New research shows conservative beliefs are linked to happiness and life meaning, while liberal beliefs align more with psychological richness, suggesting that political views shape different paths to personal well-being.
You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.
Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.
No, I disagree. I have empathy for all humans, no matter who. When I hear that some natural catastrophe occurs, I don’t need to know details about those affected to feel for them. There was a time when I was a child when that wasn’t true, but since some point in my childhood it is.
That coincided with the point in time when I started leaning very left.
That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.
Yes, and I don’t need to know the details of someone’s life to do so. Do you? You can’t feel empathy for e.g. Floridians who recently went through that hurricane?
not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well
That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?
That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?
No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.
Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.
Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.
So you’re claiming that most people never have empathy for other people… Sure, that sounds very realistic and not-at-all “holier than thou”.
I mean, I’ve seen plenty of examples where other people have empathized with me, but I guess I just happen to be surrounded by living incarnations of Buddha himself.
Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.
Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.
Oh, so now people can have empathy for others without having to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do? Just a bit ago you declared that to be an absolute requirement for “true” empathy. Or is it fake empathy they are feeling?
There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.
To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.
Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.
To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.
You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.
Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.
No, I disagree. I have empathy for all humans, no matter who. When I hear that some natural catastrophe occurs, I don’t need to know details about those affected to feel for them. There was a time when I was a child when that wasn’t true, but since some point in my childhood it is.
That coincided with the point in time when I started leaning very left.
That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.
What you’re describing is more like sympathy.
Yes, and I don’t need to know the details of someone’s life to do so. Do you? You can’t feel empathy for e.g. Floridians who recently went through that hurricane?
That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?
No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.
Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.
Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.
So you’re claiming that most people never have empathy for other people… Sure, that sounds very realistic and not-at-all “holier than thou”.
I mean, I’ve seen plenty of examples where other people have empathized with me, but I guess I just happen to be surrounded by living incarnations of Buddha himself.
Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.
Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.
Oh, so now people can have empathy for others without having to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do? Just a bit ago you declared that to be an absolute requirement for “true” empathy. Or is it fake empathy they are feeling?
There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.
To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.
Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.
To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.
I wonder how it feels to be talked to like this.
How should I know? I don’t know chonglibloodsport enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do.