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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: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 11 2019, @07:13PM (4 children)
How many people in either group are going to self-report a lack of empathy?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 11 2019, @08:21PM (2 children)
I will admit there are people that I would have difficulty feeling empathy for.
Especially if I rightly or wrongly perceive that they are somehow bad evil people.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 11 2019, @08:43PM
Me too. I'm not going to give myself any glowing scores on the empathy-self-evaluation, though.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:35AM
I don't. You don't need to cut off your ability to recognize what drives a person to oppose them and you don't need to demonize them. I could simultaneously understand what might drive a meth head into breaking into my house and put two rounds in his chest and one in his head. And unless you're severely deficient in the empathy department, you should be able to as well. So this study was bullshit from the outset, regardless of the conclusions it reached, because it doesn't even understand what empathy is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:18PM
I think what's more interesting here is that the study shows that much of the people who self-identify as being empathetic are on the more extremely side of not being empathetic. It's something like people who think they are wealthy being poorer than average or people who think they're astronauts being more likely to live in caves.
I think much of this is due to the population being studied, consisting in large part of college students. The usual group of twenty-somethings will have inflated estimates of their abilities and such. Maybe this is just another thing that doesn't get self-evaluated well. Or even perhaps that young people who don't self-evaluate well are more likely to have problems with empathy too? Then there's the ideologies that have all kinds of empathy for the in-groups and hate for the out-groups.