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Empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity: study

127 points by Reedx 7y ago

jdc 7y ago
Could this not call into question the empathy scale used in the study?
- adnzzzzZ 7y ago
  Likely not. I would assume they use one of the big five traits which is called agreeableness, or something that's close enough it, and this result seems in keeping with how that trait would be described. People who are high in agreeableness are more likely to see the world in prey vs. predator terms - in my speculative opinion because this trait evolved as a maternal trait primarily to deal with the protection of infants - which takes its form in the political sphere as a very nasty type of behavior where if someone is found out to be the enemy everything's fair game to destroy them, since they're predators and you need to protect the prey on your team.
  - deleted 7y ago
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tehjoker 7y ago
When you have empathy, do you take the viewpoint of the master or the slave?
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- dragonwriter 7y ago
  If you have empathy, you do both. That doesn't mean that your sympathy for each is equal. EDIT: But, the measure in the article doesn't measure empathy, which is independent of position, it measures whether one frames virtue through victimization narratives. People who agree with that wouldn't empathize with both, they'd empathize with the one that they see as the slave, which would all too often be driven by confirmation bias and tribal victimization narratives within their in group. I mean, we live in a country where the racial, religious, gender, and political ideology groups (alone and in every combination) having measurably disproportionate social, economic, and political power have equally strong or stronger (within their own communities) victimization narratives to the groups that are objectively disadvantaged. It's very easy for people to answer yes to the question that supposedly measures empathic concern when they in reality have no empathy for those outside of their identity group, which they perceive as disadvantaged and their only “empathic” concern is for those within their in-group that they identify as even greater victims of the same injustice that they themselves are victimized by.
  - kempbellt 7y ago
    Empathizing with the master is difficult for many people. Not realizing that a person, born into the lucky privilege of being the master, doesn't see what they do as victimizing to a slave. It's just how life works for them. Tim Minchin did an interesting bit on empathy a while back. Discussing the nature of empathizing with the shooter, as well as the shooter's victims, in incidents of mass shootings. The podcast is available here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrPkI4xkWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrPkI4xkWA
    - sysbin 7y ago
      Listened to the podcast and its good. I've always been empathetic to shooters because I understand determinism and realize the shooter didn't have any free will in how his/her life turned out. The universe just happened to make it be. Anyway more food for thought to the topic.
      - mnm1 7y ago
        Based on what you're saying, it's immoral to send the shooter to prison or punish him in any way since he had no control over his actions and therefore was not guilty of assault or murder. Bet that theory goes right out the window when it's someone you know lying dead in a pool of blood. Does this apply to all actions? In that case mortality simply doesn't exist and there cannot be good or bad things. How far do you take this delusion is what I'm curious about?
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Based on what you're saying, it's immoral to send the shooter to prison or punish him in any way since he had no control over his actions and therefore was not guilty of assault or murder. No, it's not; determinism applies to the punisher as much as the punished, so if the fact of determinism negates any moral culpability for the act being punished, then it likewise does so for the punishment.
- harshreality 7y ago
  #nondualism The master and slave are part of the same whole; one cannot exist without the other, and more generally, everyone is a flawed or incomplete person in one way or another. Having empathy for one without having empathy for the other is to misunderstand the universe.
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    Would you seriously argue that in 1864?
    - fennecfoxen 7y ago
      Let's do an 1864 argument. Have empathy for the slave. He is endowed with dignity by the Divine. Jesus Christ paid a price in blood to set him free from the bonds of sin. What God has freed, let no man return into bondage. Have empathy for the master. Jesus died not only for the upright, not only for the oppressed, but for tax collecting thugs, prostitutes — even the murderer crucified beside him. He raised a saint from Saul of Tarsus. He died for the slave's master. Oh, yes, the master is undeserving, but none of us are deserving. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, how should I stand? But know what shape this empathy for the master takes. You must fear for his soul. If it is consumed by sin, he will be cast into perdition. He must well and truly repent, and his sin is grave.
    - larnmar 7y ago
      I certainly would. A little more empathy for slaveowners (that is, the ability to see things from their point of view) would have enabled the US to abolish slavery without the bloody civil war. Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.
      - tehjoker 7y ago
        This is a misunderstanding of American history. I don't fully know why it was so easy to do away with slavery in other parts of the world (and it mostly happened all within about 100 years of each other), but in the US, slavery was core to the economic system of the south - a slavocracy headed by white slavocrats. The slavocrats would have been happy to have empathy, for the northerners to treat them softly and allow their system to persist. They were (not entirely happily) trading free state / slave state as new states were admitted to the union. It was only when a fever pitch of abolition put the new Republican party in with Lincoln as president did the south finally decide it would be impossible to continue their system in co-existance with the industrialized free north. The capitalist free north also had an interest in liberating the slaves so they could be put to use as highly productive industrial workers instead of agricultural workers. To this end, the south seceded from the union and fired the first blow against the north at Ft. Sumter. A brutal military campaign was necessary to break the power of the slavocracy and free the slaves. You can look at the historical material interests of the north and conclude it wasn't entirely selfless, but by god it was necessary to end the evil endemic to the southern economic system.
- deleted 7y ago
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harimau777 7y ago
I wonder if some of this could be due to people feeling that what people believe is not as relevant of what they do. E.g. it seems like a lot of Republicans genuinely believe in family values and integrity, but whenever Trump violates them there is some excuse for why they don't stop supporting him.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  This has puzzled me as well. I lean right of center, and know some really super people who also lean conservative. I haven't been able to reconcile their values, their support of Trump, and Trump's behavior.
  - thinkingemote 7y ago
    In group belonging is a powerful motivator
- journalctl 7y ago
  People tend to think that your beliefs drive your actions. So if someone claims to believe one thing, but acts in accordance with other beliefs, what are you going to assume about their beliefs? If I talk about believing in family values but make it impossible for gay people to get married, do I really believe in family values? Or was I just lying/using a dog whistle?
throwaway13337 7y ago
Maybe the scale at which you love your neighbor comes at the cost proportional to how much you hate your common rival. To put it another way, humans might be incapable of emotional empathy outside of tribal brotherhood. That is, people they can identify with. It'd make sense in a sort of selfish gene way. Emotional actions just seems wholly negative at the scale of our society. This may be the core of our division. We shouldn't be encouraging broad emotional responses to global events.
- miedpo 7y ago
  Hmm... just two cents I have. While this may be true to a large degree, I do think it's possible to overcome this. I went on a religious mission for 2 years and one of the things I remember most vividly about it is that I came to a point where I didn't have emnity towards other people. It took a lot of work (quashing emnity can be hard), but it did work. I'm not sure most people are in a place where they are ready to try that, but I do think it's possible. Anyways, yeah just my two cents :). People do have a tendency to be tribal as you said.
- chongli 7y ago
  You don’t need empathy to love your neighbour, you just need to choose to do so. This is one of the central tenets of Christianity. This story reminds me of Scott’s essay I can tolerate anything except the outgroup [1]. I am partial to Father Brown’s argument that it doesn’t count if you only forgive the people you like. That’s just tribalism, which humans are naturally inclined toward. The hard thing is to forgive (or indeed to offer anything of worth to) people you don’t like. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
- pbourke 7y ago
  > humans might be incapable of emotional empathy outside of tribal brotherhood Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man
kempbellt 7y ago
> It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That’s right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude. I can relate, as I am certainly someone who would probably laugh in this situation, as I also find myself laughing at the idea that people trample one another during Black Friday. If someone were to physically injure someone during a controversial debate, I find it amusing in the sense that I am thinking "Hah... That's the way to get people to listen to your viewpoint", sarcastically. It's not that I'm laughing at the injury. I'm laughing at the absurd immaturity of it all. Laughter is frequently used as a coping mechanism for dealing with unpleasant realities. Personally, it doesn't diminish the tragedy of what happens. It allows me to process it with a sort of mental "buffer".
- sysbin 7y ago
  > Personally, it doesn't diminish the tragedy of what happens What's more tragic, an unpleasant reality you don't laugh at or an unpleasant reality where you laugh at as a coping mechanism. I would assume the unpleasant reality where you cannot even laugh at it. So I imagine some diminish of the tragedy does exist.
- aleister_777 7y ago
  And many of these same people will claim a moral superiority over you and cast you out for any disagreement.
- deleted 7y ago
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- pas 7y ago
  Probably highly empathetic folks would be hard to find in todays information overloaded world with so many bad news. Eg I have a relative who very much cannot look at the news because it's all bad. And actively seeks out positive things. (Like meditation, Om chanting, they try to bring positivity to the world, basically the new age thoughts and prayers.)
dorkwood 7y ago
> Like many past studies, this one gauges people’s level of “empathic concern” by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with a series of seven statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Does this really signify empathy? I consider myself empathetic, but I wouldn't agree with the above statement. If anything, having concerned feelings for someone solely because they're less fortunate than me seems a bit patronising. I wouldn't want someone to think I thought less of them just because they had less than I do. This is why I'm skeptical of studies based on surveys in general -- by playing empathy chess, and wondering how it would make the other person feel if they knew how I was feeling about them, I'm placed into the "not empathetic" camp.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  > Does this really signify empathy? I consider myself empathetic, but I wouldn't agree with the above statement. You are noticing the difference between "compassion" (a divine emotion) and "pity" (its near enemy). Pity grants you a position above the pitied, while compassion positions you alongside/with the sufferer. These nuances are hard enough to suss out given unlimited information and attention. I agree it's all but impossible to gather equivalent distinctions from a rigid survey.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    I'm busy, but it would be nice to see the questionaire, because the supplied example in the article could either signify pity or compassion.
- larnmar 7y ago
  I agree, empathy is about being able to see things from another’s point of view, not the feeling of “tender, concerned feelings”, and particularly not of restricting those feelings to those less fortunate than yourself.
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    "cognitive empathy" (as it's called in this article) isn't all there is to empathy: http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cognitive-emotional-compassionate/ http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cogniti...
daenz 7y ago
>The authors of the APSR study—Elizabeth Simas and Scott Clifford of the University of Houston and Justin Kirkland of the University of Virginia—have this kind of dynamic in mind when they write, “Polarization is not a consequence of a lack of empathy among the public, but a product of the biased ways in which we experience empathy.” That's the nugget. According to the study, it seems that people with high empathy are more often people with high empathy towards their in-group...and a lack of empathy for the out-group. I'd argue that it isn't really empathy at all...just a more emotional form of tribalism.
- knzhou 7y ago
  Nah, I would argue that empathy has never been anything more than that. We have existing names for the “real” empathy you being up too — people call it being two-faced, practicing whataboutism, being callously analytical, being too unempathetic to side with the obviously right side, and so on.
  - pas 7y ago
    People can be empathetic toward one person easily. A small group, yeah sure, it happens. But the moment they need to consider a group roughly the same size as theirs, and with opposing intents, fuck no. (And that's why seemingly two part politics devolves everywhere to a zero-sum game.)
- r00fus 7y ago
  I’d call it emotional parsimony. It’s the kind of behavior (core human nature) that views the pain of thousands from another country (or other social/socioeconomic group) as less than the pain of someone directly familiar to oneself.
- baked_ziti 7y ago
  > According to the study, it seems that people with high empathy are more often people with high empathy towards their in-group...and a lack of empathy for the out-group. I'd argue that it isn't really empathy at all...just a more emotional form of tribalism. Yes this, especially considering literally everybody is this way. Care and concern for some people and none for others is par for the course. At that point it's not empathy, it's just being the same thing everyone else is.
knzhou 7y ago
Empathy has always been morally neutral. Feeling what others do allows you to help them, but it also allows you to manipulate them, or better hurt them. Most of the time it only acts as a way to strengthen existing tribal affiliations.
jenxkfjeo0 7y ago
The problem is we’ve exploited our ability to tailor our messaging so specifically that people aren’t getting new information. We’ve seen this before, in a way: when Christianity ruled, no new emotional information or perspective was capable of taking hold. Our media apparatus is essentially doing the same thing by feeding people the same narrative they grew up on their entire lives. We have kept thousands of hours of TV shows, video games, and movies, news clips, etc and repeatedly view it. One can mentally exist in 1995 with the Internet and the new couch that feels just as comfy. Our limbic system suggests it anyway. Look at our politics mired in clinging to the past, sticking to same old tax & drug policies. The problem is a bunch of nerds who meant well built the panopticon, because they were staring at screens and not considering human history of authoritarian corruption of our emotionally guided agency (humans brains don’t find facts, they engage motor controls and coordinate agency, speaking sounds or doing a mechanical motion of some sort) to focus on the speech we don’t control. Previously religious doctrine, now finance. Now media corp can beam the exact speech necessary to keep every individual soothed just so. How brilliant.
- vharuck 7y ago
  >One can mentally exist in 1995 with the Internet and the new couch that feels just as comfy. 1. 1995 was just 24 years ago. I'm not a historian, but thinking a cultural period lasting 24 years unusual would be ridiculous for any time before the industrial revolution. And I don't think it even applies today. 2. You might be biased about 1995 culture because it's your culture. My mother-in-law watches reruns from the 70s. People tend to stick with what they like, and there have always been other people willing to provide.
  - jenxkfjeo0 7y ago
    The year was an arbitrary choice. People used to have to, except in the political context, move on from such experiences. Being able to recall a few quotes of much different than sitting there importing it all verbatim over and over. For minute in all-the-minutes: LiterallyWatch(FavoriteShow) There was no preservation, books wore out, etc etc They were forced to emotionally process as part of assimilating the info and seek out new info. I am describing an abstract process and how it’s changed to where we can reconnect instantly to past emotional selves. We keep certain pathways lubed and hot without generating new ones through exploration of new truly unique sensory input (how many for loops does a programmer write over and over? Oh sure the JSON content changes. Does the value of a for loop?) Stand still in information stagnation so the social political system can figure out to adapt to maintain control. This isn’t novel thinking and it’s not even radical, it’s pretty well trodden philosophy backed by modern biology research. So downvote all ya want HN. Disinterest in one posters rhetoric does not delete facts of reality
StuffedParrot 7y ago
Most people’s views don’t neatly align with any party; that’s simply the easiest narrative to follow. I am on the left (technically independent) but I certainly have a mountain of criticism about Democrats. When party loyalty is divorced from values I wouldn’t expect a change in the underlying dynamic that drives people to partisan polarization. To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. In more concrete terms, how do I know I can eat and be healthy and be around my people in the future and experience joy as I do now? In fact these are often the same things that drive Democrats, Independents, in fact these are universal. It is something else (cultural, economic, social?) that drives party loyalty. For another example, often conservative christians give to charity at higher rates than any other group (at least in the us). Yet, the left is constantly striving for representation and equity, which in some forms is certainly a type of empathy. It is a mistake to consider a lack of empathy a driving force in politics.
- garmaine 7y ago
  > To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. I’m a republican-leaning independent, and what you write here strikes me more as stereotype of the right than actual concerns of the right. I don’t really worry about any of the things you mention.
  - aleister_777 7y ago
    Agreed. These are not the values that make me. Many of the values that I represent will lead towards stability, however, it's not fear that I'm defined by.
  - StuffedParrot 7y ago
    That may be true, I never claimed to be accurate (certainly not in a general sense), I am just conveying what I hear when I talk to people about what matters to them. Fear is certainly not a value, but americans rarely talk about values in any explicit way.
rdtsc 7y ago
> These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. > one gauges people’s level of “empathic concern” by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with a series of seven statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” It seems like a problematic way to measure empathy. I don't think it would be surprising that people who claim to have a lot of empathy in surveys, or in general conversations, would demonstrate a lack of empathy in their actions. My tongue-in-cheek version of the abstract would be something like "...We argue that, in practice, the _self-reported_ experience of empathy ... can actually exacerbate political polarization."
- koboll 7y ago
  The truly empathetic might be humble about it, whereas sociopaths would seem to be the most concerned at coming across as virtuous in the way they describe themselves
  - um_ya 7y ago
    San Francisco has entered the chat
- baked_ziti 7y ago
  The word does seem to be taking on a different meaning as time goes on. People seem to intend for it to mean "care and consideration for the ingroup as I define it." Which is of course, not its actual meaning.
  - allovernow 7y ago
    Sure it is. Nothing about the definition of empathy suggests that it isn't selective. We are generally empathetic but still eat animals. Some cultures still eat dog - you don't think they can love their children?
    - baked_ziti 7y ago
daenz 7y ago
I think there's an interesting dynamic with empathy and freedom of speech: defending freedom of speech forces you to have a basic empathy for everyone. It might not be an empathy based on their lived experiences, but it is one based on respecting that we should collectively protect what they have to communicate. It's why I believe attacks on freedom of speech are so dangerous...they undermine this foundational respect for one another. If hating what someone has to say but defending their right to say it isn't a form of sincere empathy, then I don't know what is.
- pas 7y ago
  Naturally this empathy only self-reinforces itself, if it selectively ignores those who agitate against it. Eg if someone advocates against free-speech, maybe protecting them won't preserve this basic empathy. And it seems this instability is real, as we have a hard time defining the minimums of free speech.
  - baked_ziti 7y ago
    > we have a hard time defining the minimums of free speech. In what sense? Legally, for example, we don't.
    - pas 7y ago
      But we do. In many countries, and even in the US the history of what is and isn't a good trade off to limit speech is a long and still ongoing discourse. Sure, the gov part seems easy, but then people call on FB to filter lies in political ads, and again people want laws to mandate social networks to do this, and so on.
    - Dumblydorr 7y ago
      What about shouting fire in a crowded theater? I've had lengthy debates about whether that should be allowed or not, and if we still "have" free speech if we disallow it.
      - 7y ago
dorkwood 7y ago
> In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform. For those interested, here's the story that participants were asked to respond to. You can find it in the supporting documents section of the study linked in the article. Replace 'Democrats' with 'Republicans' for the alternate version. > College Democrats Shut Down Invited Speaker Rowdy protests lead university to cancel lecture from controversial speaker On Monday, campus police struggled to break up a large group of students who were gathered to protest a speaking engagement that was planned for Friday night. The invited speaker is a social media celebrity known for making inflammatory statements about Democrats. His posts frequently mock the intelligence of Democrats and in one recent post said that “there may be nothing more despicable or disgusting than a Democrat.” Thought the protest, which was organized by the College Democrats was mostly peaceful, it became chaotic as students tried to pass through the protestors and enter the building. Michelle Jones, a junior at the university, said she was struck with a sign being carried by one of the students demonstrating. “I don’t know if he did it on purpose,” said Jones, “but I was pretty annoyed. I just wanted to hear what the speaker has to say.” Ultimately, the College Democrats were successful in getting the university to cancel the event. But not all are happy with the outcome. A petition on social media is calling for officials to punish those involved and suspend the College Democrats’ ability to hold events for the rest of the school year.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  This seems like a poor prompt to generalize from. The premise isn't about some random speaker from the other side. It's about a controversial celebrity known for mocking, inflammatory statements, who practically calls their opponents subhuman. Sounds like an asshole. Maybe highly empathetic people don't like assholes. This headline certainly doesn't seem to be a warranted takeaway.
  - baked_ziti 7y ago
    Highly empathetic people should be the ones most able to empathize with people who are deeply unpleasant. Else they wouldn't be highly empathetic. > Maybe highly empathetic people don't like assholes. Nobody likes assholes...
mrxd 7y ago
Great study. As usual, Robert Wright’s evopsych tendencies have him barking up the wrong tree. White college educated liberals are highly empathetic towards racial minorities, people they don’t have any kind of “tribal” or “in group” connection. Meanwhile, they are highly unempathetic towards certain other whites. Empathy isn’t a primitive spontaneous moral emotion that everyone assumes it is. In real life, our empathetic reactions are determined by abstract moral beliefs about whose suffering is valid or not.
goodmachine 7y ago
Sci-Am link if you hit the paywall https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-empathic-concern-actually-increase-political-polarization/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-emp... Original APSR paper https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-empathic-concern-fuels-political-polarization/8115DB5BDE548FF6AB04DA661F83785E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Adam Smith's first book was about empathy: "the theory of moral sentiments." He used empathy to describe why people act good to others. Because when others feel bad, we feel bad; and, when others feel good, we feel good. It like the exchange of feelings as an economic good.
thinkingemote 7y ago
If I were to produce a survey for users here asking if they are empathetic I would expect everyone to answer in the positive. It's like those surveys of university students asking how many times a week they have sex (hint, it's much more than reality as no insecure student wants to admit they are not getting any) People want to be thought as good, kind and considerate. Whether they actually are or of it only applies to their in group are other questions. I'd wager to say that it's a selective empathy, compassion or love at its core that drives partianship. That your opposite group are full of people thinking and feeling they are good and empathetic is itself a shaking thought for most people. For example, here is something that most of the people who voted yes to in my survey would shudder at. The idea that Trump voters are acting how they do from the sense of love and positive feeling for their families and communities is very worrying for self identified empathetic people. Or how about that China is acting the way they do from a sense of love and empathy to their huge country and people and they seek to reduce suffering overall. It sounds insane doesn't it?
pgcj_poster 7y ago
This isn't surprising. If you don't much care about other people, then politics just won't seem worth it. Even if your side wins completely, your personal gains will be pretty small. And conflict isn't fun. Just read the flurry of articles that will be coming out this week about politics and Thanksgiving dinner. The easy, comfortable position is "why can't we all just get along?" And that's the one you'll take if you're only concerned about your own welfare, and not that of the millions of other people who are affected by political decisions.
foobar_ 7y ago
Paul Bloom: Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVCwjjT_CVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVCwjjT_CVY
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
Excellent. I had a difficult time when I moved from hands-on work to true consulting, which is trying to help others. In a way, a consultant is a "rented smart friend". We put your interests first, we know stuff you don't, we try to watch out for you for things you wouldn't think about. Why did I have a hard time? Because I had the wrong model of empathy and caring. Like most of us, my initial model for "how not to be a dick" came from my family. The lessons I learned there lasted a lifetime. They were about empathy, sharing, caring, listening, and so forth. As I got older, I involved myself in larger and larger social groups. What nobody told me as I grew up, was at the same time I was learning all of these great lessons about being a good person, I was also learning in-group, out-group behavior. Nobody ever looks at that directly. Instead it's always in the context of some greater good. Sure, the SWAT team accidentally set fire and burned down that person's house, but they were doing meth, and the babies needed to be saved. Sure, our family loves others and is kind to others, but we keep the doors locked and we don't make eye contact with people on the street asking for money (or whatever might the case). The idea of being a good person was taught inextricably with the idea of being a social person. Social people have hierarchies and other folks they are wary of. You can't be a human without having in-group, out-group behavior. It's part of the basic package. So when I got consulting, I tended to view things the same way. You are my friend, we are doing this one thing (say coding). Those folks over there, the marketing dudes? You gotta be careful around them. I was teaching empathy and caring the same way I was taught. There is really no other way to do it. Not unless you want a society that involves direct violence to organize. As I saw more and more teams and how organizations actually worked, to make my consulting effective, to be part of the solution instead of just another part of the problem, I had to replace that internal mental model with the doctor model. I am a doctor, I am still a smart rented friend, but I have a lot of patients. In general they are all good and bad in various ways. I have no desire to sort all of that out. Instead, I'll help you as best as I can, and then I won't worry about you again. We are no longer in a tight social group, but neither are you in the out-group. I have learned clinical empathy. So when I see people argue politics online, or org structure in a big company, I have to back out of being part of their social group and think about being a doctor. Heck, I might agree with you and still tell you that the things you are doing will not help you reach your goals. Or I might find you morally abhorrent and encourage you that this education you're picking up after work will eventually help out in your career a great deal. What I can't do is sort the world out into some higher-level categories and then pronounce judgment on which people are in which categories and which I agree with and which I don't. Not and do a good job. I can have personal opinions, sure. I keep them to myself. That's part of being a professional. That's not being cold, that's actually trying to help as many people as possible. To do this any other way is the exclude from helping a huge number of people simply because of my social preferences. I don't feel I have the right to hurt that many people based on my broken-ass brain, which tends to be inconsistent and change-up which groups are I like and which groups I don't like depending on what I had for breakfast.
golemotron 7y ago
Weird retitling of 'Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart' to 'Empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity: study'. The thesis of the article is that empathy may actually be causal and the research does support that conclusion.
- chippy 7y ago
  the study's title is: "How Empathic Concern Fuels Political Polarization" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-empathic-concern-fuels-political-polarization/8115DB5BDE548FF6AB04DA661F83785E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Nasrudith 7y ago
I know that I am not typical in my thinking but seems almost obvious. I would have expected partisan animosity to increase with empathy because of the stakes and the views "against" being viewed as actively harmful and damaging enmasse. And extreme viewpoints can have very divergent viewpoints. And that is before the "literal head of ISIS". Sometimes extreme situations results in weirdness like "killing everyone else in the room with your bare hands was ironically the most moral option". On another note can the political polarization lazy reporting trope just die in a ditch already? Sometimes the other side is objectively wrong both morally and effectiveness. The solution is not to compromise and have half a pogrom.
- zchrykng 7y ago
  > Sometimes the other side is objectively wrong both morally and effectiveness. The thing is that both sides feel that about the other.
andrew_ 7y ago
I'd be curious if there's a tie-in with idea of Ruinous Empathy [0] to the conclusions laid out in the article. [0] https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/
jeffdavis 7y ago
Political polarization is weird, if you think about it. It makes sense given the social dynamics, but makes zero sense from a logical standpoint. Maybe it would be interesting to make a kind of polarization "test". You could ask someone a bunch of questions, and calculate how polarized they are. If statistically improbable, it would inform them that, logically, their opinions are not really their own, and they should consider them more deeply and objectively. Obviously you'd need to make the test carefully and try not to bias it, or it would be worthless. But you could use some objective criteria to make it pretty good. There are certainly some challenges. People who live in cities their whole life are bound to have different opinions that those who live in small towns their whole life. But you could address that by looking at how people change their opinions after moving to a city from a small town or vice versa.
- xamuel 7y ago
  The list of people whose opinions are "really their own" is pretty much limited to feral children and certain philosophers/scientists
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    Which philosopher scientists did you have in mind? I think Newton and Einstein were fairly independent, though undeniably they needed to stand on the shoulders of giants to make their independent discoveries. Maybe that is a contradiction....
    - xamuel 7y ago
      In the context of political opinions, I was thinking people like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc. But you're right, even those people stood on the shoulders of giants, they didn't just independently get struck by lightning one day and suddenly have ideas in a vacuum. In any case, it's not realistic to expect Joe Smith the Generic Voting Citizen to have to have completely original new opinions on all the hot-button issues.
steven_is_false 7y ago
There's no reason to think evolution gave us a single variable for "goodness". We have a strong tendency to love our in group; our family, friends, tribe and so on. But I see no reason why love of the out group should be the same. Parents do lots of bad things to get their children ahead. Consider the soldier who "loves his country" but "hates the enemy." Prosocial behavior benefits your society, not other societies. But there's also no reason to think it benefits individuals. We know the halo effect is real and we have no reason to think empathy to attractive people is the same as empathy to ugly people. More worryingly consider the case mother cat. Mother cats love their kittens. They also eat them sometimes when they are sick or there's not enough food. The same drive to have genetic offspring can produce care and intense hate. There's no reason to think apes don't have similar kinds of natural urges.

127 points by Reedx 7y ago

jdc 7y ago

Could this not call into question the empathy scale used in the study?

adnzzzzZ 7y ago
Likely not. I would assume they use one of the big five traits which is called agreeableness, or something that's close enough it, and this result seems in keeping with how that trait would be described. People who are high in agreeableness are more likely to see the world in prey vs. predator terms - in my speculative opinion because this trait evolved as a maternal trait primarily to deal with the protection of infants - which takes its form in the political sphere as a very nasty type of behavior where if someone is found out to be the enemy everything's fair game to destroy them, since they're predators and you need to protect the prey on your team.
- deleted 7y ago
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tehjoker 7y ago

When you have empathy, do you take the viewpoint of the master or the slave?

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dragonwriter 7y ago
If you have empathy, you do both. That doesn't mean that your sympathy for each is equal. EDIT: But, the measure in the article doesn't measure empathy, which is independent of position, it measures whether one frames virtue through victimization narratives. People who agree with that wouldn't empathize with both, they'd empathize with the one that they see as the slave, which would all too often be driven by confirmation bias and tribal victimization narratives within their in group. I mean, we live in a country where the racial, religious, gender, and political ideology groups (alone and in every combination) having measurably disproportionate social, economic, and political power have equally strong or stronger (within their own communities) victimization narratives to the groups that are objectively disadvantaged. It's very easy for people to answer yes to the question that supposedly measures empathic concern when they in reality have no empathy for those outside of their identity group, which they perceive as disadvantaged and their only “empathic” concern is for those within their in-group that they identify as even greater victims of the same injustice that they themselves are victimized by.
- kempbellt 7y ago
  Empathizing with the master is difficult for many people. Not realizing that a person, born into the lucky privilege of being the master, doesn't see what they do as victimizing to a slave. It's just how life works for them. Tim Minchin did an interesting bit on empathy a while back. Discussing the nature of empathizing with the shooter, as well as the shooter's victims, in incidents of mass shootings. The podcast is available here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrPkI4xkWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrPkI4xkWA
  - sysbin 7y ago
    Listened to the podcast and its good. I've always been empathetic to shooters because I understand determinism and realize the shooter didn't have any free will in how his/her life turned out. The universe just happened to make it be. Anyway more food for thought to the topic.
    - mnm1 7y ago
      Based on what you're saying, it's immoral to send the shooter to prison or punish him in any way since he had no control over his actions and therefore was not guilty of assault or murder. Bet that theory goes right out the window when it's someone you know lying dead in a pool of blood. Does this apply to all actions? In that case mortality simply doesn't exist and there cannot be good or bad things. How far do you take this delusion is what I'm curious about?
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Based on what you're saying, it's immoral to send the shooter to prison or punish him in any way since he had no control over his actions and therefore was not guilty of assault or murder. No, it's not; determinism applies to the punisher as much as the punished, so if the fact of determinism negates any moral culpability for the act being punished, then it likewise does so for the punishment.
harshreality 7y ago
#nondualism The master and slave are part of the same whole; one cannot exist without the other, and more generally, everyone is a flawed or incomplete person in one way or another. Having empathy for one without having empathy for the other is to misunderstand the universe.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  Would you seriously argue that in 1864?
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    Let's do an 1864 argument. Have empathy for the slave. He is endowed with dignity by the Divine. Jesus Christ paid a price in blood to set him free from the bonds of sin. What God has freed, let no man return into bondage. Have empathy for the master. Jesus died not only for the upright, not only for the oppressed, but for tax collecting thugs, prostitutes — even the murderer crucified beside him. He raised a saint from Saul of Tarsus. He died for the slave's master. Oh, yes, the master is undeserving, but none of us are deserving. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, how should I stand? But know what shape this empathy for the master takes. You must fear for his soul. If it is consumed by sin, he will be cast into perdition. He must well and truly repent, and his sin is grave.
  - larnmar 7y ago
    I certainly would. A little more empathy for slaveowners (that is, the ability to see things from their point of view) would have enabled the US to abolish slavery without the bloody civil war. Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.
    - tehjoker 7y ago
      This is a misunderstanding of American history. I don't fully know why it was so easy to do away with slavery in other parts of the world (and it mostly happened all within about 100 years of each other), but in the US, slavery was core to the economic system of the south - a slavocracy headed by white slavocrats. The slavocrats would have been happy to have empathy, for the northerners to treat them softly and allow their system to persist. They were (not entirely happily) trading free state / slave state as new states were admitted to the union. It was only when a fever pitch of abolition put the new Republican party in with Lincoln as president did the south finally decide it would be impossible to continue their system in co-existance with the industrialized free north. The capitalist free north also had an interest in liberating the slaves so they could be put to use as highly productive industrial workers instead of agricultural workers. To this end, the south seceded from the union and fired the first blow against the north at Ft. Sumter. A brutal military campaign was necessary to break the power of the slavocracy and free the slaves. You can look at the historical material interests of the north and conclude it wasn't entirely selfless, but by god it was necessary to end the evil endemic to the southern economic system.
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harimau777 7y ago

I wonder if some of this could be due to people feeling that what people believe is not as relevant of what they do. E.g. it seems like a lot of Republicans genuinely believe in family values and integrity, but whenever Trump violates them there is some excuse for why they don't stop supporting him.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
This has puzzled me as well. I lean right of center, and know some really super people who also lean conservative. I haven't been able to reconcile their values, their support of Trump, and Trump's behavior.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  In group belonging is a powerful motivator
journalctl 7y ago
People tend to think that your beliefs drive your actions. So if someone claims to believe one thing, but acts in accordance with other beliefs, what are you going to assume about their beliefs? If I talk about believing in family values but make it impossible for gay people to get married, do I really believe in family values? Or was I just lying/using a dog whistle?

throwaway13337 7y ago

Maybe the scale at which you love your neighbor comes at the cost proportional to how much you hate your common rival. To put it another way, humans might be incapable of emotional empathy outside of tribal brotherhood. That is, people they can identify with. It'd make sense in a sort of selfish gene way. Emotional actions just seems wholly negative at the scale of our society. This may be the core of our division. We shouldn't be encouraging broad emotional responses to global events.

miedpo 7y ago
Hmm... just two cents I have. While this may be true to a large degree, I do think it's possible to overcome this. I went on a religious mission for 2 years and one of the things I remember most vividly about it is that I came to a point where I didn't have emnity towards other people. It took a lot of work (quashing emnity can be hard), but it did work. I'm not sure most people are in a place where they are ready to try that, but I do think it's possible. Anyways, yeah just my two cents :). People do have a tendency to be tribal as you said.
chongli 7y ago
You don’t need empathy to love your neighbour, you just need to choose to do so. This is one of the central tenets of Christianity. This story reminds me of Scott’s essay I can tolerate anything except the outgroup [1]. I am partial to Father Brown’s argument that it doesn’t count if you only forgive the people you like. That’s just tribalism, which humans are naturally inclined toward. The hard thing is to forgive (or indeed to offer anything of worth to) people you don’t like. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
pbourke 7y ago
> humans might be incapable of emotional empathy outside of tribal brotherhood Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man

kempbellt 7y ago

> It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That’s right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude. I can relate, as I am certainly someone who would probably laugh in this situation, as I also find myself laughing at the idea that people trample one another during Black Friday. If someone were to physically injure someone during a controversial debate, I find it amusing in the sense that I am thinking "Hah... That's the way to get people to listen to your viewpoint", sarcastically. It's not that I'm laughing at the injury. I'm laughing at the absurd immaturity of it all. Laughter is frequently used as a coping mechanism for dealing with unpleasant realities. Personally, it doesn't diminish the tragedy of what happens. It allows me to process it with a sort of mental "buffer".

sysbin 7y ago
> Personally, it doesn't diminish the tragedy of what happens What's more tragic, an unpleasant reality you don't laugh at or an unpleasant reality where you laugh at as a coping mechanism. I would assume the unpleasant reality where you cannot even laugh at it. So I imagine some diminish of the tragedy does exist.
aleister_777 7y ago
And many of these same people will claim a moral superiority over you and cast you out for any disagreement.
deleted 7y ago
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pas 7y ago
Probably highly empathetic folks would be hard to find in todays information overloaded world with so many bad news. Eg I have a relative who very much cannot look at the news because it's all bad. And actively seeks out positive things. (Like meditation, Om chanting, they try to bring positivity to the world, basically the new age thoughts and prayers.)

dorkwood 7y ago

> Like many past studies, this one gauges people’s level of “empathic concern” by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with a series of seven statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Does this really signify empathy? I consider myself empathetic, but I wouldn't agree with the above statement. If anything, having concerned feelings for someone solely because they're less fortunate than me seems a bit patronising. I wouldn't want someone to think I thought less of them just because they had less than I do. This is why I'm skeptical of studies based on surveys in general -- by playing empathy chess, and wondering how it would make the other person feel if they knew how I was feeling about them, I'm placed into the "not empathetic" camp.

rabidrat 7y ago
> Does this really signify empathy? I consider myself empathetic, but I wouldn't agree with the above statement. You are noticing the difference between "compassion" (a divine emotion) and "pity" (its near enemy). Pity grants you a position above the pitied, while compassion positions you alongside/with the sufferer. These nuances are hard enough to suss out given unlimited information and attention. I agree it's all but impossible to gather equivalent distinctions from a rigid survey.
- noobermin 7y ago
  I'm busy, but it would be nice to see the questionaire, because the supplied example in the article could either signify pity or compassion.
larnmar 7y ago
I agree, empathy is about being able to see things from another’s point of view, not the feeling of “tender, concerned feelings”, and particularly not of restricting those feelings to those less fortunate than yourself.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  "cognitive empathy" (as it's called in this article) isn't all there is to empathy: http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cognitive-emotional-compassionate/ http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cogniti...

daenz 7y ago

>The authors of the APSR study—Elizabeth Simas and Scott Clifford of the University of Houston and Justin Kirkland of the University of Virginia—have this kind of dynamic in mind when they write, “Polarization is not a consequence of a lack of empathy among the public, but a product of the biased ways in which we experience empathy.” That's the nugget. According to the study, it seems that people with high empathy are more often people with high empathy towards their in-group...and a lack of empathy for the out-group. I'd argue that it isn't really empathy at all...just a more emotional form of tribalism.

knzhou 7y ago
Nah, I would argue that empathy has never been anything more than that. We have existing names for the “real” empathy you being up too — people call it being two-faced, practicing whataboutism, being callously analytical, being too unempathetic to side with the obviously right side, and so on.
- pas 7y ago
  People can be empathetic toward one person easily. A small group, yeah sure, it happens. But the moment they need to consider a group roughly the same size as theirs, and with opposing intents, fuck no. (And that's why seemingly two part politics devolves everywhere to a zero-sum game.)
r00fus 7y ago
I’d call it emotional parsimony. It’s the kind of behavior (core human nature) that views the pain of thousands from another country (or other social/socioeconomic group) as less than the pain of someone directly familiar to oneself.
baked_ziti 7y ago
> According to the study, it seems that people with high empathy are more often people with high empathy towards their in-group...and a lack of empathy for the out-group. I'd argue that it isn't really empathy at all...just a more emotional form of tribalism. Yes this, especially considering literally everybody is this way. Care and concern for some people and none for others is par for the course. At that point it's not empathy, it's just being the same thing everyone else is.

knzhou 7y ago

Empathy has always been morally neutral. Feeling what others do allows you to help them, but it also allows you to manipulate them, or better hurt them. Most of the time it only acts as a way to strengthen existing tribal affiliations.

jenxkfjeo0 7y ago

The problem is we’ve exploited our ability to tailor our messaging so specifically that people aren’t getting new information. We’ve seen this before, in a way: when Christianity ruled, no new emotional information or perspective was capable of taking hold. Our media apparatus is essentially doing the same thing by feeding people the same narrative they grew up on their entire lives. We have kept thousands of hours of TV shows, video games, and movies, news clips, etc and repeatedly view it. One can mentally exist in 1995 with the Internet and the new couch that feels just as comfy. Our limbic system suggests it anyway. Look at our politics mired in clinging to the past, sticking to same old tax & drug policies. The problem is a bunch of nerds who meant well built the panopticon, because they were staring at screens and not considering human history of authoritarian corruption of our emotionally guided agency (humans brains don’t find facts, they engage motor controls and coordinate agency, speaking sounds or doing a mechanical motion of some sort) to focus on the speech we don’t control. Previously religious doctrine, now finance. Now media corp can beam the exact speech necessary to keep every individual soothed just so. How brilliant.

vharuck 7y ago
>One can mentally exist in 1995 with the Internet and the new couch that feels just as comfy. 1. 1995 was just 24 years ago. I'm not a historian, but thinking a cultural period lasting 24 years unusual would be ridiculous for any time before the industrial revolution. And I don't think it even applies today. 2. You might be biased about 1995 culture because it's your culture. My mother-in-law watches reruns from the 70s. People tend to stick with what they like, and there have always been other people willing to provide.
- jenxkfjeo0 7y ago
  The year was an arbitrary choice. People used to have to, except in the political context, move on from such experiences. Being able to recall a few quotes of much different than sitting there importing it all verbatim over and over. For minute in all-the-minutes: LiterallyWatch(FavoriteShow) There was no preservation, books wore out, etc etc They were forced to emotionally process as part of assimilating the info and seek out new info. I am describing an abstract process and how it’s changed to where we can reconnect instantly to past emotional selves. We keep certain pathways lubed and hot without generating new ones through exploration of new truly unique sensory input (how many for loops does a programmer write over and over? Oh sure the JSON content changes. Does the value of a for loop?) Stand still in information stagnation so the social political system can figure out to adapt to maintain control. This isn’t novel thinking and it’s not even radical, it’s pretty well trodden philosophy backed by modern biology research. So downvote all ya want HN. Disinterest in one posters rhetoric does not delete facts of reality

StuffedParrot 7y ago

Most people’s views don’t neatly align with any party; that’s simply the easiest narrative to follow. I am on the left (technically independent) but I certainly have a mountain of criticism about Democrats. When party loyalty is divorced from values I wouldn’t expect a change in the underlying dynamic that drives people to partisan polarization. To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. In more concrete terms, how do I know I can eat and be healthy and be around my people in the future and experience joy as I do now? In fact these are often the same things that drive Democrats, Independents, in fact these are universal. It is something else (cultural, economic, social?) that drives party loyalty. For another example, often conservative christians give to charity at higher rates than any other group (at least in the us). Yet, the left is constantly striving for representation and equity, which in some forms is certainly a type of empathy. It is a mistake to consider a lack of empathy a driving force in politics.

garmaine 7y ago
> To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. I’m a republican-leaning independent, and what you write here strikes me more as stereotype of the right than actual concerns of the right. I don’t really worry about any of the things you mention.
- aleister_777 7y ago
  Agreed. These are not the values that make me. Many of the values that I represent will lead towards stability, however, it's not fear that I'm defined by.
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  That may be true, I never claimed to be accurate (certainly not in a general sense), I am just conveying what I hear when I talk to people about what matters to them. Fear is certainly not a value, but americans rarely talk about values in any explicit way.

rdtsc 7y ago

> These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. > one gauges people’s level of “empathic concern” by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with a series of seven statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” It seems like a problematic way to measure empathy. I don't think it would be surprising that people who claim to have a lot of empathy in surveys, or in general conversations, would demonstrate a lack of empathy in their actions. My tongue-in-cheek version of the abstract would be something like "...We argue that, in practice, the _self-reported_ experience of empathy ... can actually exacerbate political polarization."

koboll 7y ago
The truly empathetic might be humble about it, whereas sociopaths would seem to be the most concerned at coming across as virtuous in the way they describe themselves
- um_ya 7y ago
  San Francisco has entered the chat
baked_ziti 7y ago
The word does seem to be taking on a different meaning as time goes on. People seem to intend for it to mean "care and consideration for the ingroup as I define it." Which is of course, not its actual meaning.
- allovernow 7y ago
  Sure it is. Nothing about the definition of empathy suggests that it isn't selective. We are generally empathetic but still eat animals. Some cultures still eat dog - you don't think they can love their children?
  - baked_ziti 7y ago

daenz 7y ago

I think there's an interesting dynamic with empathy and freedom of speech: defending freedom of speech forces you to have a basic empathy for everyone. It might not be an empathy based on their lived experiences, but it is one based on respecting that we should collectively protect what they have to communicate. It's why I believe attacks on freedom of speech are so dangerous...they undermine this foundational respect for one another. If hating what someone has to say but defending their right to say it isn't a form of sincere empathy, then I don't know what is.

pas 7y ago
Naturally this empathy only self-reinforces itself, if it selectively ignores those who agitate against it. Eg if someone advocates against free-speech, maybe protecting them won't preserve this basic empathy. And it seems this instability is real, as we have a hard time defining the minimums of free speech.
- baked_ziti 7y ago
  > we have a hard time defining the minimums of free speech. In what sense? Legally, for example, we don't.
  - pas 7y ago
    But we do. In many countries, and even in the US the history of what is and isn't a good trade off to limit speech is a long and still ongoing discourse. Sure, the gov part seems easy, but then people call on FB to filter lies in political ads, and again people want laws to mandate social networks to do this, and so on.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    What about shouting fire in a crowded theater? I've had lengthy debates about whether that should be allowed or not, and if we still "have" free speech if we disallow it.
    - 7y ago

dorkwood 7y ago

> In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform. For those interested, here's the story that participants were asked to respond to. You can find it in the supporting documents section of the study linked in the article. Replace 'Democrats' with 'Republicans' for the alternate version. > College Democrats Shut Down Invited Speaker Rowdy protests lead university to cancel lecture from controversial speaker On Monday, campus police struggled to break up a large group of students who were gathered to protest a speaking engagement that was planned for Friday night. The invited speaker is a social media celebrity known for making inflammatory statements about Democrats. His posts frequently mock the intelligence of Democrats and in one recent post said that “there may be nothing more despicable or disgusting than a Democrat.” Thought the protest, which was organized by the College Democrats was mostly peaceful, it became chaotic as students tried to pass through the protestors and enter the building. Michelle Jones, a junior at the university, said she was struck with a sign being carried by one of the students demonstrating. “I don’t know if he did it on purpose,” said Jones, “but I was pretty annoyed. I just wanted to hear what the speaker has to say.” Ultimately, the College Democrats were successful in getting the university to cancel the event. But not all are happy with the outcome. A petition on social media is calling for officials to punish those involved and suspend the College Democrats’ ability to hold events for the rest of the school year.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
This seems like a poor prompt to generalize from. The premise isn't about some random speaker from the other side. It's about a controversial celebrity known for mocking, inflammatory statements, who practically calls their opponents subhuman. Sounds like an asshole. Maybe highly empathetic people don't like assholes. This headline certainly doesn't seem to be a warranted takeaway.
- baked_ziti 7y ago
  Highly empathetic people should be the ones most able to empathize with people who are deeply unpleasant. Else they wouldn't be highly empathetic. > Maybe highly empathetic people don't like assholes. Nobody likes assholes...

mrxd 7y ago

Great study. As usual, Robert Wright’s evopsych tendencies have him barking up the wrong tree. White college educated liberals are highly empathetic towards racial minorities, people they don’t have any kind of “tribal” or “in group” connection. Meanwhile, they are highly unempathetic towards certain other whites. Empathy isn’t a primitive spontaneous moral emotion that everyone assumes it is. In real life, our empathetic reactions are determined by abstract moral beliefs about whose suffering is valid or not.

goodmachine 7y ago

Sci-Am link if you hit the paywall https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-empathic-concern-actually-increase-political-polarization/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-emp... Original APSR paper https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-empathic-concern-fuels-political-polarization/8115DB5BDE548FF6AB04DA661F83785E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Adam Smith's first book was about empathy: "the theory of moral sentiments." He used empathy to describe why people act good to others. Because when others feel bad, we feel bad; and, when others feel good, we feel good. It like the exchange of feelings as an economic good.

thinkingemote 7y ago

If I were to produce a survey for users here asking if they are empathetic I would expect everyone to answer in the positive. It's like those surveys of university students asking how many times a week they have sex (hint, it's much more than reality as no insecure student wants to admit they are not getting any) People want to be thought as good, kind and considerate. Whether they actually are or of it only applies to their in group are other questions. I'd wager to say that it's a selective empathy, compassion or love at its core that drives partianship. That your opposite group are full of people thinking and feeling they are good and empathetic is itself a shaking thought for most people. For example, here is something that most of the people who voted yes to in my survey would shudder at. The idea that Trump voters are acting how they do from the sense of love and positive feeling for their families and communities is very worrying for self identified empathetic people. Or how about that China is acting the way they do from a sense of love and empathy to their huge country and people and they seek to reduce suffering overall. It sounds insane doesn't it?

pgcj_poster 7y ago

This isn't surprising. If you don't much care about other people, then politics just won't seem worth it. Even if your side wins completely, your personal gains will be pretty small. And conflict isn't fun. Just read the flurry of articles that will be coming out this week about politics and Thanksgiving dinner. The easy, comfortable position is "why can't we all just get along?" And that's the one you'll take if you're only concerned about your own welfare, and not that of the millions of other people who are affected by political decisions.

foobar_ 7y ago

Paul Bloom: Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVCwjjT_CVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVCwjjT_CVY

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

Excellent. I had a difficult time when I moved from hands-on work to true consulting, which is trying to help others. In a way, a consultant is a "rented smart friend". We put your interests first, we know stuff you don't, we try to watch out for you for things you wouldn't think about. Why did I have a hard time? Because I had the wrong model of empathy and caring. Like most of us, my initial model for "how not to be a dick" came from my family. The lessons I learned there lasted a lifetime. They were about empathy, sharing, caring, listening, and so forth. As I got older, I involved myself in larger and larger social groups. What nobody told me as I grew up, was at the same time I was learning all of these great lessons about being a good person, I was also learning in-group, out-group behavior. Nobody ever looks at that directly. Instead it's always in the context of some greater good. Sure, the SWAT team accidentally set fire and burned down that person's house, but they were doing meth, and the babies needed to be saved. Sure, our family loves others and is kind to others, but we keep the doors locked and we don't make eye contact with people on the street asking for money (or whatever might the case). The idea of being a good person was taught inextricably with the idea of being a social person. Social people have hierarchies and other folks they are wary of. You can't be a human without having in-group, out-group behavior. It's part of the basic package. So when I got consulting, I tended to view things the same way. You are my friend, we are doing this one thing (say coding). Those folks over there, the marketing dudes? You gotta be careful around them. I was teaching empathy and caring the same way I was taught. There is really no other way to do it. Not unless you want a society that involves direct violence to organize. As I saw more and more teams and how organizations actually worked, to make my consulting effective, to be part of the solution instead of just another part of the problem, I had to replace that internal mental model with the doctor model. I am a doctor, I am still a smart rented friend, but I have a lot of patients. In general they are all good and bad in various ways. I have no desire to sort all of that out. Instead, I'll help you as best as I can, and then I won't worry about you again. We are no longer in a tight social group, but neither are you in the out-group. I have learned clinical empathy. So when I see people argue politics online, or org structure in a big company, I have to back out of being part of their social group and think about being a doctor. Heck, I might agree with you and still tell you that the things you are doing will not help you reach your goals. Or I might find you morally abhorrent and encourage you that this education you're picking up after work will eventually help out in your career a great deal. What I can't do is sort the world out into some higher-level categories and then pronounce judgment on which people are in which categories and which I agree with and which I don't. Not and do a good job. I can have personal opinions, sure. I keep them to myself. That's part of being a professional. That's not being cold, that's actually trying to help as many people as possible. To do this any other way is the exclude from helping a huge number of people simply because of my social preferences. I don't feel I have the right to hurt that many people based on my broken-ass brain, which tends to be inconsistent and change-up which groups are I like and which groups I don't like depending on what I had for breakfast.

golemotron 7y ago

Weird retitling of 'Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart' to 'Empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity: study'. The thesis of the article is that empathy may actually be causal and the research does support that conclusion.

chippy 7y ago
the study's title is: "How Empathic Concern Fuels Political Polarization" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-empathic-concern-fuels-political-polarization/8115DB5BDE548FF6AB04DA661F83785E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Nasrudith 7y ago

I know that I am not typical in my thinking but seems almost obvious. I would have expected partisan animosity to increase with empathy because of the stakes and the views "against" being viewed as actively harmful and damaging enmasse. And extreme viewpoints can have very divergent viewpoints. And that is before the "literal head of ISIS". Sometimes extreme situations results in weirdness like "killing everyone else in the room with your bare hands was ironically the most moral option". On another note can the political polarization lazy reporting trope just die in a ditch already? Sometimes the other side is objectively wrong both morally and effectiveness. The solution is not to compromise and have half a pogrom.

zchrykng 7y ago
> Sometimes the other side is objectively wrong both morally and effectiveness. The thing is that both sides feel that about the other.

andrew_ 7y ago

I'd be curious if there's a tie-in with idea of Ruinous Empathy [0] to the conclusions laid out in the article. [0] https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/

jeffdavis 7y ago

Political polarization is weird, if you think about it. It makes sense given the social dynamics, but makes zero sense from a logical standpoint. Maybe it would be interesting to make a kind of polarization "test". You could ask someone a bunch of questions, and calculate how polarized they are. If statistically improbable, it would inform them that, logically, their opinions are not really their own, and they should consider them more deeply and objectively. Obviously you'd need to make the test carefully and try not to bias it, or it would be worthless. But you could use some objective criteria to make it pretty good. There are certainly some challenges. People who live in cities their whole life are bound to have different opinions that those who live in small towns their whole life. But you could address that by looking at how people change their opinions after moving to a city from a small town or vice versa.

xamuel 7y ago
The list of people whose opinions are "really their own" is pretty much limited to feral children and certain philosophers/scientists
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Which philosopher scientists did you have in mind? I think Newton and Einstein were fairly independent, though undeniably they needed to stand on the shoulders of giants to make their independent discoveries. Maybe that is a contradiction....
  - xamuel 7y ago
    In the context of political opinions, I was thinking people like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc. But you're right, even those people stood on the shoulders of giants, they didn't just independently get struck by lightning one day and suddenly have ideas in a vacuum. In any case, it's not realistic to expect Joe Smith the Generic Voting Citizen to have to have completely original new opinions on all the hot-button issues.

steven_is_false 7y ago

There's no reason to think evolution gave us a single variable for "goodness". We have a strong tendency to love our in group; our family, friends, tribe and so on. But I see no reason why love of the out group should be the same. Parents do lots of bad things to get their children ahead. Consider the soldier who "loves his country" but "hates the enemy." Prosocial behavior benefits your society, not other societies. But there's also no reason to think it benefits individuals. We know the halo effect is real and we have no reason to think empathy to attractive people is the same as empathy to ugly people. More worryingly consider the case mother cat. Mother cats love their kittens. They also eat them sometimes when they are sick or there's not enough food. The same drive to have genetic offspring can produce care and intense hate. There's no reason to think apes don't have similar kinds of natural urges.