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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @11:30PM
I think this study may be some how mistaken as to what empathy is. Feeling as though you care about poor people's sufferings related to poverty, is not necessarily the product of empathy. If I want to elevate my social status, taking up, 'noble causes', may be a great way to do that. There is no need for empathy there. All you have to do is look at the Christian Crusaders and the Inquisitors. These were not empathic people. These were cruel and sadistic people trying to behave, 'rightly', based on their held beliefs. In trying to act, 'rightly', they did many things that were very cruel (torture and murder).
Empathy is an emotional response. Perhaps there may be logic involved in the process; but, it is not necessary. Empathy is not sympathy and empathy is not behavior being acted out based on a logical construct. Empathy is feeling what another person feels. Experienced empathy gives insight into another person's pain, for the simple reason, that when you experience empathy you can't NOT know what the other person is feeling, because you are feeling it as well to some degree.
Finding amusement in another persons failing or defeat is not empathic at all; and, any test that has deemed such a person especially empathetic has improper criteria for discerning true empathy. A very empathetic person finds it difficult to take up cause against a perceived enemy, because they are usually too busy understanding why that person feels and thinks as they do. Sociopathic and anti-social behavior is usually the result of having a lack of insight into another person's experience.
I'm sure they are times when a sociopath is the best woman for the job and times when an empath is the best man for the job; but, reveling in the defeat of one's perceived enemies is not a hugely empathetic trait.