Summary

The article "The Evils of Empathy" argues that empathy, despite its positive connotations, can be detrimental to both the helper and the person in need, suggesting that compassion is a more effective approach.

Abstract

The article discusses the negative aspects of empathy, drawing on insights from Buddhism and science. It presents the case of Matthieu Ricard, known as the happiest man alive, who found empathy meditation unbearable, preferring a method that left him more capable of aiding others. The article defines empathy as understanding someone's perspective by putting oneself in their shoes, which can lead to decreased likelihood of helping due to the pain it causes the helper. It outlines three main drawbacks of empathy: it can hurt the helper, overload the brain, and lead to biased decision-making. The article suggests that empathy often results in personal distress and reduced cognitive ability, which hinders effective problem-solving. Moreover, empathy can amplify biases, causing unequal distribution of help to those who are more similar to us. The proposed alternative is compassion, which allows for concern without sharing the suffering, thus enabling clearer reasoning and a more sustainable motivation to help.

Opinions

Empathy can be counterproductive, leading to decreased help for those in need.
Experiencing empathy may result in personal distress and reduced cognitive function, impairing decision-making.
Empathy can exacerbate biases, causing favoritism in who receives help.
Compassion is presented as a preferable alternative to empathy, fostering a clear and motivated approach to helping others.
The article challenges the common belief that empathy is inherently beneficial and necessary for altruistic behavior.
It is argued that a compassionate approach, rather than an empathetic one, can lead to greater happiness and effectiveness in helping others.

The Evils of Empathy

Lessons from Buddhism and Science

Matthieu Ricard has been dubbed the happiest man alive.

That’s why it was a surprise that, when this monk was asked to engage in empathy meditation for a neuroscience study, he found it unbearable. Instead, he preferred another method, one that left him energized, happy, and able to help others more effectively. Perhaps we could all learn from his thousands of hours of meditation.

Where empathy goes wrong

But wait, isn’t empathy what we should be aiming for? Isn’t that exactly how we help our friends, family, or those in need?

First off, let’s make sure we’re all working with the same definition. When it comes to psychology, empathy is generally defined specifically as understanding someone’s point of view by putting yourself in their shoes. What sets empathy apart from similar emotions, like sympathy, is that it forces you to get inside of the person’s mind, to really see and feel every inch of what they’re experiencing.

When working with this definition, scientists have found that experiencing empathy will actually decrease the likelihood that you help someone. Based on these findings several prominent psychologists, such as Paul Bloom, have argued that we should make it our goal to feel less empathy. If we’re going to be there for our partners, kids, friends, and family, it seems like empathy is not the way to go.

Why? 3 main reasons:

You’re hurting yourself

Inherent in the idea of feeling someone else’s pain is that, well, you feel their pain. Whether you're watching someone you love or a stranger on the other side of the world, that can be excruciating.

Suddenly, your brain’s priorities shift. Instincts kick in and your caveman brain understands one thing: “Feel pain. Want out.” Whether you notice it or not, your first priority becomes to alleviate your own hurt, rather than helping the sufferer. So you go home, wrap yourself in a blanket, eat some ice cream, and stay as far away as possible from the person you hoped to help. Plus, you feel like shit. It’s just a lose-lose situation.

Your brain is crashing

Consider the process of empathy from the brain’s perspective. You’re not only understanding someone else’s point of view (already a tiring task), but you’re imagining it so vividly that you feel as though you’re them. You’re considering things you might have no experience with, and taking that person’s past into account.

From a neuroscience perspective, that’s incredibly impressive. But for your brain, that’s also exhausting.

Experiencing empathy tires out your brain. Yes, that’s super uncomfortable itself, but most importantly, it reduces your cognitive ability. And what crashes and burns along with cognition? Decision making.

In the end, your goal is to fix the problem that is causing someone’s pain, but your own brain isn’t able to make sound decisions.

Your favoritism

This one extends beyond your relationships to your overall impact on the world.

This will not shock you, but it needs to be said anyway: you’re biased. You’re biased towards your age group, your gender, your race, your nation, your religion, and your favorite brand of soda, no matter how much you consciously try to override it.

When we couple all that bias with the emotionally charged feeling of empathy, we tend to run headfirst into a roadblock — we’re going to feel a lot more empathy for those in our “in-group”. Now, does that mean the old man facing tragedy on the other side of the world deserves less empathy than your coworker? No, of course not. But when we let empathy guide our actions, only one of those people will ever get any of our attention.

Get some distance

Okay, so no more empathy. From now on, we become hyper-analytical machines, deciding who to help and how to help them to use strictly logical and robot-like scrutiny, right?

Well, those whose emotional reasoning is damaged are actually less able to make sound decisions, so the purely logical route seems out of the question too. As always, we have to settle for a happy medium.

That medium, Bloom proposes, is compassion.

What sets compassion apart from empathy is that when we feel compassion, we value a person’s experience, we feel concerned for them, but we don’t feel the suffering ourselves. This distance is critical — it allows us to see the pain without getting picked up by the swirling vortex ourselves.

With this distance, we can reason through the situation better and are therefore able to offer a better solution. Not only that, but we are better able to be that person’s “rock”. After all, no anxious patient wants to see their doctor freaking out.

What’s truly valuable about approaching suffering through compassion is that you become genuinely happy to help the person. Ricard describes the feeling as a warm feeling of motivation to help the other person. Instead of running away to deal with your own pain, you’ve become motivated to help the person and improve their situation, big or small.