We tend to think (and everyone seems to reaffirm it) that empathy, that is, the capacity to perceive what the other can feel, is something necessary in the human being, since it makes us better, more aware of others and less selfish. , or that was believed.
The truth is that not everyone agrees with the benefits of empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom argues that empathy can have dangerous effects and lead to good people making wrong decisions.
What generates emotion
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1995, revealed the negative effects that empathy can have on people.
The study at the University of Kansas consisted of telling the group of participants about a charity foundation called Quality Life Foundation that helps improve the quality of life of children with terminal illnesses.
Those who participated were asked to listen to an interview with one of the applicant children. Half of them were asked to listen objectively, without focusing on the child's feelings, which is known as a condition of low empathy.
While the other group was asked to imagine how the child interviewed would feel and the impact of everything he had to experience. What is related to high empathy.
Then everyone heard the same (fictitious) interview about a 10-year-old girl named Sheri Summers, who explained in detail her terminal illness and explained that she was on the waiting list of the foundation and that other children were a priority.
As a result, three quarters of the subjects in the high empathy group wanted to move the girl on the list, regardless of the other children, compared to a third of the low empathy group.
The study made it possible to see that the effects of empathy were not aimed at increasing the feeling of justice but that they increased the concern for the goal of empathy without taking into account the cost that it has on others.
Criticism of empathy
Psychologist Paul Bloom defines empathy as "the act of experiencing the world as we think someone else does".
Bloom criticizes that empathy has a projection effect that consists in that the act of feeling the pain of another person, makes us approach that pain and that we want to do something about it, but often at the expense of other more important causes.
Bloom also criticizes that it is very difficult to really empathize with more than one or two people at the same time. We engage in a cause or a detail without seeing the bigger picture.
For Bloom, compassion as the act of caring for others and wanting them to succeed, is a better emotion than empathy, because although it has its problems, empathy makes us feel stronger towards people who are like us, that we do not see things from the right but from the emotion and that we project the other's in ourselves.
As Bloom argues, the dangerous power of empathy has not only served to raise money for charities or win elections but also in war and torture.
Bloom's vision may seem controversial but by delving into it, the dangerous consequences that can derive from empathy are clearer, do not you think?