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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: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:47PM
empathy - understanding viewpoint of others, being able to simulate experience of others in your own head
sympathy - feeling sadness as a reaction to the sadness of others
A trump supporter who would emotionally enjoy an Elizabeth Warren supporter getting punched is a totally different thing than someone who would enjoy a trump supporter being punched, which is what this article is trying to mindfuck us with by saying there is an equivalency where there is not.
This study seems to think that all factions are of the same moral nature, that there are a lot of 'high empathy' trump voters, and that the 'empathy' trump voters 'feel' is the same as the vast majority of the population who detests him. This goes hand in hand with the breitbart and trump jr. narrative(lol) that liberals are really mean hateful people, and everything else that tries to convince right wing nutjobs to stop listening to anyone else but themselves.
I do not doubt that many old ladies who watch fox news feel bad when cats get hit by cars, or hear babies crying. But the real question is why these people feel no empathy for the victims of Trump as a person, the people he has cheated and women he has shamed(at the very least his wife). They have no empathy for any of the enemies fox says they should have. There is a real inability to see the pain of others when it is easy to abstract, and a susceptability to being programmed to apply strict morality here but not there. It is a real sickness and this study could have studied that, but rather seems content to make us all feel equally bad and confused about ourselves, which could be intentional, as it basically helps the republican party waaaaaay more, becausethey are the party of the heartless plutarchs and foreign countries who don't give a flying fuck about america or its citizens. I am not surprised you can get money to study anything that might support their point of view at the university of houston.
I know these people, my father is one of them. He is not capable of empathy or only barely. He has a real honest-to-abe handicap understanding how other people experience the world, and when he is told that it is not what he expects, he loses his shit. He refuses to see it and throws literal fits, rips up letters, drives away squealing his tires, etc etc.
Then he sits there watching professional wrestling with this grin on his face as the hulkster gets a comeback victory, and calls himself one of the good guys. Nowadays I see this 'pro wrestling' as something much more dangerous than it appears, as those wrestling fans are very much the same people who jump into the 2-minutes hate on command and paint their faces from trump's visit to the same venue they watch their wrestling.
Anyone painting an equivalence in character between him, the many people like him I have met, and myself has an agenda. And then have the gall to say 'empathy'(well, dispositional empathic concern, whatever that really is) itself is the problem? Wired and cambridge, elizabeth simas, you are losing me. I really think they are barking up the wrong tree here and shredding the english language with meaningless, misleading data.
Like what is even the point, the united states is facing the dissolution of the constitution, this 'research' tells those who are cheering for the downfall of the very flag they made into a shirt, that the ideas of their opponents are not important and are ruining the country with 'divisiveness', which will support them while they make their lists of who to exile and purge when the time comes.
In other words, who is behind this highly manipulative fascist propaganda that is trying to destroy our language and turn us into emotionless drones who eat propaganda for breakfast lunch and dinner, and don't give two shits about any other person, much less society?