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There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you're one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.
Last week APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study[$] which found that "empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it."
The study had two parts. In the first part, Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of "affective polarization"—defined as the difference between the favorability rating they gave their political party and the rating they gave the opposing party. In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.
It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That's right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude.
This study is urgently important—though not because it's a paradigm shifter, shedding radically new light on our predicament. As the authors note, their findings are in many ways consistent with conclusions reached by other scholars in recent years. But the view of empathy that's emerging from this growing body of work hasn't much trickled down to the public. And public understanding of it may be critical to shifting America's political polarization into reverse somewhere between here and the abyss.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 11 2019, @07:02PM (8 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday November 11 2019, @09:40PM (7 children)
How is ths conclusion not:
Those who go to the most effort to present themselves as empathic are actually sociopaths?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 11 2019, @11:48PM (5 children)
Fits with what I've seen on SN. Fair number of people extol the virtues of empathy and then start the straw man building when they run into criticism.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:45AM (1 child)
Who needs a strawman when we have a khallow? Much easier to obviously rebut.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:11AM
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:53AM (2 children)
That's because they think they have empathy. They don't or at the very least are severely crippled in it. If, for instance, you can't understand what might motivate someone to vote Trump without demonizing them, you are empathy deficient.
That's what empathy means: the ability to accurately put yourself in someone else's shoes. If you're not accurate your empathy is broken and demonization is almost never accurate.
Mind you, none of the above means you have to give a shit once you've attained empathy with someone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)
Or, (possibly) insightful.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:12PM
Nope. In trying to paint half the nation as monsters, you are always going to be wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:37AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?