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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: 2) by exaeta on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:06AM (2 children)

    by exaeta (6957) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:06AM (#919152) Homepage Journal

    Empathy is correlated with being emotional. Emotion is correlated with neuroticism.

    Rational people who think logically instead of emotionally will always be better behaved. Emotion is animalistic, something we are born with. Reason is a higher mental state we learn and train. We should encourage rational thinking again instead of this snowflake crap...

    --
    The Government is a Bird
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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:54AM

    by dry (223) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:54AM (#919248) Journal

    People use rational thinking to rationalize their emotions so they can pretend that their emotions don't control them.

  • (Score: 1) by Sally_G on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:00AM

    by Sally_G (8170) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:00AM (#919283)

    And, how's your love life? Do you have a lot in common with Jackson? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wnzVMUbpV4 [youtube.com]