Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

Subjects were told about a math competition for a twenty-dollar prize between two students, described as strangers, who were currently in another room of the laboratory. They then read an essay purportedly written by one of the students, which described her financial problems—she needed to replace a car and pay for class registration. The subjects were then told that they were involved in an experiment that explored the effect of pain on performance, and to make everything random they would get to choose how much pain to administer—by choosing a dosage of hot sauce—to the student the financially needy student was competing with. The trick here concerned how the essay purportedly written by the student ended. As in the Batson studies we talked about earlier, some of the subjects read a passage designed to elicit empathy (“I’ve never been this low on funds and it really scares me”), while others did not (“I’ve never been this low on funds, but it doesn’t really bother me”). As predicted, greater amounts of hot sauce were assigned to the competitor when the person was described as distressed. Keep in mind that this competitor didn’t do anything wrong; he or she had nothing to do with the student’s anxiety about money. Interestingly, the studies by Buffone and Poulin also found that there was a greater connection between empathy and aggression in those subjects who had genes that made them more sensitive to vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones that are implicated in compassion, ...