Can Empathy Make People Mask Up?

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By Wendi Rank

My daughter didn’t cry when her guinea pig died.

He was old, she shrugged. Shocked, I suggested to my husband we had perhaps raised a serial killer. Where was her empathy?

My husband, practical as ever, agreed with our daughter. KitKat had been quite old for a guinea pig. But if I wanted to know if our kid was capable of empathy, he told me, I should yawn in front of her.

A 2017 study indicated yawning in response to another person’s yawn is a barometer for empathy. Well, I’ve been yawning in front of those two for years. Neither has ever offered me a nap, much less an empathetic yawn.

I cried for days over KitKat’s death. But then, I had witnessed his death first-hand. I was the one who discovered him convulsing in his cage. His little body seized for close to an hour as I bundled him off to the vet.

I also had to store his corpse at my parents’ house for the better part of the morning, but that story is too long for the space I have here. We can chat later.

KitKat’s tragic story is not all that different from the pandemic. Tom Avril of The Philadelphia Inquirer illustrates just how much knowing someone affected by COVID contributes to health behaviors surrounding the disease.

Few Americans know someone who has survived diphtheria. This becomes their argument for shunning the vaccine. COVID is no different. One study showed subjects who knew someone with COVID were more likely to take precautions than those who knew of no one with COVID.

Some subjects in that study were given reading material and a video describing the effects of COVID on others. Other subjects were given just the reading material. In the end, says Avril, the reading and video group was more likely to acquiesce to COVID restrictions than the reading-alone group.

These results indicate playing to our empathy may yield more adherence to COVID regulations. This is especially true when considering a US Census Bureau stated population of 330 million against just under 8 million infected, according to Johns Hopkins’ most recent figures.

That means – hang on, I’m Googling “percentage calculator” – 2.4% of Americans have been infected. You’re more likely to meet a United States citizen living with food insecurity than someone diagnosed with COVID. That can make COVID seem less real, and restrictions easier to skip.

In other words, no one has yawned in front of you.

Numbers can be tricky. Empathy can be tricky too. COVID has killed more Americans than sharks and lightning combined killed in 2019. But I’m willing to bet most people wouldn’t hang outdoors during a thunderstorm. Nor would they swim with Steven Spielberg.

Don’t wait until you know someone with COVID before you follow restrictions. Yawn when someone near you yawns.

And shed a tear for my poor dead guinea pig.

Tom Avril’s article can be found here.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendi Rank is a Willow Grove native with a graduate degree from LaSalle University. She has worked as a school nurse, a registered nurse and nurse practitioner in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She has previously written for the journal Nursing.

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