The bad things we do because of empathy

Abstract

Empathy is usually seen as a pro-social and morally positive influence on behaviour. This article provides an overview of cases of negative acts motivated by empathy. The article includes discussions of polarizations that are fueled by side-taking and empathy, selfish forms of empathy (such as sadistic empathy, vampirism, and helicopter parenting), and filtered empathy (using identification with a third person as a medium to have empathy with another). The definition of empathy used is to coexperience the situation of another.

The social mind: disentangling affective and cognitive routes to understanding others

“…Moreover, the suffering of out-group members may even elicit pleasurable emotions such as schadenfreude (Cikara et al 2014). Because of the putative relation to increased in-group empathy, these negative outcomes have been discussed as 'dark sides of empathy' (Breithaupt 2017(Breithaupt , 2018.…”

Empathy: Concepts, Theories and Neuroscientific Basis

“…It can arouse positive emotions which play a strong role in life satisfaction, it can enriches one's range of experience by expanding the perception of a person beyond his or her own senses and immediate situations, it allows people to participate in the lives of others or situations other than their current situation. However, current researchers do not have a clear picture on all mechanisms of that type of empathy so far [64].…”

“…That can only be applied to certain emotions, such as pain, suffering, disgust, confusion, pride, shame, and guilt. Other more complex and social emotions including love or other mixed feelings represent a much bigger challenge for empirical study [64].…”

“…If the empathizer adopts some of the preferences of the person of his empathy, it is likely that aversions towards the other side are also adopted. These can lead to people committing aggressive acts against the other side of a conflict and of side-taking and empathy can help to revise understandings of some hateful acts [64].…”

The practical other: teleology and its development

“…This is what happened, as shown in Figure 1. Children who passed the false belief test made two-and-a-half times more poaching moves than those who failed the belief test (on the dark side of empathy, see Breithaupt (2018)). Haryu and Imai (1999) assessed when children take pragmatic information about a speaker's desire into account for resolving reference in the context of the well-known mutual exclusivity bias.…”