Decoupling as Empathy

Becoming a better coupler through decoupling

I had an interesting discussion in notes the other day where I talked briefly about empathy, first in response to someone making a good point that I thought could use a bit more detail:

In the replies, I mentioned a theoretical application of decoupling that I often use interpersonally:

Decoupling is a word I hear most from and around rationalists and in the rationalist diaspora. Obviously, I’m not going to rely on my own powers to write a definition from memory, so here’s Sarah Constantin (an incredible writer who’s still writing on Substack here, I highly recommend subscribing) on the subject:

Stanovich talks about “cognitive decoupling”, the ability to block out context and experiential knowledge and just follow formal rules, as a main component of both performance on intelligence tests and performance on the cognitive bias tests that correlate with intelligence. Cognitive decoupling is the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate.

Sarah furthermore claims that most people do not have the capacity to decouple:

Speculatively, we might imagine that there is a “cognitive decoupling elite” of smart people who are good at probabilistic reasoning and score high on the cognitive reflection test and the IQ-correlated cognitive bias tests. These people would be more likely to be male, more likely to have at least undergrad-level math education, and more likely to have utilitarian views. Speculating a bit more, I’d expect this group to be likelier to think in rule-based, devil’s-advocate ways, influenced by economics and analytic philosophy. I’d expect them to be more likely to identify as rational.

If the application of decoupling is policy debate, especially politics in general, my experience maps to Sarah’s as written here - decoupling is most commonly done by particular types of men, especially those interested in economics, utilitarianism, and rationalism.

Decoupling is almost universally written about as a form of thinking that will be perceived by others, especially women, as having minimal empathy. To wit:

To a low-decoupler, high-decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a high-decoupler the low-decouplers insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight.

So why would I write a post about how decoupling could be useful for empathy?

There are two types of empathy, cognitive and affective empathy. As defined here:

Affect (Emotional) Empathy: The visceral, emotional, part of caring. Usually including a measurable physiological response (eg. watching a video of someone getting hurt increases heart rate, crying when sad, experiencing cringe).

Cognitive Empathy: The analytical ability to identify and understand what a person infront of you is feeling and why - without necessarily feeling it yourself.

Good cognitive empathy requires successful decoupling, especially when what you’re feeling is at odds with what the person in front of you is feeling.

I think that a lot of things are labeled as empathy failures when they are in fact decoupling failures, especially disputes between a man and a woman. Men show a persistent inability to decouple their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions from how they speak to and act with their wives. When a woman is upset about something and her husband or boyfriend disagrees with her, he will often fail not in empathy but in decoupling. Women do this too, but they’re at least marginally less likely to tell their husbands that they just need to be more rational and less emotional while doing it. The fact that men and women alike label the male version of this pattern a lack of empathy obscures what’s really going on, in my opinion. The piece that follows focuses on the male version of this pattern because it’s been mislabeled, not because women never do something similar.

It’s tempting but inaccurate to pretend that a situation where feelings are involved is one where logic is absent. Feelings can, in my experience, be modeled as a traceable logic chain, one that begins by accepting a few premises and coming to a particular conclusion and accompanying feeling. I much more often take issue with the premises others are accepting to reach their conclusions than with the conclusion itself.

You may protest that emotions are inherently sub-rational, being operated by our lower brain functions and susceptible to, for example, uncomfortable and unconscious somatic states. Emotions can certainly be influenced by somatic responses, but it's basically impossible outside of severe mental illness for a strong emotional response to present without a stimulus. Something happened to trigger a feeling of “because this happened I feel x”, even though I feel x in part because e.g. I got almost no sleep this week. The stimulus is still part of a logic chain and often not an unreasonable one, just one that is confusingly strongly felt if you don't account for the somatic response or unconscious process. Accounting for the somatic response can be very helpful, but usually is best approached in one of a few ways:

1. Make a guess and try to serve the need without explicitly tying it to how they’re acting. Offer food, rest, chocolate, NSAIDs, a bathroom break, or say that you are going to get yourself one of these and offer it to the other person

2. Show understanding of how they’re feeling, then point out that the feeling may be stronger due to e.g. not having eaten in a few hours

3. Depending on who your partner is, they may offer the somatic process as an amplifier without your help. As there is more trust in a couple, I believe this one becomes more common.

Whether or not an unconscious emotional amplifier is in play, there is ~always a line of reasoning and conclusion underlying an emotion.

An example of such might be:

Premise A: my friends don’t text me first very often

Premise B: a lack of texting first implies a lack of thinking about me, and possibly or even probably a lack of interest in or concern for me

Conclusion: my friends no longer care about me

Depending on who you are, the above line of thinking may not be a hard one for you to “empathize” with. The culprits in this logical progression are her friends, not you, for example, which is always going to make it easier to avoid a sort of fog of war in your assessment of the situation. You may notice, however, that if your significant other talked to you about this in great distress, you wouldn’t exactly agree with her about premise A or premise B.

Potential skeptical questions regarding premise A: How often are her friends actually texting first? Is she indexing strongly on the recent past, for example, one or two instances, or has this been going on for months? How frequently is she texting first, daily? Every other day? Do these friends feel like there’s enough communication between them that it doesn’t occur to them to text first?

Potential skeptical questions regarding premise B: does lack of texting really imply that? While your friends might be thinking about you less, is it likely because of you? Do they have any stressors in their life that might contribute to lower levels of engagement, both on text or in person? If you think it’s likely that they’re not interested in talking to you, what makes you so sure? Did you do something they didn’t like? If it’s really about you, is it about you in a way that’s a big deal? For example, is there a possibility that they’re going through a rough time and they’d rather talk to their sister, or a different friend? Is there a possibility they don’t want to bother you?

And of course, there’s the final conclusion following from the premises, which is not without its shakiness as well. These are reasonable questions, and they might be illuminating to explore at some point, and to some extent.

I’ve also written a lot of them. Some readers may be surprised that I have so many potential questions to be asked about this situation - does it really warrant this much skepticism? Not necessarily, but actually engaging with this level of questioning, especially immediately after someone says that they’re upset at their friends, is what it looks like when someone has “cause” to pick apart an emotional narrative - when they don’t believe you.

In other words, this is what asymmetric epistemic rigor looks like emotionally.

If you’re applying asymmetric epistemic rigor to how someone else is feeling, you’re pretty much always going to get an irritated, truculent response: someone who is not going to be fun to talk to. This is where a lot of dudes slip up and assume that the resistance is evidence of lack of rationality on behalf of the woman they’re talking to. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to side with her on this one, and say that asymmetric epistemic rigor is usually evidence of your own lack of rationality more often than it is anyone else’s.

That said, there is absolutely a place for poking at those kinds of questions. It may genuinely provide some illumination to her or feel helpful to analyze some of those questions, under some circumstances. Usually, the first step to interrogating the premises girding a feeling conclusion is communicating that you understand what her premises are and how they flow toward the conclusion, even if you disagree. After that, you have a choice about how to cover these questions - collaborative discussion or tedious nitpicking.

Again, a comparison to more traditional intellectual discussion is useful - compare two hypothetical Astral Codex Ten commenters. One rarely comments, and only appears to complain about what Scott got wrong about any particular factual detail in a post, often criticizing irrelevant inclusions that are non-central to his point, or offering corrections that are simply asserting as fact a competing expert analysis without acknowledging that there is ambiguity in the space. The second commenter is a frequent figure in the Astral Codex Ten space. This commenter will praise Scott when he likes the post, offer “yes, and” style additions where relevant, and only provide corrections when they’re above a threshold of important and possible to prove with evidence.

Your goal in disputes with your wife is to be the second type of commenter. If you cannot manage this, at least do not be surprised (or consider whether it’s actually reasonable of her) when she gets extremely irritated when you act like the first commenter.

“But Eury,” you say, exasperated, “my wife is nothing like Scott or the ACX comments section. She’s EMOTIONAL.”

Yeah, that does make this whole thing harder than it is with a dispassionate interlocutor. That said, if you actually have a real handle on your feelings when stakes are high - like when someone you love is mad at you - you can provide similar levels of good faith, productive engagement to an upset spouse as you can to a LessWrong forum.

In the vast majority of cases, reconstructing the line of reasoning for whatever the other person is upset about and saying “it sounds like you’re saying [if x and y… then z], is that right?” is sufficient to make the other person feel empathized with. Empathy is much more a question of showing understanding than it is one of showing emotion, although the emotional valence of the words you choose do matter. As in intellectual conversations, you’re going to start off on pretty good footing by basically steelmanning the line of thought and feeling the other person is experiencing and saying it out loud to them. “I understand why, given that you believe x, you have concluded and are distressed by y.”

Men, at least men with a basic level of logical skill, are fully capable of this. Often, what’s impeding them following through with this is an attachment to their own position. It seems unacceptable, under these circumstances, because they don’t want her to think they agree with her, even when the text of what they said clearly does not imply agreement. “I’m hearing you say [this],” is, after all, directly claiming to be a restatement, not agreement. Sometimes, people claim that others don’t want empathy, they want to be agreed with.

While I’ve had this happen, this is not my most common experience. If I successfully show that I understand what someone is thinking or feeling, I can mention that I’ve reached a different conclusion and otherwise let it be, and they will not be particularly bothered by my difference from them given that I showed understanding. If I’m pushy about changing their mind or telling them why I think they’re wrong in detail, they won’t like it, but that’s because I’m the one who can’t handle disagreement, not them. If I could handle that we disagreed, I wouldn’t insist on telling them where and why I think they might be missing something. People don’t like it when you’re pushy with them, but they’re not particularly bothered by disagreement that doesn’t insist upon itself and focuses on understanding.

Men often make these logical errors because they find it difficult to think straight when their wife is upset. From there, their unconscious or semi-conscious assessment is that the problem to be solved is that their wife feels something that is harming them, rather than decoupling from their emotional response to their wife’s feelings and productively engaging with the problem that she’s perceiving.

This means they start from the realization that they want their wives to stop feeling, speaking, or acting the way she is, and in order to change this reality, they review the facts at hand, looking for a point, any point at all, with which they can argue that their wife is wrong to feel, speak, or act the way she’s acting (unspoken: because her behavior is bothering him/impeding him in some way). They perceive that showing her understanding could prevent them from achieving what they want, which is for her to change her feelings and behavior immediately. In other words, they can’t handle her disagreement, and they set out to find a way to insist that they know how she should act, think, feel, or speak, and that her failure to listen marks her as irrational.

The central problem is a failure to detach from or at least interrogate that immediate, knee jerk desire to push her into or out of a particular feeling, speech pattern, or behavior. Why does how your wife feels prevent you from hearing her out instead of telling her why she’s wrong, for example? It doesn’t, it just makes it hard because how she’s feeling affects how you’re feeling, and you can either manage that internally or try to manage what she’s feeling, externally. That is an emotional response, not a rational one. You’ll get immediately better at empathy if you start treating the conversation like a debate where your job is to act as a devil’s advocate for your wife’s position.

You may immediately find that you have a revulsion to doing that. “But what I think is correct and what she’s saying is not!” “But she’s being unreasonable!” “BUT SHE’S WRONG”

Hmm, yes, I see that you want to have a fully contextualized conversation with your wife where the context that we never abandon is the possibility/definite and obvious concrete reality that you’re right and she needs to feel differently/think differently/act differently. Too bad. Use that big brain to decouple from that. It requires high cognitive flexibility and well-developed emotional control to be able to do this under emotional pressure, and relationships strongly benefit from both of those skills, well-applied.

Women can often tell the difference between you asking questions in an asymmetric rigor kind of way and you being genuinely interested in finding out what she knows about the situation, how she’s understanding the situation. A huge percentage of conflicts between especially immature or early couples are downstream of the man wanting his need to nitpick to be treated with exactly as much grace as his genuine concern and curiosity. Some of the words can be very similar but the conversation will not be, again, see the ACX commenter example above.

You can walk through the reasoning of why your wife is upset to show her that you understand the whole picture of how she’s feeling, and then you can tack on (if you must), something like, “while I disagree, it makes sense to me that given these premises you’d be feeling x about what happened here”. The focus is not your disagreement, but your disagreement is still being communicated.

You may protest that in other circumstances, steel manning is a prelude to your own argument. Sometimes you’re going to need to make your own case here - maybe your wife thinks you left the kids at soccer practice and is distressed when you show up at the front door without them. You’re going to want to tell her what happened eventually. You can launch into an emotionally aggrieved complaint about how you took them to their grandmother’s and they wanted to stay, or you can decouple from your emotional context, tell her where they are and why, and then say that you logically understand her distress, given the information she has (there are no children at her house and you were supposed to bring them from soccer practice to her house).

More intensely, sometimes you’re going to need to work out whether your wife is right that you’ve done something with negative consequences. That requires a rational assessment, not an emotional one. Emotional responses to this sort of thing often look like immediately dismissing the possibility of her being right and then constructing a long list of reasons why she’s wrong. Epistemic rigor is both more important and much harder to apply when you’re dealing with the inner workings of a familial relationship.

In my experience, men are actually really great at showing empathy to their wives and girlfriends when they don’t have a fundamental disagreement about the source of her distress or how she’s acting in response. They love being someone’s shoulder to cry on, a place for her to go to.

They’re just pretty bad at logical decoupling when the thing they have to decouple from is an egoic assumption about whether they’re right. This makes them seem bad at empathy, but I honestly think that lets them off the hook too easily. Many men have the skills to recreate the premise-conclusion framework tied to their wives’ distress and say it back to her in words that she’d agree with. What’s preventing them is a logical failure rooted in the emotional experience they’re having in response to hers. That’s human and understandable, but it’s not particularly emotionally or relationally productive.

Both of you can be right at the same time, and you don’t need to agree on everything to be a functional team. Her feelings don’t actually need to match yours any more than your feelings need to match hers. It’s tempting to complain that she simply won’t accept your comfort because she needs you to agree with her. A lot of the time, she just needs you to be capable of logically reconstructing how she feels and communicating that to her, and once you’ve done that successfully, you can offer disagreement in good faith.

You ~never need to change how your wife feels to resolve a conflict, at least not in the sense of telling her that her feelings don’t make sense. Another form of useful decoupling is detaching from a need to get her to feel or act a certain way. Most of the time, what’s necessary is not actually feeling what your spouse is feeling. It’s having control of what you’re feeling so that you can be productive when you talk to her.

Maybe you don’t need to get better at empathy at all. Maybe you need to get better at decoupling, which is to say, thinking more clearly under emotional pressure.