly it will require several funds, but generating a line of research within the metaverse, could allow insights in different aspects, such as in the video game audience or understanding the emotions of pro-players during a challenge. The second path, in order for such research to get off the ground, is the one that is less costly in terms of economic resources and time, and that includes digitizing the lab. To go this route, it will be sufficient to imprint the laboratory on digital aspects, such as overhead projector, projector and computer. Each of these tools, will ensure to pursue specific aspects. For example, through the projector, it will be possible to project emotion-­ inducing images and, through the use of eye-tracking, to begin the investigation of the aspects toward which our sample dwells most. This will make it possible, as we will see in the chapters to follow, to generate a statistical inference on the results obtained, create graphs and use them through an overhead projector that can allow us to shift the indices at will. It should not be assumed that these techniques are easy to use just because they involve a smaller investment than laboratory virtualization. Indeed, eye-tracking records eye movements and calculates their seconds, yet it is not user-friendly. In fact, the synthesis of results is done through a series of software, which could become very expensive if the decision is made to use the operator-assisted package. Certainly, these two courses of action described, for creating a research environment, are not the only ones, but they could be good ideas on how to proceed to generate a

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comfortable environment that can both make the sampled people feel comfortable and help the researcher in data collection and synthesis. However, this represents only the first step toward the research investigation. In the following section, it will be shown how to methodologically start a research investigation, starting from the question and ending with the sampling steps and examples that exist to date on digitized emotion analysis.

3 Research Methodology Within the research hypothesis we are pursuing within this second part of the text, we could see how it is possible to recreate a virtual or digital environment, without too much effort, within which to carry out an investigation. However, the fundamental and essential part of any type of research lies in its methodology. There are several ways in which empathy can be analyzed within applied sociology research; in this section we will look at the two that might provide generalizable results. Before we begin, it is necessary to proceed with the detailed objective, such as understanding how different levels of empathy manifest themselves in social relationships; that is, understanding whether the levels of empathy highlighted are sufficient to analyze the different nuances of empathy. With respect to the method to be used, we want to understand the extent to which the application of a laboratory-based experimental method, can be useful in investigating the emotions that underlie social interactions. Empathy, as Rifkin has repeatedly argued, has enormous potential, considered the new social glue, is capable of improving human relationships and the quality of life in society; therefore, it is crucial that it be viewed through solid, transdisciplinary and scientifically informed conceptual frameworks. On a methodological level, approaches from social psychology, and embodiment will be considered, voluntarily excluding the neuroscience approach, as it focuses solely on biological aspects. In addition, a test will be administered that can confirm or refute the data collected, identified as the Implicit Association Test, and, through a meta-analysis, an attempt will be made to understand the extent to which social relationships are founded on an empathic basis. Moreover, the hypothesis of this

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research work is based on recent findings that have used immersive virtual reality (VR) to analyze violent behavior and the study of anger (Smeijers & Koole, 2019). So, we begin to set the foundation for the analysis that we might consider applying. At this point, it is useful to detail our methodology, which will be qualitative-quantitative, and the research journey will necessarily have to take place in at least 3 stages. 1. In the first phase, the construction of virtual scenarios will be initiated within which everyday settings will be created that can stimulate interactions among the people under investigation (Auriemma, 2023). This will be recreated as described in the previous section, choosing whether to use virtual environments, digital environments, or both. In addition, images of situations that arouse emotions will be included, so as to analyze the reaction induced in people. The hypothesis we will pursue below will be to use both a virtual environment, accessible through a virtual reality viewer, and the setting of a digital environment. Therefore, in our hypothesis and within the same phase, the second piece of hardware, eye-tracking, will be technically set up, its use will be from the same images included in the metaverse but projected onto a screen mediated by a projector and a cloth, in this way it will be possible to record the pupil movements of people taking part in the research, providing details on which elements they tend to dwell on when they experience an emotion and especially for how long they dwell their gaze on those elements. As minor and superfluous as they may seem, these details could lead to a deepening of our investigation, especially considering that empathy not being properly a measurable emotion, could become so through secondary tools that help the researcher. At this point an additional concept comes into play, namely embodiment, which we will explore in the next section by bringing examples from research over the past five years. So, participants will experience the perceptual illusion of ownership over a life-size virtual body, embodiment in fact, which visually replaces their own body. Contrary to what one might think, although these virtual bodies may appear drastically different from those of the participants in terms of size, height, skin tone or age, the sampled individuals will be able to

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experience a strong subjective feeling of ownership through the personalization of the avatars, as evidenced by embodiment theory. In addition, current technology and, especially, VR scenarios, allow valid experimental setups of the surrounding environment as well, while maintaining a high degree of control (e.g., recreating one’s room, a childhood setting, a square or a pub); in fact, individuals will have the illusion of being in a real environment, consequently assuming real but transposed behaviors. Therefore, virtual reality provides a valuable tool for the simulation and study of empathy without exposing participants to any real danger, thus overcoming the ethical problems that arise in nonvirtual experiments. What has been emphasized has been previously demonstrated in studies in which virtual reality has been used to assess violent behavior on others, such as Lobbestael and Cima’s 2021 study. This phase will allow the generation of an optimal virtual environment capable of performing, without bias, the second phase of research (Ibid.). 2. The second phase will be characterized by sampling and applied research; therefore, non-probability sampling will be used, and specifically, reasoned choice sampling will be used. This is because, not everyone will be able to be sampled, specifically certain subjects will be included. The hypothesis is to perform this research within the sociology undergraduate course, so as to maintain a strong relevance to both the subject of investigation and to use it as a practical activity during the courses. Thus, the hypothesis could be that the sample will consist of 30 students (15 males and 15 females), this will ensure both to use this study as a pilot study, so as to limit the physical and economic energies to be expended to reach the first results, and to understand whether and how large the margin of error present in the results will be. As for the selection of the sample, it will be done according to the following criteria: 20 people will be selected from those between the ages of 19 and 25, who upon administration of the Empathy quotient (EQ), will have achieved a high and average EQ score and 10 people, from the same age group, who will have achieved a low EQ score. In addition, within the same phase, an in-depth, open-ended interview will be conducted from Charmaz’s Grounded Theory methodology, this will be crucial to delve into those EQ items aimed at analyzing

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interaction with others, deepening and helping the researcher to understand portions of the lived experience of the people part of the sample. At this point, the 30 participants, are to be divided into three equally distributed groups, and referred to as Group I, Group II and Group III; Group I will consist of 10 people who scored high on the EQ and will use only VRs; Group II, similarly to Group I, will consist of 10 people who scored medium on the EQ, but unlike the former, will only use eye tracking; and finally, Group III, which will serve as the control group, will consist of 10 people who scored low on the EQ and will use both VRs and eye tracking; the data collected from the latter will be used as a control on the first two groups. So, a clear distinction also of the tool to be used, the former will be dropped into a virtual environment, the latter into a digital environment, and the third will experience the analysis on both environments. This is because, our starting hypothesis is that introverted people score high on the EQ and that their level of empathy is emotional. In contrast, sensitive and solitary people, achieving medium and low EQ scores, which will fall under the cognitive and compassionate levels, respectively (Ibid.). In addition, the experimental laboratory analysis will consist of two independent blocks presented in a counterbalanced order; in a first block, emotional images expressing fear and happiness will be displayed, and in a second block there will be expressions eliciting fear and anger. Group I participants will wear helmets to observe the two blocks of scenarios at regulated intervals, all for a total duration of 15 minutes, this is because the virtual reality viewer may bring nausea. Participants in Group II will use the eye tracking glasses for a maximum duration of 10  minutes, as prolonged use of this tool could generate dizziness in subjects, who will be shown the same previous images again but projected. Finally, Group III, will have a total duration, between VR and eye tracking, of 25 minutes, always maintaining regular intervals between images and, most importantly, a break period of at least 20 minutes between the use of one piece of hardware and the other. This will allow the researcher to understand how ­empathy manifests itself in people’s lives and in their interactions, as well as allow them to understand whether the levels of empathy high-

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lighted may be sufficient or more needs to be used to bring in the many nuances that exist. However, this is not the only methodology that can be used; one could, for example, rotate the three groups so that for each group there is a double analysis. Of course, the process will be more time-consuming, but perhaps it could bring out interesting discordances between using a virtual reality and using a digital reality. Or, again, bring out fundamental confirmations about people’s ability to feel empathy within any kind of relationship. All that remains at this point is to apply the third and final phase of the investigation that is the subject of our example (Ibid.). 3. The third and final phase will be characterized by the administration of a questionnaire with the purpose of confirming or not confirming the data collected through the hardware and with the aim of containing the error and exposure of the final results. After the experimental phase to all participants, a test will be administered, namely the closing test, the Implicit Association Test; as we have seen, such a test has been previously validated and currently used in the field of social neuroscience, which allows to objectively investigate the strength of association between an item A and an item B, through what are called implicit associations. Such a test, will be able to provide an indirect measurement of the strength of association between concepts represented in the images previously displayed within the virtual environment and through eye tracking. This will provide insight into the analysis of the current state and possible future developments (Ibid.). The second hypothesis of methodology could be related to the Grounded Theory approach. In this case it is possible to proceed with a different application. Much more similar to an earlier research that I personally followed, in collaboration with psychotherapists, based on drop-­ out in psychology. However, this path although more straightforward to pursue, will be much longer. In fact, it will be necessary to initiate a series of steps preparatory to the search for results. First, once the sample, which could be the same one identified within this paragraph, has been identified, an audio and video recording will need to be made of everything that takes place both within the virtual laboratory and the digital laboratory. Therefore, it will be necessary to encode each and every recording,

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and thereafter, it will be essential to investigate all aspects in detail by analyzing them minutely. To do this, it will be necessary to transcribe the recordings, specifying recording code, duration and mode of administration (VR, eye-tracking or both). This work, hypothetically, could take up to more than a year of work, in fact periodic briefings with the entire research team will be necessary in order to be able to detect any errors in time. However, at the conclusion of the transcription phase of the recordings, we will need to move on to even more important work, namely the selection of the core categories, i.e., the categories of analysis of the phenomenon we want to investigate. Having identified the categories, it will be necessary to create a legend subdividing them by color; this will be necessary so that the analysis of the transcripts can be easily readable and, above all, identifiable. In fact, the categories will have to be identified through further analytical reading of the transcripts. At the conclusion of this phase, it will be necessary to census the frequent actions and words within each recording; to facilitate this task, it might be useful to use the NVivo software. Once the frequent words and actions have been identified, it will be necessary to move on to the analysis of each of them (Ibid.). Obviously, performing such a search using Grounded Theory alone could lead to enormous difficulties along the course of the analysis. In fact, should an error arise, one would have to start the entire search all over again. This might appear to be a major limitation, but it is essential so that the error can be minimized. These methodological assumptions are not meant to present themselves as the only ones, but only as one of the possible assumptions that can be applied within this field. Aware of the fact that for its actual implementation there will need a lot of funds and, above all, a lot of time, cheaper solutions could be found. One of the hypotheses that has been developed in recent research is to use only eye tracking as hardware to be able to develop the research. The idea originated from a neuromarketing research group in Milan, Italy, who, in order to analyze the power of an advertisement used this hardware to understand what elements the sample members’ attention was resting on. Moreover, as much as this hypothesis may be very complex to pursue, it has been expanded and strengthened by other research performed in recent years, starting with the concept of embodiment, all of which we will see in the next two paragraphs.

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4 The Theory of Embodiment The second hypothesis of methodology could be related to the Grounded Theory approach. In this case it is possible to proceed with a different application. Much more similar to an earlier research that I personally followed, in collaboration with psychotherapists, based on drop-out in psychology. However, this path although more straightforward to pursue, will be much longer. In fact, it will be necessary to initiate a series of steps preparatory to the search for results. First, once the sample, which could be the same one identified within this paragraph, has been identified, an audio and video recording will need to be made of everything that takes place both within the virtual laboratory and the digital laboratory. Therefore, it will be necessary to encode each and every recording, and thereafter, it will be essential to investigate all aspects in detail by analyzing them minutely. To do this, it will be necessary to transcribe the recordings, specifying recording code, duration and mode of administration (VR, eye-tracking or both). This work, hypothetically, could take up to more than a year of work, in fact periodic briefings with the entire research team will be necessary in order to be able to detect any errors in time. However, at the conclusion of the transcription phase of the recordings, we will need to move on to even more important work, namely the selection of the core categories, i.e., the categories of analysis of the phenomenon we want to investigate. Having identified the categories, it will be necessary to create a legend subdividing them by color; this will be necessary so that the analysis of the transcripts can be easily readable and, above all, identifiable. In fact, the categories will have to be identified through further analytical reading of the transcripts. At the conclusion of this phase, it will be necessary to census the frequent actions and words within each recording; to facilitate this task, it might be useful to use the NVivo software. Once the frequent words and actions have been identified, it will be necessary to move on to the analysis of each of them. Obviously, performing such a search using Grounded Theory alone could lead to enormous difficulties along the course of the analysis. In fact, should an error arise, one would have to start the entire search all

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over again. This might appear to be a major limitation, but it is essential so that the error can be minimized. These methodological assumptions are not meant to present themselves as the only ones, but only as one of the possible assumptions that can be applied within this field. Aware of the fact that for its actual implementation there will need a lot of funds and, above all, a lot of time, cheaper solutions could be found. One of the hypotheses that has been developed in recent research is to use only eye tracking as hardware to be able to develop the research. The idea originated from a neuromarketing research group in Milan, Italy, who, in order to analyze the power of an advertisement used this hardware to understand what elements the sample members’ attention was resting on. Moreover, as much as this hypothesis may be very complex to pursue, it has been expanded and strengthened by other research performed in recent years, starting with the concept of embodiment, all of which we will see in the next two paragraphs. Of course, just like the Internet, the processes of virtualizing bodies have also come to a screeching halt, just think of the various attempts such as Second Life or the more recent Meta. But, these elements cannot make us think that we will not go further with virtual embodiments. In fact, what emerges from another 2021 study by Gall, Roth, Stauffert, Zarges and Latoschik is that the illusion of embodiment in a virtual body provides the means for the modulation of emotional responses. Emphasizing how participants were able to experience more intense arousal, dominance and valence in the high embodiment condition than in the low embodiment condition. The illusion of embodiment thus intensifies the emotional processing of the virtual environment. This result suggests that artificial bodies may increase the effectiveness of immersive entertainment applications, computer-mediated social interactions, or health applications (Gall et al., 2021). In fact, we could argue in agreement with the 2009 work of Niedenthal, Winkielman, Mondillon, and Vermeulen that “theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that the use of concepts involves a partial reactivation of sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. According to this view, emotion knowledge processing involves a (partial) re-experience of an emotion, but only when access to

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the sensory basis of emotion knowledge is required” (Ibid.; Niedenthal et al., 2009, p. 1120). For this reason, we could reflect on microsociological, everyday life (I feel like saying) issues of these elements. The example is that of videgames. The word videogames is one of the most subjective elements that we know, the word alone evokes in each of us different elements, different memories and, above all, different videogames. This word allows us to bring up emotions in us, both positive (for example, playing video games with some of our friends and being happy) and negative (anger at not overcoming a certain obstacle). Agreeing on the narrowness of this example, both because of the absence, in most cases, of total immersiveness (e.g., video games that do not take advantage of VR), and because of the “goals” inherent within them, we might think, in spite of everything, that we manage to embody ourselves within our avatar (recreated ad hoc in certain games, a classic example being The Sims), rather than in the character we have to play (e.g., Kratos in God of War or the entire soccer team in a soccer simulator). At this point, to reinforce the symbolic interaction that the concept of the video game evokes, I try to bring some examples that have marked the recent history of the game from 2005 to the present and that, perhaps, not everyone is aware of, but are useful to make it clear how emotions, albeit limited and transformed, can be potentially fundamental and, perhaps, more real and strong than those felt in the physical world. The video game, as we know, is an element that manages to create enormous social value, starting from its constitutive aspect, that is, to a special and unique relationship that it creates between the content conveyed by the video game and the people who use it. One example that gives insight into such power dates back to 2005 and was a real pandemic, a sort of ancestor of Covid-19 but virtual. In fact, on September 13, 2005 in the well-known MMORPG9 World of Warcraft, henceforth WoW, an update was released, namely the Zul’Gurub dungeon, which was accessible only to players of level 60 or higher, and in which it was  A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or MMO) is a networked game capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously connected via the Internet, and is typically set in a giant persistent virtual world. 9

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possible to fight against a boss, namely “Hakkar the Soulflayer.” During combat with Hakkar, players were infected with a “disease” (spell DOT, damage over time10) called Corrupted Blood. This DOT spell was capable of infecting, by proximity, avatars causing them to constantly lose life points, but which was relatively negligible for those high level players. However, through a glitch not considered by the programmers, it was possible to take this “pandemic” outside the dungeon area reserved for certain high-level players. Initially, this virus outbreak was unintentional and, therefore, there was no intent to act as an anointer, but once this bug was discovered, thousands of players improvised themselves as anointers and “enjoyed” spreading the “disease” around the server. This resulted in the death of all lower level players. Although, in this case, the death was not permanent, it involves a considerable loss of resources, not only temporal (in terms of game time), but also emotional (such as anger and frustration), as the death could turn into an annoying endless loop. Blizzard, the developer of this video game, even attempted to institute and promote a voluntary quarantine, even allowing for the development of an infected recognition system. The pandemic lasted four days, until, on September 17, the bug was finally fixed. What we are interested in, in this context, is the emotional and symbolic aspect; in fact, as soon as the scale of the phenomenon became apparent to everyone, different types of reactions began to occur: The so-called “troll infector”: those who, as mentioned earlier, deliberately brought the plague to the most populous video game centers, unleashing thousands of deaths and, more importantly, thousands of looping deaths. We could compare this type of action to so-called negative empathy, that is, the type of empathy that develops for the sheer pleasure of deliberately and for no apparent reason hurting another. The so-called “fugitive”: many players, frightened that they might do irreparable harm to their avatar, took refuge in the most remote places and in total solitude, a forced quarantine. This action, as selfish as it may appear ti mold, has a double reading, on the one hand the desire not to infect oneself in order to avoid death and what we might call “emotional shock” with attached emotional reactions and, on the other hand, to  Refers to damage inflicted over a period of time (Gamepedia, 2020).

10

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avoid infecting, by proximity, other players of the same level. So, a type of neutral empathy aimed at emotional preservation. The so-called “good samaritans”: a certain section of players, particularly those possessing healing skills, created veritable “field hospitals,” caring for the infected; this allowed them to keep the sick alive, generating what we might call true empathy toward the less strong and fortunate players. A type of positive empathy. The so-called “journalist”: some players became spokespersons for what was happening in the game by trying to convey continuous updates on the pandemic through in-game communications, blogs, and e-mail (Salemi, 2020). This attitude, however limited, we can place it in a subcategory of positive empathy, as the information they released was life-­ preserving for other players. However, the level of the “journalist” players and their abilities is unclear, as the documentation of facts was proximate and, therefore, very risky for them as well. Many researchers and scholars have become interested in the phenomenon because of its important implications in epidemiological research, for example in Modeling infectious diseases dissemination through online role-playing games (Balicer, 2007) the epidemiologist and Prof. Balicer explained how WoW had represented a platform for the study of infectious diseases because of its inherent properties, i.e., a world in its own right and a population, virtual, that was extremely large. Lofgren and Fefferman (2007), in their article The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics, also discussed the importance of this genre of games in epidemiological mapping, insisting on studying the behavior patterns of a viral infection to make predictions. In particular, Lofgren and Fefferman, delving into the aspect of human behavior, pointed out that players showed two basic reactions, on the one hand empathy, applied in the gratuitous and purposeless care of the other, a kind of agape, once the uncomfortable condition was ascertained; on the other hand curiosity, never considered in the usual previous epidemiology models. Indeed, some players, out of sheer curiosity, would venture into infected areas to see the chaos for themselves, even at the cost of contracting the virus. From a sociological perspective, it is important to consider the mapping principle highlighted by Williams, according to which people enact certain behaviors both in reality and in

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the virtual world (Williams, 2010). The occurrence, then, of a catastrophic event, albeit in a virtual and controlled world, would allow us to reconstruct a set of behaviors, very similar to those in real life, which are activated in conjunction with the emergence of a “global” emergency, trying to manage and, above all, control the emergency as best as possible. To draw a concluding line, it is important to specify that empathy, in its various historical meanings, has always been considered an end. This, for the concept of empathy itself, is almost a limitation, a kind of half-­ hearted explanation. For while it is true that it could be considered as such (an end), in reality it is not, especially since empathy seen as an end could only be considered in a biological key, as something ascribed in our DNA and chained from there. Empathy is the means by which, people and animals alike, are able to perceive the change in others’ states of mind. Its response, the end in fact, is translated, through the result of actions and its meaning explains how empathy is used.

5 Some Practical Examples, from Empathy as Care to Virtual Empathy To conclude this chapter and, consequently, the entire text, it might be interesting to bring some practical examples of the analysis of empathy in applied sociology research. In detail, there are three articles to reason about, as a starting point toward new frontiers of investigation, in order to understand how empathy can be a fruitful field of inquiry. The first research concerns the 2019 paper by Ruiz-Junco and Morrison, the authors attempt to emphasize how important the model of empathy as care is in contemporary medicine. The arguments start from certain assumptions, including the question “does empathy mean care?” However, unlike one might have imagined and for the sake of this very sensitive topic, the authors tread cautiously, arguing that empathy is definitely not a synonym for care in all medical practice but could become an essential element in palliative care. In this regard, I think it is necessary to report some details of the investigation performed by the two authors (Weiner & Auster, 2007). First of all, the work presents an insight of very close

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relevance, which we reluctantly delved into during the Covid-19 period. Indeed, the model of empathy as care “differs from other types of empathy for the sick and dying in that it is a medical intervention. However, this model does not simply imply a relationship of empathy subordinated to the medical guidelines of a particular institution or profession. In our view, the model of empathy as care implies that professionals walk the paths of empathy creatively, in ways that are not predetermined at the level of the institution or medicine more generally, or the field of medicine more generally” (Ruiz-Junco & Morrison, 2019, p.  163). This is because the turn that governments are taking to empathy is mystifying, in that it is not based on a feeling that arises from people, but is being imposed as a necessary part of human relationships, so much so that the two authors point out how much “business leaders invoke it as a tool of the new capitalism, elevating it to a quality that can transform the way we engage in the marketplace” (Ibid.). This research is interesting in several respects, the first is surely that of the emergence of an emotion in a particular field such as medicine; the second aspect concerns its deepening in the last two years. The pandemic has changed the emotional asset of everyone, including hospital staff, the concept of empathy has become relevant in public health at the time when Covid-19 began to establish itself as a “wave.” In fact, the second research, which I also contributed to, was carried out by physicians, health personnel, psychologists and sociologists, within the Intensive Care Unit of the Cava de’ Tirreni Hospital located in Salerno, Italy. The purpose of this work was to understand whether COVID-19 survivors experience a worse outcome than other patients discharged from the ICU. But beyond the overall research, what emerged was that patients were able to empathize with healthcare staff and vice versa, as never before. Of course, these results are mainly dictated by the forced isolation to which the patients were forced, moving from an open-­intensive care system to a prohibited one. So, the only people with whom they could relate were the very members of the hospital. In this regard, comparing the data with a similar research study, “Intensive Care 2.0” dating back to 2019, it was possible to identify a clear difference between the responses to a telephone questionnaire administered to all patients who left the ward within six months. The latter, emphasized, unlike the previous research that physicians and health

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care personnel were particularly empathetic toward them, deeply touched by the current pandemic situation (Auriemma et al., 2023). This latest research, which is currently being published, only confirms the data of Ruiz-Junco and Morrison’s research, underscoring how empathy has become a strongly present emotion within our lives, beyond the economic and neuroscientific aspect, capable of affirming the importance of society over self-interest. Of course, this is not to say that the lust for success has died out or that self-­interests no longer exist, but I do mean to point out that we have tended to become more sensitive to particular issues, as the two research papers proposed here have shown. However, another very important aspect, which has been stressed several times within this text, is the relationship between virtuality and empathy. A relationship that might seem ambivalent, often negatively emphasized, but that could generate a fruitful relationship starting with the interpersonal relationships of the new generations. In order to best highlight this aspect, we will help ourselves with a very interesting research, carried out long before the pandemic, Meta and the whole discourse related to the virtualization of societies, but which provides interesting insights during the “transformation of the Internet of Things.” The research in question is titled “Virtual empathy: Positive and negative impacts of going online upon empathy in young adults” by Carrier, Spradlin, Bunce and Rosen, from 2015. The authors pointed out, within a research study consisting of a sample of more than 1000 young adults, surveyed mediated using an anonymous online questionnaire that asked them about their daily media use, virtual empathy, social rapport and demographic information. The results, in contrast to what other research has shown and contrary to what many people think, showed that “in general, Internet use had very little negative impact on real-world cognitive and affective empathy and actually improved time spent in face-to-face communication” (Carrier et al., 2015, p. 39). In fact, the authors pointed out that “virtual empathy was positively correlated with real-world empathy, although virtual empathy scores were lower than real-world empathy scores for both sexes (Peñalver et al., 2020). Finally, both real-world empathy and virtual empathy correlated positively with social support, but real-world empathy showed a 5-6 times stronger relationship. The results show that spending time online neither replaces face-to-face time nor reduces empathy in the real

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world and suggest that perhaps the lack of nonverbal cues in the online world contributes to overall lower levels of virtual empathy than in the real world. The negative effects of being online on empathy appear to be due to specific activities such as video games rather than the total amount of time spent online” (Ibid.). It has not been possible, as a result of this research, to confirm or not confirm the results of this research, because there has been very little research on the subject and, the few that do exist, tend to emphasize playful rather than learning aspects. We can, however, begin to reflect on a very important aspect, which is that the Internet today has become a big “world,” within which it is possible to do anything. We empathically attach ourselves to a social, perhaps based on their function and role in society, for example, Twitter. To the role it might play in triggering a massive notoriety effect, such as Instagram, or the way for profit maximization. In the latter case, we might think of the rapid evolution of the Cryptocurrency system, rather than the emergence of NFTs and other tools to bring value to the blockchain. Here, too, it might be possible to emphasize how important it is to empathize with other investors, even before these tools, in order to generate value. In this case, however, the concept of empathy could take on an entirely different meaning, because there is an end that drives the interaction, namely selling at the best price to maximize one’s profits. Obviously, the role of empathy with these examples is put to the test, just as its function is put to the test, in fact, there are some contexts such as Twitch, OnlyFans, online video games such as Fortnite, Fifa and League of Legends, where empathy might seem to be totally absent but, as we will see in the section on text limitations, this aspect is more alive than ever, but it masks itself until it assumes a totally different function by allowing people to take on a particular role in Meta-Empathic interaction. For this reason, one must be very careful when talking about empathy within virtual contexts, demonization of a tool is not always the only truth, there are interesting nuances within which to fit. One example, which I noticed during a little netnography on Twitch, is the role of comments in the live streams of some Italian content creators. One example, peculiar in its kind, concerns the streamer GSkinato (https://www.twitch.tv/gskianto), a streamer who has conquered Twitch Italy with his live streams, to date he has about 736,453 followers. The peculiarity of this user’s content is the long

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live streams, even reaching, at least to date, 54 days in consecutive live streaming, day and night, without ever interrupting it, filming himself even while he sleeps and, through the activation of banners for donations, receives gifts which involve being woken up abruptly, forced to scream, rather than being “frozen” while he bites food. What was noted during the lengthy directs are the characteristics with which interactions occur. During the day, while he is awake, users interact with him only via chat, resulting in GSkianto’s maximum attention to the screen, often in anger from too many messages he yells and breaks objects. In contrast, while he is asleep, users interact with him through Alexa, which is activated only when donations are made. Right from the start, this nighttime interaction appears violent, as the virtual assistant, at maximum volume, plays sudden noises and sounds of danger designed to abruptly wake the streamer as a reward for the donation made. This sort of thank you for the donation made is not an end in itself, but becomes an incentive to donate more and to do worse. To top it off, the requests made by users are among the most disparate and absurd, and most of them are intended to create disruption to the content creator. For example, screaming from the bacon in the middle of the night, sleeping sitting in the bathroom, making prank calls. Add to this the hundreds of messages in livechat, most of them are negative, hateful and undermining comments toward this person, who is a victim of the transition from “factory” to “digital work.” Almost no one expresses “positive” requests or words of “kindness,” a small minority, empathizing with this streamer, tries to end the spectacle by flagging his channel. The reporting, which occurs in remote cases, produces a reprimand to GSkianto by Twitch for violating security terms, generating even more anger at the content creator. Certainly this attitude allows him to receive high earnings, but at the same time he becomes the object not only of digital work but also of the public that incentivizes it. So, apparently among the comments empathy is absent, but analyzing it from a different point of view, we might think that empathy does exist, however, it is used to hurt the streamer. Net of hate messages towards him, we find actions. For example, his long-time followers know full well that certain actions cause him anger and frustration, so they make a donation designed to trigger precisely those certain actions with attached

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reactions from GSkianto. Examples in this regard are many, ranging from Twitch to OnlyFans, but we will see this in the final coda of this text. Limitations of the text The text certainly has some limitations, which cannot be filed away at this time since research on empathy in an applied sociology discourse is young and needs time to be refined. Certainly from a methodological point of view, new avenues of inquiry could be explored that would be able to test certain compartments of emotions, as well as empathy, in a timely manner, but also from a theoretical point of view there would need to be more support, which hopefully over the years would come both from other scholars and from new sociological research. Unfortunately, to date, sciences such as clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social neuroscience have investigated and continue to investigate this field by bringing biological contributions that severely limit the entry of the social sciences, which may suffer from the lack of practicality of the data. Moreover, for applied, laboratory-based sociology research such as that investigated in this text to take place, it is yes possible but needs a lot of funding. So, a second limitation, not so much of the text itself, but of the implementation of such a structure is precisely in its generation. In fact, to create an applied sociology laboratory, according to the methodology to be used for a research on empathy, we are talking about at least one hundred thousand euros, a figure that not all public facilities have available, to these figures must necessarily be added the annual fixed costs to be able to keep the programs active and updated, for the maintenance of the physical spaces and for the maintenance of the virtual spaces, especially those inserted within the metaverse. Not to mention the cost of personnel, qualified and able to work actively with these technological products, thus, a considerable economic outlay that is not said to be repaid by the results. In fact, the results of this type of investigation are not certain; the risk is that these could be vague, perhaps random or read in a philosophical key. Of course, some of you may be thinking “the outcome is not predictable and whatever result you receive is still a result,” but perhaps that may not be enough for the applied sociology laboratory to remain open. So, practical limitations for sure, but that spenso come into fusion with economic limitations. From a theoretical point of view, however, further effort will

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have to be made to think about what theorization could be applied, perhaps the one used within this text is not sufficient to gather the information needed to achieve a goal within a research study. Or perhaps, the theoretical setting of this paper might be useful only to achieve goals on the discourse “empathy” and not on emotions, again, the theoretical setting might conflict with the methodological setting and, therefore, will need to be expanded. However, the effort presented within this text is to insert itself into a new discourse for sociology as one of the possible keys for applied sociology research, without sinning in presumption and imposing itself as a new method, but with the humility of presenting itself as an attempt to initiate innovative investigations within a field as vast as it is rich in notions, avoiding falling into one of the two greatest reductionisms, namely the biological and the theoretical. Therefore, the intent of this paper is to present to the public a possible key to interpretation, starting from sociological theory, meeting with neuroscientific theory and uniting, within a discipline, neurosociology precisely, capable of investigating, in concert with other sciences, borderline objects of study with alternative methodologies, as is precisely the discourse on emotions in general and empathy in particular. Certainly it will take years before a methodological discourse, in a linear fashion, can be established in sociology, but this could represent a first reading of the phenomenon capable of broadening its discourses.

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Carrier, M., Spradlin, A., Bunce, J., & Rosen, L. (2015). Virtual empathy: Positive and negative impacts of going online upon empathy in young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. chb.2015.05.026 Crespi, F. (2002). Sociological thinking. Il Mulino. Galimberti, U. (2021). Il libro delle emozioni. Feltrinelli. Gall, D., Roth, D., Stauffert, J.-P., Zarges, J., & Latoschik, M. (2021). Embodiment in virtual reality intensifies emotional responses to virtual stimuli. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.674179 Gamepedia. (2020). https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_ (debuff) Gordon, B. S., James, J. D., & Yoshida, M. (2016). The development of brand association measures in multiple product categories: New findings and implications for goods and service brands. Gough, H. G. (1964). Academic achievement in high school as predicted from the California Psychological Inventory. Journal of Educational Psychology, 55(3), 174–180. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046186 Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464. Hathaway, S. R., & McKinley, J. C. (1943). The Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (Rev. ed., 2nd printing ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Hogan, R. (1969). Development of an empathy scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33(3), 307–316. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0027580 Lobbestael, J., & Cima, M. (2021). Virtual reality for aggression assessment: The development and preliminary results of two virtual reality tasks to assess reactive and proactive aggression in males. Brain Sciences, 11(12), 1653. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11121653 Lofgren, E. T., & Fefferman, N. H. (2007). The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 7(9), 625–629. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-­3099(07)70212-­8 Maison, D., Greenwald, A., & Bruin, R. (2004). Predictive validity of the implicit association test in studies of brands, consumer attitudes, and behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 405–415. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15327663jcp1404_9 Niedenthal, P., Winkielman, P., Mondillon, L., & Vermeulen, N. (2009). Embodiment of emotion concepts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1120–1136. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015574

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Peñalver, J., Salanova, M., & Martínez, I. M. (2020). Group positive affect and beyond: An integrative review and future research agenda. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17, 7499. https://doi. org/10.3390/ijerph17207499 Ruiz-Junco, N., & Morrison, D. (2019). Empathy as care: The model of palliative medicine. Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-­019-­00344-­x Salemi, M. (2020). Horizon Psytech. Tratto da Quando il Virus colpì WoW  – L’Incidente del Corrupted Blood. https://www.horizonpsyte-­ch.com/2020/06/08/ quando-­il-­virus-­colpi-­wow-­lincidente-­del-­corrupted-blood/ Segal, E. (2018). Empowerment series: Social welfare policy and social programs (4th ed.). Cengage Learning. Smeijers, D., & Koole, S. (2019). Testing the effects of a virtual reality game for aggressive impulse management (VR-GAIME): Study protocol. Front Psychiatry, 10, 83. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00083 Weiner, S. J., & Auster, S. (2007). From empathy to caring: Defining the ideal approach to a healing relationship. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 80(3), 123–130. Williams, D. (2010). The mapping principle, and a research framework for virtual worlds. Communication Theory, 451–470.

6 Conclusions

To conclude this long journey, it is fitting to draw a line that could serve as a starting point toward new perspectives, emphasizing what is being done, especially by the department for which I work. Increasingly, at least until a few years ago, a number of sociologists were convinced that neuroscience was totally incompatible with sociology, certainly because of the way in which the latter was imposed. Obviously, this is compounded in the thinking of many by what happened in the middle of the last century, that is, when sociology’s greatest battle was waged against biological reductionism, particularly against the analyses of sociology. Recently, however, a new kind of approach has been found, one that embraces not scientistic universalisms but different sciences. At first glance, this new approach has found fertile ground in neuroscience, which has increasingly dialogued fruitfully with cognitive psychology, capturing the attention of academia and others. To follow, however, sociology also began to broaden its views, albeit sporadically began to work in concert with other sciences; therefore, it generated interesting research from a social point of view. At this point, the question that arises is, but is a deepening of such dialogue possible in sociology? In what fields and, more importantly, how could social neuroscience make interesting contributions in sociological studies, without necessarily asserting one universalism over another? We © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6_6

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could point out again that, in addition to the study of empathy, subjects such as social psychology, sociology of health and medicine, economic sociology and cultural sociology are, at first glance, the subjects most involved in this preliminary process of interconnections. Although, due to the interactions that general sociology has with each of them, the entire sociological field would benefit manifold. However, before proceeding, it will be useful to present practical examples of these interconnections both through the words on Empathy and Ethics, from a sociological perspective, uttered by David Franks (1963) within the aforementioned Handbook of Neurosociology text (Franks & Turner, 2013), and through works that in the past two years have broadened interest in topics such as emotions and metaverse, some of which have seen my personal co-­ investigation. Beginning with Franks’ talk, the latter argues that “in the mid-1970s, Amitai Etzioni (1929) shocked much of sociology by arguing that a culture could be detrimental to human nature and thus to its people. The idea that humans had no nature and were infinitely flexible had become axiomatic since the popular writings of anthropologists such as Clyde Kluckhohn (1944) and Ashley Montagu (1967). It was thought that making such negative judgments about a culture was nothing more than parochial ethnocentrism. Behind this assumption was the old Enlightenment idea that the human mind was a blank slate written by experiences that differed fundamentally from culture to culture” (Franks & Turner, 2013, p. 99). Universal ethical issues, to specify this concept, focus on what forms of murder are considered murder and what forms of sexual intercourse are considered incest. Other universal issues concern the obligations of child care, what constitutes telling lies and what it means to break promises, and the elements of family loyalty. Regardless of the variety of interpretations a culture may make, every culture deals with ethics. For a more positive approach, we can turn to Frans de Waal and his arguments in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009). Here we find more direct trends, not only in us but also in mammals and primates in general (Franks & Turner, 2013). In fact, the ethical part of our empathic nature emerges not only from the fact that we are social subjects to the core. However, he takes great care to balance empathy with the insinuating side of animal and human behavior. Into this balance comes Jonathan Turner’s argument that the population

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derives from a grumpy and relatively isolated ape who had weak ties to others (Turner, 2000). As ascertained, sociology and neuroscience have largely evolved independently of each other, with little or no reference to each other’s problems, models, research, empirical findings, or even terminology. This lack is understandable given the different disciplinary interests, Pareto would argue that there is no communication between the two due to a lack of matching of subjective and objective ends. This, however, has led to an underlying problem; neurosociology has made certain conceptions, certain fields of inquiry, and certain methodological interests primes, bringing, or at least attempting to bring, biological universalism to bear on each (Clarke & O’Malley, 1996; Finger, 2001; Catani & de Schotten, 2012; Swanson, 2015). In contrast, sociology has had to struggle hard to ensure that certain concepts could be left free of universalisms, among these we certainly find that of emotions. However, although historically the social sciences and neuroscience traveled in their respective orbits, there was always a common gravitational center around which they revolved, namely the attempt to understand the activities, on the one hand, and the interactions, on the other, of the human brain. Accordingly, sociologists and social scientists in general, as well as neuroscientists, at least shared the interesting hypothesis that starting from the brain, objectively presented within people, one could analyze from a dual perspective acting, emotions and emotional interaction, for example. But, more recently, cognitive and social neuroscience include social contexts in the modeling of cognition (Robbins & Aydede, 2009; Clark, 2011; Semin et al., 2013; Gianotti, 2017). The uncritical assumption that the social sciences and neuroscience represent radically different disciplinary and explanatory frameworks is belied by the literature of the past decade in cognitive and social neuroscience (Cacioppo et al., 2006; Franks, 2010; Decety & Cacioppo, 2011; Todorov et al., 2011; Carlston, 2013; Schutt & Seldman, 2015). At this point, I feel to point out, that there is a serious problem in the transdisciplinary approach, which lies in the conceptual vocabulary that is used. Indeed, in these disciplines, historically, theoretically, and methodologically, it most likely does not share any of the meanings or references that they have as their starting point. Indeed, “traditionally, what constituted social cognition for sociology and psychology was operationally defined independently of brain-based

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models of human cognition” (Tibbetts, 2004, p. 4). Therefore, one attempt might be to bring diverse knowledge together to begin to place meanings in common to initiate conspicuous collaboration. A practical example, in this sense has been done on several occasions, only in my, still, short research experience I have had the opportunity to collaborate transdisciplinarily on 4 occasions. The first time was in 2017, even before I could get interested in this research topic, and it was with the research on Religiosity in Italy. That research, which officially christened my path as a researcher, was one of the most interesting experiences on a practical and scientific level. I was given the opportunity to actively collaborate with psychologists, sociologists, methodologists and statisticians, so much of the credit goes to Professor Cipriani who was able to put together a close-knit team that, through the methodology of Grounded Theory, started the work toward what would become the analysis toward the presence of religion, or not, in people’s lives. The second example, again through the methodology of Grounded Theory, which generates collaborations and research activities that are as interesting as they are fruitful, was with my colleague Valeria Saladino, a researcher, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, who gave me the opportunity to collaborate with her team in order to address a burning issue for psychology, from a social point of view, namely drop-out in psychotherapy starting with fundamental concepts such as emotions during psychotherapy sessions. The third moment of great effervescence as a researcher happened to me during my visiting in Switzerland, thanks to the preparation and kindness of Professor Balbi, my tutor at the host university, who was able to give me excellent advice on the path to take and, above all, on writing and, to the preparation of Professor Rosalba Morese, introduced to me by the same professor, it was possible to begin to have the first contacts with social neuroscience. On this occasion we enjoyed writing very interesting papers on bullying and cyberbullying focusing on two fundamental points of view, the social impact and the neuroscientific impact on the possible interventions to be applied. The fourth moment of great personal growth occurred within a research study, thanks to Professor Piazza, performed at Salerno Hospital in the intensive care unit during the pandemic. Within that research, which was translated into a book chapter and article, gave me the opportunity to learn about four worlds far from my conception of

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research. On the one hand, I collaborated with social psychologists, helping to open me up to new points of view for my current research; with physicians, who, without ever falling into biological universalisms, were able to guide us through patient histories and understand certain states of mind; the nurses, who have provided me with a great “power” the patience to steal information where it was very difficult to get any; and, finally, new methodologies of inquiry such as narrative medicine, which allow, through an enormous analytical effort on the part of the researcher, to complete research that is fundamental to the analysis of social welfare. These four researches, though few in number, allowed me to have an additional observational capacity in addition to the sociological gaze that is fundamental to the analysis of societies. Tibbetts himself argues that a gestalt explanatory shift has recently been made toward models of perceptual and social cognition, where “neuro,” behavioral and socialized variables are seen as multiple and interdependent parameters in the definition and modeling of social cognition (Tibbetts, 2014; de Haan & Gunnar, 2009; Ochsner & Kosslyn, 2014). In this regard, it is incumbent to elaborate on social cognition and the problems related to its conceptualization. In fact, Keenan within an article based on the relationship between neuroscience and social sciences argues that the latter, today, tend to focus on the complex interplay of biological and social forces. This is evident when considering research on self-awareness and social cognition, which, attempt to shed light on how we interact with others, offering some interesting insights into psychosocial research objects, such as the nature of actions (Keenan et al., 2011). However, modeling social cognition is difficult given the highly abstract nature of this concept (ibid.; Ochsner & Kosslyn, 2014). “In a sense, translating explanations from one level to the level immediately below, for example, social cognition into computational language, is a relatively conservative conceptual move” (Keenan et al., 2011, p. 322). The real problem is the complexity of the concept at the moral level, where social cognition is only mapped onto the supposed neural architecture at the micro level. A possible clue to “unpacking” this concept can be found in the neuroscience literature. For example, Ochsner and Kosslyn (2014) note that neuroscientists have learned to “fractionalize the processes that give rise to specific subtypes of abilities.” “That is, instead of mapping the general category memory,

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neuroscientists map subtypes such as short- and long-term memory, declarative memory, episodic memory, semantic process, working process, motor process, and so on” (ibid.). An interesting question, as well as intrinsic to the phenomenon just described, is the extent to which the neurological modeling of sociological concepts depends on certain factors, such as symbolic, explanatory, and context related to the questions asked. In this regard, it would be interesting to pose some insights, turned into a small netnographic research, which is possible to do on the net with the help of other disciplines. In particular, as already mentioned within the previously described paragraphs, the example of online netnography from contexts (understood as websites) and dynamics (understood as “screen-to-screen” interactions between users) might come in handy. Once again, in this context transdiciplinariarity takes center stage; in fact, as we know, emotions pervade TV series, in particular, one’s gaze can be turned toward a series that has racked up 12 years of awards, namely The Big Bang Theory. The work investigated the TV series as a space of representation of the cultural media consumption of post-­ millennials. In particular, the way audiences appropriate the symbolic heritage of the nerd subculture, developing a level of empathic identification with the personal and the plot, which reaches its maximum intensity in “mourning” the end of the series. Such research was conducted on social media, a place where fandom collectively expresses passion for a TV series. To investigate the specific ways in which TBBT fans reacted to the sitcom’s conclusion, a non-participant netnographic observation was favored, which aims to study social interactions in contemporary digital communicative contexts (Kozinets, 2010). This qualitative research methodology adapts ethnographic techniques to the study of practices and cultures formed through computer-mediated communications (Kozinets, 2002). In a netnography, research focuses on cultures, experiences, activities, and relationships developed through different online media contexts (social networks, blogs, communities), in a word “worlds of meaning” (Kozinets, 2015). Qualitative analysis allowed us to abstract concepts that can be replicable and applicable to the categories we selected. Given these assumptions, it was deemed appropriate to apply this methodology in order to extract data of scientific interest for our

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research objective—to verify how the mourning of the “end of the series” was processed in the TBBT fandom. For this reason, we first defined the social network on which to conduct the netnography. The choice fell on the private communities (closed groups) on Facebook, which favor the birth, dissemination and proliferation of some particular content such as images, photographs, memes and infographics […] content that has the characteristic of being ready to be shared […] therefore capable of responding with ease and economy (of time, of commitment, …) to the injunction to be connected: easily publishable on the wall, without the effort, problematic, of producing and devising unpublished content. (Boccia Artieri et al., 2017, p. 89). Facebook presents itself as the ideal platform to conduct such an analysis. Our path of analysis was characterized by several steps: selection of units to be analyzed, development of interpretive categories, sampling of the content deemed appropriate, verification of coding reliability, and content analysis (Stempel & Westley, 1989). The two communities selected according to the highlighted procedures, because they are considered most representative, are the American “The Big Bang Theory” (77,083 community members as of September 1, 2020, with an average of 60 posts per day and 70 interactions per day) and “The Big Bang Theory Italian Fans Group” (14,136 community members as of September 1, 2020, with an average of 40 posts per day and 55 interactions per day). We focused our analysis on the period from the broadcast of the concluding double episode of TBBT to the following three months: for the American community this period runs from May 16 to August 16, 2019, for the Italian community from June 24 to September 24, 2019. The selection of posts was made based on the number of interactions received; all posts published in the three months were analyzed, and then subsequently those with low numbers of interactions were excluded to select an actual sample of 80 total posts (40 per community). A preliminary observation allows us to identify the prevalence, among the posts, of content related to episodes of the series (for fans already literate to the reference encyclopedia), images of gadgets, situations and events of daily life variously related to the storyworld, biographies of actors, and scripts of entire episodes. This allowed us, moreover, to identify four interpretive categories, namely (1) The category “Resistance At the June” (where “June” refers to the month in which the

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last two episodes aired in Italy) collects content related to the empathic “end of series” grieving, the most numerous in both communities. (2) The category “ShAmy” (from the nickname invented by Penny for the coppia formed by Sheldon and Amy) includes content referring to a proactive reaction, consisting of the continuation of the affective bond with the actors of TBBT, following their steps in the TV shows and other productions in which they are engaged. (3) “Lovers of Entertainment: Of course, NE(A)RD” is the category into which all expressions of “collector” fandom fall: fans-with no apprehensible differences between the two social communities-resort to those forms of extractability seen earlier to perpetuate, through gadgets, the connection with TBBT’s storyworld. (4) The category “HOW do you spell LeonarARD’s surname?” includes posts associated with exploring the TBBT universe through competitive contests. The mourning of the “end of the series” is here processed by testing one’s exhaustive and obsessive knowledge-a trait typical, as we have seen, of nerd culture. In conclusion, the hybridization of disciplines is equal to the hybridization of the contexts of media experiences, underscoring how much emotions, particularly those in this context, allow people to feel a real empathy toward specific characters that turns, at the end of the series, into a general mourning that pervades the souls. So, an empathy that moves out of the classic face-to-face interaction and transmutes into a screen-to-screen interaction. These dynamics could be lumped in with the dynamics of situated interactions in individuals and small groups, families, neighborhoods, communities, all the way to local, national, and global organizations (Tibbets, 2015). There are certainly also neuroscientific explanations to these concepts just analyzed, but without the sociological gaze it would only be one side of the coin. Any influence of cognitive neuroscience in cultural sociology provides naturalistic underpinnings, which, in this case, involves admitting that the processes and mechanisms described in cognitive neuroscience are constitutive of the social actor (Turner, 2007). So, a cultural sociologist who were to find himself or herself embracing cognitive neuroscience could not treat individuals as black boxes and, consequently, it would not be possible to use psychology and literary fiction as the only mode of interpretation (Lizardo et al., 2019). Rather, it would be

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necessary to use a transdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the interrelation or simple relationship between the sciences. As Franks notes, in Mead’s classic theory of role taking, “the actor incorporates the imagined response of the other into his or her emergent behavior” (Franks, 2013). For Mead, the medium of this incorporation is “symbolic meaning.” The mirror neuron mechanism reveals the embodied foundations of intersubjectivity, including neural self-representation (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003), thus overcoming the residual scientific bias in the conceptualization of role-taking. In this account, inferences about the other’s mental state can be automatically simulated by perceptual and sensorimotor schemas acquired from worldly experience in the world (Wood et al., 2018). For example, Chartrand and Bargh refer to the automatic tendency to adopt postures and gestures through “the chameleon effect” (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). So, a kind of mirroring, of mirroring oneself in the other, therefore, Husserlianly speaking is like sharing the same “life world” as the other person. For this to happen, there needs to be a common experiential history between them, not necessarily related to a personal acquaintance of theirs, but also to historical situations that allow the person to mirror themselves in the other’s experience and, for that reason, empathize. Obviously, this particular type of empathizing falls outside the general empathy that we have dealt with several times within this text, the latter being more related to an empathy of experience rather than pure empathy, by which I do not mean to argue that this type of empathy is forced or fictitious, but it is definitely related to external events and not to consciousness. An example would be the war situation that several populations are experiencing, not least but close to us, Ukraine. It tends to be the case, at least according to what some research on the strength of bonds has described, that the Ukrainian population will be able to empathize more with each other, even activating mutual and entirely “free” help unlike other people who do not and have never experienced war. Therefore, how we can observe “mirroring” thus becomes an empirical question and can be linked to traditional concerns with sociocultural processes that generate and perpetuate “symbolic boundaries” between groups (Ridgeway, 1991; Lamont et al., 2018). For example, Cheng and Chartrand noted that there is a greater likelihood that participants will imitate another individual if they consider him or her a “peer”

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rather than a “superior” (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003). However, this last statement must be taken with caution. In fact, there are two elements to point out, the first is that the principle of imitation is not necessarily related to the principle of empathy, in fact, most likely the two issues are completely unrelated; the second case concerns the strength of imitation instead, it is true that it is easier to imitate a “peer” rather than a “superior,” but this is dictated by the fact that one does not possess all the knowledge, means, and interpersonal skills that a superior has acquired through experience. In addition, imitation of a superior might take place for other purposes and toward people with “lower” ranks than one’s own, generating acts of “hazing” for example. However, we might find a common, transdisciplinary element within ritual and anthropological analysis that could marry with sociology. To clarify, the term “ritual” does not presuppose religious or traditional issues, but also the ritual of imitation by learning or play. In fact, this dovetails nicely with a key observation from sociology and anthropology on the importance of ritual read in terms of the production of solidarity. In particular, from Durkheim’s concept reread by Bellah, it is possible to see how the sociologist observes distant populations coming together, concentrating in specific places for a limited or permanent period, expressing an emotion. Specifically, in such a condition, dear especially to the transition from a mechanical to an organic type of solidarity, we find two rituals, the first being the adaptation to the other through the welcoming phase and, in a second moment of enormous social emphasis, the identification with the other’s life stories. The latter, in fact, bring real stories belonging to personal ties, generating what Bellah called collective emotion, which cannot be expressed collectively without an order that allows for harmony among people, generating a harmonic figure composed of ritual and emotionality (Bellah, 2005). Similar observations are made by McNeill in Keeping Together in Time, as he refers to “muscular bonding,” in which military groups, religious groups, and social movements exploit the emotional consequences of moving “together in time” in such a way that individuals experience a “loss of boundary” or feel as if they are one body (McNeill, 1997). More recently, Summers-Effler, Van Ness, and Hausmann, building on Collins’ (1941) interaction rituals, explore why social movements fail or succeed (Summers-Effler et al., 2014). He argues that what we

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tend to think of as stable groups should actually be conceived of as “rhythmic patterns of organization.” The mirror system, a fundamental element for this type of identification, hence the importance of neuroscientific analysis, provides the neural mechanism through which one is able to move together, almost generating a rhythm, laying the prelinguistic foundations of solidarity (ibid.). Geertz (1973) also noted that individuals have evolved in such a way that the development of neural structures requires cultural integration and, more importantly, that through cultural integration neural structures continue to transform. The specification of how mechanisms at the cognitive and neural levels can inform theorizing in cultural analysis, such as those mentioned above, are often confused, limiting it to a simple outside/inside the mind analysis (Lizardo et al., 2019). For other cultural sociologists, the connections are stronger and the dependencies are clearer, such as for cultural sociologists interested in the link between meaning, action, and experience, the connection between language and cognition, or the way people are coupled through intersubjective “entrainment” loops (Lizardo, 2009; Cerulo, 2010; Ignatow, 2012; Summers-Effler et al., 2014). Ignoring cognitive scientific work would, as we noted at the outset, lead to discrepancies on situation analysis. In this last respect, the emerging transdisciplinarity, between sociology and social neuroscience, must pose as a model of productive interchange, going to avoid any notion or attempt to become exact science (Lende & Downey, 2012). This model could be adopted as a bibliographical basis by both sciences coming into contact with each other, generating a concert of information that could lead to the basis of a first linguistic dictionary and, therefore, understand each other without prevailing. So as argued by Wacquant, it would be interesting to begin to understand transdisciplinary ethnographies between sociology and social neuroscience, perhaps within a neurosociological discourse I might add, what fields of inquiry they might open up (Wacquant, 2015). Despite the experience of neurosociology, which was relatively successful in America in 1972 but stopped there, it is important to reiterate that re-introducing it in a cultural sociology context would become a more complex and multifaceted area, within which multiple lines of connection with cognitive neuroscience could be applied; some of which will be stronger than others (Lizardo et al., 2019). For example, it is clear that understanding

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the neural basis of language alone cannot provide useful explanations or fields of inquiry for sociologists. It certainly has implications for the growing work of cultural sociologists using automated text analysis to capture meaning structures (Ignatow, 2015), but cognitive-­neuroscientific insights may not be enough; something closer to cultural history, narrative studies, or other forms of textual interpretation of action should be pursued in this regard. However, to the extent that the latter help support substantive theories about the way symbols function, the nature of meaning, language, and their connection to practices (Biernacki, 2000), developments in cultural theory, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, will also indirectly influence most strands of humanistic work. In this regard, we could argue that all branches of cultural analysis, regardless of method or approach, will be affected by the neuroscientific turn, some more strongly than others. This could be very interesting for the purpose of developing new practices and concepts, since, as we noted at the beginning, while not all cultural theorists or cultural sociologists could join in social neuroscience analysis, better cultural theory, based on common meanings, could help realize and pursue optimal results for the scientific enrichment of sociology. Finally, this might also be the only way for social neuroscience to make significant contributions to sociology. This discourse could expand, perhaps, right through neurosociology.

1 Empathy and Emotion Analysis from Transdisciplinary Networks: The Example of IRNSN This concluding paragraph is meant to be an input toward new theoretical and empirical paths, particularly those based on applied research in sociology. In particular, as has been repeatedly explored throughout this text, new technologies could lend a big hand to researchers. A kind of laboratory-based sociological analysis, where the researcher will be able to delve into aspects that until now are difficult to analyze with the usual modes of inquiry. One example that I want to bring to you and of which I am a member, conceived in 2021 and implemented in early 2022,

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initially between the University of Salerno and the University of L’Aquila, and then expanding to the University of Italian Switzerland and the University of Buenos Aires, is an international research network named IRNSN (International Research Network for Sociology and Neuroscience). This Network, which consists of the Department of Political and Social Studies with Prof. Iorio, the Gino Germani Research Institute with Prof. Scribano, the Department of Human Sciences with Prof. Roberti, the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society with Prof. Morese and the Neurosociology Laboratory of the Institute of Neuroscience Research with Prof. Maslova, is a transdisciplinary attempt at inquiry, combining different paths of research, reading and investigation. Specifically, the researchers’ goal is to bring together approaches from the social sciences, sociology, communication sciences, psychology and neuroscience to analyze the emotional, social and cultural elements underlying social interactions and relationships, including those embedded in the context of digital and social media. Within this transdisciplinary theoretical framework, the dialogue between the disciplines allows key concepts such as relationality, empathy, interaction, and digital communication to be reflected upon in an innovative way. The idea stems from the fact that, as we all know, human beings, far from being exclusively rational, are also guided by emotional dynamics in their decision-­making processes. Along the course of 2022, several activities have been initiated, including the setting up of the first research project named “Individualized Connections: a multidisciplinary analysis of changing social relations in the age of social media.” The intent of this project is to deepen the analysis of the transformation of social ties with an interdisciplinary approach, in an attempt to innovatively address the reflection on some key concepts related to the individualization process that characterizes the current era, also in light of the role played by the forms of connectivity supported by digital communication and social media. It is our firm belief that disciplinary contamination will enable researchers to profitably integrate different sensibilities, approaching the analysis of social phenomena from a variety of mutually enriching perspectives (Poel et al., 2015). This is because in an ever-changing society, in which it is increasingly necessary to identify new models through which to read the complexity of the

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present, it is essential to analyze these aspects. The idea arose from the studies of Barry Wellman and Manuel Castells on the spread of a new social form, that of networked individualism, so much so that it led IRNSN researchers to attempt to understand what drives individuals to build networks of connections based on increasingly selective and selfdirected ties, exploring the role of emotions and empathic connection in defining that individualized network at the center of which is the social actor. Interest is directed primarily at the increasing experiential and life diversity present in the network, which accompanies people in a process of total individualization that weakens the forces of social ties and the perception of the existence of an individualized common destiny. As stated in the research project on the IRNSN website, “as Rainie and Wellman (2012) suggest, the territorially dispersed social networks supported by social media enable the exercise of such forms of reticular individualism, indicating the partial overcoming of those patterns of communal belonging that characterized societies of the past” (IRNSN, 2022). The two scholars highlight how the new social operating system of networked individualism frees actors from the restrictions of tightly connected groups, but also requires them to develop networking skills and strategies and engage in the daily maintenance of ties. The networks created through these modes of interaction are characterized by multiple and temporary memberships, resembling more networks of individuals connected for specific practical and/or emotional needs than integrated groups of actors oriented toward the construction of a common project; group membership loses importance compared to being part of a network. In fact, the main driver of most of what happens online is the need to socialize and connect with others: this need is not induced or determined by available technologies, but arises from individuals, from their desire to be socially engaged, to network with others. In some ways, networked individualism represents a new balance between individual and society; it is the me with others that prevents isolation but also limits the uncomfortable constraint of belonging (Zavala Pérez, 2012). Within these forms of networked sociability (Castells et al., 2007), individuals are always establishing new connections, activating, from time to time, those offline and online ties that appear most functional to their purposes.

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However, the ease of connection to an increasing number of social networks raises a number of questions for scholars: although networked individuals can count on a significant number of social contacts, how long do these ties last? Is real empathy generated through these relationships? And what kind of continuity can an identity built through these networked connections have? If our ability to feel similar to others is an essential factor in building a social network, how many others are we able to identify with? Can we talk about a personalized identity on our network nodes? These are just some of the research questions that the IRNSN project will attempt to answer in order to investigate the dynamics underlying social relationships from a truly multidimensional perspective (IRNSN, 2022). Therefore, through the use of new technologies, in conjunction with the virtual, as seen just above, which is increasingly entering our real, must be a focal point for reflection and research. This is especially endorsed by the Pandemic from Covid-19, which has expanded and profoundly transformed that connection that already encompassed us before, expanded the educational sector and, most importantly, reestablished rules to leisure time. We could almost argue that, during the lockdown period, we were able to learn about multiple forms of empathy, entering into new relational processes and new meeting places. In this regard, a first glance, albeit fleeting and theoretical, must obligatorily be given to this interesting field of inquiry so as to initiate first experimental processes. For example, Prensky already argued in 2012 that “we are increasingly living in a human-machine world. Anyone who does not understand this and who is not struggling to adapt to the new environment, whether they like it or not, is already being left behind. Adapting to the new rapidly changing and technologically advanced environment is one of the greatest challenges of our time. And this certainly applies to education” (Prensky, 2012, p. 64). Thus, technology-mediated human interaction involves an increasingly reduced bodily physicality, but this is not lost, but is “replaced” by a virtual physicality through avatars. Of course, although modern messaging media are able to synthesize our emotions through emoticons, emoji or the more modern memoji, they still do not support digitized multisensory exchanges. This might appear to be a limitation,

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but if one looked at this from another point of view, it might seem like an excellent opportunity. For example, why should the virtual world be a transposition of the real world? Does the metaverse really seek this? Theoretically no, the logic of the so-called metaverse, as anticipated in the text is nothing more than the Internet we have always known but which allows for a different psychic sensoriality, does not seek to transpose real interactions within a virtual world, but seeks to complement the two worlds. To the real world, composed of physicality and sensoriality, it introduces the virtual world, “expanding sensory capabilities.” Therefore, the proximate consequence, is the transformation of all verbal and para-­ verbal aspects. One might speculate that, in the field of neurosociology, future research might focus on para-verbal elements related to technologies such as eye-tracking and VR, as proposed in the methodology. One thing must be clear, however, interactions depend not only on the explicit exchange of information, but also rely on implicit and affective modes of communication. To conclude, it is necessary that all investigations aimed at the analysis of emotions, thus characterized by an arduous path, must not have as their ultimate goal the attainment of morality at all, because this would mean saying that empathy is at our complete disposal, that we are able perhaps to disable it or disregard it, and the whole thing could lead to a choice, yes complex but mathematical, through a ratio of positive and negative things that invites the person to choose, assuming a kind of utilitarian thinking. For example, in Fechner, Lotze and Titchener the path is similar, empathy was always seen as an end, that is, as the representation of feeling (Manca, 2018). Representing feeling meant analyzing empathy, or the conception that one had (has) of it, as the culmination of a process of action; starting from relationships and moving on to reciprocal interactions, one arrives at the representation of a feeling, love, hate, joy, and anger, for example, but always considered, precisely, as an end. Only with the sociological meaning of the concept has it begun to be interpreted as a means (Marano, 2019). That is, through empathy, action can evolve in one way rather than another. However, as we have analyzed, this conception underwent a further transformation with the discovery of mirror neurons. The latter have given, yes, the possibility of analyzing it as a medium, but as a medium suitable for imitation and replicability,

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thus as a unique and univocal element. In this regard, it must be emphasized that the historical process that led to the empathy we know today is of fundamental importance; this is because many of the discourses, discourses and reflections on the concept, are of close relevance today. Suffice it to say that Verstehen, or empathy, is a concept that, explained in different terms, was used by Rifkin, to name but one, who contributed to a development, in a timely manner, of further declinations of the concept. This is by far an advantage, as was analyzing the concept itself as it evolved, useful, especially, for the study of empathy within the discourses on mirror neurons. However, before reaching a final analysis, it was necessary to have a clear frame of reference so as to understand how empathy has evolved conceptually and methodologically. The starting point of greatest interest is, surely, the path that has led several authors, including Weber, Schütz, Goffman, Berger and Luckman, to use and deepen this concept, starting from the explanation of actions with the German terms Verstehen and Einfhulung, two terms that are both polysemous and polyvalent, but that have allowed to integrate the general concept of empathy, until arriving at the conception on social construction, useful to understand how empathic interaction can occur. In fact, it is precisely from the interpretivist concept that we can say that empathy underlies social relations. This is because, thanks to society’s conception of the world as a shared outcome, we could say that in order for there to be relationship and interaction, there needs to be empathy. To speak of empathy is to deepen the need for communication, interdependence, and interpretation of the other that runs through the contemporary world. However, the value of empathy is not to be found in a priori salvific or positive qualities, but rather in the commitment, which invests every individual in exercising and developing a human capacity endowed with a specific characteristic, that of giving access to reality and allowing one to open up to the other. Hence, it is precisely through this access, today more than ever, that one feels the need to enter and expand it. Importantly, the conceptual introduction seen within this research paper is useful to enter into the details of the issue. Of particular importance we find the approach Ardigò gave to sociology, almost as if he anticipated the discovery of mirror neurons, rather than the sociology of emotions, as a precursor to what Ardigò himself, TenHouten and Turner have repeatedly

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advocated in their texts, namely to place the person at the center of a sociological discourse, capable of considering him as the source and ultimate goal of any scientific knowledge (Zurla, 2010). Therefore, the attempt to be advanced to enable the achievement of this goal is to introduce a transdisciplinary approach to sociology, giving the possibility to other sciences to analyze what contribution can prove useful and fruitful for sociology and vice versa. Only in this way can science place the subject as its primary source and end by influencing (the subject) and being influenced (by the subject). So, the discovery of new knowledge, or new ways of knowing, could lead to a timely conception not only of empathy, but also of the capacity that each of us has, in different ways, to experience it, or, as Ardigo argued, to empathize with the other person even before we enter into verbal or gestural contact. In this regard, it turned out to be crucial to understand that the fine lines that the sciences have as boundaries should, yes, be sensitively crossed, but also precisely interwoven without ever presumptuously and impulsively crossing them, knowledge and skills. Doing so could open the way for a new discipline, neurosociology, which could enable this transdisciplinary exchange provided there is a willingness of all the sciences to ascertain a cultural and social basis even before a biological one, because—using Turner’s words— it is indeed true that mirror neurons are given in our biology and that they influence our actions, but society and culture influences, at the same time and with the same force, mirror neurons and their evolution. The purpose of what has been said so far has been to delve, in small steps and with caution, using Turner’s work, into the analysis of theory of mind, that is, extending the early insights of George Herbert Mead. This allowed us to incorporate, at a very abstract but still fundamental level, the interpersonal processes that drive theory of mind in humans. Such arguments have led neuroscientists, Rizzolatti being one example, to assume that humans are guided by bio-programmers in the brain to engage in behaviors like those within troops and groups. The reality of the facts tells us that this statement is not really true. People have to work culturally and emotionally to form and sustain groups, and tension, conflict and volatility are very common in groups precisely because lacking are natural bio-­ programmers that override negatively charged emotions. Humans must rely on neurological systems to organize themselves, but once they assume

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this angle of vision, they must never forget that they are first and foremost cultural beings, where the latter can influence and modify mirror neurons and orient them toward other horizons (Jung, 1979; Jung et al., 1999). Thus, the task of neurosociology is to discover the brain modules through which one is prone to this capacity for group organization and, above all to provide for explaining, through empirical research, not the motives for behavior, but the socio-cultural-interactionist derivation of every behavior and every type of action. So, starting with education, new technologies, the virtual that is increasingly embedded in the real, and culture, new implications will be possible. In education today, and in the world, the advancement of technology allows us to create a new human-­ machine symbiosis that improves the way we do almost everything. We must join the quest for digital wisdom and empathy in our practice and also in our lives (Prensky, 2012). In fact, for several years now the direction being taken in the sciences has been in the “neuro” realm, and sociology should implement spaces for reflection in this regard. Only through neurosociology can we keep up with the social, cultural and economic change we are going through. Acknowledgements  To conclude this work, which has come after intense years of research, spent among studies, publications, seminars, conferences and lectures, during which I had the opportunity and the good fortune to meet and compare myself with scholars, colleagues and professors, numerous thanks could not be missing. I intend to thank, first of all, Prof. Gennaro Iorio who, in addition to the trust he gave me in accepting me as his doctoral student, was able to spur me on, follow me and allow me to expand my knowledge, teaching me what it means to be a researcher. I thank Serena Quarta, who patiently reread the entire research paper and with her professionalism was able to shore it up, her invaluable suggestions will also be useful to me in my future. I thank Prof. Maurizio Merico, who with his passion was able to suggest, both Nadia and me, in facing our path in the best way, suggesting and guiding us to our different journeys, including anxiety-filled ones abroad. I thank Professor Geraldina Roberti, for her punctuality in revisions, notes and insights, thanks to her advice it was possible to improve our work. I thank Professor Gabriele Balbi and Rosalba Morese, for welcoming me in Switzerland, during my Visiting, with kindness and gentleness, following and advising me, ending up collaborating in research and writing activities. I thank Professor Piazza for taking interest in my

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research and deepening what I analyzed in relevant research topics. This work, moreover, has been enriched by the advice of numerous colleagues and friends, such as Valeria Saladino, Nadia Crescenzo, Chiara Iannaccone and Simona Castellano, with whom I have shared educational journeys and research ­activities; Mario Tirino and Vincenzo Del Gaudio, with whom I have shared publications and fruitful discussions on countless topics. I thank the entire Social One team and especially Silvia Cataldi, for support in the research stages and for the opportunities for discussion at conferences and seminars. I thank Monica and Dino, who welcomed me like a son without any hesitation, always ready to smile and take an interest. I thank Cristina, Luca, Ali and Fede, who were always close when needed and always ready to have fun and entertain us in order to defuse in the little difficulties that can happen. Finally, a heartfelt thank you goes to my family, who allowed me to be able to reach this milestone, made of sacrifices, apprehensions and joys.

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Index1

C

I

Callard, F., 55

Interdisciplinary, 49–52, 54, 70

D

de Waal, F., 38 E

Einfhulung, 9, 21–28 Embodiment, 144, 151, 157–159, 163–168 Empathy, 7–43 Erleben, 9, 11, 15, 21, 28–32 F

Fitzgerald, D., 55

M

Methodological approach, 146–154 Multidisciplinary, 50–52, 53n3, 53n4 N

Negative empathy, 36 Neurosociology, 39, 39n23, 40, 41n25, 42, 90, 95, 96, 105–127

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Auriemma, Empathy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38860-6

243

244 Index R

T

Research methodology, 157–162

Transdisciplinarity, 49–57, 59, 67, 72–83 Trans-disciplinary approach, 49–83

S

Singh, I., 55 Social Neuroscience, 89–127 Social Psychology, 89–127 Sociology, 89–127 Sympathy, 8, 10–15, 18, 22, 37, 43

V

Verstehen, 20–22, 28 Virtual empathy, 168–174