When we were kids, one universal maxim was hammered into our minds: the Golden Rule. Treat others how you would want to be treated.
In the simple world of playgrounds and snacktime, it was an effective starter pack for being a good person. Or, at the very least, it gave kids a reason to rethink their career as a bully.
The Golden Rule is often linked to empathy, but in a much more complicated, grown-up world, our reliance on empathy and the Golden Rule is limiting.
To begin, what exactly is empathy? Empathy is defined as being able to feel what another person feels and “step into their shoes.”
Essentially, it’s a mirror for emotions. However, having empathy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good, kind or moral. You can care about people without empathy. You can love people without empathy. You can act without empathy.
For one, you don’t have to feel the same emotions to logically understand what someone is going through.
People who have low empathy are still capable of sympathy — rather than feeling how someone feels, they can see it and think it. We all have the intellectual capacity to make connections between our own experiences and others’ emotions. We all have the capacity to know when someone is upset and attempt to understand why.
Sometimes, sympathy is better than empathy. It would be presumptuous to say you can actually empathize with anyone who has been through a traumatic experience that you have not gone through. Plus, the way we process our emotions is very personal — empathy only deals with reflecting perceived pain, and our perceptions are often not reality.
Sympathy is also more of an active response than empathy. Sympathy means seeking to understand how the other person is feeling. Empathy is automatic and passive, and it’s based on how your brain is wired rather than how you interact with others.
A misconception of empathy is that it automatically makes you a good person who does good deeds. Though the Golden Rule is conflated with empathy, empathy doesn’t actually include any action or treatment of others. Compassion does.
Empathy means suffering with the affected — the equivalent of seeing someone drowning and jumping into the ocean with them. Compassion, on the other hand, means taking a less immersive route and, more importantly, taking action. It means throwing the drowning person a lifesaver and pulling them up.
Like sympathy, compassion is active. It is a choice. Sympathy and compassion can exist without empathy. You choose the way you respond to a situation. For example, you can feel empathy and still be a jerk, or you can not feel it and still be compassionate and considerate.
So, now that we’ve established how you can care and act without empathy, let’s discuss how emotional empathy can be limiting.
Our society tends to focus on the idea that the way we treat others is reliant on how we feel and are affected by it. It’s an individualistic take.
You should care about other people simply because it’s right and it creates a healthy community. The basis of how you treat others should not be on your own feelings. In fact, focusing on yourself and empathizing with those close to you — at an extreme — can enable the dehumanization of and aggression toward outsiders.
Additionally, while empathy can be a motivator for helping friends and family, it doesn’t work as well on a larger scale. Psychologist Paul Bloom argues in his book “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion” that empathy is too individual-centric to the victim and not the empathizer.
Studies have shown there is an emotional plateau when it comes to empathizing. Hearing an individual’s heart-wrenching story might compel you to act on your empathy, but we often don’t have the capacity to fully process large-scale tragedies and abstract death tolls.
This leads to the prioritization of individuals you are familiar with over large groups of people you don’t know or who are outside of your social bubble. Blow up the proportions, and you’re left with an unfair distribution of resources and awareness.
Bloom also points out how empathy can amplify the effects of implicit bias. You can feel empathy in different ways about different people. There can thus be, say, a racial bias in how you empathize with and perceive someone else’s pain.
Notably, in the medical field, doctors have long been documented for undertreating pain in patients of color and exhibiting more empathy for white patients.
Empathy can backfire in many situations because your immediate emotional response is not always correct or just. More often than not, it is informed by your experiences, opinions and prejudices. Reliance on empathy then translates into a flawed treatment of others. Not exactly the Golden Rule we expected, right?
We cannot and should not allow empathy to be key in our decision making. We can’t let it dictate how we treat others. As we tackle larger social and human rights issues, it’s especially important to instead practice compassion, self-awareness and moral responsibility.
