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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: 1) by VacuumTube on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:39PM (2 children)
"I cite those two because I surmise you would reckon them credible."
Okay, I had that coming. But could you tell me why believe that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from minority U.S. citizens? It really doesn't make sense to me, but perhaps you know something I don't.
I'm also interested in understanding why you apparently believe that the only hope of salvation of the U.S. is to destroy what exists and start over. Here again, it looks to me as though we have one more chance to make major changes before it's too late.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:44PM (1 child)
The question has been asked & answered, counselor. The second source cited, the NY Times piece.
Everyone across the political spectrum sees the same dysfunction. Elizabeth Warren in 2010 commented on the Dodd-Frank Bill, saying it should have smashed the big banks to pieces. In 2014 an FTC regulator became a whistleblower when she documented howregulatory capture [boingboing.net] has become near total in the financial system. Jeffrey Epstein ran an extensive pedophile and blackmail operation that involved many powerful people, including the Clintons, but he was murdered in his prison cell and the Clintons remain at large. The recent scandal about college admissions points up how even that is rigged.
Occupy Wall Street called the powerful interests responsible the "1%." The Tea Party and Trump supporters call them the "Deep State." But they're both talking about the same people, and they are very much on the same team, playing against us, the regular citizens. Left vs. Right, Republican vs. Democrat, and all those formulations are only kabuki theater meant to keep the citizens at each others' throats instead of fighting the people really responsible for their misery. Meanwhile, they steal everything that's not nailed down.
That is not a system that can or will reform itself. Q.E.D.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by VacuumTube on Friday November 15 2019, @07:06PM
Sorry that I misunderstood you on the NY Times article. I've had a little trouble understanding your point of view, but now it's now pretty clear. It seems the only thing we really disagree on is what it will take to fix the many problems. Even in that I have to grant that it's quite possible you're right. I just hope that you're not, but we'll see next year.