Your Unlearning Report

Empathy Is Bad, You’re Not as Racist as You Thought, and Believing in Luck Won’t Help Your Golf Game

STUART VYSE

Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, which won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

For a skeptic, there is nothing more satisfying than discovering that some previously cherished truth has been overturned by new evidence. It is in that spirit that I offer the following Unlearning Report.

Empathy Is Bad

Everybody loves empathy. Former President Barack Obama often spoke about our “empathy deficit” and the need to “see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us” (Obama 2006). Amazon.com lists over 1,500 books with “empathy” in their titles or subtitles, and the Internet is replete with blogs and YouTube videos on the subject. Yes, everybody loves empathy—everybody except Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom.

It seems wrong to be against something so kind and well meaning as empathy, but in his new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Bloom builds a strong argument for empathy as a destructive emotion. He suggests that empathy is innumerate and myopic and that more good can be done by adopting “rational compassion,” a more detached form of caring.

For example, Bloom cites the research of C. Daniel Batson and colleagues (1995) who told study participants about a ten-year-old girl who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for a treatment that would relieve her pain. The participants were told that they could move her ahead in the line, and when simply asked what to do, most said that the girl must wait because there were others ahead of her in line. However, when they were asked to imagine what she felt, they were more likely to choose to move her up the line. In this case, empathy made participants bend the rules unfairly.

Bloom spends considerable time discussing the innumeracy of empathy. This passage sums up the problem: “Stalin has been quoted as saying, ‘One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.’ And Mother Teresa once said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’ To the extent that we can recognize that the numbers are significant when it comes to moral decisions, it’s because of reason, not sentiments” (Bloom 2016, 89).

In one study (Kogut and Ritov 2005), participants in two separate groups were asked to give money for a drug that would save one child or a drug that would save eight children. They tended to give equal amounts, but when a name and a picture where associated with the child, donations were larger for the one child than the eight. Similarly, psychologist Paul Slovic (2007) points to the case of eighteen-year-old U.S. high school student Natalee Holloway, who went missing while on vacation in Aruba. Coverage of this case dominated the cable news for weeks despite an ongoing genocide in Darfur.