this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Most people I know lack empathy for things like this. Even people I’ve grown up with my whole life.
So that raises the question, is it something you’re inherently born with? As I don’t think I chose to be this way, but here we are. I find it interesting to think about.
Empathy is definitely a learned trait that develops slowly. Children generally start off treating life as if it has a preset plot and other people as sort of NPCs or characters in their life. Realising other people and even animals experience things at all should happen at some point. And realising their experiences are different again later. But it's a complicated process and may even fail.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/smart-parenting-smarter-kids/201905/how-children-develop-empathy looked pretty good from a quick search. Otherwise that's just my memory from basic psychology classes.
Thanks for the response. I guess some people still think everybody else is an NPC into later life lol.
I’ll have a read of that link over the weekend so thanks for sharing.
getting beyond ape-brain requires a lot of learning and practice. like any skill.
depends on your genetics and the environment of the womb, brains are pretty complicated and behaviour is affected a lot by that kind of stuff. there exist people who mostly or entirely lack empathy after being born and there are people who are ultraempathetic, and there's a ton in between.
there's also a difference between "cognitive empathy" (the ability to recognize others' emotions) and "affective empathy" (how you emotionally respond to your perception of others' emotions). something also associated with empathy is the ability to distinguish between yourself and others, i.e. how well you can put yourself in their shoes rather than think of their experience from your own perspective.
a lot of people suck at the last one, which is bad because even if you have positive affective empathy and can share others' emotions, you still may not be able to really grasp how they feel and you'll probably think that they're overreacting or underreacting or reacting wrong because you can't imagine yourself acting the same way if you experienced the same thing. many people are subconsciously sexist or racist because they see someone dealing with casual sexism and racism and think it's not that bad, just brush it off, but they can't relate at all because they don't have the same set of life experiences and same psychology as other people. to them it's "i wouldn't react that way if someone did that to me, so you shouldn't either".
it's usual for humans to have enough empathy to survive as a pack/society at least, but it's also usual for humans to not have a mood disorder and it's usual for humans to have 5 toes on each foot. in some "societies" like american capitalism, less affective empathy is usually advantageous with high cognitive empathy, and more affective empathy is usually a disadvantage, which is kind of the opposite trend in humans.
a lot of the times when it seems someone lacks empathy, they either don't express their empathy in typical ways, or conditions (like culture) require them to silence it to be successful. but they could also just lack affective empathy, or have dissonant empathy (affective empathy entailing an opposite emotional response than what you would expect), both of which are typical anti-social and narcissistic traits.
Thank you for all this, it’s been very informative.
It does raise a few more questions, but it’s cool if you don’t have time to answer.
What kind of empathy would it be when one cries at films due to the story. Whether it be something bad happening to somebody or even tears of joy for their success.
How does one know if there empathy for someone else is from your own perspective vs trying to see it from someone else’s?
Like if I’ve never been homeless but i wholeheartedly can understand and see how one might end up there though choices, or even no fault of their own.