Consequences of empathy are not all good

Even though empathy is highly valued in today's society, author Paul Bloom argues, and reveals, that there are bad consequences of empathy.

There are three types of empathy, cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. It can be argued that emotional empathy, the ability to understand and feel the feelings of another, is what makes us most human. However, Paul Bloom argues the opposite in his 2016 book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Bloom is not against kindness or compassion, but he is specifically against putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. The book highlights the bad consequences of empathy such as it can be narrow focused and individualized. It can overlook statistical abstractions as well as the big picture by focusing on only one person's suffering instead of the rest who may suffer in the same way. Our empathy also “causes us to overrate present costs and underrate future costs” (Bloom, 2016, p. 55). Emotional empathy can be biased in the sense that one might care more about their neighbor's sick child compared to the hungry children in Africa. The argument suggests that kind of empathy can be bad if prompted by an unreliable source for the wrong reasons. Alternatives to empathy could include the truth and rational reasoning. Bloom also suggests that cognitive empathy, having knowledge of what others may think or feel, is better for everyday kindness as well as self control, intelligence, and diffuse compassion.

The empathy that Bloom (2016) speaks of and is against is the one Adam Smith describes as having the capacity to think about another person and “place ourselves in his situation…and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degrees, is not altogether unlike them.” (Bloom, 2016, p. 16)  According to Bloom, the emotional empathy Smith speaks of doesn't do as much good as we may think and doesn’t equate to morality. An empathy based decision isn’t always the right or most moral decision. For example, in an experiment mentioned in Bloom’s book, participants were asked to empathize with a ten-year-old who has a fatal disease. She was on a waitlist for a treatment that would relieve her pain. After hearing the child's story and seeing her pictures, participants were asked if they would move that child up on the waitlist. Participants were made aware that those higher on the waitlist have higher priority due to worse conditions, yet most still chose to move up that one child they were introduced to despite the decision being unfair or immoral. This experiment is a prime example of the powerful “spotlight effect” empathy has.

The spotlight effect of empathy is often utilized by charities and hospitals. YouTube ads about Cole Peterson, his mothers “miracle child”, often pop up urging donations to St. Judes hospital to “Give monthly. Give hope.” Even though Cole’s story is very important, Bloom would argue these types of ads take advantage of empathy’s spotlight effect and can skew our decisions. He argues that if “we are faced with a choice where one specific child will die now or twenty children whose names we don’t know will die a year from now, empathy might guide us to choose to save the one”. That also highlights another bad consequence of empathy, the “identifiable victim effect”, which suggests that people are more likely to empathize with, and therefore react, to a specific person rather than a statistical number, even if greater. That highlights how empathy is limited and causes us to focus on certain individuals rather than statistical consequences. Like donating to Cole Peterson and not recognizing the root problem that only four percent of all federal funding goes towards childhood cancer research. It’s a perfect example that proves the “innumerate and myopic” nature of empathy, which is what Bloom describes as the problem.