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Those who treat people poorly may lack empathy. "Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy," Pillay told Bored Panda.
"In the brain, they both involve different sets of anatomical structures. For a person to have empathy, these two brain systems must be able to function, and in people who lack empathy, they do not function well."
"For example, in psychopaths, the emotional empathy system is not activated as much as in people who are not psychopathic," the Harvard-trained psychiatrist and brain researcher explained. "Some regions involved in cognitive empathy (the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view) also do not function well. There is a range of capabilities when it comes to lacking empathy."
Pillay said that there are no standard therapies for conditions where egoistic behavior is prominent such as antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders.
In such cases, especially when an early developmental trauma led to these conditions, long-term psychotherapy is usually recommended.
"However, there are approaches such as transference-focused psychotherapy and anecdotal use of psychodynamic-based psychotherapies with some success," the brain researcher added. "So, overall, there are therapies that can help this but the treatments are challenging."
Scrolling through these pictures, you might feel disappointment or even anger toward their villains. But that's perfectly normal. "If you are an empathic person, seeing someone being hurt as a result of a jerk will activate your own mirror neurons, making you feel the pain of the victim," Pillay added.
"Also, we carry impressions of social rules in our brains, and when these are violated, we may even have exaggerated reactions."
"Reactions are partly due to moral emotions but may differ by culture," he said. "For example, one study revealed that reactions to violating someone's autonomy are similar in India and Britain, but Indian participants express more moral outrage than do Britons when there are violations of community."
However, if you want a more spiritual or philosophical explanation of the pictures, we can look at the idea of karma which originated in Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Of course, the notion that good and bad deeds will be rewarded with the same results is widely spread in the West too. The popular saying "What goes around comes around” and the much older proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap” are excellent examples of that.
This line of thought teaches us that everything that happens to us is ultimately due to our own influence—whether intentional or not—and that coincidence is in reality an illusion.
Self-described Buddhist physician Alex Lickerman, M.D., thinks that general causality is something everyone understands and believes, namely that every effect has a cause.
"We may not be able to identify what particular cause is responsible for a particular effect, but it's difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of an effect that has no cause," he wrote. "Buddhism, however, takes this principle of general causality even further. It denotes the principle of cause and effect as a universal law that governs not just the physical universe but our own lives as well."
Basically, it works like this: everything we say, think, and do serves as a cause that will, at some time in the future, when circumstances are right, manifest an effect.
"In one sense, this seems obvious: if you get angry (cause) you might get punched (effect). But Buddhism takes this even further, arguing that all the causes we make are recorded at some level in our lives as if they were transactions in a bank," Lickerman highlighted.
"Making a good cause would be like depositing money that can be withdrawn at some point in the future while making a bad cause would be like borrowing money that at some point in the future will have to be repaid. So if, for example, you slander someone today, that might result in them slandering you tomorrow (if they hear about it)—or it might result in you breaking your leg."
However, the lines are often blurry. "The chain of causation that connects original causes (e.g., slander) to their manifest effects (e.g., a broken leg) is simply too sublime to trace from beginning to end, making it difficult, if not impossible, for us to believe such a chain even exists," Lickerman acknowledged.
"In fact, according to Buddhist thought, it requires nothing short of a great awakening—enlightenment itself—for a person to perceive the workings of this law of cause and effect in his or her own life."
However, if we accept the possibility that we ourselves have made the causes of all the effects we currently experience in our lives, does that then mean the woman who suffers abuse at the hands of her husband or boyfriend is to blame for it? Or even worse, deserves it?
"From the Buddhist perspective, we are indeed responsible, but importantly not to blame, for every effect we experience (blame accruing only if we intend to yield a particular effect at the moment we made the cause for it)," Lickerman said.
"Whether or not you deserved it isn't even a consideration," he explained. "Through the inexorable workings of cause and effect, you received the effect of the cause you made. The law of cause and effect is impartial, impersonal, and strict, just like the law of gravity, requiring no higher power to make it run."
However, the physician thinks there's a silver lining. "It explains how bad things can happen to good people (everyone has made bad causes in the past, and each cause carries with it an effect that must at some point be experienced in the future). It also, most importantly, places the power to change our destiny firmly in our own hands."
