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Why is Empathy So Hard?
Psychologists explain why people don’t want to care, while those most vulnerable to Covid plea that we would
One thing we all seem to agree on: We’re tired of pandemic prevention measures. Yet we remain bitterly divided over our willingness to nonetheless make individual efforts to help protect our fellow humans, particularly the most vulnerable, from the deadliest disease outbreak in more than a century. As a society, we seem to have lost perspective on the importance of public health, on what some philosophers view as a moral obligation to inconvenience ourselves for the greater good.
We seem to have lost our collective empathy. Or maybe we never had much.
In a survey of 2,000 Americans last summer, 73% said society would be better off if people were more empathetic, and 42% said empathy had declined in the past year.
Meanwhile, psychologists are beginning to explain the apparently widespread aversion to empathy: Many people are afraid or unwilling to care, because it might mean having to do something.
What is empathy?
Empathy is defined as understanding the feelings of others and looking at things from their perspective. Empathy does not by itself necessarily involve taking helpful action…
