Why Empathy Can Backfire

Empathy is generally thought of as something we want more of. From the school yard to the board room, if only people had more empathy, if only we understood each other more, the world would be a better place. The implicit assumption is that by understanding someone else’s circumstances, and their challenges more specifically, we are motivated to act towards helping them. It is in seeing the refugee child washed up on the shore that will motivate me to work towards social justice. It is in understanding the exhaustion of health-care workers that I will become more engaged in finding a solution.

This is a reasonable assumption. Indeed, many well-intentioned initiatives are based on this idea, and examples can be found in journalism, education, and parenting. It is by talking about the ills of others that we will feel their pain and work towards relieving it.

But this assumption is often wrong. Not only is it often wrong, it can also backfire; that is, empathy can lead us away from helping others, not towards it.

To better understand why this may be, we can examine what we mean by empathy, the assumption that it facilitates action and why it is misguided, and what may be a better solution.

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What do we mean by empathy?

There are two important distinctions to keep in mind when we talk about empathy. First, empathy is most frequently defined as the ability to feel what another person is feeling, or to ‘put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.’ Interestingly, however, in everyday use, empathy refers mainly to feeling another person’s distress. We can imagine saying for instance, “I had such empathy for her when she told me about her separation,” but it’s harder to imagine saying “I had such empathy for her when she told me about her engagement.”

Second, psychologists distinguish two levels of empathy - emotional and cognitive. Emotional empathy is about feeling what someone else feels. This happens automatically, as when we wince when seeing someone in pain. Cognitive empathy refers to taking someone else’s perspective. This takes more effort, as when we imagine how someone could have a different point of view than our own. This distinction is important when we talk about ‘teaching’ or ‘cultivating’ empathy because this mainly applies to the cognitive ‘perspective-taking’ level of empathy; emotional empathy is a more automatic response, and comes online developmentally quite early. At its most basic level, for example, it has been found that even newborns cry when exposed to another baby’s cries. Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is more challenging, as shown by the many misunderstandings we make as adults. When we talk about teaching empathy, therefore, it is helpful to focus more on perspective taking than on emotional contagion.

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Why empathy does not lead to helping

A focus on teaching empathy stems from the assumption that the more we understand someone else’s experience of hardship, the more likely we will be to take action.

This, however, is an unsubstantiated assumption, based on a misunderstanding of how the mind works.It is as if we thought that showing people images of mouth-watering food would quell their hunger, when it in fact has the opposite effect of stimulating it.Although we may feel like it’s a reasonable assumption, the research simply does not support it. Witnessing someone else’s pain will only increase the probability of taking action if we know specifically what we can do and we know we can do something about it immediately. If not, understanding someone else’s hardship does not systematically increase prosocial behaviour. Not only that, research has found that exposure to others suffering can lead to less tendency to engage in action. Witnessing others’ pain can lead to a state of ‘empathic distress,’ a neurological state in which our amygdala is on heightened alert, resulting in our closing ourselves off, instead of opening up.

This helps explain why a steady stream of global news can lead to a feeling of paralysis. Our brains are overwhelmed and shut down, essentially conserving precious energy for problems that are more ‘solvable.’

This is true for children as well as adults. One study found that children who reacted with greater signs of ‘empathic distress’ (characterised by increased heart rate, pupil dilation, and frowning) to videos of children in difficulty (for instance, lying on the ground crying) were less likely to help when presented with an opportunity to do so.

As stated above, witnessing other people’s distress drives us to act only in very particular circumstances, namely when we know specifically what needs to be done, and we know we are capable of doing it. Such circumstances are rare when digesting our daily news feed. We don’t necessarily know what specific actions need to be done, and we don’t know if we are capable of doing them anyway. This is even more true with children.

This has considerable implications for journalism, politics, social change and education. Exposing people to others’ hardship doesn’t increase their action-tendencies, it paralyses them. Our implicit model of what drives us towards engagement is mistaken. If we want people to be engaged, we need to change our focus.

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A better solution

How to get out of this paralysis then, and move towards action? If we want to make the world a better place, we do not need more empathy; instead we need more accessible opportunities to act.

It sounds simple, and it is.

‘Accessible opportunities to act’ means satisfying two criteria: 1) we know what needs to be done; and 2) we know we are capable of doing it.

Indeed, when given such an opportunity, we will seize it. Humans are agency machines,  we love to act on the world. We are also social beings. And to act on the world in a way that helps others pushes all the good buttons.

But we forget about the need to feel competent when wanting to encourage children to engage with the world.Global warming, immigration and inequality, for instance, are huge challenges that may be difficult for children to feel competent to act on in any way that makes a difference. Imagine how you would feel: faced with a big task, with massive consequences, that is beyond your skillset, and you’re not sure what needs to be done or where to start. Would you buckle down or take a scroll through social media?

We need more opportunities to act that are small and doable. When faced with big problems, we’re paralysed. When faced with small problems, we’re mobilised.

We also need these actions to be intrinsically rewarding, and things that are intrinsically rewarding are things we are good at. Children are good at fewer things arguably than adults so we have to take that into account when talking to them about news.

We need to keep this in mind when exposing our children to the state of the world. Which will trigger more action - presenting big problems or mini solutions?

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What can you do as a parent?

There are several steps you can take as a parent.

First, keep in mind that empathy does not drive action, and may just result in feelings of empathic distress and helplessness. Be careful not to confuse the importance of helping children appreciate their privilege with an impulse to expose them to hungry children in war-torn countries. It’s important of course to understand other people’s lives and challenges, but this needs to be balanced by opportunities to act.

Second, provide opportunities to care directly for others, and for your child to appreciate the effect it can have. If you see a lost cat, give it a cuddle, or a box to sleep in. Taking a photo and making a poster is a good way to show your child that they have some power to make a difference. If your child is distressed about climate change, ask them to come up with ways the family can reduce, reuse and recycle. When faced with a problem, adopt as much as possible the mindset of ‘ok, what’s a mini way of making a difference that is within our control?’

Third, give more opportunities to help in ways that children will enjoy and that takes advantage of their skills. This can help remind them how helping can be intrinsically rewarding when it combines our need for agency and our need for connection. This can be in helping others, or having your child help you: Can you teach me that football trick? How do I make a this a better post for Instagram? Can you make me one of your super smoothies? A daily diet of this can go a long way towards cultivating a sense of agency in children.

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What do we want for our children?

We want them to be happy and we want them to grow up in a healthy society. At its core, journalism has a similar objective insofar as we need to understand what is going on in the world to be able to make it a better place. Unfortunately, mainstream media can have the opposite effect if we are exposed to so many problems, causing us to feel overwhelmed and deflated. This is why solution-focused journalism is so important, for adults and for children. Empathy may seem like it is an effective way to trigger action, but providing concrete ways to do so is a much better way to move forward.