Empathy

Empathy has been a section of psychology and sociology that I have had the fortune of studying many times over the course of my academic career. Needless to say, much of the Dr. Decety's talk was not entirely new to me. Of the various subjects Dr. Decety spoke about, however, I found the two separate experiments regarding rats and altruism to be the most surprising.
The first one, a 1959 experiment by psychologist Russell Church, showed that rats, who pulled a lever for food, would stop pulling this lever if the response was paired with an electric shock to a neighboring rat. Such a type of altruism was shocking for many reasons to me; I did not know that any sort of animals were capable of providing others (besides offspring) with so much benefit without any real benefit to themselves. In fact, these rats were even going through legitimate harm by not receiving food, yet they still decided to not pull the lever which harmed their neighbor.
Dr. Decety's talk was focused on empathy in humans, so obviously the experiments on rats were not of extreme importance. However, I still felt that it was important to show, and I believe this type of research paved the way for more complex hypotheses on human empathy. There were many points to draw from Dr. Decety's talk; this point was my favorite.