Poor Practical Empathy: Why Some People Disregard Nearby Suffering in Their Actions and Failures to Act
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Healthy Empathy
Situation: Alice is suffering. Beatrice observes Alice’s suffering.
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Cognitive empathy: Beatrice understands that Alice is suffering.
Emotional empathy: Beatrice experiences a milder version of what Alice is probably feeling, given what Beatrice has observed. Beatrice also experiences an impulse to help Alice.
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Practical empathy: Beatrice is likely to exhibit empathic behaviour; she is likely to approach Alice and try to help, either by trying to ameliorate Alice’s suffering directly, by explaining her own actions and apologising for the suffering that her actions have caused (if Beatrice has helped to cause the suffering), or just by validating and expressing that she understands Alice’s suffering.
Since Beatrice has healthy emotional empathy—and thus feels bad after observing Alice’s suffering, together with an impulse to help—it would require a deliberate effort of self-control on Beatrice’s part to stop herself from approaching Alice and trying to help.
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Impairments of Practical Empathy
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1| Psychopathy (Lack of Emotional Empathy)
Situation: Alice is suffering. Beatrice observes Alice’s suffering.
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Possible cognitive empathy: Beatrice possibly understands that Alice is suffering (though a full, rich understanding is somewhat unlikely).
Seriously deficient emotional empathy: Beatrice does not experience a milder version of what Alice is probably feeling, given what Beatrice has observed. Moreover, Beatrice has no automatic impulse to help Alice.
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Impaired practical empathy: Beatrice is unlikely to exhibit empathic behaviours. I.e. she is unlikely to approach Alice and try to help. She will almost certainly fail to do so if doing so would interfere with her present goals, however minor those goals and however minor the interference.
Since Beatrice has little to no emotional empathy (and therefore has no automatic impulse to help Alice) it would require a separate, more personal form of motivation for Beatrice to actually approach Alice in an effort to help her.
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2| Narcissism (Obstructed Emotional or Practical Empathy)
Situation: Alice is suffering. Beatrice observes Alice’s suffering.
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Possible cognitive empathy: Beatrice possibly understands that Alice is suffering (although a full, rich understanding is somewhat unlikely).
Possible emotional empathy (probably obstructed): Beatrice possibly feels a milder version of what Alice is feeling (given what Beatrice has observed), together with an automatic impulse to help Alice. (Of course, she will have neither of these things if she also happens to be psychopathic.) However, if Beatrice does have this capacity for emotional empathy, then her emotional empathy is likely to be obstructed. E.g. in the present case, something is likely to interfere with or alter Beatrice’s feelings of what Alice is probably feeling, together with Beatrice’s impulse to help Alice. In a typical case of pathological narcissism, emotional empathy would be obstructed by the unconscious defence mechanism repression, which would hide unpleasant empathically-generated feelings from consciousness (especially if the narcissist believes, on some level, that she is partly responsible for someone’s suffering).
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Impaired practical empathy: Beatrice’s practical empathy is impaired, either because her emotional empathy is obstructed (such as by repression, as discussed) or because the path from her emotional empathy to her behaviour is obstructed in some way. In a typical case of the latter, the path from Beatrice’s emotional empathy to her behaviour would be obstructed by the overwhelming and countervailing desire to avoid bad feelings as quickly as possible (especially feelings of shame). This powerful desire would then interfere with the healthy, slower processing of such feelings by way of the appropriate behaviours (such as empathic behaviours). E.g. in the present case, the desperation to avoid bad feelings would most likely cause Beatrice to withdraw from Alice and ignore her suffering, instead of approaching Alice in an effort to help her. In effect, assuming that Beatrice’s emotional empathy is healthy and unobstructed, this more direct impairment of her practical empathy would cause her emotional empathy to backfire, by causing it to elicit antisocial behaviours instead of prosocial empathic ones.
Whatever the impairment of Beatrice’s practical empathy, she is unlikely to exhibit empathic behaviours by approaching Alice and trying to help. Since Beatrice either lacks emotional empathy altogether (if she is psychopathic), has obstructed emotional empathy, or has a more direct obstruction of her practical empathy, it would require either separate personal motivation or a deliberate effort of self-control on Beatrice’s part for her to actually approach Alice in an attempt to help her.
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3| Mind-blindness (Lack of Cognitive Empathy)
Situation: Alice is suffering. Beatrice observes Alice’s suffering.
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Seriously deficient cognitive empathy: Beatrice’s observation of Alice’s suffering provides her with little or no immediate understanding that Alice is suffering.
Possible emotional empathy (most likely obstructed): Beatrice possibly feels a milder version of what Alice is feeling (given what Beatrice has observed), together with an automatic impulse to help, but only to the extent that these things don’t depend on an immediate understanding that Alice is suffering.
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Impaired practical empathy: Since Beatrice’s cognitive empathy is severely deficient, she has no immediate understanding that Alice is suffering. Therefore, she is unlikely, at least in the short term, to exhibit empathic behaviours in any normal or complete way. I.e. at least in the short term, Beatrice is perhaps unlikely to approach Alice, and is unlikely to try to help Alice effectively even if she does approach Alice.
Assuming that Beatrice’s cognitive deficit is not so severe as to proclude even the conceptualisation of Alice’s suffering, there should be ways for Beatrice to subsequently come to understand that Alice is suffering, despite the fact that merely observing Alice’s suffering was insufficient. So long as Beatrice is neither a psychopath nor a narcissist, this would engage her emotional empathy and elicit empathic behaviours as normal, causing her to approach Alice in an effort to help (in ways that are as effective as Beatrice’s cognitive deficit allows).
