• Question: How far does the government affect our individual concept of compassion and human nature?

    Asked by 553reah34 to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 15 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      Hi 🙂 Wow, that’s a fantastic question, and very relevant just now!
      Where to start…. 😉 I’m not sure how much the government affects it directly, however, I think they do to a great extent through the media…. In the recent election for example, certain news sources were linked to certain parties and they would present their own views of certain politicians, but also of society – making certain groups out to be lazy, money grabbing, dangerous etc…. So I think that the media has a huge affect – not necessarily on our concept of compassion, but certainly, who we think is worthy of our compassion. I think we can also suffer from overload with constantly being bombarded with images we can start to become a bit immune to tragedies, and start to lose our compassion. So to the extent that the government is related to the media, I think it does affect our sense of compassion a little, but also think about how the government reflects society’s compassion (or lack of!)…

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 17 Jun 2017:

      When we are told about certain groups of people doing bad things, and we don’t get a full picture of those groups, we can become biased towards assuming that all people from those groups do those things. In contrast, research has shown that when we see stories of individual people, this enables us to feel compassion towards them, and can change our attitudes towards the groups that they belong to. The government has its own agendas (and these change depending on the governing party and particular politicians), and a lot of these agendas seem to play out in the media (not all media is impartial – some former politicians are in charge of certain newspapers, for example). So, yes, powerful institutions like the government can have an impact on our understanding of society and I think you’re touching on some really interesting questions around how these agendas can filter down through institutions like the media and education (institutions in a position to change our attitudes, behaviours and beliefs). For example, the institutions that give money to organisations (like the government) can have power over what those organisations do, by funding their activities. There’s some great research in social psychology that looks at the influence of power structures that you might be interested in 🙂

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