Against Empathy

Paul Bloom

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062339355
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

New York Post Best Book of 2016

We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don't have enough of it.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.

Basing his argument on groundbreaking scientific findings, Bloom makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations—who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison—are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions. With precision and wit, he demonstrates how empathy distorts our judgment in every aspect of our lives, from philanthropy and charity to the justice system; from medical care and education to parenting and marriage. Without empathy, Bloom insists, our decisions would be clearer, fairer, and—yes—ultimately more moral.

Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make.

CHAPTER 1

Other People’s Shoes

For the last couple of years, when people ask me what I’ve been up to, I say that I’m writing a book. They ask for details and I tell them, “It’s about empathy.” They tend to smile and nod when I say the word, and then I add: “I’m against it.”

This usually gets a laugh. I was surprised at this response at first, but I’ve learned that being against empathy is like being against kittens—a view considered so outlandish that it can’t be serious. It’s certainly a position that’s easy to misunderstand. So I’ll be clear from the start: I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, being a mensch, and doing the right thing. Actually, I’m writing this book because I’m for all those things. I want to make the world a better place. I’ve just come to believe that relying on empathy is the wrong way to do it.

One reason why being against empathy is so shocking is that people often assume that empathy is an absolute good. You can never be too rich or too thin . . . or too empathic.

Empathy is unusual in this regard. We are more critical when it comes to judging other feelings, emotions, and capacities. We recognize their nuances. Anger can drive a father to beat his infant son to death, but anger at injustice can transform the world. Admiration can be wonderful if directed toward someone who deserves it; less wonderful if one is admiring, say, a serial killer. I am a fan of deliberative reasoning and will push for its importance throughout the book, but I’ll admit that it too can steer us wrong. Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors, talks about the struggles of those who performed experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. He describes these doctors as smart people who used their intelligence to talk themselves into doing terrible things. They would have been better off listening to their hearts.

For just about any human capacity, you can assess the pros and cons. So let’s give empathy the same scrutiny.

To do so, we have to be clear what we mean by empathy. There are many definitions thought up by psychologists and philosophers: One book on the topic lists nine different meanings of the word. One team of researchers notes that empathy is used for everything “from yawning contagion in dogs, to distress signaling in chickens, to patient-centered attitudes in human medicine.” Another team notes that “there are probably nearly as many definitions of empathy as people working on this topic.” But the differences are often subtle, and the sense of empathy that I’ll be talking about throughout this book is the most typical one. Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

Empathy in this sense was explored in detail by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, though they called it “sympathy.” As Adam Smith put it, we have the capacity to think about another person and “place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”

That is how I’m thinking about empathy. But there is a related sense that has to do with the capacity to appreciate what’s going on in the minds of other people without any contagion of feeling. If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that’s empathy in the sense that I’m interested in here. But if I understand that you are in pain without feeling it myself, this is what psychologists describe as social cognition, social intelligence, mind reading, theory of mind, or mentalizing. It’s also sometimes described as a form of empathy—“cognitive empathy” as opposed to “emotional empathy,” which is most of my focus.

Later in this chapter, I’ll talk about cognitive empathy, rather critically, but right now we should just keep in mind that these two sorts of empathy are distinct—they emerge from different brain processes, they influence us in different ways, and you can have a lot of one and a little of the other.

Empathy—in the Adam Smith sense, the “emotional empathy” sense—can occur automatically, even involuntarily. Smith describes how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” John Updike writes, “My grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.” When Nicholas Epley goes to his children’s soccer games, he has to leave the row in front of him clear for “empathy kicks.” And it takes someone sturdier than me to watch someone bash himself on the thumb with a hammer without flinching.

But empathy is more than a reflex. It can be nurtured, stanched, developed, and extended through the imagination. It can be focused and directed by acts of will. In a speech before he became president, Barack Obama described how empathy can be a choice. He stressed how important it is “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.”

I like this quote because it provides a nice illustration of how empathy can be a force for good. Empathy makes us care more about other people, more likely to try to improve their lives.

A few years ago, Steven Pinker began a discussion of empathy with a list:

Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. . . . [Other examples include] Teaching Empathy, Teaching Children Empathy, and The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child, whose author, according to an endorsement by the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, “strives to bring about no less than world peace and protection for our planet’s future, starting with schools and classrooms everywhere, one child, one parent, one teacher at a time.”

As I started to write this book, I kept my eyes out for similar examples. Right now, there are over fifteen hundred books on amazon.com with empathy in their title or subtitle. Looking at the top twenty, there are books for parents and teachers, self-help guides, marketing books (“How to use empathy to create products people love”), and even a couple of good scientific books.

There are many Web pages, blogs, and YouTube channels devoted to championing empathy, such as a website that lists everything Barack Obama has said about empathy, including this famous quote: “The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit.” After I published an article that explored some of the ideas in this book, I was invited to join a series of “empathy circles”: online conversations in which individuals talk about the importance of empathy and work self-consciously to be empathic toward each other. Books on empathy fill my shelves and my iPad, and I’ve been to several conferences with “Empathy” in their names.

I became sensitive to the way empathy is discussed in response to certain public events. In the fall of 2014, there was a series of incidents in which unarmed black men died at the hands of the police, and many people expressed their anguish about the lack of empathy that Americans—and particularly police officers—have with racial minorities. But I would read as well angry responses complaining about the lack of empathy that many Americans have with the police, or with the victims of crimes. The one thing everyone could agree on, it seemed, was that more empathy is needed.

Many believe that empathy will save the world, and this is particularly the case for those who champion liberal or progressive causes. Giving advice to liberal politicians, George Lakoff writes, “Behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy. . . .” Jeremy Rifkin calls for us to make the “leap to global empathic consciousness,” and he ends his book The Empathic Civilization with the plaintive question “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid global collapse?”

For every specific problem, lack of empathy is seen as the diagnosis and more empathy as the cure. Emily Bazelon writes “The scariest aspect of bullying is the total lack of empathy”—a diagnosis she applies not only to the bullies but to those who do nothing to help the victims. The solution, she suggests, is “to remember that almost everyone has the capacity for empathy and decency—and to tend that seed as best as we possibly can.” Andrew Solomon explores the trials of children who are different in critical ways from their parents (such as dwarfs, transgender children, and children with Down syndrome). He worries that we live in xenophobic times and diagnoses “a crisis of empathy.” But he suggests as well that these special children can help address the empathy crisis and notes that parents of such children report an increase in empathy and compassion. This argument is familiar to me: My brother is severely autistic, and when I was growing up I heard it said that such children are a blessing from God—they teach us to be empathic to those who are different from us.

Perhaps the most extreme claim about lack of empathy is advanced by Simon Baron-Cohen. For him, evil individuals are nothing more than people who lack empathy. His answer to the question “What is evil?” is “empathy erosion.”

It makes sense that empathy would be seen by so many as the magic bullet of morality. The argument in its simplest form goes like this: Everyone is naturally interested in him- or herself; we care most about our own pleasure and pain. It requires nothing special to yank one’s hand away from a flame or to reach for a glass of water when thirsty. But empathy makes the experiences of others salient and important—your pain becomes my pain, your thirst becomes my thirst, and so I rescue you from the fire or give you something to drink. Empathy guides us to treat others as we treat ourselves and hence expands our selfish concerns to encompass other people.

In this way, the willful exercise of empathy can motivate kindness that would never have otherwise occurred. Empathy can make us care about a slave, or a homeless person, or someone in solitary confinement. It can put us into the mind of a gay teenager bullied by his peers, or a victim of rape. We can empathize with a member of a despised minority or someone suffering from religious persecution in a faraway land. All these experiences are alien to me, but through the exercise of empathy, I can, in some limited way, experience them myself, and this makes me a better person. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman put it like this: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.”

Empathy can be used to motivate others to do good. Just about all parents have at some point reminded children of the consequences of bad acts, prodding them with remarks like “How would you feel if someone did that to you?” Martin Hoffman estimates that these empathic prompts occur about four thousand times a year in the average child’s life. Every charity, every political movement, every social cause will use empathy to motivate action.

And there’s more! I haven’t yet told you about the laboratory research, the cognitive neuroscience studies, the philosophical analyses, the research with babies and chimps and rats—all said to demonstrate the importance of empathy in making us good.

Even the biggest fan of empathy should admit that there are other possible motivations for good action. To use a classic example from philosophy—first thought up by the Chinese philosopher Mencius—imagine that you are walking by a lake and see a young child struggling in shallow water. If you can easily wade into the water and save her, you should do it. It would be wrong to keep walking.

What motivates this good act? It is possible, I suppose, that you might imagine what it feels like to be drowning, or anticipate what it would be like to be the child’s mother or father hearing that she drowned. Such empathic feelings could then motivate you to act. But that is hardly necessary. You don’t need empathy to realize that it’s wrong to let a child drown. Any normal person would just wade in and scoop up the child, without bothering with any of this empathic hoo-ha.

More generally, as Jesse Prinz and others have pointed out, we are capable of all sorts of moral judgments that aren’t grounded in empathy. Many wrongs, after all, have no distinct victims to empathize with. We disapprove of people who shoplift or cheat on their taxes, throw garbage out of their car windows, or jump ahead in line—even if there is no specific person who appreciably suffers because of their actions, nobody to empathize with.

And so there has to be more to morality than empathy. Our decisions about what’s right and what’s wrong, and our motivations to act, have many sources. One’s morality can be rooted in a religious worldview or a philosophical one. It can be motivated by a more diffuse concern for the fates of others—something often described as concern or compassion and which I will argue is a better moral guide than empathy.

To see this at work, consider that there are people who are acting right now to make the world better in the future, who worry that we are making the planet hotter or running out of fossil fuels or despoiling the environment or failing to respond to the rise of extreme religious groups. These worries have nothing to do with an empathic connection with anyone in particular—because there is no particular person to feel empathic toward—but are instead rooted in a more general concern about human lives and human flourishing.

In some cases, empathy-based concerns clash with other sorts of moral concerns. As I write this, there is a debate going around in the academic community over whether professors should announce in advance that material presented in the lecture hall or seminar room might be upsetting to certain people, particularly those with a history of trauma, so that the students have a chance to absent themselves from class during that period.

The arguments in favor of these “trigger warnings” have largely been based on empathy. Imagine what it would be like to be the victim of rape and suddenly your professor—in a class that isn’t about rape at all—shows a movie clip depicting a sexual assault. It might be terrible. And you would have to either sit through it or go through the humiliating experience of walking out in the middle of the class. If you feel empathy for a student in this situation, as I imagine any normal person would, this would make you receptive to the idea that trigger warnings are a good idea.

One scholar derisively summed up the move toward trigger warnings as “ ‘empathetic correctness.’ ” She argues that “instead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon, students are . . . refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.” But this is too dismissive. While concerns about “personal comfort” might be poor reasons to restructure the curriculum, real suffering and anguish are a different story and certainly have to have some weight.

What about the arguments against trigger warnings? These are also about the welfare of people—what else could they be, ultimately?—but they aren’t inherently empathic, as they don’t connect to concerns about any individual person. Instead, they rest on considerations that are long term, procedural, and abstract. Critics claim that trigger warnings violate the spirit of academia, in which students benefit from being challenged by new experiences. They worry that since it’s impossible to anticipate what will set people off, they are impractical. They argue that by focusing on trigger warnings, colleges and universities will divert attention from more important issues, such as better mental health care for students.

Of course, someone making such arguments can try to evoke empathy for individuals, real or imagined—in moral debate, empathy is a spice that makes anything taste better. But concern for specific individuals is not, ultimately, what the anti-trigger-warning arguments are about, so this debate illustrates that there is more than one way to motivate moral concern.

As another example of how empathy can clash with other moral considerations, C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues did an experiment in which they told subjects about a ten-year-old girl named Sheri Summers who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for treatment that would relieve her pain. Subjects were told that they could move her to the front of the line. When simply asked what to do, they acknowledged that she had to wai...