There is an interesting book "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion" (2016)
written by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. This book talks about problems, which can occur in society due to too much empathy. It also suggests using alternatives such as rational compassion instead of empathy.
Book Summary
Issues with Empathy
The author suggests that empathy can be biased, prejudiced, innumerate, overly emotional, and sometimes selfish. Indeed, there are some studies about people being able to empathize more with others of the same race, gender, and/or being in the same social situation as they are. Dr. Bloom calls empathy an emotional response that allows humans to "feel" what other people might feel. The author suggests not to be confused with sympathy, which is feeling for someone, rather than feeling with others. The biggest issue with empathy, which Dr. Bloom states is that empathy is based on emotions, not logic, and, as a result, it doesn’t always judge fairly.
The book provides an argument against empathy in today’s world. The author states that it is too much of attention to empathy and empathy development in the modern world. For example, nurses and doctors are being trained to be empathetic toward their patients. Dr. Bloom states how empathy can be a problem for a doctor, who would not be able to be fully rational and make the best decisions if would feel too much of a patient's feelings or pain. After becoming empathic toward a patient's pain, such a doctor would need help for him/herself and instead of one helpless person, we would get two.
In summary, a reader can go away with the following three takeaways:
Empathy is biased
Empathy can lead one to make poor choices
Alternative: rational compassion can help one make better decisions than empathy
Rational Compassion
Dr. Bloom suggests that empathy motivates people to do good things toward others due to personal distress. He then offers better, less selfish reasons to help others: rational compassion. There is an example: a child is drowning in a river. Answering the question of what motivates a person to jump into the river and save a child, it could be not empathy but just the right thing to do. Dr. Bloom highlights that one does not have to "feel" the desire to help or fear for a child's life in order to help him. Moreover, emotions might only cause additional challenges. The author suggests not to stop helping people, but start helping people more logically. "Instead of going with our gut, we should think first to make the best decisions". Dr. Bloom defines compassion as “simply caring for people, wanting them to thrive” and recommends a depersonalized approach to helping others that focuses more on cost-benefit analysis. It creates a terminology: "rational compassion." Dr. Blooms believes that rational compassion is very important in the modern world. He suggests that if political and social policymakers were able to be more rationally compassionate instead of attempting of being empathetic, it would teach people to help more people and do it without bias.
My thoughts about the book
A need for terminology agreement
The topic of empathy is widely discussed and explored across different fields of study including medical, biology, psychological, education, design, marketing, business, game design, and human-computer interaction fields. Unfortunately, not always the terminology is aligned across these fields, which causes understanding challenges. For example, medical, biology, and psychology fields usually identify three aspects (or dimensions) of empathy (affective, cognitive, and behavioral) (Jeffrey, 2016; Preston and de Waal, 2002) and consider empathy more comprehensive than compassion. In particular: "a broad concept of empathy, being more complex and nuanced than compassion, is a more relevant and useful construct for clinical practice, medical research, and education." They define compassion (a word derived from the Latin meaning "to suffer with") as "deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it". This definition is close to how Dr. Bloom defines compassion. However, at the same time, Jeffrey (2016) adds that "compassion does not necessarily involves cognitive understanding." This contradicts the ideas of Dr. Bloom. However, neuroscience and neuropsychology, echos the terminology used by Dr. Bloom (Preckel et al., 2018). Design and technology research fields while talking about empathy tend to cite different psychologists with different definitions, which creates more confusion.
To avoid the "challenges of translation" I would suggest using the following mapping of the terminology:
empathy (according to Bloom's definition) = overly high level of affective empathy or emotional contagion
rational compassion (according to Bloom's definition) = cognitive empathy followed by an appropriate behavioral response (behavioral empathy)
But this mapping is very simplified. Even though I made an attempt to draw the parallels in terminology, I feel a little too narrow in this dualistic space created by Dr. Bloom. There are so many more questions about the connections between the affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of empathy (whatever we call it) and its motivations.
Agreement on the matter
After agreeing with the terminology, we can discuss the matter of the research findings. In fact, there were similar findings in my research. I was working with children on exploring how they would interact with different VR characters while playing our VR Empathy Game. Children with high emotional and social engagement were not able to handle the emotions of the VR Characters and asked to stop the game. In contrast, children who expressed some level of emotional distance along with high social engagement were able to help the game characters and finish the game successfully. Our findings support the point of view of Dr. Bloom, that excess emotional contagion (he calls it empathy) can cause problems.
Measuring Empathy
I am not a neuroscientist myself and I cannot claim that I am able to filter the quality papers and research opinions well on this topic, but my information comes from my literature review exercise as well as conversations with my neuroscience colleagues. I learned that several studies on measuring empathy and compassion (Preckel et al., 2018) were done with fMRI. These studies used terminology aligned with Bloom's terminology. However, this research is still only in the exploration phase and does not yet have any mathematical models or clear connections between the differentiation of empathy and compassion and how it looks on the brain map. Nowadays, it is yet only suggestions and can be considered on the hypothesis level. It means we can see the difference in fMRI pictures, but still cannot explain, justify, or draw models on that yet.
Additional notes
The book "Against Empathy" discussed compassion as a strong and fair motivation to right prosocial actions towards other people without mixing this motivation with personal emotional biases. However, it seems like not all prosocial behavior must be motivated by either empathy or compassion. I see the space for prosocial behavior done based on good habits learned from parents, high morals and values, or just a feeling of appropriateness to the moment. For instance, this book gives an example of a drowning child and a person jumping into the water to save a child's life. Why does motivation need to come from empathy or compassion necessarily instead of just being the sense of what is right to do at the moment? This is a rather open question and might lead to more discussions: what is the place for empathy and what is the place for compassion? Whatever discussion will be awakened, I encourage sides to agree with terminology first before starting any argumentation.
References:
Paul Bloom. (2005). Against Empathy.
Jeffrey, D. (2016). Empathy, sympathy and compassion in healthcare: Is there a problem? Is there a difference? Does it matter? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 109(12), 446–452. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076816680120
Preckel, K., Kanske, P., & Singer, T. (2018). On the interaction of social affect and cognition: empathy, compassion and theory of mind. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 19, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.07.010
Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1–20.
Muravevskaia, E., & Gardner-McCune, C. (2023). Designing a Virtual Reality Empathy Game framework to create empathic experiences for children. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2022.100561
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy
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