A little empathy is a dangerous thing

I’ve touched on similar themes in the past: in this blog post I consider critically the idea of “putting oneself in another person’s shoes.” But a couple of recent events made me ponder a little further the dangers of a little empathy, or what I call armchair empathy.

The first was watching this TEDx talk by Sam Richards on empathy. Richards claims that the key skill needed to become a sociologist is empathy — being able to put oneself in another person’s shoes. That’s the first minute or so of his talk. After that, he sketches an example of building empathy with suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq, taking short detours to building empathy with US soldiers who are commanded to fight them.

The second was my participation in the comments section of an article in the Chicago Maroon regarding protests against possible layoffs of housekeeping staff (you can also read this Chicago Weekly article or view Keep Housekeepers, a protest website created by students). Some of the logic in the comments reminded me of what Bryan Caplan calls make-work bias (see here and here for more). However, beyond using what I think was fallacious economic reasoning, my critics also made a resonant point about my lack of empathy for the plight of the workers who might lose their jobs.

Both these led me to formulate more clearly what I consider the chief problem with the a little empathy approach that I find all too common.

Empathy requires knowledge, not just willingness

If you listened to the proponents of empathy such as Sam Richards, you might come with the impression that all you need to experience empathy is to be willing to do it, overcoming the internal resistance to doing so. But the willingness to feel empathy is a trivial and largely non-existent obstacle. Psychopaths aside, most people want to feel empathy for others. Good intentions, and the desire to understand and feel empathy for others, are all over the place. What’s lacking is accurate knowledge about other people’s actual thought processes, incentives, beliefs, values, and constraints. A person serious about feeling empathy as more than just a feel-good exercise would concentrate on acquiring that knowledge with an open mind.

To take the example of Sam Richards’ presentation, he makes a case for feeling empathy for insurgents, freedom fighters, and suicide bombers in Iraq. In order to concretely feel empathy, he needs to develop a narrative for the salient thoughts, feelings, experiences, and motivations of these suicide bombers. He builds this narrative with moving images. However, he offers very little by way of evidence that this narrative is in fact the narrative that actually fits the suicide bombers. I am not here to argue that his particular narrative is false, but it is certainly not the only plausible one. Is oil as important a part of the story as Richards makes it out to be? Is relative poverty as important as he makes it out to be, or more, or less? What about the role of religious belief, which Richards mentions very parenthetically — is it more important than he makes it out to be? These are all serious questions on which many people disagree. It is likely that Richards has studied the matter and come to the conclusions he presents after careful study. Yet he offers his viewers little of that evidence, whether polling data, or ethnography, or the actual words and recordings of suicide bombers, or other indirect forms of evidence. By using a storied style, Richards appears to be using emotional leverage to build the case for one particular mix of factors.

Now, a TEDx talk is meant to be short and flashy, so it is obviously not possible to build a conclusive academic case in one direction. However, Richards might have done better to place emphasis on the fact that accurate knowledge and information, collected through a diverse range of sources and methods, is a first step to building empathy for others. Otherwise, the empathy is just empathy with a make-believe character, not with the actual person, and it could be rigged to favor one’s particular original biases.

Sometimes it is necessary to form very crude caricatures or snap judgments, or make general statements about multitudes based on general human psychology rather than a study of the specifics. For instance, the economist focus on incentives, the psychological focus on formative childhood experiences or feelings, the sociological focus on socio-economic and cultural factors, all give first-pass approximations on how people may be behaving and feeling and thinking. Such crude general first passes should be recognized for what they are — crude first passes that create a presumption in favor of certain predictions — and that need to be refined further based on closer analysis. To build a storied narrative of “empathy” based on such crude first passes gives the illusion of intimacy without the concrete knowledge that would justify it.

Seen versus unseen: availability bias

Getting empathy out the door too quickly may limit one’s empathy only to those who are most visibly impacted by something (this is a corollary of the availability heuristic). To take the example of the Chicago Maroon comments debate above, people who took the opposite position from me made arguments such as:

CRAIG JOHNSON:

This is not a textbook. This is not a lecture hall. This is not the 19th century. We are talking about actual people here. Real people who live lives, have children and other loved ones, who make plans, who make mistakes, who get hurt (physically and emotionally), who want to provide for others, who want to live long and fulfilling lives. For some of these people, loosing these jobs might be it. No apartment, no heat, no medicine, no insurance, no college for their kids.

I know that you know that, and I know that there are other actual people who would take these housekeeping positions if they were offered with lower wages or no benefits. But reducing the amount of compensation people receive from housekeeping work (which is notoriously strenuous and physically harmful) just doesn’t seem to me like the best way to improve people’s lives.

And with a 5.5 billion dollar endowment it is simply not true to say that the University can’t or shouldn’t afford its housekeeping staff. As one of the biggest employers on the south side, and after the incredible strain and destruction it has leveled on the surrounding communities, seems to me the University can endure the burden of paying a living wage.

COLIN LOW:

What an ironic sense of entitlement, to have someone who can afford to teach/study at this university (however much one works to pay for that service) call university workers who earn $15-$16/hour “privileged”.[...]

(2) You fail to account for the psychological and emotional distress that arises from job instability. The formula you suggest, in which lower-wage workers constantly replaces higher-wage workers for the same job, would only work if knowledge/channels for seeking of alternative jobs are much smoother than they are in reality.

Over-eagerness to feel empathy with those who are clearly potential victims or sufferers often leads to ignoring the unseen gains to others — or even the ways in which those potential victims have responsibility for their own fate. Make-work bias runs rife because of people’s instinctive empathy for those who may lose their jobs when productivity enhancements render some jobs redundant. Such empathy blinds many to the value created for society by labor-saving innovations, or even to the new jobs that are created as a result of that freed labor. Bastiat’s Candlemaker’s petititon pokes fun at the economic logic. But the deeper problem isn’t the lack of understanding of economics, it is people’s sense of empathy.

As Bryan Caplan notes, part of the empathy difference may be personality differences: in this blog post, Caplan notes that people who are high on “agreeableness” tend to be poor at understanding or accepting the logic of arguments against minimum wage laws or of labor-saving innovation (note: this isn’t counting those who accept the logic but come up with counter-arguments, rather it refers to those who get indignant at such arguments).

Further, he argues that hyperactive empathy (or sympathy) with some chosen others often comes coupled with indifference to the plight of strangers outside of one’s sight. Thus, hyperactive sympathy for low-skilled workers in developed countries can lead “well-meaning” people to support immigration restrictions that prevent millions of potential immigrants from escaping absolute poverty (see also here).

My modest proposal

Given that people have a natural tendency to feel empathy for others, and that this tendency to empathy is a crucial ingredient to understanding and dealing with other people, how best can the dangers of “a little empathy” be avoided? I have some modest suggestions that I try to follow:

• Admit ignorance: When people ask you to feel empathy for others, first admit ignorance of all the things you don’t know about those others that make the task of feeling empathy impossible.

• If it matters, build the knowledge so that you can experience informed empathy: If you want to feel empathy for some other people, either in order to understand them or help them or deal with them, seek knowledge. Ask the right questions, collect data from whatever types of sources work best (direct conversation, observation of actions, large-scale polling data, ethnographic accounts, input from others who have dealt with those people).

• If you’re using a first-pass caricature or stereotype, don’t confuse that with a deep and intimate understanding: First-pass rough-cut models are great to use since it isn’t possible or economical to collect deeper data in many cases. But treat these models as rough-cut models. Don’t confuse them with full-scale empathy. Don’t imagine a deeper, more insightful understanding than the evidence warrants.

• Search for the unseen in the “seen versus unseen” — look for the arguments and evidence regarding the effects on other parties: Don’t get stuck in one person’s shoes, see the bigger picture. Think about the larger moral issues involved, whatever your specific moral perspective.

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