Why empathy is bad

The subjects were prepared for the interview in one of two ways. Half were told, “While you are listening to this interview, try to take an objective perspective toward what is described. Try not to get caught up in how the child who is interviewed feels; just remain objective and detached.” That was the so-called low-empathy condition. In the high-empathy condition, subjects were told, “Try to imagine how the child who is interviewed feels about what has happened and how it has affected this child’s life. Try to feel the full impact of what this child has been through and how he or she feels as a result.”

Then, everyone heard the same interview, which was from a (not real) “very brave, bright 10-year-old” named Sheri Summers. Her painful illness was explained in detail, and after they heard about it the subjects were asked whether they would move Sheri up the wait list, past the other terminally ill kids who were viewed as higher priority, who would have to wait longer to enjoy the Quality Life Foundation’s offerings as a result. “The effect was strong,” writes the Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, describing the experiment in his new book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. “Three-quarters of the subjects in the high-empathy condition wanted to move her up, as compared to one-third in the low-empathy condition. Empathy’s effects, then, weren’t in the direction of increasing an interest in justice. Rather, they increased special concern for the target of the empathy, despite the cost to others.”

It would be hard to find a single study that better explains the thesis of Bloom’s book. We are told that there is no such thing as too much empathy, that politicians and policy makers and religious leaders and community activists and everyone else should feel more empathetic. Bloom doesn’t buy it — empathy has certain pernicious effects, he argues, and often leads to results like the one demonstrated by Baton’s experiment: good-hearted people actively making the world worse. Empathy is not an accurate moral signpost, let alone a good basis for policy-making.