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What is empathy?

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Re: What is empathy?

#41

Post by jm__87 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #27
baddox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when most people talk about empathy as a good attribute, what they really mean is the capacity for empathy.

I think what they real mean is to have empathy, and uae it for good. I can put myself in your shoes...and then use that against you. Empathy doesn't promote nor prevent that.

I think in most people it would, though? Imagine if you were harming someone and you're imagining what they would feel like as you're doing the harming, you're going to feel badly. Not harming someone will help you avoid these negative feelings.

Re: What is empathy?

#42

Post by jetrink »

platz wrote: post #29

https://imgur.com/a/5RGnstB

Via OCR:

"Let us imagine for a moment that people have attained happiness — a state of complete human freedom of will in the widest sense: at that very instant personality is destroyed. Man becomes as solitary as Beelzebub. The connection between social beings is cut like the umbilical cord of a new-born infant. And consequently, society is destroyed. With the force of gravity removed, objects go flying off into space. (Of course some may say that society ought to be destroyed so that something completely new and just can be built on the debris! I don’t know, I am not a destroyer ...)"

Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Re: What is empathy?

#43

Post by jm__87 »

cko wrote: post #28
classics2 wrote: post #7

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw

I used to think I had empathy. I mean, when I see someone being taken advantage of, I tear up immediately. Until one day my mentor straight up told me “you have no empathy.” Which didn’t really bother me, since I’m pretty sure I’m not a sociopath. (Though that probably wouldn’t bother me either, by definition.) Watching that video made me realize that what I usually feel is sympathy. I think I’ve been so fortunate (o…

It sounds like maybe you do have empathy? Experiencing some level of suffering when you witness someone else's suffering would be empathy. Sociopaths do not experience this. From my understanding, the part of the brain that processes pain and fear is much smaller or nonexistent in sociopaths, so they couldn't feel bad even if they wanted to.

There is another thing called compassion which is generally wishing others to be well and giving people a break. Most people don't have much compassion as it somewhat goes against the human instinct to compete with others and do what is best for yourself. That being said, compassion can be directly developed through loving-kindness meditation, if you're motivated to become more compassionate. I personally also find that developing an understanding of evolutionary psychology and doing mindfulness meditation can also lead to more compassion as it leads to more understanding of how we are all, for the overwhelming majority of our conscious lives where we are not being mindful, slaves to whatever thoughts and feelings happen to be arising at any given moment. Some of us are lucky and don't experience much in the way of negative feelings or thoughts, some of us aren't so lucky. Either way, realizing that a lot of life comes down to the luck of the draw is a powerful realization that can lead to more compassion. This i feel is another reason why some of us lack compassion - if we're successful, we have some understanding of what set of actions we did that lead us to be successful. But no one ever sits there and thinks about all the things that didn't happen to them that would have lead to a worse outcome (of which there are infinitely many), so when we see another person who isn't succeeding we may just assume they are lazy or don't care without actually bothering to understand what is holding them back.

Re: What is empathy?

#44

Post by leetcrew »

jehlakj wrote: post #39
cko wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think I had empathy. I mean, when I see someone being taken advantage of, I tear up immediately. Until one day my mentor straight up told me “you have no empathy.” Which didn’t really bother me, since I’m pretty sure I’m not a sociopath. (Though that probably wouldn’t bother me either, by definition.) Watching that video made me realize that what I usually feel is sympathy. I think I’ve been so fortunate (o…

I believe that nobody can “have” empathy. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is still you who’s in their shoes. It’s just impossible to share the same emotions as someone if you’ve lived a different life, different experiences. When we see a teen yelling, “You don’t understand!”, we really don’t understand even when we were teens ourselves. I’m not a huge fan of the word because I think the first step to true c…

i do agree with you in the broad strokes, but there is some thing called "empathy" that some people simply do not have. it can still be a useful word.

Re: What is empathy?

#45

Post by pilijupetur »

People always confuse sympathy with empathy. That's the reason why a lot of think that we are showing empathy when we are not. In fact, being empathetic is difficult. Very few times in our life are we truly empathetic

Re: What is empathy?

#46

Post by wpietri »

ThomPete wrote: post #19
projektir wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good. It's a pretty heavy prerequisite. A lot of bad things can be traced to people not understanding other people, or refusing to understand them (dehumanization). It's sufficiently fundamental and a common problem that I'm not sure how big the cohort of emphatic-but-manipulative people is. It certainly exists, but there are other issues mixed in there…

The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the…

> Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.

Then how would you explain, well, most of human history?

For example, look at this graph of approval of interracial marriage, which has increased quite steadily: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-w...

What changed, if not the level of racism?

Or look at the various declarations of secession of the southern states in the US Civil War, or the Cornerstone Speech; it's pretty obvious that people were willing to go to war to defend both personal racial bias and a system of racial discrimination.

The people who study racism professionally don't seem to have a hard time defining it. And I don't think most of US history can really be explained without it. It began with rule of, by, and for well-off white men. Even after Reconstruction we had the Nadir [1] and sundown towns [2] and Jim Crow [3] and redlining [4] and a whole lot else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...

Re: What is empathy?

#48

Post by jm__87 »

pilijupetur wrote: post #45

People always confuse sympathy with empathy. That's the reason why a lot of think that we are showing empathy when we are not. In fact, being empathetic is difficult. Very few times in our life are we truly empathetic

Personally I think affective empathy is extremely common, but we just construct strategies to avoid experiencing it too much. Most people are going to experience some level of suffering if they directly witness another person suffering. It's just that no one likes that feeling of suffering so we say smth like "that's too bad but there is nothing i can do here" so we can feel better and move on with our lives. This is I guess what we call sympathy, but really I feel it's just a strategy to reduce the impact of the empathy reflex most of us feel. Imagine what your life would be like if you couldn't get over the feeling you get when you witness someone else suffering - you would constantly be suffering yourself and be totally useless to yourself and others. Strong feelings of empathy aren't necessarily a good thing.

Compassion would be what I think is the difficult thing. Whether you fully understand what someone else is going through or not, you have an intention to help them feel better. To actually act in a compassionate way you need to first feel that others are deserving of your compassion and that can be a very tough thing to develop for anyone but those who are the very closest to you.

Re: What is empathy?

#49

Post by hliyan »

Having witnessed many cases of individuals who help the poor, donate to cancer/heart patients and then turn on a dime and advocate the carpet bombing of rebel held civilian areas, I'm starting to feel empathy is not the issue. The empathy circuits are intact in most human beings. The problem is dehumanization.

Empathy is proportional to how "human" we perceive someone/something to be. We experience the most empathy for close family, friends and individuals we have met in person. As the distance grows the empathy response reduces. It further reduces if the victims are portrayed as uncivilized or savage. It further reduces when the victims are numerous (hundreds of thousands).

Re: What is empathy?

#50

Post by ThomPete »

ben_w wrote: post #25
ThomPete wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the…

It’s very easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. I think the thing which makes it hard to spot is that we normally treat questions as boolean yes-or-no things. For example, a police department which is 10% more likely to let one race off with warnings than another race is racist (and that’s not a moral judgement: if warnings are effective everyone should get them), but it’s also an example deliberately chosen to…

Its easy to define it but very hard to ascribe it.
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