Having witnessed many cases of individuals who help the poor, donate to cancer/heart patients and then turn on a dime and advocate the carpet bombing of rebel held civilian areas, I'm starting to feel empathy is not the issue. The empathy circuits are intact in most human beings. The problem is dehumanization.
Empathy is proportional to how "human" we perceive someone/something to be. We experience the most empathy for close family, friends and individuals we have met in person. As the distance grows the empathy response reduces. It further reduces if the victims are portrayed as uncivilized or savage. It further reduces when the victims are numerous (hundreds of thousands).
In addition to dehumanization, which is a huge problem, there are also people who just want to be perceived as being empathic and charitable.
There is a couple in my neighborhood that makes a big point out of helping people in poor countries, sending toys to their children on Christmas, hosting all kinds of charity events, etc, but on a personal level, they behave like the numbest troglodytes and could not care less about anybody's needs.
In some people, empathy is a carefully crafted facade without any substance behind it, which might also be a reason why they are in favor of carpet bombing.
I would disagree. The problem is the unnatural, ever expanding range of concern for the entire human population as it increases and as things globalise. We in general get no additional happiness from remote billions of people and only added risks and concerns. It is hardly surprising that the natural empathy capacity is being exceeded.
Worse the limited amount we do have is manipulated. As remote concerns are selectively beamed into our consciousness via the media.
I once had this thought myself. Our brains evolved to deal with social grouping of a few dozen individuals at most. Now it's being heavily taxed -- not only do we have to remember and deal with hundreds of individuals, we're no longer just comparing ourselves against others in our tribe/village, but the entire world. And the amount of rules and social conventions that need to be followed are numerous, and the pace of society is breakneck.
I'd like to see a study done to see if this is the cause of the rising levels of mental health issues (or is it just more and more diagnoses)? Whenever I hear a report of someone shooting, stabbing or driving a vehicle into random strangers, I wonder whether it is someone who's been broken by the size, speed and complexity of modern life.
I agree to this as people are duty bound. In moral philosophy, it's argued by some that obligation is of higher moral value than pure empathy, as you don't emotionally feel anything but do what is your duty. Most people adhere to rule based ethics in which the law is imperative. But Law paves the way for carpet bombing within a framework of ethics. Bombing the rule breakers. As for family relation stuff this is called the Price equation. For me empathy is just a form of guilt. So still relates to the self. You don't do bad as you don't want to feel guilty. I therefore constantly have to learn right from wrong on a social or interpersonal level. But I think some people may experience it differently. Those who lack these Lamarkian tools are defined as sociopathic, but it can be expedient. Napolean would be a good character to debate on this topic.
To expand on this, you are likely to do favors for people you know even if it will harm other groups. This happens a lot. There are conspiracy theories galore about big governments and their level of organization to keep the populace out-of-the-loop, but I think it just comes down to rich people who know each other and help each other out at the expense of out-groups. It's an organic process, and not really organized in a strict sense. The Clinton foundation is a good example of this (watch the Clinton Cash documentary).
This is an ongoing discussion I have with many people. There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good. In reality what it is is neither good nor bad. It's the ability to put yourself in the emotional state of someone else to understand things not only from their rational point of view but from the point of view of them as humans with both irrational (emotional) and rational perspectives.
It can be used for good or bad not just good and it's doesn't mean that just because I can put myself in their position I agree with their pov (which many people will claim i.e. "you have no empathy")
> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good.
It's a pretty heavy prerequisite. A lot of bad things can be traced to people not understanding other people, or refusing to understand them (dehumanization). It's sufficiently fundamental and a common problem that I'm not sure how big the cohort of emphatic-but-manipulative people is. It certainly exists, but there are other issues mixed in there, such as moral detachment (i.e., people who decided they're not interested in being good).
I believe pretty much all of your typical -isms (sexism, racism, homophobia) are rooted in lack of empathy towards groups that one is physically unable to be part of. Most people don't have active empathy ability (i.e., modeling people not like them), they just empathize with their own experience only. That's why your otherwise normal people can end up with very problematic beliefs.
Empathy also requires you to understand the world in a more complete way, which also tends to break down quite a range of rationalizations, and rationalizations can lead to a lot of evil, as well.
So while you're technically right that empathy is merely a tool, it's a very major tool, and I've found people with relationship problems who are telling me they have no empathy, don't know how to do it, don't want to do it, are pretty much a dead end.
If I had a button that could suddenly make lots of people more empathetic, I would absolutely press it and be convinced that it'd make the world a much, much better place.
The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.
In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
It’s very easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. I think the thing which makes it hard to spot is that we normally treat questions as boolean yes-or-no things.
For example, a police department which is 10% more likely to let one race off with warnings than another race is racist (and that’s not a moral judgement: if warnings are effective everyone should get them), but it’s also an example deliberately chosen to be as far as possible from racially motivated genocide as I could manage without the risk of people denying it was racism.
It’s a spectrum. How much do you empathise with $person, not do you.
Or look at the various declarations of secession of the southern states in the US Civil War, or the Cornerstone Speech; it's pretty obvious that people were willing to go to war to defend both personal racial bias and a system of racial discrimination.
The people who study racism professionally don't seem to have a hard time defining it. And I don't think most of US history can really be explained without it. It began with rule of, by, and for well-off white men. Even after Reconstruction we had the Nadir [1] and sundown towns [2] and Jim Crow [3] and redlining [4] and a whole lot else.
Racism and sexism, being dominant paradigms in America, are mostly invisible to the people living them. 50 years from now, people will look back on what has changed and be dumbfounded that we thought we were living in an egalitarian paradise. Just like we look back on the people 50 years before.
No I don't realize that and I am pretty sure you can't find much that would back that up. People didn't even think in terms of racism it was just what was normal historically. Today we think like that but that also comes with it's own dangers of becoming another kind of opressor.
> The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.
I don't know about that. People face very real, easily definable dangers and risks from being in a marginalized group, which seems to imply there's more than just a few people involved. Is it really so outlandish to say that many parts of Russia are homophobic, for instance?
On the more obvious end of things, people who have participated in hate crimes or voted for laws that restrict marginalized groups are close enough to be deserving one of the -isms, and depending on the time period, they were not at all rare.
> In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
You're mixing quite a few things in here in a manner I find worrying.
> you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea
Please address this directly if you think I am doing so, because I'm pretty sure I am not. I've laid out my views on empathy and it's relationship to morality pretty clearly in the OP, I think.
> you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
I have to think that. It's my fundamental responsibility as a human to judge whether things are objectionable or not. If I do not do this, the default takes place, and the default is much worse than collective judgment errors.
If nobody had the right, like you say here, there would never be anyone to question the default, and I don't want to be anywhere near the kind of norms we used to have.
Being ill suited to the responsibility to judge good and evil, as we are, does not mean we get to shirk it. It does not make it better to wash your hands, say you don't know, and stay out, because the default does not wait. It will catch up with us, and I know for certain it's not on our side, and it is much worse.
The point is once you have to point your finger at someone and say you are racist or you are sexist. You will most likely be wrong in ways that matter and only in ways that doesn't really matter (we are all racist, sexist etc).
And yes it's outlandish to say that in any way that matters. Sure you can say that someone who might be deeply religious. But its much harder once you get into the normal modern westerners mindset. I have seen my share of people being accused of things they weren't. That's were it's really dangerous especially the way you continue to talk about it as if you know when it's sexism or racism etc.
Again hate crimes aren't that easy to ascribe to someone either. I am pretty sure you and I would disagree on many of these matters.
I am not mixing anything at all, what I am saying is that very few people are those things in any way that matter.
I am adressing it directly. You say that if more people have empathy button you would press it because that would make the world a better place. So yes you are indeed doing exactly that.
No one is saying we shouldn't do it just that the way you speak of it scares me because you sound so certain you can differentiate.
If this sort of topic interests you, I'd highly recommend "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky. A lot of the book examines what is going on in the brains of people who have strongly held "us" vs "them" beliefs (i.e. sexists, racists, homophobes). The core thing with these people seems to be essentialist beliefs - believing there is something essentially different and/or wrong with the out group and being too cognitively lazy to view people as individuals or trying to find commonalities.
So some people can actually strongly empathize with their in-group and do terrible things to others in the out-group, so I'm not sure I'd say a lack of empathy is 100% the cause of some of humanities worst behavior. More so bad ideas and cognitive laziness. Another thing to mention is that empathy can actually hinder action if you happen to have strong feelings of empathy for someone who is suffering. The reason is because if you're feeling someone else's suffering, you're going to then be focused on how you can stop feeling the suffering yourself instead of how you can help the other person. It has been shown that the stronger you're feeling someone else's suffering, the less capable you will be to help them. Having more compassion is the answer to this problem and if everyone was more compassionate, the world would be immeasurably better.
My experience is that for some, dehumanization is a direct response to having their capacity for empathy overwhelmed. It's a defense mechanism. I've seen it play out in people who are confronted with the homelessness epidemic in San Francisco.
With that in mind, making the whole world more empathetic sounds like one of the most destructive - if obviously well-intentioned - ideas I can think of.
Empathy is indeed powerful. And, if people understood each other better, I do think it would mostly be used for good. Conflict is rarely a constructive outcome, so even the self-interested would probably try to use it to broker peace.
The problem is that empathy isn't evenly applied. We can more easily gather empathy for people who are like us than for others. Asking people to be more empathetic may very well exacerbate the lopsidedness rather than reducing it. That uneven distribution of empathy makes it very difficult to make good, impartial decisions when their interests are in conflict.
> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good.
By strict definition, the OP is correct. The __presumption__ is you will use that understanding for food. However, having that connection, and using it are two different things.
The thing is, once you put yourself in someone else's shoes it is that much harder to act in a way that is against that person's best interest. You would actually need to deliberately work against your emotions to harm someone once you have empathized with them. It's kind of forcing yourself to jump off a cliff. Sure, it's possible, but it doesn't come natural. So the two (empathize and doing good) aren't completely two different things.
Yes. To both possess empathy and then proceed to do harmful things requires you to actively convert to a negative moral philosophy (i.e., legitimately realize you are doing bad things and are OK with it).
Most people are not like this, and actively believe they are good people, so higher empathy does, in practice, makes them nicer people.
I think it might be too strong to say the things you are doing are bad just because they hurt other people. Thats what tradeoffs are, like firing people, for instance. I would write more but basically I think its too strong to say that most people are not like this or perhaps its too strong to say that its morally wrong to doing something harmful to someone.
>To both possess empathy and then proceed to do harmful things requires you to actively convert to a negative moral philosophy
Or taking a consequentialist moral philosophy quite seriously. You can both empathize with terrible people and believe that harming them the correct thing to do for the greater good.
I think in general we take the "understanding" part in empathy too lightly. I would say we use "empathy" a lot when we are actually talking about compassion. Since the inner experience is never completely shareable, it's hard to talk about real understanding. Not trying to get philosophical here, we will probably agree that a reasonable level of understanding is both possible and sufficient. But I feel like too often there's way more "rationalization" than actual understanding, and we make the (in my opinion) mistake of calling that "empathy".
With this in mind, I would say empathy is always socially positive. If we were talking about compassion, I would share more your opinion, but I'd still say it's positive as long as we do not completely swap it for empathy.
This is a really good point. Empathy can be applied to judging moral crimes such as stealing food becuase you are starving. Although anctedotally I find that people who come from the exact background/situation tend to have less empathy even though they understand the context more.
Your experience seems to match the research. People who faced a challenge and succeeded in overcoming it tended to judge people who failed more harshly, but tended to judge people who succeeded more favourably.
That makes sense because of the "if I did it, you should be able to"-fallacy that fails to take into account that people are different, even coming from identical backgrounds.
I think in most people it would, though? Imagine if you were harming someone and you're imagining what they would feel like as you're doing the harming, you're going to feel badly. Not harming someone will help you avoid these negative feelings.
I used to think I had empathy. I mean, when I see someone being taken advantage of, I tear up immediately. Until one day my mentor straight up told me “you have no empathy.”
Which didn’t really bother me, since I’m pretty sure I’m not a sociopath. (Though that probably wouldn’t bother me either, by definition.)
Watching that video made me realize that what I usually feel is sympathy. I think I’ve been so fortunate (or complacent) that I can’t really say to someone “I’ve been there. I know how it feels.” I mean I have been sad and depressed and lonely, don’t get me wrong, but overall I’m like “holy shit why am I so lucky?”
Feelings are icky. If a close friend suffers a loss, I just want to do something practical. Help them move furniture, or babysit their kid or something. I don’t want to “get down to their level.”
It sounds like maybe you do have empathy? Experiencing some level of suffering when you witness someone else's suffering would be empathy. Sociopaths do not experience this. From my understanding, the part of the brain that processes pain and fear is much smaller or nonexistent in sociopaths, so they couldn't feel bad even if they wanted to.
There is another thing called compassion which is generally wishing others to be well and giving people a break. Most people don't have much compassion as it somewhat goes against the human instinct to compete with others and do what is best for yourself. That being said, compassion can be directly developed through loving-kindness meditation, if you're motivated to become more compassionate. I personally also find that developing an understanding of evolutionary psychology and doing mindfulness meditation can also lead to more compassion as it leads to more understanding of how we are all, for the overwhelming majority of our conscious lives where we are not being mindful, slaves to whatever thoughts and feelings happen to be arising at any given moment. Some of us are lucky and don't experience much in the way of negative feelings or thoughts, some of us aren't so lucky. Either way, realizing that a lot of life comes down to the luck of the draw is a powerful realization that can lead to more compassion. This i feel is another reason why some of us lack compassion - if we're successful, we have some understanding of what set of actions we did that lead us to be successful. But no one ever sits there and thinks about all the things that didn't happen to them that would have lead to a worse outcome (of which there are infinitely many), so when we see another person who isn't succeeding we may just assume they are lazy or don't care without actually bothering to understand what is holding them back.
I believe that nobody can “have” empathy. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is still you who’s in their shoes. It’s just impossible to share the same emotions as someone if you’ve lived a different life, different experiences. When we see a teen yelling, “You don’t understand!”, we really don’t understand even when we were teens ourselves. I’m not a huge fan of the word because I think the first step to true connection is to admit that you in fact do not understand, but you’re there for them. Like the video suggests (which in my opinion isn’t really talking about empathy).
The field of communication and information (in humanities) has covered a lot of ground about that. Of course we can't inject our thoughts directly into someone else's brain and vice-versa.
If two things have the same properties, there's truly only one thing.
That's empathy. Empathy is a type of understanding, on any level. Maybe you have not experienced directly what is causing another person's emotional reaction, but you experience their emotional reaction.
Sympathy is more along the lines of caring about someone enough that you care they are in pain. If you don't feel that pain, if you aren't "crying with them", but instead are a shoulder to cry on, that's sympathy.
Both are very related and work together, depending on how close another person is to you.
I'd say you have more empathy than compassion. I think it's a good thing. I myself have much more compassion than empathy and I am working on sorting things out to be more empathic than compassionate.
People always confuse sympathy with empathy. That's the reason why a lot of think that we are showing empathy when we are not. In fact, being empathetic is difficult. Very few times in our life are we truly empathetic
Personally I think affective empathy is extremely common, but we just construct strategies to avoid experiencing it too much. Most people are going to experience some level of suffering if they directly witness another person suffering. It's just that no one likes that feeling of suffering so we say smth like "that's too bad but there is nothing i can do here" so we can feel better and move on with our lives. This is I guess what we call sympathy, but really I feel it's just a strategy to reduce the impact of the empathy reflex most of us feel. Imagine what your life would be like if you couldn't get over the feeling you get when you witness someone else suffering - you would constantly be suffering yourself and be totally useless to yourself and others. Strong feelings of empathy aren't necessarily a good thing.
Compassion would be what I think is the difficult thing. Whether you fully understand what someone else is going through or not, you have an intention to help them feel better. To actually act in a compassionate way you need to first feel that others are deserving of your compassion and that can be a very tough thing to develop for anyone but those who are the very closest to you.
One side of this is just shifting of meaning over time. As this article points out, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) gives the term "sympathy" a very central role, but his meaning is much closer to what we now call empathy.
Female brains have evolved to be better at empathizing and communicating and are hard-wired for empathy. Male brains are more suited to rational understanding and system-building – from making machines and writing software to engaging in abstract thought, writing music, engaging in politics, or theorizing about the fundamental foundations of physics.
And herein is the reason why there are so few female engineers, especially in computer science, laid bare. The task at hand, then, should be to continue buckling the stereotype in gender segregation: little girls should be encouraged to become more involved in being system builders and tinkerers, while little boys should be nurtured to develop and show significantly more empathy. This will be hard going, but the good news is that it is entirely doable.
> And herein is the reason why there are so few female engineers, especially in computer science, laid bare.
Do I read it correctly that "the reason" does not refer to how brains have evolved, but rather to the belief about how the brains have developed? In other words, do you consider the statement about the brains wrong?
If I understand that right, what other related beliefs do you have about brains? That they are exactly the same for men and women, that sexual hormones have zero influence on development and functioning of human brains, that all differences between male and female thinking and behavior are caused by society? Just making sure I am not debating a strawman.
"Tabula rasa" is a popular opinion in certain political circles, but there are two obvious problems with it:
1) It does not explain differences between male and female behavior in animals. Why do e.g. male birds behave differently from female birds; did patriarchy teach them to? A possible answer would be that evolution created mechanisms that apply to all animals, but for some reasons they do not apply to humans. And then humans invented patriarchy, which by sheer coincidence has a similar effect.
2) How about the brain differences where men get it worse? For example, boys being more likely autistic than girls; did patriarchy also do that? Because I am not aware of patriarchy having high opinion about autism; it seems rather the other way round, nerds being stereotypically bullied by jocks; so why would then patriarchy encourage boys to become more autistic?
Note: I agree that society often wildly exaggerates the gender differences, or adds some extra bullshit. I am just saying that this is an exaggeration and distortion of a real thing, not something invented from scratch.
> little girls should be encouraged to become more involved in being system builders and tinkerers, while little boys should be nurtured to develop and show significantly more empathy. This will be hard going, but the good news is that it is entirely doable.
You don’t. Males and females are very, very different because of molecular biology. That is obvious. However, those differences do not make one or the other sex superior or inferior. It also does not mean that females aren’t capable of the same things males are. However, how females think is largely negatively skewed by upgringing. For example, when I see a small girl pushing a toy baby carriage, I see all Red because from experience, that’s brainwashing a little girl that girls are meant to incubate offspring. That’s an opportunity to produce a really good system bilder and thinker, or perhaps a scientist, wasted. Females can be just as good engineers and scientists as males if not better, if only they weren’t being brainwashed during their upbringing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an intellectual atrocity.
"But an empathy box," he said, stammering in his excitement, "is the most personal possession you have! It's an extension of your body; it's the way you touch other humans, it's the way you stop being alone."
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
Paul Graham had a lot of interesting observations about empathy in his 2003 essay "Hackers and Painters":
Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.
When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.
Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite.
Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in.
Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It's hard for such people to design great software, because they can't see things from the user's point of view.
One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical question to someone without a technical background. We probably all know people who, though otherwise smart, are just comically bad at this. If someone asks them at a dinner party what a programming language is, they'll say something like ``Oh, a high-level language is what the compiler uses as input to generate object code.'' High-level language? Compiler? Object code? Someone who doesn't know what a programming language is obviously doesn't know what these things are, either.
I find it interesting how many varying definitions for empathy I'm seeing in this thread. I always thought of empathy to specifically be "feeling oriented", not simply taking someone else's perspective. Not saying anyone is wrong here, seems like we have yet to fully come to a consensus on what the word empathy really means.
> how many varying definitions for empathy I'm seeing
The words sympathy and empathy are like the words ashamed and embarrassed. Everyone thinks they know the difference, but when they try to explain it, they find that it's very difficult to separate the words.
At least for my own mind, I found a handy way of differentiating sympathy and empathy from a line in The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they'll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant by empathy. So, then, sympathy is when you don't grimace but say something like, "I hope you're OK."
Paul Bloom (who's provocatively-titled book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion is prominently discussed in the article) says something like the following:
"For example, consider long-distance charity. Someone who hears about the sorrow of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly."
It sure makes someone pause and think, but not quite sure how accurate it is in the realm of reality. Bloom's talk feels a bit like clever verbal judo to me. But what do I know...
"Let us imagine for a moment that people have attained happiness — a state of complete human freedom of will in
the widest sense: at that very instant personality is destroyed. Man becomes as solitary as Beelzebub. The connection between social beings is cut like the umbilical cord of a new-born infant. And consequently, society is destroyed. With the force of gravity removed, objects go flying off into space. (Of course some may say that society ought to be destroyed so that something completely new and just can be built on the debris! I don’t know, I am not a destroyer ...)"
The word "empathy" has a somewhat eerie ring to it, as if it were a magical capability. At least in its most common understanding as "the ability to feel what another person feels".
Fun fact: that's impossible. You can never be sure what another person is feeling, because you are not that person. They, and only they, are the sole authority on their feelings.
Instead, I choose to understand empathy as opening up to the fullest extent possible: removing all filters, prejudices and opinions, listening to what another person has to say, and being with them in a mindful way.
As Marshall Rosenberg puts it: “Empathy: emptying our mind and listening with our whole being.”
The word "empathy" has a somewhat eerie ring to it, as if it were a magical capability. At least in its most common understanding as "the ability to feel what another person feels".
> Fun fact: that's impossible. You can never be sure what another person is feeling, because you are not that person. They, and only they, are the sole authority on their feelings.
That's because that definition of empathy is wrong and distorted to almost be a synonym of telepathy.
A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), coined by Edward Bradford Titchener to translate German Einfühlung.
Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person. ex: She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.
> Instead, I choose to understand empathy as opening up to the fullest extent possible: removing all filters, prejudices and opinions, listening to what another person has to say, and being with them in a mindful way.
That's active or good listening but being with them in their emotional state (whatever that means) isn't yet the definition of trying to understand how they feel and how they think about the topic at hand. Emptying yourself means you can't rely on your own life experience to better understand the other one. (Not a fan of how Rosenberg rephrased that though non violent communication is really useful in some settings while in otheres you have to act upon feelings being conveyed to you).
Empathy isn't the ability to say "I understand." Empathy is admitting that, sometimes, you don't understand, but you'll still try and be appropriately supportive.
You state a position, but don't present any argument to support it. You seem to contradict the dictionary definition[1], so what are you basing your definition on? Why is that a better definition and how does that relate to the research in this article?
[1] "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another"
I don't agree with the notion that you need to "understand" to be empathetic. If a friend tells me that they're going through a rough time I feel like it's disingenuous for me to tell them that I understand their situation, even if I myself have been through difficult periods. I can't and don't feel like I should give the impression I can understand the nuance of their situation. I've found it's much more productive to be supportive in situations like that by saying things like, "I know I can't understand fully what you're going through right now, but that sounds really hard and if I can help in any way please let me know" versus "Yeah, I understand what you're dealing with."
If empathy is putting yourself in another person's shoes and that's the understood general definition... I don't think it's genuine to say that, "Yes, in these few seconds/minutes/hours since you've told me your problem I have gone through the effort of visualizing life from your perspective and I now understand all of your issues." Even if "I understand" is communicated with good intentions I feel like it rarely looks to productive discussion.
Well, right, you might not immediately understand and identify with someone else's problem. That is, you won't empathize with them. But you could say that you sympathize with them, if their pain causes you to feel pain as well (or joy, or...whatever). Or their situation may cause you to feel compassionate, if their suffering makes you want to help. I think that there are already words that name the feelings you're talking about.
"Empathy" has a generally-accepted meaning. You can disagree with it if you'd like...but it will hinder communication to use words in ways that they aren't commonly used.
Well, empathy is a word with a definition, not a directive as to what is helpful to do.
Empathy is the ability to replay another person's state in your mind so that you can understand it. It's not directly connected to what you do with that information, though. You can just as much use empathy to manipulate someone since it lets you model mental states well.
In your particular example, if what you say is true, having empathy would mean understanding that the person probably wouldn't care for you to tell them that you understand. :P
I think that should have been more discussed in the article. What is empathy? I'd say empathy involves understanding ("I know how you feel"), and I would call what you talk about "compassion" or goodwill/being supportive/caring for someone ("I can't say I know how it's like to be in your situation, but I can see you are suffering and I'll be there for you")
Seems this thread is full of varying definitions for various concepts. I've posted a few comments in this thread myself assuming my own definitions without really reading a dictionary first, so I'll leave my definitions here for anyone who might be interested:
Affective empathy: experiencing some level of suffering or discomfort when visually seeing someone else suffering. This is just a reflex for most of us that scales with how obvious and immediate the other person's pain appears to be. Seeing someone get hit by a car or cry will cause this feeling whereas seeing a depressed person will not as they do not obviously appear to be suffering.
Cognitive empathy: thinking about someone else's circumstances and thus feeling some level of shared suffering. This form of empathy does not require the suffering to be right in front of you for you to feel something and does require cognitive effort (i.e. is not a reflex). We would use this to empathize with someone who is depressed.
Sympathy (as in to feel sympathy for someone): feeling empathy but not taking much time or energy to do anything to help the sufferer and more likely coming up with some rationalization to help yourself deal with your own feelings (i.e. they'll be fine, there is nothing i can do). I guess we also have a concept of "fake sympathy" where someone lies about feeling empathy and then does nothing.
Compassion: a belief that someone is worth helping and having an intention to help them if you can, regardless of the degree to which you empathize with them.
I'm almost certain these definitions are not the "correct ones", but for the sake of me not amending all my previous comments I'll just leave this here.
Empathy is proportional to how "human" we perceive someone/something to be. We experience the most empathy for close family, friends and individuals we have met in person. As the distance grows the empathy response reduces. It further reduces if the victims are portrayed as uncivilized or savage. It further reduces when the victims are numerous (hundreds of thousands).