Jakob Sverre Løvstad
CTO, Seema
30 April 2025
In this growing saga of how we treat those who are different, the influence of stress is yet another factor that seems to exacerbate the situation. This is perhaps especially important since most of the people we talk to through our own work in the field are people with above-average workloads.
To take the empathy part first, there have been quite a few experiments on this in social psychology. But I think the so-called "Good Samaritan" experiment by Darley and Batson, published in 1973, illustrates the main point very well. In a nutshell, they looked at 67 seminary students who were all asked to come to a room to lecture on the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37 for those unfamiliar with the story).
The set-up was such that some of the students were given plenty of time, others very little time, to get to their presentation. On the way to the room where they were to lecture, there was a person, an actor, who was apparently in bad shape and needed help. What you then saw was that 10% of those who were in a hurry word 63% by those with plenty of time, stopped to help out. Funnily enough, it turns out from the trial notes that some of those with little time also jumped over the man lying there to rush to the room and talk about the importance of being an altruistic person.
Of course, there have been many other variations of this experiment in retrospect, but I still think the original stands up well to illustrate that we don't exactly become better people by having little time and feeling the cold sweat running down our backs.
In addition, stress also seems to have a negative impact on performance during intelligence tests. This involves looking at self-reported stress as well as physical measurements (e.g. cortisol in the saliva), and what the impact is on top performance. It's a bit of a mixed bag as to exactly which components of IQ deteriorate depending on how you measure stress/anxiety and which test batteries for intelligence you've actually "exposed" the participants to, but the negative effect is there. Not that stress actually makes you dumber (unless cortisol is present over a very long period of time), but performance is down as long as the stress is present to a high enough degree.
So, to summarise: Stress, in high enough quantities, tends to make you less empathetic and more stupid in your behaviour. Of course, this has a lot to do with how things go in general (e.g. returning home to family or meeting friends after a really hellish day at work), but it becomes particularly problematic when we have to relate to, understand, help (and so on) those who are strangers to us.
In that sense, working with chard is also somewhat dependent on getting your heart rate down. Plus, you usually live a little longer, so it's a win-win situation.
English 
Norwegian