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Comment by 895-grbtio | Hacker News Reader

Don't believe the hype. Lack of empathy is a huge handicap in life. People who are unable to imagine things from the perspective of others are often unable to correctly interpret or anticipate others' actions and responses. Managers with low EQ tend to not go very far.

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Empathy is good because you understand people. Psychopaths may have empathy which often makes them good manipulators but they lack sympathy so they don’t feel with others. That’s my understanding.

I think you are referring to sociopaths and not psychopaths, the latter of which are associated with empathy impairment and aren’t as great manipulators as the former.

The APA considers them the same thing.

Source? There are lots of articles that describe the difference between the two:

https://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/psychopat...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disor...

I think you two are talking about different things. Empathy has two components: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine things from the perspective of others, and lacking that is clearly a big handicap. Emotional empathy is the ability to respond emotionally to other people's mental state, and it's definitely not clear whether lacking that (as sociopaths do) is a handicap.

Interesting distinction, one that I was unaware of.

I'd disagree with your assertion that lacking cognitive empathy "is clearly a big handicap" and also that "it's definitely not clear whether lacking [emotional empathy] (as sociopaths do) is a handicap".

Speaking from personal experience I frequently fail to exhibit what is deemed to be the correct emotional response to the emotions of others by either misinterpreting their emotion, being unable to adduce the underlying cause for an emotion, or not caring about or being unaffected by their emotion. This has caused much negative interpersonal consequences and has been highly detrimental. I imagine that emotional empathy is quite a big component of what people call emotional intelligence. (I also don't have the little voice that says "don't say what you're about to say" that other people have but I think that's something else?)

However I have no trouble imaging things from the perspective of others. I'd go further than that, I am too good at imagining things from the perspective of others. It's practically a default setting of mine to flip roles and situations around to evaluate scenarios from another's perspective. It's why people with ideological biases infuriate me because it makes them unable to perform this simple "trick", same with someone or groups suffering from delusions of exceptionalism and other tribal biases. Because this is so prevalent and doesn't appear to impact negatively on individuals I have to conclude it's not so much of an immediate handicap, it doesn't appear to hinder people getting on in life the way lacking emotional empathy does. (It does have rather big societal consequences obviously which can eventually hurt the individual via the group but people are too 'stupid' to see this if I may say that without causing offense.)

Sociopathy isn’t associated with empathy impairment like psychopathy is. Sociopaths understand empathy well, and can use it like a weapon.

Sociopaths aren't master manipulators. They mostly get by on the of element of surprise. People generally don't expect others to stoop below a certain level of immoral behavior in most contexts.

What's your source for that? It's not how I've understood the distinction between sociopaths and psychopaths. In fact, it's not clear that there is a well-defined distinction. Everybody seems to draw the line differently.

https://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/psychopat...

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