empathy/altruism

[Guest guest]

Nicky said:

" It went ok, but it is depressing to me when he gets disappointed in me. "

Greg: Yes, hoovering, though enmeshment or pseudoempathy/vicarious emotion (see

below) might be more precise terms.

The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life

by Alfie Kohn

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465007589/

Book Description

Drawing from hundreds of studies in half a dozen fields, " The Brighter Side of

Human Nature " makes a powerful case that caring and generosity are just as

natural as selfishness and aggression. This lively refutation of cynical

assumptions about our species considers the nature of empathy and the causes of

war, why we (incorrectly) explain all behavior in terms of self-interest, and

how we can teach children to care.

excerpts:

p. 131 (on pseudoempathy and vicarious emotion):

Without imagining the reality of *the other*, empathic feeling is ultimately

*self-oriented* and thus unworthy of the name.

p.133:

Projection is one variant of pseudoempathy that deserves special attention.

This is a classic defense mechanism, defined as the process of unconsciously

attributing something about oneself to another person because it would be too

painful to acknowledge ownership of that feeling; thus, someone who cannot bear

to admit his own aggressive impulses may believe that it is everyone else who is

hostile toward him. In empathy, one is responding to *someone else's* affect,

while in projection the arrow is reversed and one 'discovers' in the other what

is really part of oneself. The processes are so different that one might

reasonably say projection has nothing whatever to do with empathy, yet in

practice the two can easily be confused. People may purport to respond to

another's distress when in fact the distress they are responding to is *their

own*. The self-absorbed individual may appear for all the world to feel others'

pain even though she really uses others as screens on which her *own* pain is

projected. (The manifestation of this phenomenon in families, particularly in

pathological identifications between mother and daughter, has been addressed by

several writers.)

Considering the different ways in which people can match another's feeling

without really responding to that other - feeling *with* but not feeling *for* -

calls to mind the classic definition of knowledge once used by epistemologists:

justified true belief. The first modifier is the pertinent one here. One may

for no good reason believe something to be true, and one may accidentally be

correct, but one cannot thereby be said to 'know' it. This is analogous to what

is missing in empathy (or pseudoempathy) with perspective taking: one feels

without any justification for the feeling, without any sense of what the feeling

means *for the other*.

p. 134:

....how well one can empathize with the other when his situation is *outside

one's own experience*. Here the *imagination* is the sine qua non of empathy.

p. 135:

....perspective taking and empathy allow us to appreciate that you are not me and

that we can be connected in spite of that.

p. 199 (quoting Jerome Kagan):

The idea that humans always act in the service of self-interest has created

serious mischief. So many citizens have come to accept the truth of that

assumption about human nature that the average person now treats it as a natural

law. And because they believe they should not violate a natural law, they try

to obey it...What worries me is that the presumptive validity of the law of

self-interest is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(Greg: one can only wonder where these beliefs came from)

Greg: There are other passages on the unfalsifiable propositions (not

hypotheses) that sociobiologists and economists have formulated to completely

preclude ANY form of altruism, but they really don't pertain to this list.