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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 Thursday November 14 2019, @09:03AM
This leader selection algorithm, if you could screw up this algorithm for another country, you could just walk it in and take it over. The whole sheep led by wolves thing.
In my opinion, that is what israel has done to the united states through their bribery of the republican party, which you can see in the quality of our current 'leadership'.
That is what facebook allows cambridge analysitica to do on a person by person basis, the people who are the best leaders of the country should be given lives of absolute hell so that they can barely exist, and the internet makes that very possible.
I suspect the strongest potential leaders in the united states are homeless and dying in large numbers from fetanyl sold to them by whichever division of the fbi or cia is handling that sort of thing nowadays. But if you can believe the official story of 9/11 and that saddaam hussein/assad/qadafi/bagdadi/mrbean is a clear and present danger, you will get a scholarshiop to westpoint.
That clears the way for people who have no leadership qualities, trump and biden, to run amok and sell the country out further down the river, as we are seeing in the daily news.