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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 11 2019, @06:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-could-care-less dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by pipedwho on Monday November 11 2019, @09:19PM (5 children)

    by pipedwho (2032) on Monday November 11 2019, @09:19PM (#919087)

    In other words, they asked a bunch of questions testing for sympathy and called it empathy.

    Do you pity the fool? Sympathy.
    Is your heart open and accepting? Empathy.

    Sympathy seems to go hand in hand with some level of condescension, judgement and often hypocrisy. "Those poor gays, may god have mercy on their souls." Or, "That poor beggar, someone should give him a job."

    Sympathy often manifests in a response that is devoid of empathy, often due to uninformed assumptions.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @09:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @09:22PM (#919090)

    "I'm sympathetic to their cause, but they're a bunch of pricks."
    "Such a nice bunch of guys deserving of so much better, but I'm totally unsympathetic to their cause."

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by exaeta on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:18AM (3 children)

    by exaeta (6957) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:18AM (#919163) Homepage Journal

    There is actually a technical distinction between empathy and sympathy.

    Empathy is the ability to comprehend how others feel at a rational level. I.e., the ability to infer people's feelings from their behavior. That is, an exercise of mirror neurons.
    Sympathy is what most people would usually call "empathy" and is roughly concern for another's feelings.

    --
    The Government is a Bird
    • (Score: 2) by pipedwho on Tuesday November 12 2019, @10:08AM (2 children)

      by pipedwho (2032) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @10:08AM (#919308)

      If the only criteria for empathy is understanding someone's feelings, then it stands to reason that many of the people surveyed may have been empathic, but didn't give a rat's arse about the person's feelings. Those sorts of 'empathic' people are the epitome of users of the phrase "Sucks to be you."

      They know you're feeling like crap about a situation, and well isn't that just too bad.

      • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:23AM (1 child)

        by exaeta (6957) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:23AM (#919615) Homepage Journal
        I actually think the survey was good at finding narcissists. People have a tendency to answer questions in a way that makes them look good to themselves (i.e. how they view themselves). The actual questions asked by the study do not measure empathy nor sympathy, but I think are effectively a proxy for narcissism. Call it speculation on my part, but I don't think they asked very good questions. They should try to make the questions sound more neutral to reduce the influence of cognitive biases.
        --
        The Government is a Bird
        • (Score: 2) by pipedwho on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:43PM

          by pipedwho (2032) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:43PM (#920002)

          I think you're right about that. A study like that likely has an agenda, either intentional or sub-conscious.

          Questions like they're asking are the kind of thing that people even lie to themselves about. Who wants to think they have zero concern for someone in trouble? Who wants to think they're being hypocritical? Lest they be found out, or worse, find out that they aren't the loving/caring/etc person they think they are.

          Many people are very selective and conditional on where they put (or pretend to put) their concern, and in being selective they are working to their own agenda rather than from the emotional needs of the 'other'.