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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: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Monday November 11 2019, @11:55PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @11:55PM (#919148) Journal
    I think rather it speaks to a huge limitation of empathy. You're empathizing with what you perceive not what is. So if someone can fake emotions well, they got your number. Similarly, if you're invested in a fantasy where some people wear black hats, you get schadenfreude fantasizing when the black hats get in trouble.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:04AM (#919189)

    Hear, hear. The perpetually self-deluded khallow should know a thing or two about investing in fantasies.