Empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity: study

> It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That’s right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude.

I can relate, as I am certainly someone who would probably laugh in this situation, as I also find myself laughing at the idea that people trample one another during Black Friday.

If someone were to physically injure someone during a controversial debate, I find it amusing in the sense that I am thinking "Hah... That's the way to get people to listen to your viewpoint", sarcastically.

It's not that I'm laughing at the injury. I'm laughing at the absurd immaturity of it all. Laughter is frequently used as a coping mechanism for dealing with unpleasant realities. Personally, it doesn't diminish the tragedy of what happens. It allows me to process it with a sort of mental "buffer".

Would you seriously argue that in 1864?

>The authors of the APSR study—Elizabeth Simas and Scott Clifford of the University of Houston and Justin Kirkland of the University of Virginia—have this kind of dynamic in mind when they write, “Polarization is not a consequence of a lack of empathy among the public, but a product of the biased ways in which we experience empathy.”

That's the nugget. According to the study, it seems that people with high empathy are more often people with high empathy towards their in-group...and a lack of empathy for the out-group. I'd argue that it isn't really empathy at all...just a more emotional form of tribalism.

The problem is we’ve exploited our ability to tailor our messaging so specifically that people aren’t getting new information.

We’ve seen this before, in a way: when Christianity ruled, no new emotional information or perspective was capable of taking hold.

Our media apparatus is essentially doing the same thing by feeding people the same narrative they grew up on their entire lives.

We have kept thousands of hours of TV shows, video games, and movies, news clips, etc and repeatedly view it. One can mentally exist in 1995 with the Internet and the new couch that feels just as comfy. Our limbic system suggests it anyway.

Look at our politics mired in clinging to the past, sticking to same old tax & drug policies.

The problem is a bunch of nerds who meant well built the panopticon, because they were staring at screens and not considering human history of authoritarian corruption of our emotionally guided agency (humans brains don’t find facts, they engage motor controls and coordinate agency, speaking sounds or doing a mechanical motion of some sort) to focus on the speech we don’t control. Previously religious doctrine, now finance.

Now media corp can beam the exact speech necessary to keep every individual soothed just so. How brilliant.

Most people’s views don’t neatly align with any party; that’s simply the easiest narrative to follow. I am on the left (technically independent) but I certainly have a mountain of criticism about Democrats. When party loyalty is divorced from values I wouldn’t expect a change in the underlying dynamic that drives people to partisan polarization.

To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. In more concrete terms, how do I know I can eat and be healthy and be around my people in the future and experience joy as I do now? In fact these are often the same things that drive Democrats, Independents, in fact these are universal. It is something else (cultural, economic, social?) that drives party loyalty.

For another example, often conservative christians give to charity at higher rates than any other group (at least in the us). Yet, the left is constantly striving for representation and equity, which in some forms is certainly a type of empathy. It is a mistake to consider a lack of empathy a driving force in politics.