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Altruism under stress: cortisol negatively predicts charitable giving

217 points by rustoo 5y ago

Trasmatta 5y ago
Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways. It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression. It can be difficult for people with high levels of empathy to recognize the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others. As a kid I was highly empathetic, and it's something I've struggled with my entire life. It never really felt like a virtue, and mostly just brought me pain. I have less empathy now, but it seems to largely be the result of emotional numbing, which isn't pleasant either. Even now though, my mind seems to always mirror the thoughts and feelings of those around me, as if I don't have a self or personality of my own. It's rather odd, but I've read about a number of people with similar experiences. I've read some interesting things about how in many cases schizoid personality disorder may be the result of highly empathetic children who later withdraw in life because interpersonal contact was a source of significant suffering for them. I seen to exhibit many of the signs of SPD, but I've never been diagnosed. (If you're not familiar with SPD, I'd recommend looking it up. It's likely not what you think it is, and not directly related to schizophrenia.)
- supertofu 5y ago
  Empathy, also called compassion or karuna in Buddhism, is one of the most sublime mental states that exist. The trick is to learn how to experience compassion without also wounding yourself. This is what Buddhist practice teaches you how to do.
  - white_dragon88 5y ago
    Basically don’t be a schmuck. Common sense should dictate one’s practice well.
    - smordistan 5y ago
      Dostoyevsky's The Idiot comes to mind.
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      People made a religion out of turning others into schmucks with the dual whammy of sorrow and shame. The only correct use of sorrow is to attain stillness when someone uses humor to deflect emotions, but that doesn't keep a priest gainfully employed.
    - supertofu 5y ago
      I don't understand your response. It's very common for empathetic people to feel great suffering. It's not "common sense" knowledge to learn how to maintain deep compassion while preventing the pain from affecting your own being. In fact, most highly empathetic people, like OP, feel burdened by this emotional state because the untrained person experiences compassion as double suffering (the suffering of the object of compassion and the suffering to oneself that comes from untrained empathy). The result is that highly empathetic people try to numb out or attempt to restrict their capacity for empathy. The early Buddhist texts (the canonical suttas) describe meditations and trainings to develop this skill. The reason the suttas devote so much time to explaining these techniques is because they are NOT common knowledge. The etymology of compassion means "suffering with". It's baked into the word (in English) the assumption that compassion involves suffering for both parties. In Buddhism, we learn that compassion doesn't have to create suffering for the holder of compassion. We learn that it's possible to dwell in the state of compassion as a way of moving out of suffering, rather than moving into it.
      - JetAlone 5y ago
        The understanding I've gained as an Orthodox Christian is that God works in us, using the suffering to help us repent. He prepares us for resurrection unto life. This justifies the suffering, gives it enough meaning to keep going. When we have this conviction of compassion and do not run away from it, but shoulder it as a responsibility and work through it to find the truth and serve within it to the best of our ability we are living out what it is to be the long-suffering servant. I am grateful to you for pointing out this etymology. I find it to be beautiful because in compassion I can be suffering with Christ. So, thank you.
- mountainriver 5y ago
  Feel the same way as you, and I had to withdrawal as a child and now have mental disorders in the spectrum of schizophrenia. So anecdotally, I imagine that’s correct. The loss of boundaries thing is very real, I know there are some upsides to it but most days it’s hard to not feel like a curse
  - catchclose8919 5y ago
    Just FYI "schizoid personality +/- disorder" has absolutely nothing to do with (the spectrum of) schizophrenia, they're about different things on different systems on different axes etc. And yeah, psychologist REALLY suck at naming things! And one of the reason to avoid ever discussing about "schizoid personality" with people who aren't trained psychologists since they're 90% likely to think you're talking about the wrong thing :|
    - krageon 5y ago
      There is a schizoid spectrum, which what people call "Schizophrenia" falls on. They do suck at naming things, that's a pretty fair point.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Der_Einzige 5y ago
      "schizoid" is just another word for "person with avoidant personality disorder"
      - Trasmatta 5y ago
        APD and SPD are not the same thing.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Cool. Now I know the name of my personality disorder. This whole time I thought I was normal.
- fendy3002 5y ago
  Yeah, I was stressed out when I accidentally make other people mad. Now I just apologize and move on, if they're having meltdown I just assume they're assholes and move on. Especially true when driving.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    It's really a balance— you can do your best to do right by other people, to do what they're asking of you and behave in prosocial ways, but any therapist will tell you that ultimately other people's feelings are their responsibility to manage and work through, and not yours. Traditional CBT says this is even the case in romantic relationships, though EFT is a bit more nuanced on this— you're not directly responsible for your partner's feelings and emotions (you don't owe them an apology when you cheat on them in their dream), but understanding their emotions is an opportunity to be a better and more supportive partner, which can be massively enriching to the relationship if both parties are fully committed to doing the work and have the language to communicate effectively about it.
- bongoman37 5y ago
  I can empathize with this :), high empathy is almost always a curse and gets taken advantage of. I've also numbed out over the years but its not ideal either. I've been accused of being sociopathic at times simply because empathy is not a knob one can tune and sometimes the only option is off rather than an on, because being empathetic would mean losing boundaries.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control. Empathy is an incredible virtue, but it must be disciplined. I don't know enough neuroscience to know what the "right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex" is exactly but I know that you can over-ride/master it with reason and discipline. So I think there's something more to people allowing their better nature to slip under stress than simple brain chemicals. A colonel told me, that in the moment of most stress that's when the men need you most of all, and need you to retain dignity, self-sacrifice, and thinking about _them_ more than ever. When everyone is shitting themselves we revert to "I'm alright Jack" self-preservation mode. That's precisely the time when you need to dig deep and let _reason_ take the lead. Compassion/altruism etc is a personality structure, not a fleeting feeling, so it's encoded into your rational decision making. So a ton of training is about getting you to "snap out of yourself". The body moves in fast time, but if the mind can still stay in slow, measured mode, that's how the best comes out in some poeple under adversity. Hardballs who have no love for humanity will jump on to the tracks to save a kid from a subway train, because deep down they are actually masters of the empathy they've carefully hidden. I guess that tension between what you know you should do and what you find yourself instinctively inclined to do - is conscience.
  - SpodGaju 5y ago
    > Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control. Empathy is an incredible virtue, but it must be disciplined. Disciplined empathy is no longer empathy. And it is no longer virtuous. You are close to understanding, but keep going. Giving birth and nourishing, making without possessing, expecting nothing in return. To grow, yet not to control: This is the mysterious virtue. Chapter 10, Dao De Ching
    - joshyeager 5y ago
      Rather than saying "You are close to understanding, but keep going", it would be more helpful to explain why you think that disciplined empathy is no longer empathy. I agree with the previous poster, but I'm curious to learn what you mean.
      - 5y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I would argue that it's a disadvantage only from the self-centered perspective that modern society encourages us to cultivate. Empathy is an incredibly useful tool for humans that exist as part of a community, but our societies are structured to benefit those who seek to maximally exploit others, our role models are sociopaths, and the cultural narrative is that our only value is either in being them or being useful to them.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    Empathy is great for the society, a burden for the individual. Very empathetic people have a hard time minding their own path in life for they get caught in the suffering of others. Regardless of setbacks and disilussionments, empathetic people feel good when helping others.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > Empathy is great for the society, a burden for the individual. But society is good for the individual, so supporting that society that supports them is mutually beneficial.
      - allmodelsRwrong 5y ago
        This chain of comments reminds of what I read in a paper regarding multilevel group selection, namely: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups". Though there is a bit of controversy around that if I remember correctly.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    It can be an advantage when it's been tuned and trained properly. When it hasn't been, it mostly just leads to additional pain for the empathetic person, and eventual withdrawal. Parents need to be taught how to recognize children that are highly empathetic, and given the tools to teach them to train and deal with that aspect of themselves. Otherwise they'll experience great emotional pain in their lives without any of the tools they need to cope with it. That can have a rebound effect, leading to emotional numbing and social withdrawal.
- bitshiftfaced 5y ago
  I think that's probably true, but it's more about conscientiousness than empathy. If you're empathetic and lack conscientiousness, you have a great advantage in being able to "work" people. And you feel no guilt if things don't go well for them. On the other hand, you could be highly conscientious and lack empathy. You may try to do the right thing, but you feel guilt anyway because you're unable to understand why what you did wasn't in line with what the other person was feeling.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    Hmmm, in my mind empathy isn't just cognitively understanding that somebody is feeling pain, it's feeling that pain on their behalf. Most people have that ability to some degree, but it's extremely magnified in certain individuals.
    - bitshiftfaced 5y ago
      Yeah I tend to separate empathy (being able to put yourself in another's shoes and feel what they're feeling) and "other-oriented-ness". Having empathy means you understand what the driver behind you at the fast food restaurant is feeling emotionally if you take too long at the window. Being other-oriented is feeling stressed and wanting to move forward before you've completely checked your order, because you don't want the driver behind you to feel upset by your taking too long.
      - Trasmatta 5y ago
        That's an interesting way to look at it. And a very good example, because that drive through scenario is literally the type of thing I feel almost constantly. I laughed out loud when I read it, because it perfectly describes how I react to almost everything in life that involves other people.
- natvod 5y ago
  You might find the research about sensory processing sensitivity interesting. "Theory and research suggest that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), found in roughly 20% of humans and over 100 other species, is a trait associated with greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the environment and to social stimuli. Self-report studies have shown that high-SPS individuals are strongly affected by others' moods, but no previous study has examined neural systems engaged in response to others' emotions." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086365/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086365/
- peakaboo 5y ago
  You shouldn't numb it, that's crazy. The best people on this planet care about others. The worst turn into Putin.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    Numbing it was never a conscious choice, and it's not like I even noticed it happening while it did. It was a learned response to significant pain over years / decades, without having a support network to help deal with it in a healthy way. This is one of the theorized ways schizoid personality disorder presents itself, and it's not a conscious choice that people make. And it's not just a switch I can turn on and off at will, it's much more complex than that.
- pfisherman 5y ago
  > It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression. So is intelligence. However on the balance intelligence is a pretty significant advantage. Empathy can be a super power for those who are able to control it - one that can be used for good or evil. Think high EQ, natural political instincts, very persuasive, ability to push emotional states onto people. The hypersensitivity you mention is the flip side of that coin. SPD and paranoia is more like seeing patterns in the noise. I think pattern matching is a big component of empathy, but I do think you can have highly sensitive pattern matching facility that does not translate across domains.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    I think a big part of it is having a supportive and understanding environment growing up that helps you foster the empathy in a healthy way, while teaching you to build and maintain your own self boundaries at the same time. If you didn't have that, it can be very difficult to change it as an adult.
    - pfisherman 5y ago
      Well life is a struggle for all of us, no? Many traits that are seen as desirable can wreak havoc on the lives of those who possess them. We envy those traits when we see them in others because we do not have access to their visceral experience, and lack awareness of their inner turmoil and struggles. I think it important for all of us to extend ourselves grace. Living ain’t easy and we are often doing better at it than we think :)
  - rafaelero 5y ago
    Intelligence is not positively correlated with anxiety. That's just a meme.
- kenjackson 5y ago
  I was like you in being extremely empathetic. What had helped me is to focus on longer term outcomes for people rather than short term. That really gave my empathy more perspective and allowed me to see that the “hard” thing that may not seem as empathetic today is the right thing for the people involved in the future. Admittedly, this might just be me creating a mechanism to cope, but it seems to be effective.
- iLemming 5y ago
  Being deeply closely related, it seems we humans are doomed to forever struggle between violent chimpanzees and highly emphatic bonobos.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  FWIW, I have a close relation that matches the pattern you’re identifying, and they have had very positive results from Internal Family Systems Therapy.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    I've actually been researching Internal Family Systems! There are some things that make me a bit wary about it, but I think it may be worth trying.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      I think the therapist’s personality might have an impact (I could see certain aspects of it feeling a little “woo”), but it has been useful to frame and work through certain emotions/reactions/situations in a productive manner. My email is in my profile if you want to reach out.
  - cptcobalt 5y ago
    +1: this comment describes me and I'm actively in internal family systems therapy. took me a while to get used to the style, but it's been beneficial for me.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I’m deeply sorry that you didn’t have the necessary support network to navigate your empathy when you were young. Now that you’re older, have you had any success in developing navigational skills and regaining your levels of empathy?
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    Thank you! I've only begun to put the pieces in the last couple of years while trying to figure out why my behavior is the way it is. Haven't made a ton of progress, but knowledge feels like a good first step. Planning to try to find a therapist, but one of the challenges is that many people in this position apparently avoid therapy, because they fear empathizing too much with the therapist, rather than focusing on themselves. It's rooted in a fear of enmeshment, and it's also why there's very little research about schizoid personality disorder, because those people generally avoid therapy. I suspect I may have SPD, but I don't want to self diagnose (and it's maybe too simple to label complex behaviors like this with one label anyway).
    - dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
      You're a person to be loved, not a problem to be solved.
      - Trasmatta 5y ago
        Thank you, this actually means a lot.
    - dwaltrip 5y ago
      Congrats on your progress so far :) This stuff is very difficult and it takes a lot of courage to face these things. I believe high empathy has contributed to some of my difficulties. I've tried therapy a few times before without much luck. Recently I've found a therapist who has helped me immensely. We have a good connection, which is very important. She also uses somatic approaches, with I think is more effective for people who need help working with and processing their emotions. It also seems to be better than standard talk therapy when working with trauma. Somatic therapy might be helpful for you :) And make sure you feel comfortable and safe with your therapist.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  > the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others. The perceived thoughts and feelings of others, and that's critical. You don't know the minds of the people around you, and presuming some kind of negative experience on the part of others is not often accurate. The problem with empathy would be if you presume everyone to be having a bad time when it seems like, to you, they should be having a bad time. IMO, that's actually arrogant, to think you can accurately know what someone else is thinking and feeling. Perhaps part of your struggle is this unidentified arrogance that you know the minds of others.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - flatuencer 5y ago
    You _can_ get a fairly accurate sense of how people are feeling or what they are thinking, and some people are better at this than others. Call it intuition, body language, or whatever else, it doesn't inherently make it arrogance. Being mindful of how you could be incorrect in what, at the end of the day, are assumptions that require confirmation, is important; without this is where the true arrogance lies.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      I think assuming how people feel and what people are thinking without asking them, giving them agency, is nearly the very pinnacle of arrogance. further, this can be some of the most damaging behavior you participate in on a daily basis, both to you and to the person you do it to. I cannot overstate how toxic to your relationships and to yourself this behavior is. You need to let people express themselves, and listen when they do. That's about as close to a "prime directive" I can think of right now, when it comes to human interaction.
      - lightredelephnt 5y ago
        You are right that assuming you completely understand another person’s mind can cause (serious) problems in your relationship with them. But people also “tell you how they feel” with more than just words. So it’s not as simple as “ignore everything but the spoken or written word”.
- amelius 5y ago
  A different way to think about it: if you play soccer (or any game) with too much empathy, you will make own goal after own goal to please your opponent. Nobody wants that, of course, so in reality you're not being empathic enough. Being too empathic has different problems if it also makes you shy. Shy people are scary, because people can't read you. It is important to internalize this. Again, this makes shyness not just your problem: it's their problem too. So you have to be more empathic about it.
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  Reading the replies to you, it's obvious that some of the perfected alpha libertarians typical of HN have shown up, and as often happens, they don't really know wtf they're talking about. But they do greatly enjoy expressing their overly abstracted, overly generalized, overly confident opinions that arise from brains that enjoy a hyper-filtered perception of the world. Perhaps you should just simply change your brain to be more like them? sigh. Anyway I empathize with you.
- qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
  Thank you for writing this. You helped me realize my own condition which is similar to your and the more I research, the more it lines up with what you have described here. Do you avoid social gatherings and prefer to work remotely ? I love spending time mostly with my family and go out of my way to avoid social contact even with relatives.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  It can be good and bad. Having a high amount of empathy but being able to control your reaction can be very helpful. You can adapt to how others are reacting much better than folks with low empathy.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > my mind seems to always mirror the thoughts and feelings of those around me Sounds like you are confusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmeshment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmeshment with empathy. Disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    It's absolutely enmeshment. I think enmeshment can emerge when children with higher than average levels of empathy aren't given the tools and support they need to deal with that. (Also now a psychologist, so I could be off base. But they do at least seem to be related things.)
- RobRivera 5y ago
  consider the idea that with empathy you can effectively communicate and persuade others better as you can gain insight into who THEY are and how THEY feel. its an attribute necessary for EFFECTIVE leadership, not of the brainwashing manipulation kind, but of the trusting kind. takes learning
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways. The grass may be greener, etc., but I am jealous - I would love your superpower and its tradeoffs; I'll give you mine. What a way to experience the world and people. (Though maybe jealousy is a form of empathy? ;) )
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    > The grass may be greener I think one thing that people don't realize is that with high levels of empathy you risk enmeshment with others, and a loss of your own self boundary. You don't know where there thoughts and pains end and where yours begin. It leads to desperately wanting to fix those around you, because you suffer as long as they suffer. And when you discover you can't fix everything, you either detach from everyone, or begin the process of numbing yourself. (Most of these are unconscious reactions to painful stimuli.) So I guess: be careful what you wish for! I still want empathy, I just wish I could tune it down by like 50% without numbing.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Thank you. I don't at all mean to be unempathetic myself to your experiences, and I'm sorry if it appears that way.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Oh yeah, high empathy is correlated with above average anxiety and depression. This is a well known psychological thing and there are plenty of articles and podcasts on it. So your intuition is correct. It's your inner child basically doing this because you want people to like you -- this is something you learned as a child and is now habit. In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    > In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe. This is 100% the case for me. My parents had children when they were very young, immature, and with major problems of their own, and I had to learn from a very young age to be highly attentive to their (very frequently shifting) emotional state. And then I had to become essentially an extra surrogate parent for my younger siblings in order to fill in the gaps that our parents weren't able to fulfill.
- unrealp 5y ago
  i have gone through similar situation and i too might have spd and never been diagnosed. all that you say here resonates with me. for me other things are okay, but "I don't have a self or personality of my own" is something of a fundamental problem for me. because of this, when i interact with anyone, i tend to adjust to how they are. if i interact individually with person A and then individually with person B, the most confusing part is interacting with A and B together. confusing for people i mean and people think, oh this is not how you are. not able to dance and disconnection from body is another sad thing. i am 41 now and with time i think i have improved. i share more with people and care less about what people think of me. i hope it will improve for you.
layer8 5y ago
Regarding empathy, there’s also an argument that it tends to be significantly biased, and that rational compassion is preferable for decision-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy
- loa_in_ 5y ago
  Decision making when? In what conditions? Do those conditions ever change?
  - layer8 5y ago
    When making decisions on moral grounds, and regarding altruistic actions. For example, seeing a picture of a single child suffer tends to induce relatively more empathy than seeing a picture of a whole family or town suffer. (That’s why you predominantly see the former in charity ads.) With rational compassion, it would be rather the converse. Having empathy with a group one is close to (in thought/space/time) also tends to make people more willing to inflict harm on a group that is more removed from them, while rational compassion would try to avoid such a subjective bias.
    - loa_in_ 5y ago
      I would be interested why do they suffer, what's the context, am I able to help?
kayodelycaon 5y ago
The title would be better phrased as a question, because this is a single study with the observation that... If you have less empathy to start with, the less stress affects how much empathy you have. This is apparently this is a significantly higher delta than expected, because the control group didn't appear to change in any significant way.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Psychologist measured that people differ by personality, and can be roughly grouped into 16 categories based on traits. I used to think everyone was more or less the same. I'm not sure if 16 is the correct number. But my understanding of the world has been helped by the concept that there are people that do and act in particular patterns. For example some of the battles on twitter that are going on, are just extensions of these personality clashes.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  It may be helpful to categorize _behaviors_, but I want to emphasize that for a given individual, personality isn't permanent.
- robluxus 5y ago
  Are you by chance referring to the 16 Meyers-Briggs types? It's been claimed that it's less useful than it is popular: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
  - jimmyjazz14 5y ago
    Yeah I don't think Meyer-Briggs has much standing these days.
  - cassepipe 5y ago
    I am myself very wary of this kind of personality tests but the case has been made in an interesting article that I can't seem to find that it is a form of "syntactic sugar" for the (apparently?) more established Big Five model. Anyways, I think OP's conclusion that it is eye opening that people have their own emotional structure/pattern of behavior from how they grew up and that you can find resembling patterns in different people quite reasonable.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    Yes I was. But I'm also aware of the Big 5 personality traits. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Which people seem to statistically group with some low or high mix of these traits. Knowing that someone is more neurotic than 99% of other people, would seem on surface be useful in predicting how they might react to new or novel situations.
dash2 5y ago
Why does stress make more empathetic people less kind, but has little effect on others? We believe this is due to a set of linked phenomena. The first is publish or perish. When a researcher needs a publication, his or her cortisol levels increase. This reduces the researcher's ability to empathize with the victims of useless scientific results, or their own future self when their work turns out to be a dead end. A second cause is the garden of forking paths. When a main effect fails to reach significance, it is all too easy to find an interaction or sample subset where it is significant. For example, if stress didn't affect charitable donations, you can always check the result among high-empathy people, or women, or nursing students. These root causes come together in p hacking, where desperate researchers kid themselves that they always meant to run that particular interaction, and absurdly pretend that their p values and careers have some meaning... [Not TFA, obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised.]
- cassepipe 5y ago
  The science behind it may be bogus but it did lead to an interesting discussion about empathy and self boundaries.
cletus 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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- anonfornoreason 5y ago
  Interesting. I tend to put a high amount of trust in people and have rarely been let down. The cases where I was let down were exclusively with drug users earlier in my life, a very predictable outcome in hindsight. I don’t think the advice you were given was good.
- vdnkh 5y ago
  This is a hilarious/sad generalization of a country of ~330 million people masquerading as an investigation into stress. I get the impression that you started with the point you wanted to make - "never trust an American" - and then stumbled backwards from there into a very rigorous exploration of the the cause and effect of stress.
- brimble 5y ago
  > My experience in Australia is that there are basic standards of decency that can be expected. This is not the case in the US. This varies, perhaps regionally but definitely from individual to individual. I can assure you that some of us in America grew up learning to be more like how you characterize Australians, and totally bought into that, only to be rudely awakened by the actual reality in much of this country. The shock took me about a decade of adulthood to really start to get over.
- floor2 5y ago
  That's just plain old-fashioned bigotry. Literally every culture on Earth has had some form of "never trust a <blank>" where the blank was whatever race, religion, nationality, tribe, ethnicity, etc was their neighbor or rival. Most people would treat it as a shameful thing from a bygone era if they had a grandparent tell them "never trust a <whatever>", it's quite unfortunate that you seem to agree with this sort of nationalistic bias and bigotry. Also, the US spends over a trillion dollars per year on the safety net. The federal budget for giving food to low-income people is $60 Billion per year, medicaid (free health insurance for non-working people) is $670 Billion per year, $51 Billion on housing assistance. There is also unemployment benefits if you're laid off, and you can keep the health insurance from your former employer or switch to a plan from healthcare.gov (which will be subsidized by tax payers if you can't afford to pay the premium). It's not a perfect system, but it's ridiculous to pretend there is "no safety net" when there is in fact an incomprehensibly large safety net.
SpodGaju 5y ago
"Stress Makes the Most Empathetic People Less Kind" when others do not help them relieve their stress. Acting out when under stress is a call for help. Please do not go around controlling yourself, it only prevents change for the better, as they implied in the article; "But it helps to have scientific evidence to bolster the case for public and workplace policies that might make our lives less stressful — and thus, we hope, more compassionate.” We do not need better people, we need a better society.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  We clearly need both. They form a positive feedback loop. Ye can be compassionate to our friends and community, and by doing so, improve both
srcreigh 5y ago
> To reach this conclusion, researchers asked the participants to make donations before they were asked to undertake a stressful task; they were asked to donate things again after the task was over. While people who were found to have high empathy donated more than the others did before undergoing the stressful task, their charitability declined sharply afterward. Isn’t asking for 2 unexpected donations in short succession a major confounding factor?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Agree. The study asked for 2 things from one group and 1 thing from another group and is trying to suggest that we should ignore the first ask. The authors are also abusing cortisol measurements to imply cortisol is something specific for bad stress when it’s not really that. Cortisol isn’t really a “bad” hormone like a lot of people believe. If you have too little cortisol you’ll feel terrible. Even fun activities will raise cortisol levels. Taking synthetic cortisol analogs often makes people feel good (for a very short while, chronic use will quickly downregulate this effect and requires slow tapering, don’t do it unless medically necessary). This study seems like junk science.
- xcyu 5y ago
  Depends on if the study tried to control for this by also testing 2 more groups with single donation before/after the stressful task. Can't access the original paper to confirm though.
deleted 5y ago
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jasfi 5y ago
Cortisol can be very destructive. A lot of people are either unaware of high stress levels, or don't do anything meaningful to bring those levels down. I've been taking Ashwagandha and it works really well.
exdsq 5y ago
Holy shit there’s some serious voodoo waffle in these comments!
unglaublich 5y ago
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
yboris 5y ago
A bit off-topic, but any discussion of altruism these days I bring up effective altruism - a movement of people focusing on effective ways of helping as much as possible (within any specific area, and focusing on finding the most-important areas of focus). These individuals (myself included) often give at least 10% of their income (see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/). I really hope more people join in on the global movement: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
nickpinkston 5y ago
This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's work [1] on "Material" and "Post-Material" values and their relation to wealth / stability - ie high amounts of the latter are causal to Post-Material values, which would include charitable giving, tolerance, etc. Using his World Values Survey [2], surveying individual values across 100 countries from 1981-today, he showed across all major cultures that you can see how several generations of stability (both income and sociopolitical) are required to get to post-material values, ie you don't get rich and change your values, they crystalize in your early/mid 20's, so you need to feel good until then and not experience trauma after to maintain those values. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Inglehart#Cultural_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Inglehart#Cultural_Evol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey
n4r9 5y ago
Regardless of whether the methods are queationable, the results are consistent with other studies I've come across on the topic of how stress affects empathy and compassion: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_anxiety_reduces_empathy https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_anxiety_re... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020313323 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402... This is of particular interest to me as I find that I very easily become wrapped up in a sort of protective self-absorption when I get stressed or criticised, making it sometimes impossible to empathize or conduct proper conversations. This in turn has a very negative affect on relationships. If you're in a similar boat, you might find the practise of compassion-focused mindfulness useful. https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-practice-of-self-compassion-and-reducing-stress#3 https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-practice-of-self-compassio... The idea is similar to CBT, but with an emphasis on mindfulness and compassion towards oneself and others. I've learned that the "oneself" bit is extremely important. Until you can accept and be gentle on yourself, with all your flaws, you will struggle to be vulnerable around others and thereby cultivate genuine connections.
seltzered_ 5y ago
It might be worth reading this alongside: "Does altruism exist?" by David Sloan Wilsom: https://www.amazon.com/Does-Altruism-Exist-Foundational-Questions/dp/0300219881 https://www.amazon.com/Does-Altruism-Exist-Foundational-Ques... "The evolution of trust" by Nicky case : https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
rrdharan 5y ago
What are the chances this study is actually reproducible? What was the sample size? Personally I’ve shifted to a default position of extreme skepticism regarding any study that makes any claim on any kind of human behavioral pattern. Burned too many times. We might as well just debate astrological predictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
MrMan 5y ago
I believe in jobs before charity. there are things that need to be altruistically funded due to market failures, but not most things. the root causes of scarcity need to be addressed, and feel-good ad hoc donations tend, in my opinion, not to accomplish that. in the micro, I will never fault someone for doing something self-less, but things need to be fixed at the policy level, or let the market work where it can.

217 points by rustoo 5y ago

Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways. It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression. It can be difficult for people with high levels of empathy to recognize the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others. As a kid I was highly empathetic, and it's something I've struggled with my entire life. It never really felt like a virtue, and mostly just brought me pain. I have less empathy now, but it seems to largely be the result of emotional numbing, which isn't pleasant either. Even now though, my mind seems to always mirror the thoughts and feelings of those around me, as if I don't have a self or personality of my own. It's rather odd, but I've read about a number of people with similar experiences. I've read some interesting things about how in many cases schizoid personality disorder may be the result of highly empathetic children who later withdraw in life because interpersonal contact was a source of significant suffering for them. I seen to exhibit many of the signs of SPD, but I've never been diagnosed. (If you're not familiar with SPD, I'd recommend looking it up. It's likely not what you think it is, and not directly related to schizophrenia.)

supertofu 5y ago
Empathy, also called compassion or karuna in Buddhism, is one of the most sublime mental states that exist. The trick is to learn how to experience compassion without also wounding yourself. This is what Buddhist practice teaches you how to do.
- white_dragon88 5y ago
  Basically don’t be a schmuck. Common sense should dictate one’s practice well.
  - smordistan 5y ago
    Dostoyevsky's The Idiot comes to mind.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    People made a religion out of turning others into schmucks with the dual whammy of sorrow and shame. The only correct use of sorrow is to attain stillness when someone uses humor to deflect emotions, but that doesn't keep a priest gainfully employed.
  - supertofu 5y ago
    I don't understand your response. It's very common for empathetic people to feel great suffering. It's not "common sense" knowledge to learn how to maintain deep compassion while preventing the pain from affecting your own being. In fact, most highly empathetic people, like OP, feel burdened by this emotional state because the untrained person experiences compassion as double suffering (the suffering of the object of compassion and the suffering to oneself that comes from untrained empathy). The result is that highly empathetic people try to numb out or attempt to restrict their capacity for empathy. The early Buddhist texts (the canonical suttas) describe meditations and trainings to develop this skill. The reason the suttas devote so much time to explaining these techniques is because they are NOT common knowledge. The etymology of compassion means "suffering with". It's baked into the word (in English) the assumption that compassion involves suffering for both parties. In Buddhism, we learn that compassion doesn't have to create suffering for the holder of compassion. We learn that it's possible to dwell in the state of compassion as a way of moving out of suffering, rather than moving into it.
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      The understanding I've gained as an Orthodox Christian is that God works in us, using the suffering to help us repent. He prepares us for resurrection unto life. This justifies the suffering, gives it enough meaning to keep going. When we have this conviction of compassion and do not run away from it, but shoulder it as a responsibility and work through it to find the truth and serve within it to the best of our ability we are living out what it is to be the long-suffering servant. I am grateful to you for pointing out this etymology. I find it to be beautiful because in compassion I can be suffering with Christ. So, thank you.
mountainriver 5y ago
Feel the same way as you, and I had to withdrawal as a child and now have mental disorders in the spectrum of schizophrenia. So anecdotally, I imagine that’s correct. The loss of boundaries thing is very real, I know there are some upsides to it but most days it’s hard to not feel like a curse
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  Just FYI "schizoid personality +/- disorder" has absolutely nothing to do with (the spectrum of) schizophrenia, they're about different things on different systems on different axes etc. And yeah, psychologist REALLY suck at naming things! And one of the reason to avoid ever discussing about "schizoid personality" with people who aren't trained psychologists since they're 90% likely to think you're talking about the wrong thing :|
  - krageon 5y ago
    There is a schizoid spectrum, which what people call "Schizophrenia" falls on. They do suck at naming things, that's a pretty fair point.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    "schizoid" is just another word for "person with avoidant personality disorder"
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      APD and SPD are not the same thing.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Cool. Now I know the name of my personality disorder. This whole time I thought I was normal.
fendy3002 5y ago
Yeah, I was stressed out when I accidentally make other people mad. Now I just apologize and move on, if they're having meltdown I just assume they're assholes and move on. Especially true when driving.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  It's really a balance— you can do your best to do right by other people, to do what they're asking of you and behave in prosocial ways, but any therapist will tell you that ultimately other people's feelings are their responsibility to manage and work through, and not yours. Traditional CBT says this is even the case in romantic relationships, though EFT is a bit more nuanced on this— you're not directly responsible for your partner's feelings and emotions (you don't owe them an apology when you cheat on them in their dream), but understanding their emotions is an opportunity to be a better and more supportive partner, which can be massively enriching to the relationship if both parties are fully committed to doing the work and have the language to communicate effectively about it.
bongoman37 5y ago
I can empathize with this :), high empathy is almost always a curse and gets taken advantage of. I've also numbed out over the years but its not ideal either. I've been accused of being sociopathic at times simply because empathy is not a knob one can tune and sometimes the only option is off rather than an on, because being empathetic would mean losing boundaries.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control. Empathy is an incredible virtue, but it must be disciplined. I don't know enough neuroscience to know what the "right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex" is exactly but I know that you can over-ride/master it with reason and discipline. So I think there's something more to people allowing their better nature to slip under stress than simple brain chemicals. A colonel told me, that in the moment of most stress that's when the men need you most of all, and need you to retain dignity, self-sacrifice, and thinking about _them_ more than ever. When everyone is shitting themselves we revert to "I'm alright Jack" self-preservation mode. That's precisely the time when you need to dig deep and let _reason_ take the lead. Compassion/altruism etc is a personality structure, not a fleeting feeling, so it's encoded into your rational decision making. So a ton of training is about getting you to "snap out of yourself". The body moves in fast time, but if the mind can still stay in slow, measured mode, that's how the best comes out in some poeple under adversity. Hardballs who have no love for humanity will jump on to the tracks to save a kid from a subway train, because deep down they are actually masters of the empathy they've carefully hidden. I guess that tension between what you know you should do and what you find yourself instinctively inclined to do - is conscience.
- SpodGaju 5y ago
  > Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control. Empathy is an incredible virtue, but it must be disciplined. Disciplined empathy is no longer empathy. And it is no longer virtuous. You are close to understanding, but keep going. Giving birth and nourishing, making without possessing, expecting nothing in return. To grow, yet not to control: This is the mysterious virtue. Chapter 10, Dao De Ching
  - joshyeager 5y ago
    Rather than saying "You are close to understanding, but keep going", it would be more helpful to explain why you think that disciplined empathy is no longer empathy. I agree with the previous poster, but I'm curious to learn what you mean.
    - 5y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I would argue that it's a disadvantage only from the self-centered perspective that modern society encourages us to cultivate. Empathy is an incredibly useful tool for humans that exist as part of a community, but our societies are structured to benefit those who seek to maximally exploit others, our role models are sociopaths, and the cultural narrative is that our only value is either in being them or being useful to them.
- tartoran 5y ago
  Empathy is great for the society, a burden for the individual. Very empathetic people have a hard time minding their own path in life for they get caught in the suffering of others. Regardless of setbacks and disilussionments, empathetic people feel good when helping others.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > Empathy is great for the society, a burden for the individual. But society is good for the individual, so supporting that society that supports them is mutually beneficial.
    - allmodelsRwrong 5y ago
      This chain of comments reminds of what I read in a paper regarding multilevel group selection, namely: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups". Though there is a bit of controversy around that if I remember correctly.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  It can be an advantage when it's been tuned and trained properly. When it hasn't been, it mostly just leads to additional pain for the empathetic person, and eventual withdrawal. Parents need to be taught how to recognize children that are highly empathetic, and given the tools to teach them to train and deal with that aspect of themselves. Otherwise they'll experience great emotional pain in their lives without any of the tools they need to cope with it. That can have a rebound effect, leading to emotional numbing and social withdrawal.
bitshiftfaced 5y ago
I think that's probably true, but it's more about conscientiousness than empathy. If you're empathetic and lack conscientiousness, you have a great advantage in being able to "work" people. And you feel no guilt if things don't go well for them. On the other hand, you could be highly conscientious and lack empathy. You may try to do the right thing, but you feel guilt anyway because you're unable to understand why what you did wasn't in line with what the other person was feeling.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  Hmmm, in my mind empathy isn't just cognitively understanding that somebody is feeling pain, it's feeling that pain on their behalf. Most people have that ability to some degree, but it's extremely magnified in certain individuals.
  - bitshiftfaced 5y ago
    Yeah I tend to separate empathy (being able to put yourself in another's shoes and feel what they're feeling) and "other-oriented-ness". Having empathy means you understand what the driver behind you at the fast food restaurant is feeling emotionally if you take too long at the window. Being other-oriented is feeling stressed and wanting to move forward before you've completely checked your order, because you don't want the driver behind you to feel upset by your taking too long.
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      That's an interesting way to look at it. And a very good example, because that drive through scenario is literally the type of thing I feel almost constantly. I laughed out loud when I read it, because it perfectly describes how I react to almost everything in life that involves other people.
natvod 5y ago
You might find the research about sensory processing sensitivity interesting. "Theory and research suggest that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), found in roughly 20% of humans and over 100 other species, is a trait associated with greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the environment and to social stimuli. Self-report studies have shown that high-SPS individuals are strongly affected by others' moods, but no previous study has examined neural systems engaged in response to others' emotions." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086365/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086365/
peakaboo 5y ago
You shouldn't numb it, that's crazy. The best people on this planet care about others. The worst turn into Putin.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  Numbing it was never a conscious choice, and it's not like I even noticed it happening while it did. It was a learned response to significant pain over years / decades, without having a support network to help deal with it in a healthy way. This is one of the theorized ways schizoid personality disorder presents itself, and it's not a conscious choice that people make. And it's not just a switch I can turn on and off at will, it's much more complex than that.
pfisherman 5y ago
> It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression. So is intelligence. However on the balance intelligence is a pretty significant advantage. Empathy can be a super power for those who are able to control it - one that can be used for good or evil. Think high EQ, natural political instincts, very persuasive, ability to push emotional states onto people. The hypersensitivity you mention is the flip side of that coin. SPD and paranoia is more like seeing patterns in the noise. I think pattern matching is a big component of empathy, but I do think you can have highly sensitive pattern matching facility that does not translate across domains.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  I think a big part of it is having a supportive and understanding environment growing up that helps you foster the empathy in a healthy way, while teaching you to build and maintain your own self boundaries at the same time. If you didn't have that, it can be very difficult to change it as an adult.
  - pfisherman 5y ago
    Well life is a struggle for all of us, no? Many traits that are seen as desirable can wreak havoc on the lives of those who possess them. We envy those traits when we see them in others because we do not have access to their visceral experience, and lack awareness of their inner turmoil and struggles. I think it important for all of us to extend ourselves grace. Living ain’t easy and we are often doing better at it than we think :)
- rafaelero 5y ago
  Intelligence is not positively correlated with anxiety. That's just a meme.
kenjackson 5y ago
I was like you in being extremely empathetic. What had helped me is to focus on longer term outcomes for people rather than short term. That really gave my empathy more perspective and allowed me to see that the “hard” thing that may not seem as empathetic today is the right thing for the people involved in the future. Admittedly, this might just be me creating a mechanism to cope, but it seems to be effective.
iLemming 5y ago
Being deeply closely related, it seems we humans are doomed to forever struggle between violent chimpanzees and highly emphatic bonobos.
germinalphrase 5y ago
FWIW, I have a close relation that matches the pattern you’re identifying, and they have had very positive results from Internal Family Systems Therapy.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  I've actually been researching Internal Family Systems! There are some things that make me a bit wary about it, but I think it may be worth trying.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I think the therapist’s personality might have an impact (I could see certain aspects of it feeling a little “woo”), but it has been useful to frame and work through certain emotions/reactions/situations in a productive manner. My email is in my profile if you want to reach out.
- cptcobalt 5y ago
  +1: this comment describes me and I'm actively in internal family systems therapy. took me a while to get used to the style, but it's been beneficial for me.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I’m deeply sorry that you didn’t have the necessary support network to navigate your empathy when you were young. Now that you’re older, have you had any success in developing navigational skills and regaining your levels of empathy?
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  Thank you! I've only begun to put the pieces in the last couple of years while trying to figure out why my behavior is the way it is. Haven't made a ton of progress, but knowledge feels like a good first step. Planning to try to find a therapist, but one of the challenges is that many people in this position apparently avoid therapy, because they fear empathizing too much with the therapist, rather than focusing on themselves. It's rooted in a fear of enmeshment, and it's also why there's very little research about schizoid personality disorder, because those people generally avoid therapy. I suspect I may have SPD, but I don't want to self diagnose (and it's maybe too simple to label complex behaviors like this with one label anyway).
  - dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
    You're a person to be loved, not a problem to be solved.
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      Thank you, this actually means a lot.
  - dwaltrip 5y ago
    Congrats on your progress so far :) This stuff is very difficult and it takes a lot of courage to face these things. I believe high empathy has contributed to some of my difficulties. I've tried therapy a few times before without much luck. Recently I've found a therapist who has helped me immensely. We have a good connection, which is very important. She also uses somatic approaches, with I think is more effective for people who need help working with and processing their emotions. It also seems to be better than standard talk therapy when working with trauma. Somatic therapy might be helpful for you :) And make sure you feel comfortable and safe with your therapist.
TameAntelope 5y ago
> the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others. The perceived thoughts and feelings of others, and that's critical. You don't know the minds of the people around you, and presuming some kind of negative experience on the part of others is not often accurate. The problem with empathy would be if you presume everyone to be having a bad time when it seems like, to you, they should be having a bad time. IMO, that's actually arrogant, to think you can accurately know what someone else is thinking and feeling. Perhaps part of your struggle is this unidentified arrogance that you know the minds of others.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- flatuencer 5y ago
  You _can_ get a fairly accurate sense of how people are feeling or what they are thinking, and some people are better at this than others. Call it intuition, body language, or whatever else, it doesn't inherently make it arrogance. Being mindful of how you could be incorrect in what, at the end of the day, are assumptions that require confirmation, is important; without this is where the true arrogance lies.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    I think assuming how people feel and what people are thinking without asking them, giving them agency, is nearly the very pinnacle of arrogance. further, this can be some of the most damaging behavior you participate in on a daily basis, both to you and to the person you do it to. I cannot overstate how toxic to your relationships and to yourself this behavior is. You need to let people express themselves, and listen when they do. That's about as close to a "prime directive" I can think of right now, when it comes to human interaction.
    - lightredelephnt 5y ago
      You are right that assuming you completely understand another person’s mind can cause (serious) problems in your relationship with them. But people also “tell you how they feel” with more than just words. So it’s not as simple as “ignore everything but the spoken or written word”.
amelius 5y ago
A different way to think about it: if you play soccer (or any game) with too much empathy, you will make own goal after own goal to please your opponent. Nobody wants that, of course, so in reality you're not being empathic enough. Being too empathic has different problems if it also makes you shy. Shy people are scary, because people can't read you. It is important to internalize this. Again, this makes shyness not just your problem: it's their problem too. So you have to be more empathic about it.
OneLeggedCat 5y ago
Reading the replies to you, it's obvious that some of the perfected alpha libertarians typical of HN have shown up, and as often happens, they don't really know wtf they're talking about. But they do greatly enjoy expressing their overly abstracted, overly generalized, overly confident opinions that arise from brains that enjoy a hyper-filtered perception of the world. Perhaps you should just simply change your brain to be more like them? sigh. Anyway I empathize with you.
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
Thank you for writing this. You helped me realize my own condition which is similar to your and the more I research, the more it lines up with what you have described here. Do you avoid social gatherings and prefer to work remotely ? I love spending time mostly with my family and go out of my way to avoid social contact even with relatives.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
It can be good and bad. Having a high amount of empathy but being able to control your reaction can be very helpful. You can adapt to how others are reacting much better than folks with low empathy.
goodpoint 5y ago
> my mind seems to always mirror the thoughts and feelings of those around me Sounds like you are confusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmeshment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmeshment with empathy. Disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  It's absolutely enmeshment. I think enmeshment can emerge when children with higher than average levels of empathy aren't given the tools and support they need to deal with that. (Also now a psychologist, so I could be off base. But they do at least seem to be related things.)
RobRivera 5y ago
consider the idea that with empathy you can effectively communicate and persuade others better as you can gain insight into who THEY are and how THEY feel. its an attribute necessary for EFFECTIVE leadership, not of the brainwashing manipulation kind, but of the trusting kind. takes learning
wolverine876 5y ago
> Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways. The grass may be greener, etc., but I am jealous - I would love your superpower and its tradeoffs; I'll give you mine. What a way to experience the world and people. (Though maybe jealousy is a form of empathy? ;) )
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  > The grass may be greener I think one thing that people don't realize is that with high levels of empathy you risk enmeshment with others, and a loss of your own self boundary. You don't know where there thoughts and pains end and where yours begin. It leads to desperately wanting to fix those around you, because you suffer as long as they suffer. And when you discover you can't fix everything, you either detach from everyone, or begin the process of numbing yourself. (Most of these are unconscious reactions to painful stimuli.) So I guess: be careful what you wish for! I still want empathy, I just wish I could tune it down by like 50% without numbing.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Thank you. I don't at all mean to be unempathetic myself to your experiences, and I'm sorry if it appears that way.
sjg007 5y ago
Oh yeah, high empathy is correlated with above average anxiety and depression. This is a well known psychological thing and there are plenty of articles and podcasts on it. So your intuition is correct. It's your inner child basically doing this because you want people to like you -- this is something you learned as a child and is now habit. In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  > In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe. This is 100% the case for me. My parents had children when they were very young, immature, and with major problems of their own, and I had to learn from a very young age to be highly attentive to their (very frequently shifting) emotional state. And then I had to become essentially an extra surrogate parent for my younger siblings in order to fill in the gaps that our parents weren't able to fulfill.
unrealp 5y ago
i have gone through similar situation and i too might have spd and never been diagnosed. all that you say here resonates with me. for me other things are okay, but "I don't have a self or personality of my own" is something of a fundamental problem for me. because of this, when i interact with anyone, i tend to adjust to how they are. if i interact individually with person A and then individually with person B, the most confusing part is interacting with A and B together. confusing for people i mean and people think, oh this is not how you are. not able to dance and disconnection from body is another sad thing. i am 41 now and with time i think i have improved. i share more with people and care less about what people think of me. i hope it will improve for you.

layer8 5y ago

Regarding empathy, there’s also an argument that it tends to be significantly biased, and that rational compassion is preferable for decision-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy

loa_in_ 5y ago
Decision making when? In what conditions? Do those conditions ever change?
- layer8 5y ago
  When making decisions on moral grounds, and regarding altruistic actions. For example, seeing a picture of a single child suffer tends to induce relatively more empathy than seeing a picture of a whole family or town suffer. (That’s why you predominantly see the former in charity ads.) With rational compassion, it would be rather the converse. Having empathy with a group one is close to (in thought/space/time) also tends to make people more willing to inflict harm on a group that is more removed from them, while rational compassion would try to avoid such a subjective bias.
  - loa_in_ 5y ago
    I would be interested why do they suffer, what's the context, am I able to help?

kayodelycaon 5y ago

The title would be better phrased as a question, because this is a single study with the observation that... If you have less empathy to start with, the less stress affects how much empathy you have. This is apparently this is a significantly higher delta than expected, because the control group didn't appear to change in any significant way.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Psychologist measured that people differ by personality, and can be roughly grouped into 16 categories based on traits. I used to think everyone was more or less the same. I'm not sure if 16 is the correct number. But my understanding of the world has been helped by the concept that there are people that do and act in particular patterns. For example some of the battles on twitter that are going on, are just extensions of these personality clashes.

chrisweekly 5y ago
It may be helpful to categorize _behaviors_, but I want to emphasize that for a given individual, personality isn't permanent.
robluxus 5y ago
Are you by chance referring to the 16 Meyers-Briggs types? It's been claimed that it's less useful than it is popular: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
- jimmyjazz14 5y ago
  Yeah I don't think Meyer-Briggs has much standing these days.
- cassepipe 5y ago
  I am myself very wary of this kind of personality tests but the case has been made in an interesting article that I can't seem to find that it is a form of "syntactic sugar" for the (apparently?) more established Big Five model. Anyways, I think OP's conclusion that it is eye opening that people have their own emotional structure/pattern of behavior from how they grew up and that you can find resembling patterns in different people quite reasonable.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Yes I was. But I'm also aware of the Big 5 personality traits. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Which people seem to statistically group with some low or high mix of these traits. Knowing that someone is more neurotic than 99% of other people, would seem on surface be useful in predicting how they might react to new or novel situations.

dash2 5y ago

Why does stress make more empathetic people less kind, but has little effect on others? We believe this is due to a set of linked phenomena. The first is publish or perish. When a researcher needs a publication, his or her cortisol levels increase. This reduces the researcher's ability to empathize with the victims of useless scientific results, or their own future self when their work turns out to be a dead end. A second cause is the garden of forking paths. When a main effect fails to reach significance, it is all too easy to find an interaction or sample subset where it is significant. For example, if stress didn't affect charitable donations, you can always check the result among high-empathy people, or women, or nursing students. These root causes come together in p hacking, where desperate researchers kid themselves that they always meant to run that particular interaction, and absurdly pretend that their p values and careers have some meaning... [Not TFA, obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised.]

cassepipe 5y ago
The science behind it may be bogus but it did lead to an interesting discussion about empathy and self boundaries.

cletus 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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anonfornoreason 5y ago
Interesting. I tend to put a high amount of trust in people and have rarely been let down. The cases where I was let down were exclusively with drug users earlier in my life, a very predictable outcome in hindsight. I don’t think the advice you were given was good.
vdnkh 5y ago
This is a hilarious/sad generalization of a country of ~330 million people masquerading as an investigation into stress. I get the impression that you started with the point you wanted to make - "never trust an American" - and then stumbled backwards from there into a very rigorous exploration of the the cause and effect of stress.
brimble 5y ago
> My experience in Australia is that there are basic standards of decency that can be expected. This is not the case in the US. This varies, perhaps regionally but definitely from individual to individual. I can assure you that some of us in America grew up learning to be more like how you characterize Australians, and totally bought into that, only to be rudely awakened by the actual reality in much of this country. The shock took me about a decade of adulthood to really start to get over.
floor2 5y ago
That's just plain old-fashioned bigotry. Literally every culture on Earth has had some form of "never trust a <blank>" where the blank was whatever race, religion, nationality, tribe, ethnicity, etc was their neighbor or rival. Most people would treat it as a shameful thing from a bygone era if they had a grandparent tell them "never trust a <whatever>", it's quite unfortunate that you seem to agree with this sort of nationalistic bias and bigotry. Also, the US spends over a trillion dollars per year on the safety net. The federal budget for giving food to low-income people is $60 Billion per year, medicaid (free health insurance for non-working people) is $670 Billion per year, $51 Billion on housing assistance. There is also unemployment benefits if you're laid off, and you can keep the health insurance from your former employer or switch to a plan from healthcare.gov (which will be subsidized by tax payers if you can't afford to pay the premium). It's not a perfect system, but it's ridiculous to pretend there is "no safety net" when there is in fact an incomprehensibly large safety net.

SpodGaju 5y ago

"Stress Makes the Most Empathetic People Less Kind" when others do not help them relieve their stress. Acting out when under stress is a call for help. Please do not go around controlling yourself, it only prevents change for the better, as they implied in the article; "But it helps to have scientific evidence to bolster the case for public and workplace policies that might make our lives less stressful — and thus, we hope, more compassionate.” We do not need better people, we need a better society.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
We clearly need both. They form a positive feedback loop. Ye can be compassionate to our friends and community, and by doing so, improve both

srcreigh 5y ago

> To reach this conclusion, researchers asked the participants to make donations before they were asked to undertake a stressful task; they were asked to donate things again after the task was over. While people who were found to have high empathy donated more than the others did before undergoing the stressful task, their charitability declined sharply afterward. Isn’t asking for 2 unexpected donations in short succession a major confounding factor?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Agree. The study asked for 2 things from one group and 1 thing from another group and is trying to suggest that we should ignore the first ask. The authors are also abusing cortisol measurements to imply cortisol is something specific for bad stress when it’s not really that. Cortisol isn’t really a “bad” hormone like a lot of people believe. If you have too little cortisol you’ll feel terrible. Even fun activities will raise cortisol levels. Taking synthetic cortisol analogs often makes people feel good (for a very short while, chronic use will quickly downregulate this effect and requires slow tapering, don’t do it unless medically necessary). This study seems like junk science.
xcyu 5y ago
Depends on if the study tried to control for this by also testing 2 more groups with single donation before/after the stressful task. Can't access the original paper to confirm though.

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jasfi 5y ago

Cortisol can be very destructive. A lot of people are either unaware of high stress levels, or don't do anything meaningful to bring those levels down. I've been taking Ashwagandha and it works really well.

exdsq 5y ago

Holy shit there’s some serious voodoo waffle in these comments!

unglaublich 5y ago

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

yboris 5y ago

A bit off-topic, but any discussion of altruism these days I bring up effective altruism - a movement of people focusing on effective ways of helping as much as possible (within any specific area, and focusing on finding the most-important areas of focus). These individuals (myself included) often give at least 10% of their income (see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/). I really hope more people join in on the global movement: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

nickpinkston 5y ago

This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's work [1] on "Material" and "Post-Material" values and their relation to wealth / stability - ie high amounts of the latter are causal to Post-Material values, which would include charitable giving, tolerance, etc. Using his World Values Survey [2], surveying individual values across 100 countries from 1981-today, he showed across all major cultures that you can see how several generations of stability (both income and sociopolitical) are required to get to post-material values, ie you don't get rich and change your values, they crystalize in your early/mid 20's, so you need to feel good until then and not experience trauma after to maintain those values. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Inglehart#Cultural_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Inglehart#Cultural_Evol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey

n4r9 5y ago

Regardless of whether the methods are queationable, the results are consistent with other studies I've come across on the topic of how stress affects empathy and compassion: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_anxiety_reduces_empathy https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_anxiety_re... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020313323 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402... This is of particular interest to me as I find that I very easily become wrapped up in a sort of protective self-absorption when I get stressed or criticised, making it sometimes impossible to empathize or conduct proper conversations. This in turn has a very negative affect on relationships. If you're in a similar boat, you might find the practise of compassion-focused mindfulness useful. https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-practice-of-self-compassion-and-reducing-stress#3 https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-practice-of-self-compassio... The idea is similar to CBT, but with an emphasis on mindfulness and compassion towards oneself and others. I've learned that the "oneself" bit is extremely important. Until you can accept and be gentle on yourself, with all your flaws, you will struggle to be vulnerable around others and thereby cultivate genuine connections.

seltzered_ 5y ago

It might be worth reading this alongside: "Does altruism exist?" by David Sloan Wilsom: https://www.amazon.com/Does-Altruism-Exist-Foundational-Questions/dp/0300219881 https://www.amazon.com/Does-Altruism-Exist-Foundational-Ques... "The evolution of trust" by Nicky case : https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/

rrdharan 5y ago

What are the chances this study is actually reproducible? What was the sample size? Personally I’ve shifted to a default position of extreme skepticism regarding any study that makes any claim on any kind of human behavioral pattern. Burned too many times. We might as well just debate astrological predictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

MrMan 5y ago

I believe in jobs before charity. there are things that need to be altruistically funded due to market failures, but not most things. the root causes of scarcity need to be addressed, and feel-good ad hoc donations tend, in my opinion, not to accomplish that. in the micro, I will never fault someone for doing something self-less, but things need to be fixed at the policy level, or let the market work where it can.