Editorial: Diversifying your environment leads to empathy and healthier society

Empathy is a rare commodity these days.

The ability to understand someone else's feelings as if they were your own has clearly ebbed in recent years as we've become more fractionalized by partisan politics.

What's more troubling is that many of us have given up on trying to understand where others are coming from.

This is a recipe for disaster.

A lack of empathy is at the heart of the civil rights explosion that has rocked the nation in recent weeks. We're encouraged by the number and variety of people who are calling for a greater understanding of and appreciation for what it's like to be black in America.

On the whole, we're still far too segregated - by geography, by politics, by race, by religion, by age, by gender, by economics - to get to a place of understanding, of empathy.

And we'll never truly be a healthy society until we challenge ourselves to move in the right direction.

Remove many of those contributing factors - economic differences, religion, etc. - and you have the makings of an interesting sociological experiment.

University of Chicago Neurobiologist Peggy Mason wanted to explore why we feel empathy for some but not others. She decided to study rats.

If a rat saw another rat in distress, would it help the other out?

Mason's experiment tested rats' ability to use empathy as a motivation for action, according to a news release from the U of C.

First, would a rat help another rat in distress? Second, would a rat help a rat of another color?

But first, she had to determine whether a rat has the capacity for empathy.

She put one rat in a clear plastic tube and introduced another rat outside the tube. That rat on the outside would put itself in a bad spot in order to help out the one in the tube, her research says, concluding that rates have the capacity for empathy.

The second part of the experiment took a white rat that had never met a black rat to see whether it would help it. It did not.

However, white rats that lived with black rats would help out any rat.

Her conclusion is that some empathy is baked in through biology but also can be shaped by one's environment.

"I think that the lessons that we've learned from the rats are just so wonderful, because what they tell us is that we can control this simply by diversifying our environment, that by interacting with others from a different type, you become affiliated toward any of that type," Mason said. "Diversity in exposure in interaction is critically important."

Is there a direct correlation to human behavior? That remains to be seen, but what the rats tell us is surely something to think about.