Empathy
The psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
The imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself.
Main
Takeaways
Empathy is element in human connections: relationships, friendships, parenting. However, empathy alone is not a reliable guide for making significant sociopolitical decisions.
Human empathy is naturally biased toward those who we can see, relate to, or emotionally connect with. That's why empathy might lead to unequal attention, inefficient choices, and emotional manipulation.
A society shouldn't be built on empathy. It must be built on balancing compassion with reason, evidence, and fairness. People should care about others, but decisions affecting millions cannot rely only on emotional reactions.
The title sounds very wrong, better to say immoral. Empathy is, some might say, the highest human virtues. We teach children to be empathetic. Politicians call for more empathy. Social media asks us to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes."
In many cases, such as friendship, parenting, and relationships, it is an essential part, but when empathy becomes the main tool for decision-making about society, it starts creating serious problems.
Dr. Paul Bloom says that empathy is powerful, but also biased, inefficient, and can easily be weaponized. (Bloom)
Empathy is a Weapon
Empathy can also be manipulated. Politicians, social media, its algorithms, and activists use emotional stories to gain support for policies that people might reject if they were shown only with statistics or logical application. A single emotional image often might have much greater influence than years of research.
Social media algorithm intensifies this problem by rewarding an emotional, catchy, and outrages contents to increase engagement. Users constantly get carefully selected content to make them feel empathy
Biases
Empathy does not treat all suffering equally. Instead, we focus on visible, emotionally vivid, and similar experiences. Just like great stories focus on one person, our empathy works only on a small scale. A single story of one suffering child can go viral, collecting enormous donations from around the world. While thousands of other people remain invisible.
Psychologists Dr. Jenni and Dr. Loewenstein call this the Identifiable Victim Effect (Jenni, Loewenstein)
When a tragedy is presented in the form of a statistic, people tend to feel a lack of emotional response. How sad were you during history lessons when the teacher mentioned the estimated total deaths? What did you feel after hearing 60-85 million? You might say "that's terrible". Whatever your answer is, it does not make you a heartless because empathy does not scale.
So, empathy doesn’t enable us to respond to the suffering itself, but rather to the suffering experienced by an empathetic individual.