Empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity: study
wired.com
wired.com
> 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."
Phrasing like that seems to be a common problem with these sorts of surveys. I'd like to think I'm an emphatic person, reading some of the messages from the people stuck in the siege at that hong kong university definitely gets me all of the feels, but I'd still probably answer no to that question. I certainly feel for them, I can barely imagine what it would be like to be in their position, but they aren't "tender" feelings I don't think. Sympathy makes me feel sorry for them, Empathy makes me angry at china. I'd hardly consider anger to be tender.
Another long rant without a good conclusion. I guess that I feel what's missing from these sorts of questions is a way to qualify your answers. I'd like a "yes, but" and a "no, but" option.
> Some cultures still eat dog - you don't think they can love their children?
This is a non-sequitur.
edit: Compassion for one's in-group can be very real, even if the in-group is small. It's almost like a breadth-vs-depth question. I've even heard of some studies suggesting that having very intense feelings of compassion for one's in-group is predictive of callousness towards the out-group.
Sociopaths score low in empathy but are excellent at perceiving others' emotions.
"Hate the sin, not the sinner."
The WWI Christmas truce in 1914 shows this dynamic very clearly. It’s likely these people had great empathy for each other as they where in similar situations even sleeping in the same trenches as the front moved around. Yet, eventually they went back to killing each other. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
Wishing others harm and being able to empathize are tangential concepts.
The ability to understand what it's like to have something terrible happen to you does not preclude you from wishing it upon your enemies.
I suspect that for a subset of people the ability to empathize with people who are suffering makes the suffering of their enemies all the better.
"Are you humble?"
"Oh yes, definitely, I'm one of the most humble people I know"
"Are you a good person?"
"Oh yes, one of the best"
vs.
"How humble would you say your co-worker is?"
"Hmm, in my opinion probably average humility. I've never seen them do anything that made me think they were especially humble."
"Would you say your co-worker is a good person?"
"Hard to tell. They don't particularly stand out as being especially good."
People may be biased toward me based on my looks, but I am way more biased toward myself by comparison.
For example, these participants who were amused by people they disagree with being beaten up self-reported low empathy. They just didn't know that's what they were doing, which is why they were honest about it.
You can measure things better that are unpopular. On a U.S. college campus, you can measure lack of empathy but not empathy, whereas in ancient Sparta you could measure empathy but not lack of empathy.
It's not like evil people walk around with self conception that includes "gee I think I'll do some evil today."
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.
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.
I get pretty worked up about perceived injustices. I cringe when I see people get hurt. The people I've volunteered alongside over the years also seem to care enough about the welfare of strangers to actively participate.
Sure, I've also know plenty of people who don't care about others. eg solution to climate crisis is to cull humanity by 99%, people in jail deserve it, political opponents are traitors.
Though I think most people are in the apathetic middle.
Why the downvotes? I really want to know.
Because obviously correct statement about the bell curve distribution of a personality trait is somehow whackadoodle?
Or is it because those who volunteer are just virtual signaling SJWs who's only motivation is to mock misanthropes?
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.
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?
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.
Everyone is a click away from broadcasting to the planet whatever is flitting through their head.
And everyone is encouraged to broadcast thanks to Zuckerberg & Co inventing the likes/clicks/views engagement feedback loop.
In the past, if one was ignorant (lacked knowledge or access to knowledge), stupid (lacked the capacity to understand knowledge even with access to it), misguided (had access to the knowledge with errors) the cost and energy required to broadcast was much higher. And there were only finite number of people and groups who could pull it off. That put an upper limit on how much energy society had to expend in dealing with issues thanks to broadcast of free speech.
Countering the issues takes energy. And that is finite.
It's not complicated to understand the change. Take the best, most compassionate, patient, empathetic teacher you have and put him in a classroom with 10 misbehaving kids (all incentivized to misbehave) You will still see good teachers having a positive effect on all of them. Make it 30 misbehaving kids and things get trickier. Make it 500 and you will have the building burning down. Some magic process will have to generate more teachers to counteract the increase.
Social media and the news media have given us scale to Broadcast and rigged the game to prop up whoever/whatever gets engagement, without giving us a proportionate increase to respond to all the issues that also scale up.
We haven't invented empathy at scale yet. And it doesn't make sense to try while social media/news media rewards all kinds of bullshit. Likes/clicks/views counts need to be hidden otherwise the misbehaving kid gets mixed signals even if you apply empathy.
> "I'll never agree with what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"
The key points are not agreeing, and defending. I'd argue if you can empathize with them, you could agree with them (were you them), so that's not happening here. What matters is that you're both being attacked by a much more powerful entity, so powerful that it requires an alliance of enemies to successfully defend against. Of course that is government (or now corporate) censorship.
So I think you can hate someone and still defend a shared right against a common aggressor. And you can empathize with them enough to understand why they'd say the thing you disagree with. It's hard for me to imagine both hating and empathizing with the same person at the same time though.
And it seems this instability is real, as we have a hard time defining the minimums of free speech.
In what sense? Legally, for example, we don't.
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.
(I don't necessarily share his very individualized approach/view.)
You have to at least listen to them.
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.
> Maybe highly empathetic people don't like assholes.
Nobody likes assholes...
Also, unironically taking joy in someone else's misfortune is pretty mean.
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.
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.
http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cogniti...
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.
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.
Take gay marriage. The left likes to lampoon the right for claiming that "homosexuality is against our values" or some such homophobic nonsense. But that's not why republicans are against gay marriage--because you might be surprised to learn that republicans are NOT against gay marriage! They're against the government defining what marriage is: marriage is a religious and/or cultural tradition and it's none of the government's damn business to define or restrict it in any way.
Being right-of-center is more about preferring distributed, consensual, market-based solutions over government mandates and regulation, and staying out of people's lives. The obsession with "our values!" and fear response is a weird leftist caricature of the right, not reality.
Wouldn't the position outlined above lead to preferring policy that:
1. In the best case, removed all government recognition of marriage: e.g. remove all differential tax treatment, remove marriage licenses, remove any recognition of marriage whatsoever from government documents
2. In the case that (1) is not possible or complete, ensure that what regulations do exist make no distinctions at all between "types" of couples that marry - e.g. no distinction or restriction between same-sex marriage, cousins marrying, more-than-two-partner marriages, etc.
That seems to me to follow logically, but also does not seem to be the position of the Republican party, at least the parts of it I read about.
As an American all I have to say is don't take anything that guys is telling you at face value.
So please explain how this is not defining marriage and how it is supportive of gay marriage rather than in opposition to it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
It was supported by some prominent republicans because of the word "marriage," and for political reasons[0]. Note that to religious conservative thinkers the word "marriage" has deep religious meaning, and to regulate marriage is to encroach on the separation of church and state. This is why many republicans are okay with "civil unions" but have such strong opinions over the word "marriage."
Personally I voted NO on Prop 8, fwiw.
[0] Political science is the pinnacle of complexity in human society. But a lot of it can be understood as virtue signaling combined with pandering to the lowest common denominator and their short attention spans, combined with the destabilizing effects of primary-issue voters. So while there is a primary distinction between the left- and right- political spectrum which has to do with the role of government, there's also a bunch of tag-along, hot-button issues which politicians pay lip service to in order to get elected by the ignorant majority, but don't really influence legislation to large degree. Things like gay marriage, abortion rights, and climate change fall in these categories, sadly.
Which is to say, you'll find conservative think-tanks putting out policy papers justifying the status quo for marriage rights on the grounds that I mentioned. But then some religious fanatics get something like California's Prop 8 on the ballot and republican politicians feel they have to endorse it if they want to get re-elected, which they do. But in reality they're quite happy with the "civil union" compromise because it solves the fundamental civil rights issue without infringing on the religious definition of marriage.
Also pretending like the core issues of the party are small auxiliary issues that the party doesn't believe in is ridiculous considering their work on passing laws and enforcing them in the courts. If abortion or other issues were not big issues, why does the party constantly pass laws and enforce laws against them? Actions speak for themselves. No amount of propaganda changes that. It'd be like pretending that healthcare is not an issue for the democrats right now. It's absurd.
Personally I think it’s fucked up that government recognizes marriage at all. The benefits have very little to do with the pluralistic definitions of marriage that exist around the world today—tax benefits & visitation rights are not closely related to tying family assets together OR romance. It’s abhorrent that these rights were ever denied to couples regardless of whether they married or not. Religious couples deserve these rights regardless of marriage too. It makes no sense to recognize marriage at the state level. As a gay man I have never nor will ever have any ambitions of marriage, but these rights are still denied to me.
I hope you can see through this that the policy and dialogue championed through partisanship is divorced from values that I hold dear, though I emphatically do not begrudge the gay couples that did find a victory through the policy.
I'm entirely unsurprised, they're more to the right than our NZ centre-right party National.
The fact that the Democrats are even considered left-wing in the USA baffles me.
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.
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.
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
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".
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.)
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.
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.
The thing is that both sides feel that about the other.
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.
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
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.
The delusion is assuming people have control over their actions. Yes it's wrong that we punish people that didn't have control over the life they were born into and what happens without any control because the universe made it so. Yes of course it applies to all actions humans are forced to do in life.
This is where the phrases "don't poke the bear" and "don't grab a snake by its tail" come from. People have determined that it is likely to lead to a not-so-fun outcome.
Determinism, essentially, is empathy with nature. It is understanding that living creatures have needs, and when those needs are not met, bad things happen.
To use a light-hearted example. A parent might notice a deterministic pattern, whereby their child begins to cry when it is hungry. Feeding the child to prevent the crying is empathizing with that child.
"Empathizing with the shooter" is a matter of learning what lead the shooter to become a shooter so that you can try and prevent it from happening again. It doesn't mean that the shooting doesn't bother you, or that if someone is about to attack your family that you write it off as "predetermined".
Edit: A better example might be empathizing with an asteroid that is about to destroy the planet. Is being angry that it is on its current path helpful? Not really. Would you be upset if it crashed into Earth? Probably (albeit briefly).
Determinism = Understanding that the asteroid obeys the laws of physics, and looking out for situations that cause an asteroid to begin flying at the Earth so that it's damage can be mitigated, or prevented.
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.
Because it would ascribe fundamental different properties to master and slave as beings that just might have been different opportunities at one point? I would think so, because the same "whole" seems arbitrary.
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.
(Ignore the partisan commentary please, I am only linking for the quotes which do demonstrate this.)
Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.
The difference is that in no other Western country were slaveowners ready to resort to violence to defend that idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-anythin...
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.
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
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.
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.
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.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-emp...
Original APSR paper
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
The thesis of the article is that empathy may actually be causal and the research does support that conclusion.