When Too Much Empathy Blinds Us

Empathy is our ability to think and feel what another person is thinking and feeling. It’s an incredibly important psychological trait that we’ve evolved to experience to help facilitate social interaction, cooperation with one another, solving social conflicts, and creating overall social harmony.

According to psychologists there are 3 different types of empathy: cognitive empathy (thinking what someone is thinking), affective empathy (feeling what someone is feeling), and sympathetic empathy (a combination of the two, coupled with the motivation and drive to take action and do something about it).

It is this last type of empathy – sympathetic empathy – that can sometimes be unhealthy and even destructive in the wrong context and situation. While empathy is a very useful trait, at times it can be misused and abused.

For example, we are all familiar with how people elicit empathy from others in order to manipulate them, whether it’s a commercial trying to make you feel a certain way to buy a product, or a politician trying to make you feel a certain way to vote for them, or even a person you know trying to make you feel a certain way to change your behavior (such as maybe through guilt-tripping or shaming you).

It’s important to be attuned to the emotions others express toward us, but at the same time we can’t let these emotions run wild and dictate our behavior.

Empathy is often associated with morality, helping others, and creating good in the world – but too much empathy can even blind us from making good moral decisions.

To start, we need to understand how empathy works.

Our capacity for empathy often extends most to people whom we know – our family, friends, coworkers, and people that are close to us. It’s, at the very least, extremely difficult to empathize with people who aren’t in your “social circle,” at least not in any measurable way.

You may see a commercial about starving kids in third world countries and you’ll feel like shit, but the truth is you’re probably much more likely to donate to a charity that is personally relevant to you. For example, if you’re Mom suffered from breast cancer, you’re probably more likely to donate to a breast cancer charity. Or if you used to grow up in an abusive household, you’re probably much more likely to spend your time volunteering with other children in those situations.

We care more about things that are personally relevant to us. That’s a completely natural and understandable limitation of empathy.

Now, let me ask you a question. How do you think your emotional reaction would be if you heard about a story on the news where 100,000 people died in a natural disaster? Now, how do you think your emotional reaction would be if you heard the exact same story on the news, but this time 100,000,000 people died?

Chances are you’d have a fairly similar emotional reaction in both situations, even though in the latter situation there’s 1000x more people dying.

Why is this? Because our brains aren’t designed to empathize at such a huge scale. We need to see people’s faces, we need to know their names, we need to know about them and listen to their stories, to really empathize with them.

To our empathic brains, it’s hard to distinguish between 100,000 people dying vs. 100,000,000.

There’s that famous quote by Joseph Stalin where he says, “When one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic.” I think that says a lot about how our empathic minds work.

When we think about organizing a “good society” or a “good government” – whatever that may mean to you – what we’re usually talking about is a lot of people who we really don’t know or understand. Our social brains aren’t designed to think about such large amounts of people and make decisions on behalf of such large groups.

There’s the famous “Dunbar’s Number,” which is the theory that there is a cognitive limit to how many meaningful social connections we can really maintain at once. It’s been suggested that this number may be around 100-250 people – but I think whatever the number may be, there is certainly a limit to how many people we can meaningfully connect with and empathize with at once. Right? To get to know someone takes time and effort, and we only have so much time and effort at the end of the day.

So this, to me, is a limitation of empathy. Because when we think about society at large – government, politics, businesses – we’re often talking about large amounts of people. Large amounts of people who we aren’t usually capable of empathizing with in any meaningful way.

But, here’s the real kicker, we sometimes get manipulated by empathy when we make these big decisions.

In one study, psychologists asked participants how much money they would donate to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child, and asked others how much they would give to save 8 children. The answers were about the same. But when they told a third group one child’s name and age, and showed them a picture of her, the donations were far higher for the one person than to the eight.

Psychologists call this the “identifiable victim effect.” If we can personally relate and empathize with a victim, then we are much more motivated to do something about the situation. This effect persists, even when we can rationally save more people.

This is a great example of how we put more weight on a situation that we can empathize with vs. ones focused on just numbers or statistics.

The media loves to play on this “identifiable victim effect.” For example, many times we focus on the “personal stories” behind the victims of mass murders and shooting sprees. And the news will tell us all about the children, and the parents of the children, and the shooter, and the parents of the shooter. And obviously, we keep learning more about this tragedy – until you’re in it – you’re empathizing like it’s a real-life movie or book, you’re living vicariously through these victims and you feel really strongly about the situation, as if it happened to you or someone you know.

However, now that you’re emotionally invested in the story, it’s time for the sales pitch. Right? There’s always seems to be underlying agenda or “call to action” behind the story, whether it’s mental health issues, or gun legislation, or some shocking cultural shift that is happening in America and needs to be stopped (like we’re playing too many video games, or too much rock music).

And you’re more likely to buy whatever they are selling if they pull the right emotional triggers. If it’s a story that you can empathize with and care about, and if there is an “identifiable victim” we can relate to and sympathize with, then you’re going to feel more strongly about any proposed solutions to fix it.

But this can be a limitation of empathy. Because you’re often times too emotionally invested to think rationally about the situation.

In an excellent article called The Case Against Empathy, the author Paul Bloom states:

“On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution. But the appetite for retribution is typically indifferent to long-term consequences. In one study, conducted by Jonathan Baron and Ilana Ritov, people were asked how best to punish a company for producing a vaccine that caused the death of a child. Some were told that a higher fine would make the company work harder to manufacture a safer product; others were told that a higher fine would discourage the company from making the vaccine, and since there were no acceptable alternatives on the market the punishment would lead to more deaths. Most people didn’t care; they wanted the company fined heavily, whatever the consequence.”

He goes on to give another example in the same article, this time about global warming:

“As it happens, the limits of empathy are especially stark here. Opponents of restrictions on CO2 emissions are flush with identifiable victims—all those who will be harmed by increased costs, by business closures. The millions of people who at some unspecified future date will suffer the consequences of our current inaction are, by contrast, pale statistical abstractions.”

So it’s a lot easier to look at environmental regulations and see the immediate consequences they will have on businesses. And it’s easy to empathize with those consequences, because there are identifiable victims. But it’s a lot harder to empathize with people in the future – those whom we don’t know and will never know – who will ultimately pay consequences in the future if we ruin the environment.

As Bloom eloquently puts it, “Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.”

Of course, empathy is a fantastic and useful ability, especially at a “micro level” in your daily life – when you’re dealing with family, friends, loved ones, bosses, and coworkers – people who you interact with face-to-face and build meaningful relationships with.

But empathy can also be severely limiting at a “macro level” – when we start looking at the bigger picture of society, when we have to think about people in more abstract terms, and we start talking about benefits and costs that affect many people who we don’t know at all and can’t possibly empathize with.

Sometimes, to make good and moral decisions (meaning, choices that benefit the most people in the long-run), we need to put aside our sympathetic empathy and strong emotional motivations, and instead try our best to see things from a more objective and rational perspective.

This means trying our best to see the “bigger picture” behind our choices and decisions and how they influence society as a whole in the long-term, without getting too narrowly focused on just one emotionally gripping story.

Enter your email to stay updated on new articles in self improvement: