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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: 5, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 11 2019, @07:26PM (5 children)
If you say you're empathetic then turn around and say you like it when the people you disagree with get hurt then you are not in fact empathetic!
So, the claim doesn't follow that empathy affects polarization because you never demonstrated the person was empathetic in the first place!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 11 2019, @08:24PM (4 children)
I don't want them to get hurt. I want them to see how obviously right I am, and how astoundingly stupid they are, and then change their view.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 11 2019, @08:38PM (2 children)
Never gonna happen. The best we can hope for is to dissuade the non-committed from following them down the rabbit hole.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 11 2019, @09:40PM
Or have them involuntarily committed.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 11 2019, @09:42PM
And we could double-hope that it's recorded, and uploaded to the internet too!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:53PM
Well, maybe you don't but there are at least a few Trump voters who do. [vox.com]