Lifted From the Comments

On this post, Jeff R. writes

The uncharitable view of liberal empathy is that humans did not evolve to feel empathy in order to solve problems; empathy exists because it helped our ancestors build and strengthen coalitions and outcompete other coalitions to ascend the status hierarchies of their tribal/feudal world.

There are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (being able to gauge others’ thoughts or perspectives) and affective empathy (being able to gauge others’ emotions and attitudes). Cognitive empathy helps us guess what our adversaries are thinking and perhaps anticipate their actions; it is this capacity which made Robert E. Lee a great military leader and Boris Spassky a great chess player. It has tremendous value in the modern economy for entrepreneurs and managers, helping them predict what new products and services consumers (many of whom will have much different tastes and preferences from their own) might want to buy and how much they’d be willing to pay for them.

Affective empathy isn’t actually very useful for solving problems of any real complexity. It’s primary usefulness is enhancing group cohesion. We praise people who demonstrate affective empathy merely because we recognize that they’d make a good and loyal ally, and we want to signal to our existing allies that they should empathize more with us. Affective empathy is thus reduced to a crude Machiavellian tool for attaining (and retaining) power and social status. Liberals have much of this latter kind of empathy and somewhat less of the former.

One might think that we would evolve low-cost ways to signal affective empathy. For example, putting a political bumper sticker on your car is cheaper than making a large donation to charity.

5 thoughts on “Lifted From the Comments

  1. I should add that that last paragraph is indeed uncharitable and probably inaccurate as a result; it ignores the fact that affective empathy helps limit conflict both within groups and between groups. My main point was simply that cognitive empathy is, in my mind, a more useful trait for modern homo sapiens and that I do not think it is this kind of empathy which is animating modern liberals. I probably overstated things a bit, using language like “crude, Machiavellian tool for retaining power.”

  2. “The uncharitable view of liberal empathy is that humans did not evolve to feel empathy in order to solve problems”

    My dear Jeff, you must be a single man.

    Of course empathy did not evolve to solve problems. Have you not noticed that solving a problem at hand instead of providing emotional support (and allowing the problem to worsen) often has negative consequences for your romantic entanglements?

    I want you to imagine your last attempt to explain to a liberal how minimum wage laws increase unemployment among the poor. I’m sure you’ve had it. I’m sure to response to your carefully worded arguments was neither superior logic nor superior data, but appeals to empathy and social position. I care so much, you don’t care, I am popular, you are unpopular, etc. You talked past each other, because their numeracy is at the one-two-many level, and there is a good chance that your affective communication abilities are at a similar level.

    To you, “minimum wage” is a rule people work around. To them, it is a statement of feelings, no more and no less.

    Affective empathy is indeed great at creating group cohesion. Those who had more of it were more likely to survive. Like our strength or capacity to reason, it is entirely amoral. All of them are merely tool that give us mastery over our surroundings.

    Think of Mike Tyson. He has the intelligence of an elementary school child, and not a bright one at that. However, he is a physical genius. His mind is finely tuned to predict the movements of others, and his body is supremely capable of both speed and strength. We may both have twice his IQ, but it would not count in the ring.

    It is similar with the liberals. Perhaps they are not good at reason, perhaps they are not good at solving problems, perhaps all they can do is form groups.

    Our last election was between a man of great quantitative intelligence, but wooden delivery, and another man whose educational and professional track record shows no evidence of mathematical awareness beyond early high school. He does, however, have movie-star looks, movie-star delivery, and a movie-star genius in interpreting and using all the tiny microexpressions of power, authority, empathy and sincerity.

    As you may have noticed, the man who could do math lost.

    We may not like the progressives. We may mock their inability to do math, their blindness to that which is not in front of them making them emote, their inability to consider great diffuse losses against small concentrated gains, their fecklessness at solving problems.

    But we must keep in mind that they are beating us, and beating us good and hard.

    • I don’t disagree with a word of that. Someone (I don’t think it was you) in that other thread suggested that high levels empathy may help people solve problems by allowing them to guess how other people will react/behave in response to various stimuli, like changes in public policy. My comment was aimed at adding some nuance to that assertion; namely the distinction between different kinds of empathy.

  3. “One might think that we would evolve low-cost ways to signal affective empathy.” Absolutely, and one might also think this could be useful to people other than liberals/progressives, and in contexts other than government and politics. Anyone who’s been involved in actively selling stuff person-to-person in a market environment is (or should be) aware that “liking” is one of the key principles in persuading others to buy. (If you take Robert Cialdini’s work as gospel here, the others are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, and scarcity.) This is why, for example, many businesspeople send out Christmas or other holiday cards to their customers, or make donations to their customers’ favorite charities–it’s a cheap way to signal “I like you, and feel the same way you do” that can potentially lead to large returns.

  4. I think the premise of this post is wrong: most studies showing that average liberals have more empathy use the davis interpersonal reactivity index, which tests both affective and cognative empathy. Is there any evidence that liberals specialize only in the former?

    The post also wrongly defines cognative empathy, the hallmarks of which are the ability to fantasize and assume another’s perspective, as the only element of empathy useful for predicting how other people will react and behave. I have never heard that, and think they are both useful. I’m not a shrink, though, and could be missing some studies.

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