There’s empathy versus sympathy, reconciliation versus forgiveness, and altruism versus “pathological altruism.”4 For a psychologist the last term might describe the empathic codependency of enabling a partner’s drug use. For a neuroscientist it describes a consequence of a type of damage to the frontal cortex—in economic games of shifting strategies, individuals with such damage fail to switch to less altruistic play when being repeatedly stabbed in the back by the other player, despite being able to verbalize the other player’s strategy.
Pathological altruism
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