Paying Attention
“A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. ”
In a world full of distractions, how do we pay attention to what matters most?
Attention is a bi-directional process: just as we have stimuli coming into awareness through our senses, we use top-down filters to determine where we pay attention and which stimuli we will detect.
Some of the filters we use include:
Filters that pick up social stimuli such as human faces
Filters that prioritize information about ourselves (self-referential stimuli)
Filters for categories and words that we are most familiar with, including chronically accessible categories, schemas, and stereotypes