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I think we re much better people when we don t succumb to the temptation to feel deeply towards some people, but rather we make our political decisions based on cost-benefit reasoning, what will help the most people.
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Welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Professor Paul Bloom.
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He s a professor at Yale and author of many fascinating books, including the one we ll be talking about today, Against Empathy.
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You heard me right.
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We re gonna talk about why one of our core emotional processes, namely empathy, actually does more harm than good, and why we evolved it in the first place.
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We ll also discuss the differences between empathy and sympathy, and why this all even matters in our decision-making processes,
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And if you or someone you know ends up getting locked down in their relationships, ends up forsaking their own values for others, it may actually be because of an empathy disorder.
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Something tells me a few of you are gonna see some familiar symptoms here.
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So enjoy this one with Paul Bloom.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show,
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we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox where we discuss things like body language and reading body language, nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking, mentorship, influence, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, 233444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Paul Bloom.
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Well, Paul, thank you for joining us again here.
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Really, really interesting new book, Against Empathy.
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I thought this was gonna be one of those things where it s like, oh, the title s clever, but really, you re kind of for empathy, or only bad people are against empathy, and it s like, okay, you got me with the title.
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but it s actually, it s quite different in that you ve got a little bit of a qualm with this, and I think that s really interesting.
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You re probably the only person I ve ever heard of that has that.
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So tell us a little bit about what empathy is and why many people view it as positive, and moreover, why you may not.
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So first, thanks for having me back.
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It s good to talk with you again.
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I really am against empathy, but the thing to clarify is that people use the term empathy in different ways.
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So sometimes people use the term empathy to mean everything good and kind and moral, and I m not against that.
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This isn t one of those crazy pro-psychopathy books.
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The sense of empathy I m most interested in here is putting yourself in someone else s shoes, feeling their pain.
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Someone suffers, you feel their suffering.
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And there s an enormous amount of interest about this by philosophers and psychologists, and many people have argued it s the key to being a good person.
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But I argue that it isn t.
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I argue that empathy in this sense is biased.
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It s innumerate.
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It s irrational.
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It leads us to all sorts of moral mistakes.
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It s a catalyst for violence and cruelty.
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And we re much better off.
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So the subtitle is The Case for Rational Compassion.
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Combining rationality, a sense of the right thing to do, costs and benefits and so on, with compassion, kindness towards others.
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Can we do a little quick overview of why this is actually bad?
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Because it seems like I should then be like, so do you hate kittens too?
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What s your problem, Paul?
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Come on.
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Yeah, I mean, my next book will be against kittens and against world peace and the whole series.
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Basically, if you feel other people s pain, it motivates you to want to help them.
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And in the short term, just one person around, that s great.
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But when you start using this as a way to direct policy and criminal justice and when to go to war, it has horrible consequences.
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So part of the problem is that the way empathy works is
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that we naturally feel the pain of those who are close to us.
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Our friends, our family, people who look like us, people in the same race, ethnicity, people who are attractive.
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Others, like people in faraway lands, people who are enemies, people who frighten us, people who disgust us, don t evoke our empathy.
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Empathy is silent.
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And because of this, empathy directs help in a fundamentally biased way.
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A second problem is empathy zooms in on one person and one specific person.
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So to the extent you worry about problems that will affect hundreds or thousands or millions of people in a statistical way, that s something that empathy doesn t speak to.
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One way I put it in my book is, it s because of empathy, we care more about a little girl stuck in a well than we do about the problem of climate change.
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because a little girl stuck in a well is gonna be immediate.
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We as humans maybe just sort of result to this tribal, tangible stuff that we can wrap our heads around, like, oh my gosh, this person who s sort of part of our greater community, nation, whatever, group here, is stuck in a well, and then it s like, oh man, 10,000 kids got sucked into a sinkhole in China, and you re like, ah, glad I m not in China.
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That s a great way to put it.
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Adam Smith said this in the 1700s.
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He said, you know, you tell somebody, an educated man of Europe,
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that the entire nation of China is destroyed.
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At the point, no man in Europe would ever know anybody in China.
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And he d say, God, that s a shame.
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That s just too bad.
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What a horrible world.
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And it ll go along his business.
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But you tell him it s a minor misfortune that will happen to himself or somebody he loves.
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Smith s example was he loses his little finger tomorrow.
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He ll freak out.
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And that s the way our emotions work.
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And for emotions, they re fine.
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It makes sense in an emotional level for me to care a lot more about my kid than about your kid or about some stranger.
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But as a guide to doing the right thing, it s horrible.
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Yeah, this actually makes a lot of sense because I think a lot of us tend to see this in black and white.
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I know I kind of did before I checked out this book.
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Even in stories that we see, empathy is a quality that the good guy in a story has, the hero.
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And no empathy tends to be associated with Lex Luthor type people who are trying to destroy everybody, destroy the planet.
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Any sort of good comic book villain, one of their trademark characteristics is no empathy.
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So we immediately think, well, I can t relate to that.
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and I like people having empathy for me, and I like to think I have empathy for other people, so empathy good, no empathy bad.
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Yeah, we associate people of feeling, people who have empathy, people who share the suffering of others, we associate that with being a good person.
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Both a good person if we meet these people in our everyday life, but also a good person as a political leader or as some sort of charismatic figure.
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Well, the cold-blooded utilitarian, a person who adds up the cost and benefits, is typically the villain.
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It s the Lex Luthor type.
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It s the Hannibal Lecter type.
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It s someone who s cold and too smart for their own good.
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In the real world, that s just bogus.
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It doesn t work that way.
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Often, it s the people of feelings, and particularly the people who elicit the feelings of others, who do terrible things.
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While it s the cold-blooded, calculating bureaucrat types who just care about people and want to do the right thing, but don t listen to their heart, that make the world such an immensely better place.
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I struggle with titles, and another title would be don t listen to your heart.
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Your gut feelings, your heart, your emotions have evolved for, as you put it, a simpler tribal circumstance, and it doesn t work as a moral guide.
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If we lack empathy, doesn t that in some ways make us worse?
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I mean, for example, shouldn t we actually feel bad for the person in the well and also for the people, the kids in China?
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I mean, I know you kind of hinted at this before.
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It leads to different policies that maybe are suboptimal because it has that primacy, that immediateness, that urgentness.
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Let s go into this a little bit because it seems like if I m listening to this right now, I m not totally convinced that empathy is bad.
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I m thinking maybe it s flawed and that we need more of it.
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two issues that your question raises.
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And one is, of course we should care about the kid in the well.
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Some poor schnook is in the well.
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You want to get the kid out.
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We should care about people suffering, where we want to be good people.
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But we shouldn t engage in empathic connection and so on, because that zooms us in on the kid.
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it makes us forget about everything else.
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So one concern that I think is sort of implicit in your question is, if we had no empathy, would we be monsters?
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Would we be just indifferent to other people?
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And if so, we might as well keep it.
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Even if it s biased and racist and innumerate, still it s better than nothing.
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But I think that s mistaken.
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One reason why I think it s mistaken is simply the data, which is they ve done so many studies now where you give empathy tests to people.
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And it turns out having low empathy
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Doesn t make you a bad person.
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There s no relationship between low empathy and bad behavior And there s actually some evidence that high empathy hampers people s good behavior Because you know how are you gonna help people if when you help people you re squirming in pain when you see him you re in vicarious suffering?
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So but you re right that you need something to replace empathy.
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And fortunately, we have a host of emotions and motivations.
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We have people have religious beliefs, political beliefs.
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They act because of anger, shame, guilt.
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The solution, the alternative that I m most caught up with is what you call compassion.
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Again, the words don t matter very much, but there s two very different psychological processes.
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One is empathy, where you feel the suffering of another person.
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The other one is compassion, where you care about another person, but you don t feel.
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their suffering.
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It turns out that these two activate different parts of the brain.
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You could train people through meditative practice to engage in compassion and this diminishes empathy and it makes people better people.
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So one mystery in my field has been why does mindfulness meditation not only have very
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as psychological and health benefits, but also seems to make people nicer and more willing to help.
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And one answer to this is it shuts down the empathic connection.
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So you could deal with somebody who s suffering and do it cheerfully and positively and happily because you yourself aren t suffering at the time.
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So it s a really important distinction to keep in mind.
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This kind of jibes a little bit with what you hear from nurses and doctors and things like that, where they feel a little bit for their patients, but it s kind of this almost academic
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empathy where they feel bad that you re in there with a broken leg, but they re not going, oh my gosh, this poor guy broke his leg.
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I need to go out and relax.
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And I can t look at blood for a week because it s so traumatizing.
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They re just like, yeah, that s a bummer.
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I m really glad that s not me.
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I feel bad that it s you.
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Let s tape it up or put some salve on it or whatever.
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And there are doctors and nurses and first responders who do feel deep empathic connection with the people who are suffering.
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They just don t keep their jobs for very long.
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Right, I m wondering, if you re an EMT, ER doctor, trauma surgeon, something like that, I d be curious to hear from you how you deal with this, because, Paul, there must be some sort of, maybe this is outside your wheelhouse, but there must be some sort of process, subconscious process where your brain goes,
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On the first day of medical school, you gotta dissect something, and you re going, oh man.
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And then the first day of real ER, you re going, oh man.
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After some point, your brain just goes, I guess I m gonna be seeing a lot of metal objects coming out through bloody skin, and I should probably just not have the exact same reaction every single time.
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So, something that ll never happen, they ll never get over their empathic response, but they typically don t make it to the inside of an ambulance.
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They don t go to medical school, they know better.
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Medical school and a lot of training inures you to some of this.
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You get used to it.
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You learn to distance yourself.
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And some people are successful at that.
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I mean, interestingly, you get inured and desensitized, but probably only for strangers.
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So the most experienced surgeon in the world, we wouldn t let him or her operate on their own child or their spouse or their best friend.
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Because you know that even though you shut off your empathy for strangers, the empathy would still be active.
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with regard to close kin.
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I mean I have a friend of mine who s a psychiatrist and I ve spoken to other surgeons and doctors and pediatric surgeons who deal with some really unpleasant stuff and what they say is they don t deal with their patients the way you and I would deal with somebody who s suffering.
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They deal with them, they care about them but they re mostly they re curious, they re interested.
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These are problems to be solved and that sounds awfully cold but the alternative would leave them unable to do their job properly.
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Right, interesting.
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So there s a process that they go through, the desensitization process, that seems like a natural evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, or even just a biological process, whereby if you re gonna be engaged in that kind of stuff, it s actually very human to see blood, gore, death, tragedy.
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It s maybe more rare that we live in an age, a recent age, where we avoid all of that on a personal level, 99% of us anyway.
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Yeah.
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I mean, the first law of psychology is habituation.
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You get used to things.
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You gradually, things that give you an intense response, they gradually get used to them and you habituate.
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And an animal that didn t get used to its environment, even unpleasant aspects of its environment, wouldn t do very well.
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So this is part of human nature, part of our evolved nature to be able to habituate.
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But some people do it better than others.
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There really is something almost unnatural seeing somebody else in pain.
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and saying, OK, that s a person in pain.
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I m not going to feel it.
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I m going to sort of step back from it.
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But this is why being a good person and being an effective doctor or therapist, it s why it s difficult.
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Not everybody can do it.
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Right, well, of course.
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I mean, my first thought is, oh, I just don t want to be dealing with that every day.
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I wonder if a lot of doctors think that they can t do it as well and they just get used to it.
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That s an interesting question, probably for another day.
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In your book, you mention, and this is super clever, empathy is like sugary soda.
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It s delicious and it s tempting, but it s bad for us.
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Is it only bad for us on that sort of macro level, that policy level, or is empathy bad for us in other ways that tend to be closer to home that we can maybe wrap our heads around?
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It s something I struggle with in the book because empathy could do good.
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There s all sorts of moral cases where empathy, feeling the pain of others, motivated somebody to do good.
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But the concern in my book is about morality and public policy and so on.
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And there s all sorts of other aspects of life.
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So one thing I make a point of saying early on, later on in the book is empathy is a wonderful source of pleasure.
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Being able to feel the joy of somebody else is terrific.
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One of the perks of having a kid is that you could take experiences that you felt a million times before, you ve had a million times before, like watching fireworks or eating a hot fudge sundae or a Hitchcock movie and experience them all over again through the eyes of your child.
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Reading novels, watching TV, watching movies, theater, all draw upon empathy.
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We get a kick out of feeling what it s like to be Anna Karenina or Walter White or Tony Soprano.
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And so empathy is a great source of pleasure.
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It plays an interesting role in intimate relationships, like between husband and wife or romantic partners, friends.
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It gets complicated.
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Most of the time, what we want from the people we care about isn t empathy.
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It s something else.
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If we re friends and you come to me and you re really anxious and you re panicking, you don t want me to panic.
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You don t want me to echo your feelings.
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I mean, now all of a sudden you came to me with one problem.
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Now you have two.
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You have yourself, you got me.
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What you want is me to say, Hey, calm down.
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You know, I m going to listen, take it easy.
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I care about you, but you don t want me to share your feelings.
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Same if you re depressed.
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If you re depressed, you don t want me to get depressed.
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You want me to cheer you up or deal with your sadness.
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I give you a hundred examples like that, where what we re looking for in these intimate relationships, isn t something just to share what we have, but to respond to it.
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Right, super, super interesting distinctions that I had never really thought about before.
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You also mentioned in the book there s a distinction between empathy and sympathy.
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Can we clarify that?
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Because that leads into what may be the same thing, but was unclear, or perhaps just more academic terms, which is cognitive versus emotional empathy, one being more useful than the other.
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So the terminology is a mess here.
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Some people say, you re not really against empathy, you re against sympathy.
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And other people say, no, sympathy is the opposite of empathy.
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So sympathy is sort of a very old school term from the 1700s from Adam Smith and David Hume.
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And they use it to mean what we now mean as empathy.
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So if I was writing this book in 1780, I d call it, again, sympathy.
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Right now, we use the term sympathy in sort of a narrower sense to refer to an emotional response to other people s suffering.
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So I feel a lot of sympathy for you if any bad happens.
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I don t like using the term as a synonym for empathy because it has a different meaning.
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For instance, empathy could refer to positive empathic responses.
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You re having your time of your life.
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I share your pleasure.
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Sympathy typically is only negative.
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Now, the other distinction you mentioned between empathy, what I m talking about, and sort of cognitive empathy is super important.
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So there s another sense of empathy, cognitive empathy.
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And again, forget about the terminology, just keep in mind, these are interestingly different things.
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Cognitive empathy is the ability to read other people s minds, not through telepathy, but through their facial expressions and what they say and what they do.
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And it s an extraordinarily powerful skill.
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My ability to make your life better, to understand you, to help you, rests critically on my ability to understand what you want, what you need, what you re thinking, what will hurt you.
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On the other hand, cognitive empathy isn t good and it isn t bad.
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It s amoral.
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It sounds like a skill, right?
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It s more like a set of skills.
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It s like a set of skills.
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It s like some people just call it social intelligence.
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And I like that phrase because it s not hard to see why intelligence is not a force for good.
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It s not a force for bad.
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It s a tool for whatever you want to use it for.
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So, if I want to make your life much better because I care for you, knowing what you want, knowing how you tick is great.
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On the other hand, suppose I want to make your life much worse because I m a bully or I m a psychopath or I m a con man or I m a torturer.
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Knowing how you tick is great.
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Cognitive empathy is the tool of the good person and it s also the tool of the psychopath.
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It reminds me of an earlier show we did with Maria Konnikova who wrote a book about con men.
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The Confidence Game, yeah.
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And one of the chief skill sets, I mean probably the number one with a bullet skill set that these guys were using was cognitive empathy in that they could get to know their victim really well, find out what makes them tick, figure out where all those buttons and switches are that will make them feel good when people are around them.
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And that was highly useful for these people to do really, really bad things.
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On the other hand, it s a really useful skill set for persuading children to learn and helping teams get along in large companies and leading wars of defense against a national enemy or whatever you want to call it.
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Looking at what we do at AOC boot camps and our workshops are essentially a master class in what sounds like cognitive empathy and the associated tools and associated skill sets, getting along with people,
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making them feel great about things they re achieving, leadership, mentorship, networking, persuasion, and influence.
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All of that stuff is what we teach at AOC, and debatably can all be used for horrible, horrible things if you really wanted to do it.
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Yeah, it sounds like you re teaching people skills, and cognitive empathy is a way of packaging people skills, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, all of that.
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And, you know, to use a nice phrase you used before, they re tools.
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The worst people in the world have high and powerful cognitive empathy.
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And this is why it s worth pulling apart different things.
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This is why it s more than just words.
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It s an important realization to know that on the one hand, there s this cognitive empathy, which is this amoral tool for good or for evil.
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Then separate from that, there s kindness and compassion.
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And I would argue as a third thing, there s empathy, feeling the suffering of others.
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You know, morality is complicated.
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But if you forget about these distinctions, you just get really confused.
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You start to say things like, oh, psychopaths have low empathy and low cognitive empathy and low emotional empathy, which is mistaken.
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A lot of psychopaths are very good at understanding people.
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They just don t care.
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That s, of course, super true.
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I mean, in fact, I know people like this, unfortunately.
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I know some people that are sociopaths or psychopaths, whatever the term is now.
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I think there s like, I don t know if those are interchangeable, that s sort of changing.
2
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But I know somebody who has definitely that disorder, I mean, diagnosed, and I m not just name-calling, but has really low cognitive empathy, so all of his scams and horrible manipulations are just kind of pathetic and don t work.
2
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It s a little comical because it s just like, so stupid.
2
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How would I ever believe that?
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Or why would I ever do that?
2
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But then the scary ones are the ones that are really, really good at this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I was reading a story a long time ago, probably on some site like Quora, where it was, what s the scariest thing you ve ever seen?
2
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And a prison worker had written about this really kind old man who was in jail and
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Everybody thought that he was innocent, and he protested his innocence, and he had all these friends, and everyone loved him.
2
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The violent guys loved him, and the executives at the prison, you know, the warden liked him, and all the guards liked him.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they caught him on camera, and he s just this sweet, portly old guy, right?
2
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And he s looking at one of the guards, and he s like, thanks so much, John, you have a great holiday.
2
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And then the guard turns around, and they show the look on this guy s face, and he just,
2
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contorts into this absolute monster.
2
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And they had figured out, and they went over other incidents in the prison after that.
2
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This is when they were doing an investigation of just somebody he had killed.
2
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I mean, this guy was a virtual Hannibal Lecter, convincing people to commit suicide, killing other people.
2
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And the reason he was in jail was because he worked, and this is so scary, at a hospital as a nurse
2
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where he had purposely killed hundreds or over a hundred people that they figured out were him.
2
SPEAKER_01
Imagine all the other deaths that he was slick enough to get away with and that s why he was in prison and it was just like this hospital s death rate was through the roof and they finally figured out he was murdering the patients.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah I mean it s important you talk about sociopaths and psychopaths and
2
SPEAKER_03
Actually, it s strange.
2
SPEAKER_03
Sociopath is sort of often a politically correct term.
2
SPEAKER_03
But, you know, you could call psychopaths whatever.
2
SPEAKER_03
They re not easily offended.
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SPEAKER_03
They re not going to care anyway.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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The term was coined because people wanted to draw attention to the social factors involved.
2
SPEAKER_03
But it s just a different way of talking about the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_03
But what s important to realize is that the brain, the mind is complicated.
2
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It has several different parts.
2
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And the parts work together in interesting ways.
2
SPEAKER_03
And your story of this old guy is a nice illustration that the part of the brain that understands other people and what they do is separate from the part of the brain that makes you care about other people.
2
SPEAKER_03
Big point of my book, of course, is to argue against empathy, to say this is really bad.
2
SPEAKER_03
But another agenda I have is to get people to realize that morality is complicated.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it s not simply, oh, just do the right thing.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it s not simply trust your emotions, but it s to appreciate there s different forces inside your head pushing you in different ways.
2
SPEAKER_03
And often what feels right isn t right.
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SPEAKER_01
I love some of these really simple but deep insights.
2
SPEAKER_01
For example, the best and worst people in the world have high cognitive empathy and that part of your brain that says you should do the right thing because you feel what others feel is not even in the same sort of neighborhood, subdivision of your brain that says you understand what makes people tick.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that in itself is a little scary because it seems like, and this is probably just a part of my empathy talking, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It seems like the part of your brain that says, I know how people tick and I can use that to my advantage in an ideal world, inextricably linked from the part that says that you should only use that power for good.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like a super villain.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just like, what the heck, man?
2
SPEAKER_01
You can lift heavy buildings and shoot lasers and you re gonna use it to blow stuff up and make money?
2
SPEAKER_01
Come on.
2
SPEAKER_03
There are interesting links.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think on the whole, even taking my whatever we said, if I could switch a dial and make everybody smarter and more socially intelligent, I would, because I think the benefits would away the costs.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think that there s a lot of evidence that high IQ in general and good social intelligence in particular tends to make people more cooperative and better in part because if their intentions are good,
2
SPEAKER_03
they re better able to project in the future and see the benefits of cooperation.
2
SPEAKER_03
A lot of people get into big trouble in their life, not even because they re bad souls, but because they re just not wise enough to see the ramifications of their actions.
2
SPEAKER_03
So, you know, in general, if I could snap my fingers and give people more intelligence and better self-control, I think it would make the world a much better place, even though it s true that we d still be left with some supervillains who now are very smart and have excellent self-control.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, hopefully we d be able to solve that problem with all of our intelligence that we have left over.
2
SPEAKER_01
Empathy itself is kind of a buzzword.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s sort of recently become the diagnosis for bullying, the diagnosis for prescription for bullying, inequality, violence, discrimination, but it also seems to be
2
SPEAKER_01
The lack of it is the cause and the prescription, the solution is more of it, more empathy.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it sounds like you disagree with that.
2
SPEAKER_03
I do disagree.
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, you see this in the current political debates and political situation where you often see empathy at its worst.
2
SPEAKER_03
You see it as a tool that makes people worse people.
2
SPEAKER_03
Take debates about immigration or take issues about hatred towards certain ethnic groups, where a lot of this is driven by, not by this evilness in our hearts or this meanness in our hearts, but rather by empathy.
2
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It s just not empathy for the other guy.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s empathy for our family, our friends, people in our community, people we feel are victims of crime due to some ethnic group or some immigrant, people who we re worried that they ll lose their job.
2
SPEAKER_03
When somebody comes in who s a demagogue and wants to direct hate against some group,
2
SPEAKER_03
They ll typically do this, and this is like from Hitler on down, by talking about victims, by getting you to feel intensely for victims, particularly those who look like you, who are women, who you see as vulnerable, as kind, and then use your empathy towards the victims to energize hatred towards another group.
2
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I think we re much better people.
2
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when we don t succumb to the temptation to feel deeply towards some people, but rather we make our political decisions based on cost-benefit reasoning, what will help the most people.
2
SPEAKER_03
As we re talking about this, there s more and more concern about the situation in Syria, more and more films and videos of suffering children.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I don t have the foggiest idea what to do in this situation, what the right thing is to do.
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SPEAKER_03
But what I do know is that we shouldn t let pictures of crying injured children to motivate us into a
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full-scale military attack just because we got to do something.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, maybe some military intervention is right, maybe it s wrong, but the argument would have to be made based on what effects it would have and not by showing you pictures and QuickTime videos.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it seems like we only see the one side of the empathy, and the statistics are kind of maybe what we need to look at, but statistics don t really evoke emotional responses in most of us.
3
SPEAKER_01
So to say, well, if we do this military strike, we re gonna kill thousands of civilians, and people might go, but the children in that school, there s like a dozen of them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you re thinking, yes, exactly, there s only a dozen, but we have a video coming through from the teacher s cell phone.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, you re thinking, oh, I see where this is going.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell us about the furlough program.
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SPEAKER_01
That was also a really good example of only seeing one side of empathy here, kind of the reverse example.
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SPEAKER_00
Your older listeners and viewers will be familiar to them.
3
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But Michael Dukakis, the then governor of Massachusetts, when he was running for president, it came out during the primaries and during the general election that as governor, he had a furlough program where prisoners were released from prison for periods of time.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Willie Horton, a large African-American man, was released on furlough, and he went on to rape somebody and assault somebody else.
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And this was considered to be an immense embarrassment for Dukakis, a huge mistake.
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I m not sure if it cost him the election.
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I m not sure why we didn t have a President Dukakis, but it sure as hell didn t help.
3
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The interesting thing, though, his opponent, I think George Bush at the time, put up giant pictures of Willie Horton and tried to associate Michael Dukakis with this murderer and this rapist who went free.
3
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It turned out though that analyses at the time and later on found the furlough program actually helped.
3
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Because the furlough program was in place, there were fewer people being murdered or assaulted or raped than without the furlough program.
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Nobody cares.
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When you see this image of somebody who s very frightening, then you feel tremendous empathy for the people that he assaulted.
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It s a very powerful emotional argument that leaves us blind to the statistics.
3
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And I think that when we succumb to this, we re worse people.
3
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And it s no accident, by the way, that there the aggressor was an African-American man who most of the people voting would not naturally feel empathy for.
3
SPEAKER_00
Statistics could be unbiased and ignore race, but empathy can t.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, right.
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It is inherently subject to whatever bias you have in your brain about that particular group, positive or negative.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the fans of empathy, and there are quite a few, say it s like a spotlight.
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And it is.
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It s like there s darkness and then the spotlight zooms me in on you.
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You re in pain, empathy zooms me in on you.
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And any good stuff that empathy does is because of its spotlight nature.
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But because it s a spotlight, it has a narrow focus.
3
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So there s all the psychological studies finding that we care more about one kid
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than aid kits, because you can feel empathy for one, you can t feel empathy for aid.
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SPEAKER_00
And also it points to where you direct it towards.
3
SPEAKER_00
So to the extent you have racial biases, ethnic biases, sexist biases, empathy is going to follow the focus of your biases.
3
SPEAKER_01
What about this trendy concept of mirror neurons and empathy?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are those two things related?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s a lot of talk about mirror neurons lately.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, mirror neurons are quite the thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think they re starting to fade now.
3
SPEAKER_00
It used to be that whenever you get into a discussion of anything online, it s like sooner or later people mention Hitler.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, sooner or later people just mention mirror neurons.
3
SPEAKER_00
Have you thought about mirror neurons?
3
SPEAKER_00
Mirror neurons are actually a really cool discovery in macaques, a type of primate.
3
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where neurons that are involved in the monkey s own action also are active when they observe the same action by other people, other monkeys or other people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s really cool.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so it might be involved in empathy.
3
SPEAKER_00
But there are some problems with the theory of mirror neurons.
3
SPEAKER_00
So one big problem
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is pointed out in a wonderful book by Greg Hickok called The Myth of Mirror Neurons.
3
SPEAKER_00
One problem is that mirror neurons, which macaques have, you can t really be enough for empathy because macaques don t have any empathy.
3
SPEAKER_00
So everybody says, oh, you need mirror neurons.
3
SPEAKER_00
Mirror neurons are a root of language and consciousness.
3
SPEAKER_00
and social capacities, but they show up in animals that don t have much of any of these things.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they might be part of the story, but they aren t the whole story.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s also sort of a time shift when it comes to this stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if I m using that term correctly, but it seems like achieving long-term goals in society often requires going through short-term pain.
3
SPEAKER_01
that pain could be a suspension of empathy and it kinda looks like we re talking about that when it comes to policy like it s funny his politicians talk about this all the time like well there s gonna be a war but it s gonna make the country a freer place and we kinda have no problem with that sometimes and yet when it comes to
3
SPEAKER_01
enforcing any policy that rational or irrational.
3
SPEAKER_01
The first thing that a lot of leaders go to is our empathy, probably because it s so effective.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So suppose some company is in trouble.
3
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Should you bail it out?
3
SPEAKER_00
Should the government just bail it out?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s all sorts of arguments by both liberals and conservatives say no.
3
SPEAKER_00
Conservatives are concerned with a free market and the government not playing favorites.
3
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Liberals are concerned about corporate welfare, where the government moves in to help big corporations while not focusing on other important priorities.
3
SPEAKER_00
But the argument for helping is always empathy, which is, but these people are going to lose their jobs.
3
SPEAKER_00
We can help them.
3
SPEAKER_00
We can immediately solve their problems.
3
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes to be a good person or a good politician or to have good policies, there s short-term suffering.
3
SPEAKER_00
that people have to experience in order for long-term goals.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here s an everyday example, which is being a parent.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you re a parent of a kid and your kid is like,
3
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really upset because he has a lot of homework to do or he wants to go to a party and he can t.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not actually a good parent who says, OK, I m going to make you happy now.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m going to make your pain go away.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll do your homework for you.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, go to whatever party you want.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, I ll give you some money for marijuana, whatever you want.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m here for you.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not perfect parenting.
3
SPEAKER_00
Perfect parenting is sometimes saying this is going to be bad news for you, kid, but I m not going to let you go to a party tonight.
3
SPEAKER_00
And perfect parenting is not only
3
SPEAKER_00
enduring the short-term suffering of your kids sometimes, and this is causing it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s saying, I got some bad news for you and causing pain.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think being a good friend, being a good romantic partner, this all comes into it in that way.
3
SPEAKER_00
Any good policy, to go back to what you re talking about, any good policy
3
SPEAKER_00
affirmative action, against affirmative action, gun control, against gun control, whatever, is always going to have winners and losers.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s always going to be people for any global policy will suffer as a result of your policy.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are no exceptions.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are no choices where everybody will benefit.
3
SPEAKER_00
And being a good leader and a good politician requires appreciating that.
3
SPEAKER_01
The idea brought up forward here that we don t have positive empathy was very, very surprising for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I d never thought about this, but if someone wins the lottery, I don t really empathize.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t feel their pleasure.
3
SPEAKER_01
It only works in one direction somehow.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why is that?
3
SPEAKER_00
This is Adam Smith.
3
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Adam Smith talks about empathy, he calls it sympathy, empathy in the course of intimate relationships.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he is such a smart guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s this kind of repressed Scotsman.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m kind of a repressed Canadian.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I have this sort of chemistry with Adam Smith.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he says, sometimes you can absorb the pleasure of somebody else.
3
SPEAKER_00
If it s your kid, if it s somebody you love,
3
SPEAKER_00
But a lot of times, somebody comes up to you and says, you know, great news.
3
SPEAKER_00
I got the promotion you always wanted.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, if it s zero sum, their pleasure will not creep up to you while their sadness might.
3
SPEAKER_00
Adam Smith advises somebody with real good news and you have real good news, you want to tell your friends to tone it down a bit.
3
SPEAKER_00
because there s always social comparison.
3
SPEAKER_00
Empathy is always sort of tainted by envy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, that s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is something I ve talked about on our YouTube channel and in little vignettes for the AOC family because if somebody gets a promotion that they ve always wanted, that you ve both been striving for,
3
SPEAKER_01
You may very well be happy for your friend or family member or even a stranger, but there is a certain single or even double-digit percentage that says, I wish that were me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me think about other ways in which I am better than this person or have more luck or reasons I didn t really want that thing in the first place.
3
SPEAKER_01
We realize when we re doing it that it s a little bit immature.
3
SPEAKER_01
At least I kind of do it anyway.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s been a very interesting battle for me over the last lifetime to not turn successes for friends into some sort of personal tragedy.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not that I hope something bad happens to my friends, don t get me wrong, I m not a bad jerk like that, but I do think...
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh man, you know, this means something about me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then it just really becomes this personal tragedy.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s a real big bummer then if somebody I don t like has something happen to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
Geez, that really says something about me.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I realize in the moment, and I realize of course now how stupid that is.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think a ton of us do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we have to be careful that we don t fall too far down that slope.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it is interesting to hear that
3
SPEAKER_01
we don t have necessarily that amount of empathy because everybody is subject to that in some respect.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the strategy is what then, temper all good news?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean if you have good news for a friend and you want your friend to really be happy.
4
SPEAKER_00
you, maybe temperate somewhat, and it depends on your nature, on a nature relationship with your friend.
4
SPEAKER_00
But Adam Smith s insight, and this is like in the 1750s, and he would have never put it this way, but is that we re primates.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re hierarchical social creatures.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so whenever we hear some news, we can help but ask the question, where does this put me?
4
SPEAKER_00
Where do I fall on the ladder?
4
SPEAKER_00
If Bill Gates makes more money, that s fine.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not going to affect me one way or another.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if my office mate
4
SPEAKER_00
gets a big raise or a big demotion, that affects me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s very human to think in terms of that way.
4
SPEAKER_00
The moral isn t that we can never feel happy for our friends.
4
SPEAKER_00
Of course, we feel happy for our friends all the time.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s that
4
SPEAKER_00
When their success connects with where we stand in the world, that makes it more difficult.
4
SPEAKER_00
And on the flip side, to the extent we could take them and put them into our in-group, our category, make their victory our victory, then we could enjoy it wholeheartedly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Social psychologists call this BIRG, B-I-R-G, Basking in Reflected Glory.
4
SPEAKER_00
So this guy down the street from me, like 10 houses, got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I m thinking, cool, it s like my accomplishment too, because he lives next to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we can do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Certainly, if something great happens to my kid, that s a no-brainer.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s easy.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because my kid is me, and I m my kid.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so it reflects.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s with friends.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just, again, it s not that you can t do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s that it s complicated.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, it just requires a little bit of thought, a little bit of maybe cognitive empathy to sort of control your own emotions at that level.
4
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think the concept of effective altruism also plays a role here.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain what that is and why it s important?
4
SPEAKER_00
So, I m not sure who came up with the term effective altruism.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know Peter Singer, the philosopher, has been very active in promoting it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the idea is, in some way, I m going to say it, and it s going to sound so obvious that you d say, who would ever doubt it?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like evidence-based medicine.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the alternative?
4
SPEAKER_00
The idea of effective altruism is putting your money where it will do the most good.
4
SPEAKER_00
Your money, your time, your efforts, where it will have the most positive effect.
4
SPEAKER_00
The weird thing is, it sounds kind of obvious because you want to make the world a better place, but a lot of people don t do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
A lot of people give money to charities that have the saddest pictures, that connect to their own lives in some way to have a sentimental attachment.
4
SPEAKER_00
It turns out a lot of charitable giving actually makes the world worse in all sorts of ways.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ll give you one example out of a hundred because I just saw it in a video that was played at Big Think.
4
SPEAKER_00
They had this video and it was somebody talking about people who send canned foods to cases of natural disaster.
4
SPEAKER_00
What often happens is there s just too much canned foods.
4
SPEAKER_00
They have no place to put it.
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So they have to find a place for it.
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They have to get people to pile it up.
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Rats and mice and vermin grow in it.
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By sending these foods, you ve just made the world worse.
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Now, your heart was pure and you couldn t have known otherwise.
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But what effective altruism says is when you want to make the world a better place, figure out what s the most bang for my buck.
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What will help people?
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as opposed to doing nothing or even worse, hurting people.
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And there s a lot of debates over the answer to that question.
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I want to be an effective altruist.
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Where should I put my money?
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And these are good debates to have.
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But I think the idea is an excellent one.
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When we think of personal relationships, I was really interested in the concept of unmitigated communion, basically an empathy disorder.
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And judging by my inbox, a lot of people have this.
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I d love to discuss that a little bit because I feel like that s so common and it causes so many issues and we never think about it as an empathy disorder.
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We just think of that person as being too nice, but that s really not what it is.
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So this is a disorder, two psychologists explore it.
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And it s more often with women than men, but men get it too.
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And the idea is that being connected with people is a good thing.
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If you re just by yourself, you have no connection, you have a horrible life.
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Some connection is necessary, but some people overconnect.
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And the overconnectedness manifests itself.
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They care too much for other people so that other people s happiness becomes essential for their own happiness.
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That helping other people in their relationships becomes
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the whole focus of their lives, so much that people with this syndrome have problems themselves.
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They have health problems because they just don t take care of themselves.
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It turns out that the partners of people with this syndrome are often unhappy with their relationship because they find the person too clingy, too pushy with the help, not enough distance, not enough separateness.
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And so there s more going on in this unmitigated communion than too much empathy, but too much empathy is a big part of it.
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A big part of it is you re in a situation where the pain of your partner becomes so real to you that you can t live your own life.
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Wow.
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And so you just start obsessing over that pain and probably also exaggerating it to some extent or possibly exaggerating it to some extent.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it becomes your focus so much that other aspects of a relationship, like simply hanging together, having a good time, fade into the background.
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You know, there are studies with people whose spouses have heart conditions, and people with unmitigated compassion will devote their whole life to helping them.
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And the people with a heart condition aren t very happy with this.
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They say, I don t want this amount of focus.
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So we want connection, but we also want some distance.
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And I think the one reason why we want some distance is we want our partners to make us happy and have good lives with us.
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And the connection could ultimately be selfish.
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So there was a study
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with people of unmitigated communion that had a kind of a really cool finding.
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Suppose I have unmitigated communion and you re my partner, and you re in a lot of pain.
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If I help you, I feel great.
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That s exactly what I want.
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But if I see somebody else help you, I feel kind of crappy.
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because I wanna do it, I wanna do it, I wanna be part of it, and that s not a healthy relationship.
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Right, that seems highly dysfunctional, and it seems like a lot of folks have that.
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If this is such a hamstring on us, why did it evolve in the first place?
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I mean, we mentioned a little bit of tribal function here, or family function, but why did empathy evolve in the first place, and how do we end up with an overdose?
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Yeah, we ve evolved for different times.
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We ve evolved to live in small groups
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roving hunter-gatherers, maybe some of our brain evolved during time of some limited agriculture, and in very different worlds.
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And the mandate of evolution is survival and reproduction.
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And in fact, many people think that empathy, as opposed to compassion or cognitive empathy, that empathy emerged
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in the context of childcare.
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One reason to believe this is some of the hormones that have to do with empathy are also released during breastfeeding and childbirth.
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So that might be what it s for.
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So it has an evolutionary background, just like racist bias and in-group bias has a powerful evolutionary forces.
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It s just that now we re smart enough to ask, well, fine, but I don t want to live according to the dictates of natural selection.
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I want to do the right thing.
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I want to make this a better world.
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And then we could acknowledge that some of the systems built into our brains by natural selection don t fit this project that we re embarking on.
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Yeah, this seems like something that would have evolved during tribal time, family function, very small groups of humans like you d mentioned, not maybe really appropriate for mass media, the internet age, what we re dealing with now, what we re seeing now in terms of communication, and knowing about everybody else s disasters at all times instantly, right?
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It seems like this may be outdated, this concept.
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This technology might be obsolete.
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So we could talk for hours and hours about how our minds, our stone age minds,
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are ill-suited for this world that we re in.
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So, for instance, you know, we get immensely caught up emotionally, often with anger concerning strangers, like road rage and things like that, because our brains haven t been evolved to deal with strangers.
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We ve been evolved to deal with people you re in continued interaction with.
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Certainly, all sorts of things about fatty foods and alcohol and everything are cases where the modern world poses challenges to our minds and bodies that evolution had never anticipated.
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Right.
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Absolutely.
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And so what do we do about it?
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I mean, what if we find ourselves, one, having that empathy disorder or two, making too many decisions that are empathy based?
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How do we check ourselves?
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Well, there s a couple of answers to that.
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One answer is we could change policies.
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We could do things so that empathy can t play a role.
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I mean, the analogy I give is racial bias, which is if you think we re unconsciously racially biased, you say, I don t want to be biased.
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That s an important part.
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If you say, I don t want to be biased, you could set up systems that avoid bias, like blind reviewing, where you don t see the race of somebody when you decide whether or not they get a job.
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So any racial bias goes away.
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There are also things we could do personally.
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We could meditate a practice, for instance.
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There s an excellent case that reduces reliance on empathy and other emotions.
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And then there s cultural stuff.
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I d love to live in a culture where when a politician drags out some schnook and says, look at this poor guy, his life has been ruined because of Obamacare, or this guy s been ruined, life s been ruined because we re canceling Obamacare.
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I d like to hear people start booing, people recognize that that s a cheap move.
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bringing out some particular person, telling a particular story.
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Politicians love this because whether they re right or whether they re wrong, there s always some story to tell.
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There s always some letter to read to the crowd.
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There s always some little girl in Iowa who got affected.
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and you could tell her story.
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And if we got into our society that that is as taboo as appealing to race, explicitly appealing to race, saying this is important because it will help white people.
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You know, no mainstream politician could say that.
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Well, I d like to see a world where no mainstream politician could use an empathy-based argument instead of relying on real arguments and real facts.
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Paul, is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you convey to the AOC audience?
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Been very interesting to hear about how one of our core sort of emotions is actually not helpful, in fact, harmful to not only us, but the group around us.
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I mean, that s the reason that I wanted to talk to you today is just because I thought, what a head spin.
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This has been a terrific discussion.
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I think we ve covered the whole thing.
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Thank you so much.
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Thanks for having me again.
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Interesting stuff from Paul Bloom, as usual.
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This was a head spinner, just that empathy is something that s actually not as useful.
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There s different types of empathy, and it s terrifying, frankly, that cognitive empathy is completely separate from that sort of sympathetic feel, other people s emotions, part of our brains.
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That s sending a chill up the old spine.
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Great big thank you to Paul Bloom.
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The book title is Against Empathy.
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Of course, that ll be linked up in the show notes for this episode as well.
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And if you enjoyed this, don t forget to thank Paul on Twitter.
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He s super, super active on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, of course, as usual.
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And you can tap our album art.
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In most podcast players, you ll see the show notes for this episode right on the screen of your phone.
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I m also on Twitter.
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I post a lot of things that never make it to the show, articles, insights, and other ways to engage with me and producer Jason.
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I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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Boot camps are live program details.
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That s at theartofcharm.com.
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The live program is just by far and away my favorite part of running AOC.
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So much fun.
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Awesome to see the guys grow.
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Awesome to hear from people months and years after the fact.
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It is just awesome.
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It is life changing.
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No exaggeration.
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and I want to encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the States, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444, and our boot camps do sell out, by the way, a few months in advance, so if you re interested even a little bit, get some info from us and plan ahead, and that challenge is about improving your networking skills, your connection skills, inspiring relationships,
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We ll send you that fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show as well, along with regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better connector, a better networker, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.