The 8 Dangers of Empathy

why it’s okay to not empathise with everybody all the time

I. Of course Popular Psychology Practitioners love empathy

According to these guys, empathy is everybody’s area of development. Until you’re sitting right next to one of them crying your eyes out and sniffling your noses out, they are not convinced that you have empathy. If you fail to convince them, then you are narcissistic, heartless, insensitive or any of their synonyms.

Empathy today has an almost cult following. Pop-psych aficionados have a zero tolerance policy for low empathy. You are expected to understand how everybody is feeling all the time. You may not express disagreement with what they are saying or feeling, not until you first learn to empathise. But then, if you empathise, it’s unlikely that you will disagree with them, isn’t it? If you don’t validate, you don’t have empathy. If you don’t cry, you don’t have empathy. If you laugh oddly, you don’t have empathy. I’ve a question here: Who will show empathy to the guys who don’t have empathy?

Pop-Psychology practitioners are confident that a lack of empathy is the root cause of all the issues in this world. The atmosphere is getting heated up? Have some empathy, you plastic-straw users. Russia is going to war with Ukraine. Have some empathy, Mr. Putin. Another rape in Delhi. Another school shooting in the US. More mass layoffs. Stricter abortion rules. More racism in the West. More casteism in India. If only we had more empathy, our world would have been such a model of peace for all the other planets to emulate.

Here’s an unpopular thought - maybe the problem of our times is perhaps too much empathy, not too little. Before you jump at me, hear me out. 

II. The 100000 meanings of Empathy

Pop-psych practitioners walk around as if they have been studying empathy and its many effects on humanity for centuries. Maybe you know this already but the term empathy has actually been around for less than a century. Perhaps the recency of its origin is why we seem to be so confused about what empathy actually means even as we plead with each other for more of it.

When you ask somebody to empathise with you, what exactly are you hoping for the other person to say or do? Do you know?

Over the past many years, empathy has come to mean different things for different groups of people. The word empathy when it was first coined meant to be able to make an object outside of you come alive. For example, imagining a waterfall and feeling the cool, moist air around it on your face. Or your mouth watering at the sight of a delicious Hyderabadi biryani. Like a kind of projection of your imagination onto the world. 

Today, empathy can mean understanding how someone else feels or it can mean feeling what someone else feels. Empathy can also mean to imitate what another person is doing. Empathy can mean adopting another person’s body language. Empathy can mean to imagine how someone else feels (different from knowing how they feel). It can also mean to imagine what another person is thinking. Empathy in some cases can even mean to feel for somebody (different from feeling with them) e.g. pity. The social psychologist Daniel Bateson says that there are at least 8 different concepts that are now believed to be associated with the word empathy. 8 meanings for a single word! And yet we are relentless in our mission towards making the world a more empathetic place. To me, the empathy mission sounds more like a befogging mission.

The confusion around empathy and if it’s an emotion worth all the attention is evident even among psychologists. One group can’t get enough of empathy. The other group can’t stand it. One group says empathy will save the world. Another says that it will destroy it. Highly credible and famous psychologists have argued against empathy; their view is that empathy can be dangerous (More about this in Section IV).

Yet we don’t hear any of these debates in our day-to-day lives. Discussions on wellbeing are always centred around empathy. The feedback is always to develop more empathy. Consequences are reserved only for the unempathetic. Love and respect is directed only towards those capable of empathy. The case for empathy is being made again and again, all the time. From Maya Angelou to Barack Obama (I like both of them by the way, just saying), we all believe that the world could do with more empathy. But frills and embellishments of the word apart, we don’t really know what it means.

III. So basically nobody knows what empathy means?

Yea, pretty much. What there seems to be some consensus around is that there are types of empathy. Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman have done some work on delineating these. They, among a few other psychologists say that there are 3 parts to empathy (I’ve created the names within the brackets to help you remember them more easily) :

1. Affective empathy (Feeling empathy): is the kind of empathy where you can feel what the other person is feeling. “Putting yourself in another’s shoes”. “Walking a mile in someone’s shoes”. Crying when you see a sad scene in a movie is an example of affective empathy.

2. Cognitive empathy (Understanding empathy): is when you understand how someone else is feeling. For example, if your friend just lost their job, you can understand what it feels like to be fired suddenly. You know that they are feeling sad, but need not necessarily feel sad. 

3. Compassionate empathy (Acting empathy): is an action-oriented empathy. It is an interesting balance of both cognitive and affective empathy. What’s distinctive about compassionate empathy is that it makes you do something about the situation. Imagine that your mother is down with a fever. You know and to some extent, can feel what she’s going through - her tiredness, exhaustion, weakness. You take up a bigger part of the chores that week so that she can rest and take it easy.

A fourth way to view empathy is through emotional regulative abilities because it plays a role in helping us be self-aware of our emotions.

IV.  The 8 dangers of empathy

1. Empathy can blind you
   When you experience empathy, it’s like having horse blinders on. The world around disappears and the subject you empathise with gets your undivided attention. A little bit like how you fall in love. The issue with falling into empathy is similar to falling in love, the red flags don’t show up on time. Before you know it, you are fighting against the felling of a diseased tree while ignoring the fact that it could collapse any time on the dilapidated houses behind it. Your empathy for the decaying tree made it easy for you to neglect the plight of the poor who were at its risk. Even if totally unintended, empathy can often make you behave in ways that contradict values of social justice and fairness.

2. Empathy sucks at Math
   If you ask empathy, empathy will tell you 1>50000000. This is why you may spend a ton of money to support 1 cute little girl’s craft business but not care about the 800 million Indians who live in poverty. Not that there’s anything wrong with helping out a kid but is that the best use of your money when you look at the larger picture? Maybe not. 

3. Empathy makes poor decisions
   You delay firing an employee because you empathise with them. While you continue to delay communicating your decision to them, you are stuck with an incompetent employee and they are held back from getting a head start on their job hunt, all because you feel bad for having to fire them. Or in the case of a romantic break-up. The dump-er empathises with the dump-ee, prolongs the break-up and makes everything worse for everybody involved.

4. Empathy can help psychopathy
   Psychopaths are widely regarded to rank abysmally low on empathy. Studies show that this is not always the case. Psychopaths are capable of empathy, especially cognitive (understanding) empathy. This makes sense. To be a great psychopath, you need to know exactly how your victims feel. How else can you torture them effectively? They may even be capable of affective (feeling) empathy but research shows that they are less predisposed to display it. This again makes sense. If they switch their feelings on, they would have a hard time making people’s lives hell. Psychopaths, contrary to popular belief, can be quite the masters at regulating empathy.

5. Empathy can scam
   I got a call a few years ago from someone who claimed that he works at a bank. At the time, I had gotten into a school for a masters program and was looking for scholarships. This guy on the call after asking me a few questions told me that he can help me get an education loan from a bank at 0% interest. He didn’t want any commission or anything for helping me out, just my card details. A true philanthropist. I obviously hung up after indulging him for a bit but do you see what he did? He knew exactly how I’m feeling which is what led him to conceptualise this whole scam. Psychics, animal communicators and all manipulators in general leverage empathy for their work.

6. Empathy can make you a racist
   Because it works like a spotlight, empathy makes you extra kind and affectionate towards your in-groups and extra aggressive towards outsiders. Racism and white supremacy are classic examples. Psychologists have talked in the past about how Donald Trump used empathy to discriminate against Muslims and immigrants. Many other social ills we otherwise despise such as chauvinism, patriarchy, sexism have their mass following because its advocates appeal to their in-groups for empathy.

7. Empathy won’t let you enjoy a game
   I thought it was important to let you know that having too much empathy can hold you back from enjoying sports. Imagine feeling terrible at your rival team’s loss. Imagine feeling like you’ve still lost when your team won the IPL. And if you’re somebody who is unapologetically competitive, imagine playing a game where there are no winners, yuck!

8. Empathy (especially affective empathy) can inhibit action
   If your partner comes to you feeling all anxious and overwhelmed, what do you think will be the useful thing to do? You could try to feel what they are feeling in the name of empathy and get anxious yourself. Then there will be 2 anxious people, super for the relationship! Or you could try to understand what they are going though and co-regulate upwards, towards both of you feeling calm maybe. Or imagine that your dog has gotten badly hurt. Would you rather sit next to them and let out a weep for every whimper, or rush them towards the vet?

A lot of what I have covered in this section are highlights from the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s work (among others). Some of them are my own contributions to the topic. I highlight Paul Bloom because I found his arguments against empathy to be the most compelling. For those of you who are interested to dig deeper into some of this stuff, I highly recommend Bloom’s book Against Empathy. Feel free to share in the comments any other sources that you have come across too.

V. If what you’re saying is true, why do I feel empathy in the first place? Why didn’t evolution get rid of this dangerous feeling?

Like I always say, our emotions have a role in our survival, even the unpleasant ones (I’ve written previously about guilt here). Empathy too has a role in survival. 

Empathy is a prosocial behaviour. Our brain has these amazing things in it called mirror neurons that help us understand what somebody else is experiencing as though it is happening to ourselves. When we can feel how another person is feeling, we are able to adjust our responses appropriately. Empathy is why we don’t laugh out loud at a relative’s funeral or hesitate from sharing more bad news to someone who just got dumped. Empathy is why stray dogs get fed and clothed. Empathy is why your boss cuts you some slack on the days you are unwell, and it is one of the reasons why you offer to share chores with your partner. Empathy is why you jump in joy when your friend clears a test or when your favourite team wins. Empathy is also why we all feel so angry about what’s happening in Ukraine.

All this to say that we feel empathy despite its disadvantages because there are also benefits to empathising. Empathy is especially great for positive emotions. To not be able to celebrate your spouse’s promotion or give your friend a meaningful birthday gift would deprive us from much joy in life. Empathy helps us regulate ourselves and co-regulate with others. It also plays a central role in sex. It’s actually a pretty incredible emotion to have in our supply of emotions but like with everything else, too much empathy can be unhealthy and work against you.

VI. How do I know if my empathy is healthy? If it’s not, how can I make it healthy?

Healthy empathy will allow you to reap all the benefits of the feeling without being biased or trapped by it. Here’s a non-exhaustive checklist that I’ve made to help you reflect on the health of your empathy levels:

1. Would you describe your empathy as more of the feeling type than the understanding type? (Section III talks about the types of empathy)

2. Does empathetic concern often make you act impulsively? e.g. spread a horrible rumour about your friend’s boss because they gave them some negative feedback

3. Do you often feel overwhelmed by empathy? e.g. going to therapy because you feel exhausted from helping people

4. Does your empathy make it difficult for you to use logic? e.g. refusing to use Zoom because of the recent layoffs

5. Does your empathy hold you back from action? e.g. delaying breaking up with your girlfriend because you know how bad she will feel if you do

6. Does your empathy make you discriminate? e.g. hating on all Brits today because they once upon a time treated Indians badly

7. Do you find it hard to detach yourself from any kind of sad news? e.g. crying for days after you read in the news about a mother who lost her child

8. Do you feel traumatised when you hear another person’s trauma? e.g. refusing to leave the house because your friend recently got groped

More officially, empathy is measured using self-reported questionnaires such as Interpersonal Reactivity Index or Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).

Of the 3 types of empathy, compassionate empathy (Acting Empathy) and cognitive empathy (Understanding Empathy) are seen to be relatively immune to the issues of spotlighting and innumeracy. One proven way to cultivate more compassion/understanding is through mindfulness practices. 

VII. Definite empathy no-nos

The biggest no-no when it comes to the usage of empathy is to not use it to make moral judgements.

While it’s easy to think of empathy as a tool to sharpen your moral compass, it in fact does the opposite. Because of empathy’s tendency to zoom in on where the spotlight is, it skews data and blocks good decision-making. It amplifies our tendency to respond more to people we identify with (”identifiable victim effect”). You may think that you are doing a great service to humanity when you gather forces to help your young neighbour pay for their cancer treatment. But perhaps your network and resources could have covered deworming treatment for thousands of children in Africa. In its worst form, empathy can even make you aggressive and cruel. It might be strange to think that empathy might be involved in the Russia-Ukraine war or Left vs Right politics or how some Americans feel about China after the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

VIII. If I can’t use empathy to make decisions, what can I use instead?

Reason, Rational thinking, Logic.

Compassionate empathy, too, can help. If your child is scared of spiders, you don’t have to feel the fear to be able to help them. You just have to understand what they are going through to be able to help.

IX. Final words

The main thing to remember about empathy is that it is a deeply biassed emotion. And if you’re not careful, it can overwhelm you. Even mental health professionals are not resistant to empathy’s downsides. Often, therapists experience vicarious trauma which leads to them quitting their practice. A second thing to remember is that correlation is not causation. What this means in the context of empathy is that, if something good that happened was helped by empathy, that does not mean that it would not have happened without empathy. In many cases, empathy is an effect, not the cause of why something went well.

We don’t just have the capacity to feel, we also have the capacity to understand. The two functions are thankfully not entangled in our brain, they are separated enough for us to make the necessary distinctions. While acting from understanding cannot guarantee good always, it’s more likely to result in good things than when you act from feeling.

People everywhere nowadays are asked to have more empathy in the name of wellbeing and humanity. Not only is it not helping the cause that they think it is helping, it’s also causing massive empathy fatigue. People are tired of trying to empathise with everybody all the time. To all such victims of empathy, I’d like to say, “Quit striving for a perfect score on empathy, both you and the world are going to be better off for it!”