Excellent throwdown from Amy Kean about apathy - with some equally great comments (Julia Harris being an obvious standout). What follows will only make sense if you read the original.
“So I'd love to know if you've seen any apathy models that you can share, and if you have any thoughts or builds on this.” - Challenge Accepted.
“And if you could "yes and" me” - But of course. The following should be read on the basis that I am very much looking forward to the next iteration of this and I am merely making suggestions about what might be in there. So lets yes and the f*** out of this.
What is apathy?
I immediately hit Google Scholar - because that is my jam. And what struck me is that there are multiple, separate traditions that discuss apathy. There is a psychological one and a political one. We’ll probably get into some of the social and economic ones as well. So people are often talking about different things when they use the term “apathy”. AK’s original post doesn’t really define apathy, it goes straight into a diagnosis of a set of social issues. That’s not really a problem for a first shot but I’d like to nail down what we are and we aren’t talking about here at some stage.
If I was going to reverse engineer a definition from the post, I would say that AK would define apathy as: “a reluctance by individuals to engage in discussion and action around important political, social, and economic issues of the day”. She can come back and tell me that I’ve got it completely wrong (this Substack operates under Cunningham’s Law).
She says that it’s not just about empathy. This is an interesting call out because empathy has been in for a rough ride recently. Empathy has become associated with the Design Thinking movement. In the last 18 months, that movement has very much hit the Trough of Disillusionment in the Hype Cycle. The shallow, cheap attempts at empathy by corporate wannabes may have tarnished the whole enterprise.
She also says that she doesn’t believe that people just don’t care or are selfish. And my considered response is that’s both true and not true. People are both selfish and selfless and no one cares about everything and I have yet to meet someone who cares about nothing. And there are people who would claim that we are getting more selfish and less caring. I just want to park that for now.
AK then highlights 5 feelings that people have that fuel this reluctance to engage: powerless, unsafe, distant, conflicted, uneducated. In other words, people want to engage but feel blocked from doing so by one of these 5 factors. And obviously these 5 are interconnected. Intuitively I think there is truth in this.
My next question is: How can we measure these? We might do this directly through surveys or we might do this indirectly through observing behaviour. Lets put a pin in this and look at some other approaches to apathy.
Apathy As Medical Condition
This paper by Marin from 1990 is a good introduction to the medical view of apathy: Apathy describes only those patients whose lack of motivation is not attributable to a diminished level of consciousness, an intellectual deficit, or emotional distress. Apathy is, therefore, a state of primary motivational impairment. Apathy is a disease of motivation.
The paper then discusses when apathy may or may not be pathological and the socioenvironmental vs biological causes. The bulk of the paper then goes on to discuss how apathy might relate to mental illness, bodily diseases, and drugs.
Marin went on to create an Apathy Evaluation Scale for measuring apathy - but it was primarily used to test people with stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression. A mere 27 years later, Ang et al developed an assessment scale for apathy in “healthy” people.
The Apathy Motivation Index says: Apathy is a disorder of motivation characterised by reduced action initiation and goal-directed behaviour. It breaks up apathy into:
behavioural activation: tendency to self-initiate goal-directed behaviour
social motivation: level of engagement in social interactions
emotional sensitivity: feelings of positive and negative affection
The research indicates that there appear to be 4 populations - with clusters around behavioural/social apathy and emotional apathy (indicating two different forms of apathy) and then linking all of this to similar measurements for depression, pleasure, and fatigue. My simplistic reading of this is that Not-Caring-Doing and Not-Caring-Feeling are two different things. There have been Italian and French replications. The Italian one “showed that AMI scores were not predicted by age, education, or sex of participants” but the French one found some differences between men and women.
All this is interesting but not necessarily helpful - yet. The AMI is still a new measure that has not been used with large numbers of people. Broader surveys of populations may reveal systematic differences in apathy among different groups (e.g. the rich and poor, the young and old) or they may not. It is also unclear whether measures on this scale are correlated to actual behaviours. Or if doing certain things (e.g. spending a lot of time on social media) impact apathy.
Apathy As Political Choice
“Why this political apathy?” is a title that we could read today but was written by Jay Franklin in 1932. So concerns about political apathy go back a long way - to at least The Federalist Papers - a healthy democratic government being dependent on a politically active populace. The behavioural measures of political apathy typically relate to participation - primarily not voting but also not joining political parties, not consuming political news, not participating in public protests, etc. Then there is survey data about attitudes towards politics.
I’d note that Finifter’s 5 dimensions of political alienation overlap with AK’s apathy drivers to an extent (particularly powerlessness and isolation).
So are we getting more apathetic about politics? To an extent, that depends who the “we” are here. But it seems to be the case that political participant is dropping in Europe. And this is not a new thing. Participation has been dropping since the 1980s. But it takes a while for the cumulative effects to wash through. And the survey data is not great either.
This disconnection between populations and governments is not caused by social media, it started way before HTML was invented. But social media may have acted as an accelerant for existing trends. My take is that the failure to deal with the aftermath of 2008 Global Financial Crisis did politicians no favours and the apathy (and antipathy) to politics is a semi-rational responses to a set of institutions that no longer seem to be working in the ways that they used to. But I could be wrong.
Apathy And Charity
One final measure of social apathy is the willingness of people to donate their money and time. The UK saw the pandemic reduce both charitable participation (which might be expected in lockdown) but also charitable giving. While in Australia the amount being given is going up but the percentage of givers is going down.
The book that comes to mind here is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone - which might position apathy as the opposite of social capital.
Whatever
I feel all apathied out now.
As Tom DeLuca outlines in The Two Faces of Political Apathy, we can see apathy as both a condition of individuals and property of structures. And if we want to reduce the amount of apathy in the world then we need to tackle both at once.
Over to you, Amy Kean.