The popularity of the Empathy Trap dominates our thinking as technological change degrades our ability to make sense of the world. It causes us to stumble in our thinking and misunderstand reality.
In this essay, I’ll explain the science behind glitches that short circuit rational thinking. Then, I describe how popular culture sets an infantilizing form of empathy above more important virtues like veneration of truth and justice. I explain how social and technological forces drive the widespread adoption of this Empathy Trap. Finally, I discuss the massive failures of this fallacious thinking and ways we can avoid the Empathy Trap.
The Reason We Find Reasons to Be Unreasonable
Of all the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is my favorite. As a kid, he ran away from home, then went on to make a fortune starting one of the nation’s first newspapers. He established himself as the sage of his day publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac. And, he said:
“What reasonable creatures humans are, they can find a reason for whatever they want to do.” (I paraphrased a bit).
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on Cognitive Bias won a Nobel Prize by adding science to Franklin’s wisdom. Wikipedia describes Cognitive Bias as:
a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.Individuals create their own “subjective social reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world.Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
People like to believe they see the world objectively and build a rational, scientific view of reality. But most people don’t. Our brains have evolved glitches that kill rational thought. Confirmation bias, tribalism, and emotions, especially fear, short circuit logical thinking. Rational thought requires education and a commitment to understanding objective reality. Both seem like they’re fading in our culture. Truth itself is falling out of favor as I explain in The Post Truth Era.
Cognitive Bias, a Glitch in our Wiring
I engage diverse groups in discussions to get to the truth. I notice two different ways of looking at the world. Rationalists use logic, science, and critical thinking skills to obtain an understanding of objective reality. The second group, who I’ll call Emotives, primarily relies on emotion and feelings to shape their views. I suppose everyone uses both ways at different points. When we’re thinking as Emotives, emotions supplant our rational view of reality.
Example of Cognitive Bias
An anecdote from Steven Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ should make this clear:
It was a dark and stormy night [when a crew member ran into the Captain’s quarters].
Crewmember: “Captain, Captain, wake up.”
Captain: “Well?”
Crewmember: “Sorry to wake you, sir, but we have a serious problem.”
Captain: “Well what is it?”
Crewmember: “There’s a ship in our sea lane about twenty miles away, and they refuse to move.”
Captain: “What do you mean they refuse to move? Just tell them to move.”
Crewmember: “Sir, we have told them; they will not move.”
Captain: “I’ll tell them.”
The signal goes out: “Move starboard 20 degrees.”
The signal returns: “Move starboard yourself 20 degrees.”
Captain: “I can’t believe this. Well, I mean I’m a captain. Let them know who I am. I’m important.”
Signal goes out: “This is Captain Horatio Hornblower XXVI, commanding you to move starboard 20 degrees at once.”
Signal returns: “This is Seaman Carl Jones II, commanding you to move starboard 20 degrees at once.”
Captain: “What arrogance? I mean, what presumption? Here is a seaman commanding me, a captain. We could just blow them right out of the water. We could just let them know who we are.”
Signal: “This is the Mighty Missouri, flag ship of the 7th fleet.”
The signal returns: “This is the lighthouse.”
That’s a true story. It’s found in the Naval Proceedings Magazine, where a lighthouse was literally interpreted as a ship.
Reality is messy and unpredictable. It rarely gives us the emotional rewards we crave, especially in this age of rapid change. The Captain was quite attached to the view of his authority and the power of his battleship. But reality has a way of imposing itself despite our beliefs. Every major religion and most great philosophical teachings emphasize some flavor of ‘life is suffering, so suck it up buttercup.’ Expecting reality to adjust itself to your emotional needs is a fool’s errand.
Faulty Assumptions Blind us to Reality
Here’s a real discussion with an Emotive on an intellectual Facebook Group. Discussing Free Speech, I cited this article where Canada arrested a Father for politely refusing to refer to his daughter as a boy in private.
Emotive: Reading about the above case on the National Post (conservative Canadian newspaper) the dad sounds like a dickhead, trying to sell a story to the media, making his kid’s story public, and potentially putting the kid in harm’s way. As the judge said, he is using his child to “promote his own interests above those of his child.” Guy sounds like a real jerk.
Rationalist: With all due respect, why do you answer every question with an emotional appeal? The dad may be a jerk but that has nothing to do with Canadians making the utterance of certain facts a crime. Do you believe feelings are more important than facts? Do you think the truth is important or should we ignore certain aspects of reality that some people don’t like?
Emotive: I think you’re going to make me quit this group because you’re so boring.
The Emotive’s argument fails due to the logical fallacy of Appeal to Emotion. He mistakes his feelings about the father as a justification for dismissing any consideration of justice or the importance of truth. His ego can’t
Reality is messy and works in ways one wouldn’t immediately expect. Like the Captain of the Battleship, Emotives think the world works in line with simplistic assumptions. But, without introspection and analysis, we crash our ships on the rocks of reality.
The Empathy Trap
Emotives believe Appeal to Emotions are valid, even though educated people know it is a logical fallacy. The Empathy Trap is one particular type of Appel to Emotion that’s become extremely widespread. Emotives falling into the Empathy Trap suffer from an excess of impulsive compassion. They let their reason become overwhelmed with an infantilizing empathy and discount important truths including truth itself. Infantilizing empathy is the desire to immediately swoop in and help someone that they subjectively perceive to be experiencing some difficulty. But, they fail to understand the whole situation and the critical context of the individual. Undifferentiated empathy works in certain circumstances like, caring for an infant that isn’t capable of doing anything for itself. But, doesn’t work in most other cases.
The Empathy Trap assumes we treat everyone like an infant who Emotives perceive to be disadvantaged. But, swooping in and treating an independent, capable adult like an infant deprives him of agency and sense of worth as a competent human. Delivering him from the consequences of his actions or misfortune might relieve the immediate situation. But it emasculates him as a person and deprives him of an essential part of his humanity. It undermines his ability and confidence to act as a self-determined agent. As Jesus said, give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Spread of the Empathy Trap
But, this wisdom is increasingly ignored as our culture’s thinking becomes more basic and simplistic. Social media and our inundation with information drive the rapid spread of Empathy Trap thinking. It makes exceptionally useful click-bait because:
- It’s easily understood and applied in many situations by even the most simple-minded.
- Exhibiting Empathy Trap thinking is widely praised and garners social re-enforcement. Due to its simplicity, it’s become a formula used to construct virtue signaling platitudes. Virtue Signaling guarantees winning Woke Brownie Points and praise by other Emotives.
- The Empathy Trap gets clicks because it generates an emotional response in as few characters as possible. It gets lavish praise from Woke Scolds who forcibly control speech in some parts of society. Woke Brownie Points can seem especially important in groups starved for social connections.
- The deluge of information, advertisements, and political propaganda jade almost everyone to messaging. But, the Empathy Trap’s emotional appeal guarantees a click in a headline size blurb.
Marketers and Propagandists Manipulate Emotives
Compassion and empathy are great things when applied in the right circumstance. But, the world is just too complicated for a one size fits all solution. You still have to think, reason, and look at the evidence.
Legions of Ph.D.’s in psychology and marketing make their career out of understanding the glitches in your thinking. They know your Cognitive Biases and the tricks your brain plays on you even if you don’t. They use that knowledge to sell you politicians and products that aren’t good.
This flaw in our decision making is worrisome because our intuition can be “hacked” by others to make us behave in ways that aren’t in our favor. This motivated framing and packaging of information happens all the time in the real world. From Tinder to LinkedIn profiles to what’s written on yogurt.
What’s left out is often more important than what’s communicated. As a quick illustration, if there were two yogurts brands on the shelves: one says “80% fat-free” and the other one says “20% fat added”, which one will you pick? When a sales manager proposes discount at the month end to boost sales and tells you that “revenue today is better than revenue tomorrow”, do second and third order consequences of discounts on your company’s reputation jump to your mind? What if the sales manager had framed his proposal as: “giving discounts will destroy our reputation as a company that’s confident about its products, but we will absolutely increase revenue. Are we ok with that?”.
Consequences of the Empathy Trap
Rationality over emotionality is still the best way to good decisions. I feel a deep, abiding, and sincere preference for triangles as opposed to circles. But, I wouldn’t get very far if I put triangle shaped tires on my car. If you believe ‘All You Need is Love’ try paying your rent in affection and see how fast you become homeless.
Compassion and empathy alone are inappropriate criteria for action outside of close personal relationships. Perhaps part of the rise in the pervasiveness of the Empathy Trap results from a decline in close personal relationships. In any event, many of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century can be attributed, in part, to the Empathy Trap.
Failure of Welfare
Many twentieth-century failures highlight the pitfalls of Empathy Trap thinking. Welfare (meaning handouts for poor families), started in the 1930s and steadily expanded until significant reforms in the late 1990s. Even Democratic President Bill Clinton admitted the abject failure of this approach by supporting welfare reform.
Empathy Trap thinking that led to welfare went something like this:
- Emotives feel sorry for people at the lower end of the economic spectrum as they seem to struggle.
- The government could redistribute income and give poorer people money.
- Therefore, Emotives would feel better, and poor people would do better in life given such income re-distribution.
Welfare emanated from good intentions. Unfortunately, unintended consequences arose, and it made things worse. The Heritage Foundation published a fact-filled article proving this, which you can read here, in 1996.
To summarize, welfare introduced powerful incentives for unemployed-single-parenthood. It destroyed poor families and led to a toxic feedback loop, reinforcing a culture of dependency and illegitimacy. Welfare provided money to single mothers making marriage economically irrational for most low-income parents. Handouts transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it.
Examination of Welfare’s Unintended Consequences
Welfare made it possible to raise a child without either the father or the mother having to hold a job. A father with low education and skills became at best financially irrelevant — and at worst a net financial handicap to the mother and the child.
[families recieving higher welfare benefits vs those in lower benefit states had] a decisively negative effect on children. Comparing children who were identical [on multiple social variables researchers], found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child’s IQ. … not poverty but welfare itself which has a damaging effect on the child. Examining the young children (with an average age of five-and-a-half), the authors found that those who had spent at least two months of each year since birth on AFDC had cognitive abilities 20 percent below those who had received no welfare, even after holding family income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant. …More Evidence on Welfare’s Negative Impact
[Welfare incentives destroyed two-parent families] Overall, children of never-married mothers have behavioral problems that score nearly three times higher than children raised in comparable intact families. …
A similar study by Mary Corcoran and Roger Gordon of the University of Michigan shows that receipt of welfare income has negative effects on the long-term employment and earnings capacity of young boys. … holding constant [multiple] variables, … welfare income had the opposite effect: The more welfare income received by a family while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy’s earnings as an adult. …
Welfare’s Crisis of Single Parenting
A 1988 study by Sheila F. Krein and Andrea H. Beller of the University of Illinois finds that the longer the time spent in a single-parent family, the lower the education attained by a child. In general, a boy’s educational attainment was cut by one-tenth of a year for each year spent as a child in a single-parent home. Controlling for family income did not reduce the magnitude of the effect noticeably. These findings are confirmed again and again in studies, conducted in the United States and abroad, which which demonstrate that illegitimacy is also associated with lower job and salary attainment. …
Illegitimacy is a major factor in America’s crime wave
Lack of married parents, rather than race or poverty, is the principal factor in the crime rate. It has been known for some time that high rates of welfare dependency correlate with high crime rates among young men in a neighborhood. But more important, a major 1988 study of 11,000 individuals found that “the percentage of single-parent households with children between the ages of 12 and 20 is significantly associated with rates of violent crime and burglary.”The same study makes clear that the widespread popular assumption that there is an association between race and crime is false. Illegitimacy is the key factor. The absence of marriage, and the failure to form and maintain intact families, explains the incidence of high crime in a neighborhood among whites as well as blacks. This study also concluded that poverty does not explain the incidence of crime. This is a dramatic reversal of conventional wisdom.
Pretty damning evidence. Here’s a great article on this topic by Thomas Sowell if you’re interested in more about welfare.
Communism
Similarly, communism seems great at first glance. Who wouldn’t want a system that elevates the poor and liberates the oppressed proletariat? It looks very attractive to anyone who doesn’t think further. Except it killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and is the evilest philosophy, as defined by death and suffering, in history. Communism makes Nazism seem like psychopath kindergarten. The darker impulses of human nature expose the shortcomings of this view.
The evils of Communism have been thoroughly documented and discussed so I won’t spend much time revisiting that. Except to say that its current resurgent popularity could be explained by voters falling into the Empathy Trap. Slogans like ‘Universal Basic Income’ or ‘Free College for All’ trigger an excess of impulsive compassion on the part of Emotives stuck in the Empathy Trap. Their reason becomes overwhelmed with undifferentiated empathy. This
To be fair, some of those forty percent may support a more nuanced form of socialism distinct from the communism of the past. But, I haven’t heard any intelligent distinctions to that effect. I see Woke Scolds silencing any opposition to Democratic Party Propaganda and Sloganeering through force and intimidation just like John Hickenlooper at the California Democratic Convention. Democratic Socialism, now widespread in the US, seems just like communism in the USSR or China to me.
I could find dozens of examples like these, but this essay is already well over 3,000 words. I think my argument is clear.
Avoiding the Empathy Trap
The Empathy Trap has become a widespread mental glitch that distorts reality and leads to bad judgments. It combines a logical fallacy of Appeal to Emotion and a natural human tendency towards Cognitive Bias. The Empathy Trap leads to consistent bad decisions not only in voting but also in personal decision making.
Education and a commitment to the pursuit of truth guard against the Empathy Trap. Educating yourself about common types of logical fallacies will improve your thinking. Appeal to Emotion is the fallacy in the Empathy Trap, but there are many others. Karla Cook explains other common logical fallacies here.
It’s also important to understand that even the best education won’t guard against Cognitive Bias. Evolution has evolved Cognitive Bias as a process of quick decision making. It may be appropriate when deciding which outfit to wear in the morning but bad when making important life decisions. According to Paras Chopra, avoiding Cognitive Bias begins with not jumping to conclusions and thinking through an issue from all angles.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading to the end! This blog is my project in the pursuit of truth. I spend dozens of hours researching each blog post, so I hope you found something useful.
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