Quotes About Empathy

This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions or billions. It is why outrage at the suffering of a few individuals can lead to actions, such as going to war, that have terrible consequences for many more.

If you absorb the suffering of others, then you're less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.

Helgeson and Fritz speculate that the gender difference here explains women's greater propensity to anxiety and depression, a conclusion that meshes with the proposal by Barbara Oakley, who, drawing on work on "pathological altruism," notes, "It's surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women's generally stronger empathy for and focus on others." The

It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)

Our altruism and kindness are grounded in the capacity to imagine the world as others see it. But so is our cruelty and manipulation. Another name for this capacity to suss out the minds of others is "Machiavellian intelligence," and the name captures the dark side of this power.

For better or worse, then, my attack on empathy is nonpartisan. Or to put it more positively, individuals of all political orientations—liberal, conservative, libertarian, hard right, hard left, all of us—can join hands and work together in the fight against empathy.

In On Apology, Aaron Lazare offers a similar sentiment: "what makes an apology work is the exchange of shame and power between the offender and the offended. By apologizing, you take the shame of your offense and redirect it to yourself.

So if the world were a simple place, where the only dilemmas one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.

empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does. Empathy is limited as well in that it focuses on specific individuals. Its spotlight nature renders it innumerate and myopic: It doesn't resonate properly to the effects of our actions on groups of people, and it is insensitive to statistical data and estimated costs and benefits

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

Our selectivity in who to care about makes a difference. About twenty years ago, Walter Isaacson expressed his frustration over the American public's focus on the crisis in Somalia and relative disregard of the (objectively greater) tragedy in the Sudan, when he plaintively asked: "Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?" Before

So what's the difference between people who are high in communion (positive) and those who are high in unmitigated communion (negative)? Both sorts of people care about others. But communion corresponds to what we can call concern and compassion, while unmitigated communion ends up relating more to empathy or, more precisely, empathic distress—suffering at the suffering of others.

This distinction between empathy and compassion is critical for the argument I've been making throughout this book.

Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.

There is also a practical difference. When people were asked to empathize with those who were suffering, they found it unpleasant. Compassion training, in contrast, led to better feelings on the part of the meditator and kinder behavior toward others.

I told a story earlier from Jonathan Glover about a woman who lived close to a concentration camp and felt empathy for those being tortured. Her response was to ask that the torture be done elsewhere, where it wouldn't disturb her. This was one of a series of examples meant to show how empathy need not make us good.

Asking people to feel as much empathy for an enemy as for their own child is like asking them to feel as much hunger for a dog turd as for an apple—it's logically possible, but it doesn't reflect the normal functioning of the human mind.

My friend does get into her clients' heads, of course—she would be useless if she couldn't—but she doesn't feel what they feel. She employs understanding and caring, not empathy

But what about the more emotional side of empathy? Here it's more complicated. He seemed to get the most from doctors who didn't feel as he did, who were calm when he was anxious, confident when he was uncertain. And he was particularly appreciative of certain virtues that have little directly to do with empathy, such as competence, honesty, professionalism, and certainly respect.

empathy is a negative in human affairs. It's not cholesterol. It's sugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us.

On a teaching assignment of a one-week module in Nigeria, I asked my class to evaluate the class experience. One of the pastors responded, "You have come to us, stayed with us and eaten our food." He made no mention of my teaching! Instead, he saw me as part of the family.

When we engage with people from the Majority World church, many of whose lives are characterized by hardship and suffering, they ask us, not unlike Thomas asked of Jesus, "Show us your scars, and then we'll believe that you understand the same gospel that we've embraced.

Genuine servanthood. Too often, we who go to serve on crosscultural short-term missions practice self-congratulatory servanthood. We live in the hut, eat the local food, endure the heat and use the squat toilet, all the time quietly congratulating ourselves on our willingness to serve.