Did Our Ancestors Feel Different Emotions—and What Does That Mean for Compassion at Scale?
Inspired by Gal Beckerman’s essay in The Atlantic, “What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?”
We often assume emotions are timeless and universal. Fear is fear. Grief is grief. Compassion is compassion.
But a growing field in the history of emotions challenges this assumption. Its claim is not simply that people in the past expressed emotions differently, but that they may have experienced them differently, shaped by cultural narratives, moral frameworks, and social expectations.
This matters for how we think about compassion today. If emotions are historically contingent, then psychic numbing—the collapse of compassion as suffering grows—is not only a quirk of the modern mind. It is also culturally scaffolded: societies teach people whom to care about, what suffering counts, and when violence is tragic, inevitable, or even virtuous.
At the same time, emotional experience is not infinitely flexible. Human cognition has limits. Attention saturates. Sensitivity diminishes. Large numbers become abstractions. Emotional life is best understood as bounded plasticity: culture shapes its direction, biology sets its limits.
Culture can reshape what emotions even are
We assume emotions are timeless, but the categories and moral meanings attached to them change across history. Tiffany Watt Smith shows how societies construct emotional vocabularies that organize what people feel—and what they are expected to feel.
Societies train “emotional communities”
Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of “emotional communities” explains how groups cultivate norms for which emotions are valued, suppressed, or ignored. Compassion is never purely individual; it is socially patterned.
Biology sets the ceiling: why compassion collapses at scale
As the number of victims increases, emotional response often decreases. Paul Slovic explains psychic numbing: a reliable pattern in which compassion does not scale with suffering. This is not a moral defect, but a cognitive constraint.
The arithmetic of compassion made visible
If one life feels like a tragedy and a million become a statistic, that is not just a metaphor. This talk situates psychic numbing in mass violence, climate risk, and other forms of large-scale harm that exceed emotional representation.
Emotion precedes reason
We like to think reason corrects emotion. In practice, emotion often determines what reason even notices. This matters for policy communication: facts alone rarely overcome psychic numbing; meaning and identity decide what gets through.
What this suggests
The history of emotions and behavioral science point in the same direction. Culture determines whose suffering matters and how it is framed. Biology determines how much suffering we can emotionally register. Psychic numbing emerges at their intersection.
Across eras, atrocities require both cultural permission and biological numbing. Large-scale harm will always risk falling outside emotional capacity. Narratives decide whether that absence of feeling becomes reflection, indifference, or justification.