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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, but it is a key factor in compassion, which involves an actual desire to help.
Research shows that a person’s degree of empathy factors into whether they will act for the good of another or for the common good. For example, people who show more concern for those at greatest risk from the coronavirus are more likely to practice social distancing, according to research done during the first year of the pandemic.
But empathy is too hard for a lot of folks, scientists concluded in a 2019 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
“There is a common assumption that people stifle feelings of empathy because they could be depressing or costly, such as making donations to charity,” said C. Daryl Cameron, PhD, a professor of psychology at Penn State University who led that pre-pandemic study. “But we found that people primarily just don’t want to make the mental effort to feel empathy toward…
