Killer Empathy

Key takeaways

Listeners are advised to balance attentiveness while engaging with immersive media to avoid distraction during potentially dangerous tasks.
Empathy plays a crucial role in understanding behaviors, not only in insects but in understanding human actions as well.
The struggle to comprehend senseless violence exposes the complex nature of human emotions and the challenge of maintaining objectivity in the face of grief and tragedy.
The narrative emphasizes that understanding violence may challenge our inherent biases and assumptions about empathy and objectivity.

Summary

Reflection on Listener Feedback

The episode opens with Latif discussing a poignant email from Paul Tucker, a carpenter who suffered injuries while listening to Radio Lab while operating power tools. Paul humorously highlights the dangers of being engrossed in content that distracts from attention to safety. This email not only brought concern to the hosts but also became a guiding principle for their storytelling ambitions. Latif expresses gratitude toward Paul for sharing his story, emphasizing the immersive experience they aim to create for listeners.

Gryllacridids and Empathy

The episode revisits a 2012 story about Jeff Lockwood, an entomologist studying a particularly fierce family of crickets known for their aggressive behavior. Through his research, Jeff learns about empathy and understanding towards these creatures, exploring their fierce nature as a form of survival. As he becomes more familiar with them, he contemplates whether they possess a sense of self, complicating how he perceives their aggressive instincts.

Personal Trauma and Objectivity

The narrative takes a somber turn when Tamra Carboni recounts a tragic event in which her mentor, Dr. LaFage, was shot during a mugging. This incident challenges Jeff's previously held beliefs about empathy and objectivity in science. As he reflects on LaFage’s death, he grapples with his inability to fully understand the motivations behind such violence—bringing forth questions about whether empathy can coexist with objective study, and what it means to approach violence with a dispassionate lens.

The Role of Senseless Violence

Tamra and Jeff explore the implications of violence as a natural part of life, akin to the behaviors observed in Gryllacridids. Tamra struggles to relate to violent actions, while Jeff attempts to understand it through the lens of survival instincts and evolutionary psychology. Their conversations highlight the tension between seeking understanding and accepting the limits of comprehension regarding human nature and violence.

Show notes

In an episode first aired in 2012, Lulu Miller introduces us to Jeff Lockwood, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who spent a part of his career studying a particularly ferocious set of insects: Gryllacrididae. Or, as Jeff describes them, "crickets on steroids." They have crushingly strong, serrated jaws, and they launch all-out attacks on anyone who gets in their way--whether it's another cricket, or the guy trying to take them out of their cages.

In order to work with the gryllacridids, Jeff had to figure out how to out-maneuver them. And as he devised ways to keep from getting slashed and bitten, he felt like he was getting to know them. Maybe they weren't just mindless brutes ... but their own creatures, each with their own sense of self. And that got him wondering: what could their fierceness tell him about the nature of violence? How well could he understand the minds of these insects, and what drove them to be so bloody?

That's when the alarm bells went off. Jeff would picture his mentor, Dr. LaFage, lecturing him back in college--warning him not to slip into a muddled, empathic mood ... not to let his emotions sideswipe his objectivity. And that would usually do the trick--Jeff would think of LaFage, and rein himself back in.

But then one night, something happened that gave Dr. LaFage's advice a terrible new kind of significance. Tamra Carboni tells us this part of the story, and challenges Jeff's belief that there's a way to understand it.

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