Why Empathy Matters (More than Ever)
Empathy is under attack, again.
It’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. Persuasion requires emotional activation, and both sides of the political aisle are guilty of exploiting our innate capacity for empathy, but the idea that empathy is inherently bad for society, dangerous, or represents a “flaw in our code” honestly just doesn’t land for me.
The following is an actual exchange between Elon Musk and Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast Episode #2281.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes, like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue.
I don’t believe a fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. But Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, might. He says most people are completely wrong about empathy. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, Bloom uses scientific studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. He claims that the extent to which individuals and societies make ethical choices on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.
In other words, the more we “zero in” on the suffering of any one individual, the less we tend to the suffering of the masses. Bloom writes in his opening pages: “I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads [(i.e., intellect)] rather than our hearts [(i.e., emotion)]” (parentheses and italics added by me).
Except, it’s with our hearts that moral decision-making is made.
It seems Bloom supports the notion that rational thinking is superior to emotional thinking, or the idea that the “head,” with its ability to organize thoughts and form coherent arguments for and against things, should be preferred when it comes to decisions of morality, over the “heart,” where our pesky emotions like to just get in the way and lead us astray.
Before we go any further, let’s define what we mean by “empathy.” According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” It is often thought of as a capacity, as Stanford psychologist, Jamil Zaki explains: “We think of empathy — people’s ability to share and understand each other’s experiences — as a hard-wired trait, but it’s actually more like a skill. The right experiences, habits, and practices can increase our empathic capacity.”
Another way of defining empathy is “the act of imagining one’s ideas, feelings, or attitudes as fully inhabiting something observed (such as a work of art, or perhaps another person), or the imaginative projection of a subjective state onto an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.” According to Susan Lanzoni, a psychology historian, at the time the term was coined, empathy was not really about feeling another person’s emotion, but the exact opposite. To have empathy, in the early 1900s, was to “enliven” an object, or to project one’s own imagined feelings onto the world.
So, is it something we feel in response to an external trigger (i.e., observing/absorbing another person’s emotional pain), which could be considered a highly sensitive form of sympathy? Is it imagining how another person must be feeling based on our own lived experiences, which seems more like a projection of sorts, putting onto another person, our thoughts and feelings?
Our ability to imagine how another person might be feeling is a critical tool used in #goodtherapy. It is one employed by the therapist themselves in order to do the job effectively, to help a patient make sense of things, to understand themselves and others more fully. We use and teach cognitive empathy skills, which is the ability to not just imagine how another person might be feeling, but to take the mental perspective of another person as well.
Bloom states, “By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So, if you’re in pain and I feel your pain — I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings. A lot of people think this is merely a verbal distinction, that it doesn’t matter that much. But actually there’s a lot of evidence in my book that empathy and compassion activate different parts of the brain. But more importantly, they have different consequences. If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better.”
On this subtle distinction, I largely agree. Empathy for empathy’s sake means very little. In fact, being highly in tune with another person’s emotional state invites an opportunity for bad actors to take advantage, to manipulate, coerce, and control. Even narcissists and sociopaths can be high on empathy (they are low on guilt and remorse). Empathy without compassion is the problem, in my opinion. Compassion prompts action to care. For individuals high on the care/non-harm morality matrix (for reference, see Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”), feeling another person’s pain activates a moral drive to help, no matter who the person is and whether they deserve the help or not.
This is where things get tricky and where I do see our good nature as humans become weaponized against us. Non-harm comes with conditions, for those who believe that not all people are worthy of the same protections, at least the protections that our government and institutions offer. The extent of this discussion is beyond the scope and purpose of this article, but suffice it to say, the idea proposed by some that empathy is harmful because it can induce us to care for people deemed unfit by religious or political doctrine just feels, in my pesky heart, wrong.
As a practitioner and teacher of Good Therapy, I will continue to teach people the skills of cognitive empathy/perspective taking, use emotional empathy to better understand my patient’s lived experiences, guide them to expand their capacity for empathic understanding and compassionate action that is in line with their particular set of values and beliefs. To me, this just makes sense, both with my head and with my heart.
Be & Stay Well,
