I recently read a fascinating book by psychologist Paul Bloom called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. In this post I will discuss this book in more detail as well as review other evidence about the difference between empathy, theory of mind, and compassion. I will also discuss how Bloom’s book has been misused by some right wing Christians.
Empathy
Definition of Empathy
Most definitions of empathy include vicariously feeling the same emotions as another person and understanding another person’s perspective. Psychologists separate these two things. Vicariously feeling another person’s emotions or pain is called emotional empathy. It is neurologically distinct from understanding another person’s perspective, which is called cognitive empathy or theory of mind. Bloom focuses his critique on emotional empathy, not theory of mind.
Emotional Empathy
Emotional empathy is hard wired into us. It is a mostly unconscious response to another person’s distress. It can motivate us to be kind and helpful to the person or people who elicit this response. It can also lead to harm and even violence. Much more about that later in this post. Emotional empathy is a system 1 response. I’ll explain what that means below.
System 1 and System 2 modes of thinking
System 1 and system two are descriptions of of two ways that our minds operate. It is a somewhat simplified model, but it is consistent with current neuroscientific research. The best accessible description of system 1 and system 2 is a book by Daniel Kahneman called Thinking, Fast and Slow. I highly recommend reading it.
System 1 is what we use for most routine tasks in our lives. It is our fast, automatic, intuitive and emotional mode of thinking. It operates without conscious awareness and relies on mental shortcuts to make quick judgments and decisions. System 1 is essentially our brain’s “autopilot” mode, constantly monitoring our surroundings and making rapid assessments. It is essential to our lives, but , it’s also important to be aware of its limitations. It can sometimes lead to errors in judgment, particularly when dealing with complex or unfamiliar situations.
System 2 thinking is a deliberate, conscious, and effortful process used for complex tasks and decisions. It is characterized by logical reasoning, careful analysis, and consideration of multiple factors. Unlike System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking), System 2 requires focused attention and effort.
Emotional empathy as a system 1 mode of thinking
Emotional empathy happens without our conscious awareness. It is contextual. Bloom cites research that emotional empathy is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in. In one study subjects were shown videos of people in pain said to be suffering from AIDS. Some of the people in the videos were described as having gotten AIDS from intravenous drug use and some were described as having gotten AIDS from a blood transfusion. Subjects showed much more empathy for the people who were described as having gotten AIDS from a blood transfusion than those described as having gotten AIDS from intravenous drug use.
Emotional empathy is also influenced by the group to which the other person belongs. Is it one of Us or one of Them? There was a study of a painful shock to the hand in European soccer fans. One person was shocked while others witnessed the person who was shocked. Subjects showed more empathy if the person was a fan of the subject’s team and much less empathy if the person was a fan of the opposing team. All of these responses were shown to be below the level of consciousness. When subjects were asked about the reason for the difference in their empathy scores, they denied that there was any bias.
Does high emotional empathy correlate with good behavior?
People do vary in how empathic they are. On one end of the spectrum are people who have a high emotional empathy response, and on the other end of the spectrum are people who have very little emotional empathy. We would expect that people with a high emotional empathy response would be more likely to take action to help. People with high emotional empathy feel peoples’ distress more strongly and this should motivate them to help if for no other reason than to reduce their own distress. Another way that they could reduce their distress, however, is to escape rather than help. We would also expect that people with very low emotional empathy would have more cruel or violent behavior.
It turns out that there is almost no correlation with empathy and good or bad behavior. A meta-analysis of all the studies showed that low empathy has no association with aggression, and high empathy has minimal to no effect on good behavior. To quote Bloom, “Being high in empathy doesn’t make one a good person and being low in empathy doesn’t make one a bad person.”
Emotional empathy as a spotlight
Emotional empathy acts like a spotlight. To quote Bloom again, “making visible the suffering of others making their troubles real, salient and concrete.” The spotlight effect is a weakness as well as a strength. When you point a spotlight at something, everything else is in darkness. What you see depends on where you point the spotlight. This focus effect makes you more vulnerable to bias. It also leads to something called “the identifiable victim effect.” This sets up a situation where one identifiable victim elicits more emotional empathy than than a thousand victims. Stalin once said “One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” We also see this effect in deaths from the COVID pandemic. Eighty percent of Americans do not know anyone who died from COVID, though over a million Americans died from the COVID pandemic. The people who died were disproportionately elderly, black or poor. For people outside of those groups there was no emotional empathy spotlight effect. That is likely why so many people were not convinced that COVID was a serious disease.
The dark side of emotional empathy
Emotional empathy where there is conflict between groups can exacerbate conflict, even wars. People on one side feel empathy for members of their group who feel they have been harmed by the other side. Empathy with your side leads to the desire to punish the perpetrators. Of course people in the group on the other side of the conflict feel emotional empathy for the people on their side and therefore want to punish the other group. In these kind of situations emotional empathy exacerbates rather than mediates conflict between groups.
Burnout
People in the helping professions (doctors, nurses, therapists) do not do well when they experience high emotional empathy with all their clients. Experiencing the pain and suffering of patients, even though empathic suffering is not as severe as the suffering of the patient, is not pleasant. Over time, symptoms of burnout can develop. These include fatigue, poor concentration, lack of energy and effectiveness, cynicism and detachment.
Manipulating emotional empathy
The emotional empathy response can be manipulated for good causes, but also for things that are morally suspect or wrong.
Charities
Charities understand that eliciting emotional empathy will increase donations. They do this by showing images of individual people or animals who are obviously in distress. Stories go with the images about the suffering of this individual person or animal. Since we have an increased emotional empathy response to children in distress, the charity ads often use images of children. The emotional empathy response is not a good way to decide which charities should get your donations. Some charities do much more good for a lot more people than others. All charities, both good and not so good use the same techniques to manipulate emotional empathy. There is a better way to decide which charities should get your donations. More about that later in this post.
Politicians
Politicians often highlight individual people to manipulate the emotional empathy response to recruit people to vote for them or to take one side or the other in political and policy battles. Once again, this is not a good way to choose which politician or which policies you want to support.
The Christian right
There have been several recent books by right wing Christian authors who have cherry picked Paul Bloom’s critique of emotional empathy. Essentially anything or anyone that elicits empathy that contradicts their view of Christianity is termed “toxic empathy.” This is just another manipulation of empathy in a negative sense that promotes a particular religious viewpoint.
Compassion
Definition of compassion
Psychologist Paul Gilbert defines compassion as basic kindness with a deep awareness of the suffering of oneself and of other living things coupled with the wish and the effort to relieve that suffering.
Compassion as system 2 thinking
Understanding (rather than feeling) the suffering of a person or group of people uses system 2 thinking. That understanding facilitates the desire to help in the most effective way possible. Determining the most effective way to help requires logical reasoning, analysis, and consideration of multiple factors. These are characteristics of system 2 thinking.
Awareness of the vast amount of suffering in the world does not mean that an individual person can help relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. Compassion involves choosing both how and whom one can help the most.
Compassion in the helping professions
As noted above, emotional empathy alone can lead to burnout. It can also lead to less than ideal doctor-patient relationships. Patients are not interested in doctors or nurses feeling their pain. They want compassionate competent care. Doctors, nurses and therapists must of necessity maintain a certain emotional distance from their patients in order to provide that compassionate care. Compassionate care clearly involves mostly system 2 thinking. Unlike emotional empathy, understanding and compassion lead to the opposite of burnout. Multiple studies have shown that compassionate care is good for both patients and their clinicians. Here is a link to a review of a book by Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli and Dr. Stephen Trzeciak: Wonder Drug: Scientific evidence that serving others is best medicine.
Compassion training
It is possible to enhance compassion through training. For over a thousand years buddhists have practiced a form of meditation on compassion called “loving kindness” meditation. It involves both compassion for self and then expanding to family, friends, and eventually all sentient beings. Here is a link to a website that describes this kind of meditation: Metta Meditation: A Complete Guide to Loving-Kindness. There are many other ways to enhance one’s ability to be compassionate including cognitively based compassion training, Stanford multidisciplinary research based training, as well as many others. They have all been shown to increase compassion, which in turn leads to helping others. Once again compassion for self and others is as good for the helper as it is for the one who is helped
Bottom Line
You cannot turn off emotional empathy, nor should you even try. It is an automatic system 1 response. When combined with understanding and compassion it is always a good thing. It makes suffering visible and salient. The important thing is to learn to recognize your emotional empathy system 1 response and then engage your system 2 understanding and compassion. Emotional empathy by itself is not good or bad, but can be either. Your capacity for understanding and compassion (which is essentially kindness) can be enhanced by training. We definitely need more kindness in our world today.