Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sadism is not the product of a lack of empathy but rather emerges from the wish for its intensification.
“empathy for empathy’s sake” and will suggest that it encompasses extreme acts of violence
There is a “normal” or “tolerated” form of sadism that takes the form of pressuring, exposing, or embarrassing others in order to predict and understand their feelings.
This perspective-sharing can be frightening, as Jean-Paul Sartre suggests in Being and Nothingness when he describes how he was happily sitting alone on a bench in the park until he suddenly realized that someone was looking at him and he was compelled to imagine himself being seen.
It is by means of others that we see ourselves as if from the outside; we perceive our environment differently because we note how others feel about it.
Like most other human abilities, empathy probably serves the empathizer first and foremost and not the target of empathy. This assumption is certainly no great insight but it inoculates one from the idea that “more empathy” alone is the best guard against egocentrism, narcissism, and self-interest. By coexperiencing, the empathetic person enriches first of all his or her own experiences and knowledge before possibly also helping the other person. In this sense, we could say that this book is devoted to the egotism of empathy and the aesthetic pleasure of the empathizer.
I define empathy as the coexperience of another’s situation,
I use emotion-sharing as shorthand for the idea that observing another’s emotions activates in the observer the neural mechanisms responsible for the production of a similar emotion, with an awareness of the difference between self and other.
the empathetic observer has an aesthetic advantage.
We owe this clarity about someone else’s circumstance—a clarity we lack when facing it ourselves—to a medium: the other person, who becomes a character in a play we watch and experience.
what someone feels in a situation and what the empathetic observer coexperiences can be quite distinct.
Without this projection and sharing of self-interest, the observer can easily slide into a state of uninvolved apathy.
coexperience of the other’s situation. Coexperiencing means projecting oneself into another’s situation emotionally and cognitively, typically with a clarity not available to the other.
A direct simulation of the emotions of the other is not a necessary condition or a result of empathy (although it can be either of these). Critically, empathy does not necessarily lead to altruism, though it can and often does, and it is these exceptions and objections to the empathy-altruism hypothesis that are the focus of this book.
People with a theory of mind can understand others more accurately, but this does not lead them to be more prosocial or morally good.
sociopaths, psychopaths, and bullies also score high on theory of mind tests.
Treating action and observation similarly has an economic advantage in brain architecture, since it avoids redundant mechanisms.
When someone innocent was punished, men and women reacted equally empathetically, observable through activation of the pain center. But when the one being punished had committed some violation (playing unfairly at a game,) the brains of female subjects still consistently showed an empathetic (that is, pain-activated) response, although a weaker one than at the punishment of an innocent person. Men, on the other hand, tended to show appreciably less empathetic brain activity, often close to none; instead, this punishment activated regions of the brain associated with satisfaction and reward.47
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Brain-imaging researchers tend to use this strict (but consistent) definition of empathy—the sharing of feelings—within a rather elastic or heuristic broader conception of empathy, in order to avoid unwanted exclusions or other conclusions. Or they speak of two empathy systems in order to integrate the phenomenon of theory of mind.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist and pioneer of empathy research, has defined empathy (although without the future-oriented component) as “feeling one with another’s state” and “shar[ing] in the other’s state of mind via bodily communication.”
The empathetic person subsumes their own identity for the sake of another but is nevertheless enriched by their coexperience with another. Self-loss contains within it the kernel of self-expansion.
