Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby’s suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.

This is a very interesting point! And it supports the notion that what we ought to encourage is complain and kindness.

This is how the magic works, how empathy can do good. But what are its actual effects in the real world? One way to try to answer this is to look at the relationship between how empathic and how moral a person is. Are empathic people morally better, on average, than less empathic people? As you might imagine, there has been a lot of work on this question. But before getting to the findings, it’s worth noting that this is difficult research to do well. It’s hard to measure the good that people do, how moral they are. And it’s hard to measure how empathic people are.

Surprisingly, even given all these considerations in favor of finding an effect, there isn’t much of one. There have been hundreds of studies, with children and adults, and overall the results are: meh. Some studies find some small relationship; others find none or yield uncertain and mixed findings. There are meta-analyses that put together studies to see what the big picture is, and some of these come to the conclusion that there is no effect of empathy and others that there is one, but it’s weak and hard to find.

A recent paper reviewed the findings from all available studies of the relationship between empathy and aggression. The results are summarized in the title: “The (Non)Relation between Empathy and Aggression: Surprising Results from a Meta-Analysis.” They report that only about 1 percent of the variation in aggression is accounted for by lack of empathy.

Being high in empathy doesn’t make one a good person, and being low in empathy doesn’t make one a bad person. What we’ll see in the chapters that follow is that goodness might be related to more distanced feelings of compassion and care, while evil might have more to do with a lack of compassion, a lack of regard for others, and an inability to control one’s appetites.

Empathy’s effects, then, weren’t in the direction of increasing an interest in justice. Rather, they increased special concern for the target of the empathy, despite the cost to others.

Because of its spotlight properties, reliance on empathy can lead to perverse consequences, consequences that no rational person would endorse.

All of these laboratory effects can be seen as manifestations of what’s been called “the identifiable victim effect.” Thomas Schelling, writing forty years ago, put it like this: “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.” This effect also illustrates something more general about our natural sentiments, which is that they are innumerate. If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

Plainly, then, the salience of these cases doesn’t reflect an assessment of the extent of suffering, of their global importance, or of the extent to which it’s possible for us to help. Rather, it reflects our natural biases in who to care about.

Such biases are separate from empathy. But the spotlight nature of empathy means that it is vulnerable to them. Empathy’s narrow focus, specificity, and innumeracy mean that it’s always going to be influenced by what captures our attention, by racial preferences, and so on. It’s only when we escape from empathy and rely instead on the application of rules and principles or a calculation of costs and benefits that we can, to at least some extent, become fair and impartial.

But so what? Maybe we’re not perfect. Suppose it’s true that our motivations to help others are racist and parochial and otherwise biased. Still, this is better than nothing. Maybe empathy and similar sentiments steer our helping of others in the wrong way, but without them we wouldn’t help others in the first place. After all, the zero-sum nature of kindness is only a valid concern if someone is going to give or volunteer in the first place. If one is going to do something good, and empathy motivates one to do something less good, then empathy is to blame. But if one isn’t going to do something good, and empathy motivates one to do it, then empathy is a plus.

Yes, while I am sure that this is about to be addressed, this is the correct way to look at the issue.

I am thinking of actual examples where, in sadly predictable ways, empathy leads to actions that have bad effects. To see how this might happen, consider first a very different domain from charity. Think about parenting. A parent who lives too much in the head of his or her child will be overly protective and overly concerned, fearful, and uncertain, unable to exert any sort of discipline and control.

Returning to the domain of charity, Singer points out that many people are “warm glow” givers. They give small amounts to multiple charities, motivated to spread their money across many causes because each one gives a distinctive little jolt of pleasure, like plucking small treats from a bountiful table of desserts. But small donations can actually harm the charities, since the cost of processing a donation can be greater than the donation itself.

A discussion of unintended consequences might lead some to the conclusion that we shouldn’t bother to help at all. This is not my argument. Many charities do wonderful work; kindness and hard work and charitable donations often make the world a better place in precisely the ways they are intended to. It’s good to give blood, to provide bed nets to stop the spread of malaria, to read to the blind, and so on.

Yes, lots we can do!

Sometimes an obsessive concern with unintended consequences is just an excuse for selfishness and apathy.

This is incredibly important to keep in mind

The conclusion is not that one shouldn’t give, but rather that one should give intelligently, with an eye toward consequences.

100%. If you want to do good, make sure you're actually doing good.

To add another example to the mix, when I was a child I noticed that my father would sit at the kitchen table on some evenings and write out checks to the various charitable appeals that came in. He didn’t empathically engage with the suffering that the appeals described—he barely read them. But when I asked him about it, he said he felt he had a general duty to help those less fortunate than himself.

I think this sense of humanistic duty would be a very good thing to foment. It ties in with my feelings on civic virtue.

I have argued that being a good person involves some combination of caring for others—wanting to alleviate suffering and make the world a better place—and a rational assessment of how best to do so.

After all, many people are in favor of global capitalism, and many honestly believe that the spread of market economies is what will make the world a better place.

Hell yeah it is B)

When it comes to adding up the costs and benefits of an action, surely the satisfaction of a Yale professor has some weight. But I’d give it a lot less weight than the needs of those who are actually suffering. If a child is starving, it doesn’t really matter whether the food is delivered by a smiling aid worker who hands it over and then gives the kid a hug, or dropped from the sky by a buzzing drone. The niceties of personal contact are far less important than actually saving lives.

A common response here is that we should try harder to feel for others. Now, this might be a worthy demand when it comes to a specific individual, perhaps someone whose suffering I am ignoring or even causing. But it’s bad advice when many people are involved, including strangers. We are not psychologically constituted to feel toward a stranger as we feel toward someone we love. We are not capable of feeling a million times worse about the suffering of a million than about the suffering of one. Our gut feelings provide the wrong currency through which to evaluate our own moral actions.

Scarry’s idea, then, is to depersonalize things, to bring everyone down rather than bringing everyone up. I admit that this sounds cold. It might also seem like aiming too low.

But since we can’t empathize with everyone to the same extent, this may well be the best procedure we will ever have.

And such depersonalization is already at the core of wise policies. When we want to make fair and unbiased decisions about who to hire or who to give an award to, we don’t give everyone equal “imaginative weight,” fully appreciating the special circumstances and humanity of each individual. No, we instead reduce our candidates to X, Y, and Z, designing procedures, such as blind reviewing and blind auditions, to prevent judges from being biased, consciously or unconsciously, by a candidate’s sex, race, appearance—or anything other than what should be under evaluation.

Or consider why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science.” It’s a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the “gay science” of music and poetry: “Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” Carlyle has a specific issue in mind, a case where he wanted to ridicule economists for objecting to something that was the subject of considerable feeling and heart, something that Carlyle had defended with great emotion. What was this issue that the economists were being so negative about? Slavery. Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you’re tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we’ve seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

Now this is a brilliant example. Being overrun with high emotions, rather than cool, reasoned compassion, can lead to horrors.

Being high in unmitigated communion is bad in many ways.

Research with college students and with older adults finds that unmitigated communion is associated with being “overly nurturant, intrusive, and self-sacrificing.” It is associated with the feeling that others don’t like you and don’t think well of you and with becoming upset when others don’t want your help and don’t take your advice. In laboratory studies, individuals with unmitigated communion are more bothered when a friend turns to someone else for help than when the friend doesn’t get help at all. High unmitigated communion is associated with poor adjustment, both physically and psychologically, and is linked to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, perhaps because the focus on others keeps those high on the scale from attending to themselves.

So what’s the difference between people who are high in communion (positive) and those who are high in unmitigated communion (negative)? Both sorts of people care about others. But communion corresponds to what we can call concern and compassion, while unmitigated communion ends up relating more to empathy or, more precisely, empathic distress—suffering at the suffering of others.

The concern about Baron-Cohen’s hypothetical Hannah is not that she cares about other people. You should care about other people.

Rather, Hannah’s problem is that her caring is driven by her receptivity to suffering. She appears to be high in unmitigated communion. The research that I just reviewed suggests that this is harmful in the long run.

Consider first the life of a bodhisattva, an enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to stay in the normal cycle of life and death to help the unenlightened masses. How is a bodhisattva to live? In his book on Buddhist moral philosophy, Charles Goodman notes that Buddhist texts distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.” The first is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” It’s the second that is worth pursuing. Great compassion is more distanced and reserved, and can be sustained indefinitely. This distinction between empathy and compassion is critical for the argument I’ve been making throughout this book. And it is supported by neuroscience research. In a review article, Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki describe how they make sense of this distinction: “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”

There is a neural difference: Empathy training led to increased activation in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex (both of which we discussed in relation to the neuroscience-of-empathy studies in an earlier chapter). Compassion training led to activation in other parts of the brain, such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. There is also a practical difference. When people were asked to empathize with those who were suffering, they found it unpleasant. Compassion training, in contrast, led to better feelings on the part of the meditator and kinder behavior toward others.

As I’ve mentioned a few times by now, it’s hard to know what to make of these claims, given all of the everyday instances in which we care for people and help them without engaging in emotional empathy. I can worry about a child who is afraid of a thunderstorm and pick her up and comfort her without experiencing her fear in the slightest. I can be concerned about starving people and try to support them without having any vicarious experience of starving. And now the research we just discussed supports an even stronger conclusion. Not only can compassion and kindness exist independently of empathy, they are sometimes opposed. Sometimes we are better people if we suppress our empathic feelings.

I agree with a lot of this. It makes sense that concern and understanding are important. But I think it’s possible to have concern and understanding while maintaining an emotional distance, without the doctor or therapist having to “inhabit” the patient’s feelings. I think it’s actually better when this distance is present, both for the patient and for the doctor.

I'm not sure what else to highlight from these passages but it seems rather weak - the experiences of doctors and nurses are particularly extreme in this respect, and the citations are heavily anecdotal. I have not been convinced here - not least because even the anecdotes are not in agreement entirely.

I think

This phrase has suddenly been appearing a lot in this section.

But this is not an argument in favor of empathy. To get this appreciation, you don’t need to actually mirror another’s feelings. There is a world of difference, after all, between understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you have felt misery in the past, even though now you are calm, and understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you are mirroring them and feeling their misery right now. The first, which doesn’t involve empathy in any sense, just understanding, has all the advantages of the second and none of its costs.

This is all fair - sort of just addressing a weak objection though.

Friends and family are different. They are home with you; they don’t have the same boundaries. What works for strangers might not work for these more intimate relationships.

Okay, good that this is being acknowledged.

I’ll add, by the way, that Smith’s discussion of those cases when we do respond well to the “small joys” runs the risk of blurring two things. Our positive response might be due to genuine empathy (what Smith would call “sympathy”). But alternatively, the positive response might just be because I care for you, so assuming that I can override envy, your good fortune makes me happy as well. This second nonempathic response is probably more common. Imagine that I learn that my good friend has fallen in love, and this fills my heart with joy. But it’s not because I’m feeling the giddiness and excitement of a new romance. No, I’m feeling good simply because I like my friend. Even in this mundane example, we have to be careful not to overstate the role of empathy.

I'm not certain how sharp the distinction is here? But it does seem very possible that trying to have empathy with someone's accomplishments or happiness simply leads to envy. But by the same narrowness, I'm not sure how common suggestions of empathy for another's happiness are, it is most often invoked to elicit understanding for suffering, sadness or difference.

It would certainly be simpler if we could keep these issues separate—if there were two moralities, one for home and one for the outside world. But any sharp distinction quickly collapses because there is only so much to go around.

This is fair and is largely how I look at morality

So there are two broader perspectives here, one which sees the parochial force of sentiments like empathy as something to be applauded, something that makes us human, and another that sees it as a moral wrong turn.

If I were to endorse a hard-core impartiality position, I would be breaking my word. Many people would say that we have every right to care about those close to us over those far away, and if empathy guides us in this direction, more power to it. Most people, I imagine, would choose Orwell and Asma over Gandhi and Singer. I am, to some extent, one of these people.

But my partiality has limits, and I bet yours does too. If I were hurrying home to join my family for dinner and I passed a lost child, I would help the child find his parents, even if it made me a bit late and caused some mild distress to those I love. So strangers have some weight.

I’ve conceded the importance of some amount of partiality here, the value of giving family and friends some special weight. So it might look as if I’ve opened up the door, perhaps just a bit, for empathy. But not really. Yes, empathy is biased and parochial—but in a stupid way. Even if we decide that certain individuals are worthy of special treatment, even here empathy lets us down, because empathy is driven by immediate considerations, making us too-permissive parents and too-clingy friends. It’s not just that it fails us as a tool for fair and impartial moral judgment, then, it’s often a failure with intimate relationships. We can often do much better.

I am somewhat sympathetic towards this chapter conclusion but I will note that it was far less convincing than the previous ones.

We’ve seen in the second chapter that some of the fans of empathy are similarly cynical, seeing empathy’s altruistic acts as emerging out of selfishness. If I feel your pain, then I’m in pain, and purely selfish motivation might then drive me to make your pain go away. We’ve also seen that this is an unlikely explanation. If I’m in pain because I’m feeling your pain, there is a much easier way to make my pain go away than helping you—I can turn my head and stop thinking of you; the empathic connection is broken, and I’m right as rain. Then there’s Batson’s research, which shows that people tend to help even when escape is readily available. This is a problem for the selfishness theory of the power of empathy and is more consistent with the view that empathy motivates good behavior (when it does) by exploiting positive sentiments that are already present.

Why would Hobbes be constituted to feel good when helping another? Why would Lincoln feel bad—getting no peace of mind—if he refrained from helping when the opportunity presented itself? Even accepting their explanations as true, then, these explanations assume a nonselfish psychology that underlies these selfish desires.

We are naturally kind because our ancestors who were kind to others outlived and outreproduced those who didn’t. But that doesn’t mean that when people help others they are thinking about survival and reproduction any more than when people eat and have sex they are thinking about survival and reproduction. Rather, evolution has shaped people to be altruistic by instilling within us a genuine concern for the fate of certain other individuals, by making us compassionate and caring.

What should be an obvious point that so many people get completely backwards when talking about evolution

Early in development, we see kindness and compassion reflected in children’s soothing and helping. And early in development, though just how early is a matter of debate, we see children suffering in response to the suffering of others. So the core question is whether these two things are connected—when children help others, is it because they are feeling their pain? Paul Harris has reviewed the literature on this topic, and he argues that the evidence for this connection isn’t there.

If we take this story at face value, then, it looks as if Len was worried about his brother and wanted to cheer him up, but wasn’t suffering himself. This is caring without empathy.

It's one anecdote, I assume there are others in the review, but still, one anecdote.

Or consider a classic study in which pairs of six-month-olds were observed as they interacted in a playroom in the presence of their mothers. Sometimes one of the babies would become distressed, and sometimes the other baby would react by touching or gesturing toward him or her. But again, there was no evidence that the distress of one baby ever bothered another baby.

I don’t think we know enough about development in either children or chimps to be entirely confident in our conclusion. It is possible that some new discoveries will come out showing that empathy is somehow necessary for morality to blossom. But right now, as best we know, empathy is not like milk.

The qualification here is welcome - assuming these studies are from an honest and representative survey of the literature, I agree with this conclusion, and we can conditionally assert that empathy is a separate issue to the development of morality.