In the introduction to "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion," Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, PhD, writes that when he told people he was writing a book against empathy, it was like telling them he was writing a book "against kittens." Indeed, empathy may be even more beloved. But Bloom argues that it's overrated, and that using empathy as a moral guide leads to bad decisions. Below, he discusses why.
People use the word "empathy" to mean different things. How do you define it?
Some people use empathy as an umbrella term encompassing kindness and altruism and compassion. I'm looking at a more narrow sense, what people sometimes describe as "emotional empathy": feeling what you believe another person is feeling.
For example, when you see someone in pain, if you understand that they're in pain, that's one thing. If you want to make their life better, that's another thing. But if you feel the pain yourself, that's the kind of empathy I'm interested in.
Why do you believe this kind of empathy is overrated?
I should be clear that I'm not against empathy in general. I think it's a great source of pleasure, for instance, and it plays some role in intimate relationships. But when it comes to moral judgments, empathy makes a very poor guide.
One reason is that it's biased. You naturally empathize with people who in some way are part of your circle, who look like you, who maybe share your ethnicity. So, for example, if you base your charitable giving choices on empathy, you find yourself inevitably giving to people who [are like you], and ignoring the plight of thousands, maybe millions of others.
Another problem is that empathy is innumerate. It's a spotlight—you zoom in on one person, as opposed to many. Some people think that this is one of its advantages. But real-world moral decisions involve coping with numbers. They often involve a recognition, for instance, that helping just one person can make lives worse for hundreds or thousands of others. The innumeracy of empathy often leads to paradoxical situations where we're desperate to help a single person—or even a cute puppy—while ignoring crises like climate change, because although millions of people will be affected by it, there's no identifiable victim to zoom in on.
A third problem is that empathy can be weaponized. So, unscrupulous politicians use our empathy for victims of certain crimes to motivate anger and hatred toward other, marginalized, groups. We saw a lot of that in the last election season.
If empathy is not a good guide to solving moral problems, what is?
We need people to apply moral principles of right and justice, and make some sort of utilitarian calculations of costs and benefits. For example, we can recognize that it's sad if a little girl dies from a reaction to a vaccine, but if removing the vaccine from the market will cause 100 kids to die, then we have to keep the vaccine. I think emotions play a necessary role in motivating us to do certain things, but decisions should be made through rational means.
You propose another problem with empathy, which may be of particular interest to clinical psychologists: burnout. You suggest that being especially empathic could be problematic for therapists and those in similar professions. Why?
First, I don't want to be the language police. If a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist says, "I think empathy is incredibly important, and what I mean by empathy is understanding and compassion," then I would agree with that.
My claim is narrower: Empathy in the sense of "feeling what other people are feeling" is not what you want as a successful therapist. It will hamper you, it will exhaust you. It's probably one of the many reasons I'd be a terrible shrink. If I'm around someone and they're depressed, I get depressed. If they're freaking out, I start to get anxious.
I've talked to a lot of clinical psychologists and what they tell me is that when they interact with their clients, they care about them and they try to understand them, but they approach them as a puzzle to be solved.
This has also led me to the Buddhist literature, because there the distinction between empathy and compassion is really explicit. People like Tanya Singer and Mathieu Ricard do fascinating research on this, where they train people to feel compassion, and they train people to feel empathy, and they find that compassion increases helping behaviors and energizes you, whereas empathy just brings you down. There are nuances, of course. One thing I've been thinking more about is this: When you're talking to someone and you're desperately lonely, they don't have to feel lonely [to help you]. But they do have to understand you. And to understand certain things, I think they would have had to have felt those experiences themselves in the past.
This may explain some of people's preferences in therapists: a woman may want a woman therapist, and an African-American may want an African-American therapist. It's not because they need empathy in the emotional empathy sense, but because if they're going to talk about feelings they have, they want to talk about it with someone who understands it, and to really understand it, you may have had to live it.
