Ideas - Can empathy be dangerous?

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

It depends on who you ask. Until recently empathy was generally considered a positive thing. But a growing number of mostly conservative voices believe empathy can be extremely dangerous — even toxic. Their argument is that empathy can drive irrational thinking and behaviour in public life. The result is a growing battle over empathy in a world that has never seemed to need it more. If you like this podcast, you may want to listen to this: Why practicing empathy is far from simple.Guests in this podcast:Matt Richins – neuroscientist and psychologist, who did research on empathy at Exeter University, UK.Susan Lanzoni – author, historian of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience and professor at Harvard’s School of Continuing EducationMary Gordon – founder of Roots of Empathy program, TorontoMichael Slote – author, philosopher and professor of ethics at the University of MiamiMargaret Davidson – Roots of Empathy classroom facilitator, Chiganois ElementaryKourtney Simms – Chiganois Elementary teacherEllie – Grade 1 student, Chiganois Elementary

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Book at Spexavers.cavers.captiasties are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this Ideas podcast, could you follow us on the app you're using? It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. On ideas, there's something for everyone. We talk to deep thinkers and produce compelling stories that help us better understand the world in which we live. The podcast is available every weekday, so our feed has lots to choose from.

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I don't think the science really supports the idea that empathy is dangerous. Well, it shows is empathy is fragile, if anything. Being able to be empathetic towards others, I think it's something that's missing in our society right now. There's never been, as the clock takes a more important time than now, to develop empathy. The concept of empathy is having a moment, one that might seem pretty counterintuitive.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else's feelings and emotions, to feel what they feel. And until recently, it was generally considered a positive thing. But there's a growing number of mostly conservative voices in the United States, but also here in Canada, who strongly disagree, arguing that empathy can be dangerous, driving irrational thinking and behavior in public life. Canadian academic Gadzad, now based in the U.S., is one of the leading voices of this argument. Most of the domestic and foreign policies that are orgiastically destroying the West stem from this misguided empathy. This new disdain for the experience of empathy is concerning to many. Social scientists often argue empathy acts like a kind of social glue

and is a key part of what makes society's work, that it acts against selfishness and indifference. Ideas contributor Pauline Dakin is a journalist, author, and academic who's been following this debate. Here is her documentary, The Battle for Empathy. We heard Elon Musk at the onset saying empathy was the fundamental weakness of Western civilization. Musk and many others on the right are arguing empathy has become a tool of manipulation, that showing care to others can be wrong, even immoral.

There's even a new term for it, toxic empathy, a concept popularized in part by Ali Beth Stucky. Toxic Empathy blinds us to reality and morality. Stucke is a prominent American Christian conservative commentator and a podcast host. Her 2024 book, Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, was a New York Times bestseller. Love can never be without the truth, and that's the problem with empathy, is that it's really unconcerned with what is true.

Stucky says toxic empathy is influenced by progressive stances on such issues as immigration, Muslims, trans people, women who choose abortion even in cases of rape, and social justice matters. That's something we really saw in 2020. Everyone was posting the same thing in support of Black Lives Matter, and people were told, if you don't support this idea that America is institutionally racist, then you yourself are racist, Christians shouldn't be bullied by that. We shouldn't be manipulated by that. We should stand back for a second and say, hmm, what is true? What is factually true?

Stucky warns people not to feel obliged to exhibit empathy, in part due to what she considers its insidious side effects. There are Canadian voices in this chorus too on the harms of certain types of empathy. Psychologist, author, and University of Toronto Professor Emeritus Jordan Peterson has talked about parasitized empathy. Not dissimilar to the position of another Canadian, Gad SAD, who we heard from briefly earlier. The problem is when empathy misfires, it either becomes hyperactive or it misfires in directing

the empathy to the wrong person. So, for example, illegal immigrants, more important. than American vets. SAD's work, warning of the dangers of empathy, has garnered a lot of attention from the right, including from Elon Musk. Sad is a best-selling author, a popular podcaster, and a regular guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

His blog posts for Psychology Today have close to 7 million views. Sad is on leave as a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, all because he said he couldn't stand all the, quote, woke nonsense around diversity, equity, and inclusion. He's currently a visiting professor at the private conservative college, Northwood University, in Michigan. Sadd uses evolutionary biology to explain consumer behavior and what he calls suicidal empathy, the name of his upcoming book. At a talk at his university in March of 2025, he described how false ideas act like parasites in the mind.

Parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitized, right? We're both a thinking and feeling animal. Suicidal empathy completes the story by now explaining what happens to our emotional system when it is hijacked by parasitic nonsense. And hence suicidal empathy. It's the misfiring of otherwise a noble emotion called empathy. So Sad says empathy is great as long as it's applied to the right target at the right time and in the right amount. But he argues too frequently these days empathy undermines logic, reason and common sense. A side effect of what he calls idea pathogens, often incubated in universities.

He calls them harmful, irrational ideas and belief systems that spread like an out-of-control virus. So what are some examples of pathogenic ideas? This is the granddaddy of them all, post-modernism, because it purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth, that there are no objective truth. So it is a form of intellectual terrorism. Up is down, left is right, men are women, anything goes. hence intellectual terrorism.

Gat SAD also declined to be interviewed for this CBC Ideas documentary. But in an interview with conservative podcaster Scott Atlas, sad talks about empathy being hijacked to support a progressive political agenda. That's exactly what we're seeing right now. Misguided, misplaced, orgeastic, weaponized suicidal empathy. Therefore, MS-13 gang members are way, more worthy of our empathy than American vets who've lost limbs, if not their lives, fighting for the United States. And so I look at all of the astoundingly disastrous, both domestic and foreign

policies, and I argue they are all rooted in this suicidal empathy. So can the overuse of empathy lead to societal disintegration, as sad, stucky, and a host of others suggest? Well, a number of scientific studies show differently. At this point, it's worth taking a more in-depth historical look at the concept of empathy. My name is Susan Lanzoni, and I taught for almost 25 years at different institutions, Yale, Harvard, Tufts, Experimental College, on history of science. Lanzoni has a special interest in the history of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. She became interested in empathy as part of her research on the doctor-patient relationship. It led to her 2018 book, Empathy, a history, a sweeping exploration of the origins and evolution of the

concept of empathy. For Lanzoni, that work started with a surprise. I was in this medical library and I encountered the German term. I'm Jung and at that point I didn't even know what it meant. Lanzoni would soon learn einfulung means feeling into. Then I realized, oh, wow, this is the word for empathy, but empathy is actually a pretty recent English word. So this idea of ein shuling was kind of talked about in German art history, but it doesn't really get sort of concretized until like the 1870s as this way we appreciate art.

we take our feelings and kind of project them in to what we see. In 1873, the German philosopher Robert Vischer first introduced the word einvaloon. But as Lanzoni just mentioned, it wasn't originally about experiencing the feelings of another person, but instead it was about projecting human feelings and emotions into works of art or an inanimate object. A couple of decades later, another German thinker, Theodore Lips, picked up on Fisher's concept of Einfelung. He expanded its meaning to include optical illusions. We feel into them.

We can imagine them moving. We can imagine them contracting. So it's a kind of interesting history because it's really more abstract about feeling into things and abstractions, and then slowly it kind of moves into this idea of feeling into other people's. It started as like feeling into an expression. So how do I know your...

sad. I look at your expression of sadness. I remember my own feeling of sadness. And then I put the two together. So that was kind of an early version of what, you know, we say just, okay, I'm empathizing with you in terms of your feelings, your feeling state or your state of mind. So there's a lot of interesting research on that part of feeling into forms. That was an early version of empathy. But along with that came some analysts, some psychiatry. some sociologists, that we're trying to also figure out, well, how is it that we understand other people's experience? But you really see it not mentioned very much, except in some of the academic literature. The English term empathy, based on the German word eimphalung, was coined

only in 1909 by the British-born psychologist Edward B. Titchner, who taught at Cornell University. but it didn't have wider use until decades later. And what I was really surprised to find out was empathy doesn't really come into Webster's dictionary until something like 1944. You know, it's very late. And then post-World War II, you have empathy all of a sudden popping up in Reader's Digest and in magazines and things like that. And it's introduced as a like elite psychological term.

So because psychology after World War II, clinical psychology, treatment of the war veterans, many of whom came back with difficult psychological profiles. And so psychology kind of booms after World War II. And that's actually where empathy is introduced to the public. So no one really even knows what it means. So it's very fascinating to see it pop up. And it's defined in very different ways. It's not like a one thing. Soon there was a great deal of interest in the science of empathy. Post-World War II, a lot of social scientists, psychologists were saying, oh my God, look, the natural scientists built the atom bomb. We have such technology, destructive technology at our fingertips as humans.

Of course, the Holocaust and the technology of death and all that played a role. And a lot of these psychologist, like there was a bunch of articles that came out in like late 40s, 50s, like, we don't understand empathy. It's been overlooked. We don't understand basically how to get along. That's, I think, when it's introduced to the public. That's when there's a lot more research on it. That's where there's an effort to say, you know, we might think more and social scientists should be thinking more about how we can help people get along, like understand what's going on with someone else. So I think at that point, it was highly aspirational. It was like, we need to push up our social science to match our sciences of destruction. So there was kind of this imperative.

And then I think that gets carried over through the civil rights period. How do we extend our empathy for groups that are very different from us? For decades after this, empathy was commonly understood to refer to connecting with people, understanding them, reducing. reducing conflict. Then, in the 1990s, a big development. Some scientists in Italy were mapping neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys. They observed that some neurons fired both when the monkeys grasped an object, but also when they watched the researcher grasp an object. This is the famous discovery of mirror neurons, specialized neurons that allow learning through imitation. Subsequent research has shown that rats and mice also have mirror neurons that respond both to experiencing pain,

but also while witnessing the pain of other rats. Brain imaging in humans followed, which showed the same effect. In 2010, scientists at UCLA used electrodes in the brain to actually record the activity of a patient's mirror neurons, which fired both when performing an action, such as grabbing a cup, and when they watch someone else do the same action. indicating that mirror neurons are a biological mechanism underlying empathy. Some scientists called this the functional architecture of human empathy, allowing us to imitate, understand, and predict the actions of others. In a sense, feel what someone else is feeling.

But some now question whether the theory that motor neurons hardwire humans for empathy tells the full story, says Susan Lanzon. Tony. Up until, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, they were seen as like, if I'm watching you do something, you have neurons firing, and I have mirror neurons that are mirroring you. And that was understood to be the basis for empathy. And then it got a huge amount of, there was a lot of popular books written by neuroscientists about mirroring and mirror neurons. And people still think, okay, these mirror neurons exist, but there's a little more kind of caution about. how much they are driving empathy.

You just don't see as much in the literature now. You know, like we all kind of have this sense of how we connect to other people. And is it emotional? Is it cognitive? Is it our concern or compassion? And, you know, even back in 1960s, people were saying, oh, this is a very complicated thing. You might call it this, but I might define it this way. And today, if you look at any of it,

the science on it. It's just like a plethora of definitions, people disagree. And while there are many different theories about how empathy works, many scientists still posit that it is likely hardwired in humans. Yes, there's been a handful of studies in the field of psychology that have tried to look at this. But I think really what we've found in the research is that actually how little we really understand about this. There seems to be quite an innate phenomenon, almost, that every human being has this capacity for empathy. But actually, the more we study it,

the more we realize we really don't understand it very well. This is Matt Richens, a psychologist, neuroscientist, and researcher based in the UK who has studied empathy. So at its most basic level, empathy shows up and really subtle. ways. We kind of mimic each other's postures, facial expressions, the tone and voice in conversation. And those kind of really micro signals, if you like, invite connection. They kind of tell people, I'm like you, right? We have a similarity. And that has what scientists have called a representational richness. So similar others, it makes it easiest to share their experiences

and to kind of feel their suffering, if you like. But empathy isn't just, just mimicry, right? It scales up to something a lot more profound, something the scholars have called empathic concern. And that's the feeling that really motivates us to help someone who's suffering. It's the kind of empathy that underpins compassion, altruism, and sort of moral decision-making. So it's a very complicated thing with lots of different facets to it. So Richens and other scientists have found empathy to be highly beneficial to society and likely innate. But in 2016, a book started garnering a lot of attention. It was called Against Empathy. The author, Canadian-American academic Paul Bloom. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a professor emeritus at Yale University.

Bloom's book and his belief that empathy can at times be dangerous has gained a lot of traction in right-wing circles, especially among those who think governments or institutions can be too soft, too willing to be influenced by emotion. Here's Paul Bloom on the Big Think YouTube channel, arguing that empathy is a poor moral guide. It's biased, it's enumerate, it saps the spirit, it can be weaponized to make us worse people.

You're suffering. I put myself in your shoes. I feel your pain. And it has all sorts of effects. Most of them bad, I would argue. Bloom says empathic concern, feeling for the other, can lead to irrational judgments. In an interview with Gernica magazine,

he said, quote, we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but empathy leads us astray. Bloom argues for distance from the emotional arousal of empathy. Instead, he writes that cognitive empathy, also known as perspective-taking, imposes a more reasoned response, that it allows an analysis of moral obligation instead of a knee-jerk emotional reaction. Bloom also declined an interview with ideas. Many social scientists and thinkers responded in outrage to Bloom's book,

including celebrated psychologist and Cambridge University professor Simon Baron Cohen. Baron Cohen is the author of The Science of Evil on Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. He criticized what he called Bloom's unempathic, rational cost-benefit calculation. Fellow psychologist Susan Lanzoni also takes issue with Bloom's theories on empathy. She says many researchers define empathy as having more dimension. being more complex than Bloom's interpretation allows. So when Bloom and his colleagues decide, okay, empathy is no longer empathic concern, it's only about feeling this emotion.

They changed the definition of empathy, narrowed it to one kind of facet, I would argue, and then said, well, this isn't really good, and then proceeded to kind of denigrate it. Lanzoni thinks that's too narrow, too simplistic. that there's something more going on besides an automatic emotional response. It's really this complex spectrum. So you have automatic responses, but it kind of, you know, it can be much more controlled and learned and trained. And so it's kind of like you have to look at empathy along a kind of, yeah, spectrum or, you know, there are automatic responses, but they're also considered responses and ways to learn and train and develop empathy.

So that's why I keep coming back to this idea that empathy is very complex. And when you just say, okay, either you have it or you don't, it's kind of an oversimplification. As social scientists debate the definitions and effects of empathy, it's hard not to wonder if the world has turned away from empathy as a human good. Now a chilling warning from several medical researchers. They say people around the world, millions of them could die in the next five years because of the Trump administration's cuts to humanitarian aid.

News 4's Amy Cho explains how this could impact... For some years, research has suggested empathy is declining as a whole. The most common method of measuring empathy is pretty simple. Researchers ask people to respond to statements about whether they have tender or concerned feelings for people in trouble. In Canada, research published by the Canadian Mental Health Association in 2022 said Canadians were feeling less empathic than they did before the pandemic. Only 13% reported feelings of empathy compared to about 25% of Canadians at the onset of COVID-19. The researchers said empathy fatigue may be related to an increase in mental health problems.

An analysis of 72 studies of American college-age students done over 30 years showed empathy had declined about 40% between 1979 and 2009. There are people who believe that if empathy is waning, there's something to be done about that, that the world needs more, not less empathy. Margaret Davidson has come to know this better than most. In 2020, the former teacher was taking it easy, enjoying retirement, but then something devastating happened in her community.

In this area, we had the mass shooting in 2020. In April of that year, the small, close-knit community of Port-a-Peek, Nova Scotia experienced the horrors of Canada's deadliest mass shooting. The calm of Sunday morning in rural Nova Scotia, pierced by sirens. the chase for a gunman who left untold devastation in his wake. When it ended, he was dead. And so were the 22 people he had killed during the previous 13-hour rampage. It all began about 20 minutes down the road from Shiganoi Elementary,

where Margaret Davidson had taught for the last 15 years of her career. After the mass shooting, I just felt it really important that I'd give back somehow to honor those people that we lost. We lost a teacher that had been in. at the school in years past, and we lost a grandmother of children that we taught. And I just, it's so important that we develop empathy and emotional, social literacy at an early age. And it's all about prevention and not remediation when things go wrong. That's when she decided to return to the classroom as a volunteer instructor for roots of empathy.

And it's sort of my way of healing. but it's also my way of promoting what I think is really important in young children. It's an in-school program for children ages 5 to 13. It's built around monthly classroom visits from a local family with their baby. Baby Lavender. It's designed to help children develop emotional literacy and build empathy. How is Lavender feeling today? Happy?

And since the nearby mass shooting, The program has seen a doubling of volunteers in the region who think that's important. Babies are the ideal teacher. They're vulnerable. They come in to this world needing care and love, and that baby, although they don't have language, they can tell us their feelings by their actions. And we learn to read their feelings and understand their feelings.

It's been fun to see her come and it's been exciting. Ellie is in grade one at Shiganoi Elementary School. Baby Lavender has been coming to her classroom for eight months at this point. She's cute and I like to see her come and smile, and it's kind of fun to watch her grow. She made me feel happy and good about myself. Courtney Sims is Ellie's classroom teacher. She's witnessing tangible changes in her young students, in particular those struggling with empathy. I have a couple of students this year who have had a very hard time with empathy,

and it's been great to see them engage with the baby. They seem to have a much more gentle approach with her and they almost can understand from her a little bit more. So one little guy in particular can be a little bit aggressive and has had a hard time understanding how his actions make other people feel. But he will often refer to, well, when Lavender was upset, we comforted her. So I need that when I'm upset.

So it's helped him to build some skills and help him to build some communication around how he's feeling. At play here are two parts of empathy, involving the head and the heart. The cognitive aspect of empathy, being able to understand someone else's perspective or perspective taking. And effective empathy, being able to feel what another person feels. It's that emotional side of empathy. The Roots of Empathy Program focuses on. both. Simms says she can see how these visits help kids. I've even heard the kids on the playground talking about, like, they have noticed the body language of other friends. So, like,

they'll come up at recess and say, oh, so-and-so needs help because they're upset. And I'll ask them what happened. Well, I don't know I wasn't playing with them, but I can see that they're upset from, like, look at the look on their face. Look at how they're sitting by themselves. Routes of Empathy was founded 29 years ago by Canadian Mary Gordon. In the early 80s, the former kindergarten teacher started a parenting program in Toronto after she'd encountered many cases of family violence and abuse. I saw all this suffering and realized that all the perpetrators had no empathy. She came to believe that empathy, or the lack of it, was the key to whether children grew up to succeed or fail in important ways.

When people grow up without empathy, they cannot feel what the other person is feeling. And it doesn't mean they're faulty human beings. They just don't have that mind-sharing ability. And without empathy, you can't make a good friend. You might have acquaintances, but you will never keep a good friend. You can never really be connected to anyone in the world. You would be lonely for life. And without empathy, you're missing the key part of your social and emotional development.

Gordon's program has now been introduced to 1.2 million children across three continents. So we're seeing amazing changes in children. Little children who were nonverbal end up talking before the year is over. Because all the concerns they had that, you know, kept them from contributing, disappear when you're working with the principle of intrinsic motivation. Children stop competing. Stop comparing. Stop making fun.

Stop being cruel. Because they understand how another person would feel. And that we do through the baby. Research done by the government of Manitoba and the University of British Columbia found that school children involved in roots of empathy showed less bullying and aggression and more. pro-social behaviors. Things like helping and showing concern for each other. A three-year study in Northern Ireland echoed all of those findings and also found students involved had less hyperactivity,

better concentration, and fewer behavior problems. You're helping children understand what it is to participate in something that is concerned about the well-being of a vulnerable person. And so when we care together in society. That is the highest form of democracy. And here's an interesting result from scientific studies. Empathy is contagious. When group norms encourage empathy, members of the group become more empathetic and altruistic. And this can also happen through training programs, as we just heard. This is CBC Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Specksaver. Every day, your eyes go through a lot.

Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.ca.caps are provided by independent optometrists,

prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.caver's.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us. us keep climbing. Donate at Lovescarbrough.ca.ca. In this idea's documentary, contributor Pauline Dakin explores the many

facets of empathy, its history, the signs behind it, and the battle over its legitimacy. While empathy is part of a biological makeup, it's not a given reaction, as the horrors of history have clearly pointed out.

So I think one of the key things is to understand about how empathy either flourishes or diminishes in the wild, if you like, or how we're interacting with other people, is the first thing to understand is it's not a constant. It's not a given. Psychologist and neuroscientist Matt Richens again. Yes, we all have this innate ability to it. But actually, it seems to function more like a perk, if you like. One that we extend to other people that we have this sense of shared fate or social glue might be a good way to think about it.

Now, when that glue is missing, empathy falls apart. If we are hardwired for empathy, what's the short circuit that can shut it down? Matt Richens and his colleagues at the University of Exeter in England did some studies using real social groups that showed empathy fluctuates depending on who we're interacting with. So a lot of my research that I've done shows that empathy is really strongest when we have that similarity with another person or a sense of oneness we sometimes try. refer to it as. And without that, empathy suddenly becomes rather selective. And sometimes disappears altogether. It's something we've called in the field the darker side of empathy. We don't give it to everyone, actually. In fact, we often withhold it sometimes consciously, sometimes without realizing it. And that's where my research has come in. So I've been interested in the years of

how these group boundaries kind of shape empathy. We often feel more for us, less for them. But recently, it's sort of clear that it's not just us and them, it's what them means to us. You know, what do we find them to be particularly threatening, highly competitive, or someone that we, you know, feel is more victimized or someone we can share sense of pity with? So it seems to be something inherent to people and how we classify them. But why? What is acting as empathy interrupters? Richens tested one theory, fear. Now more recently I've been exploring how fear plays into this, and we really want to understand,

okay, well, if those group dynamics come to play, how automatic is empathy really? Whether fear that's integral to the context, is it something about the people that are interacting with? Or is it fear in itself, this idea of incidental fear? Can that just reduce our empathy towards other people when they're in suffering? So Richens and his colleagues ran some experiments at the University of Exeter. So we wanted to know, can fear, even fear that's unrelated to the people we're looking at change, how much empathy feel towards them. So in the first study, we used real social groups. So our participants were shown images of people experiencing either painful or neutral events.

So the painful events were very clear, very visceral. So something like a hand being stabbed with, the kitchen knife or pricked by a broken class. You know, these aren't ambiguous. They really were designed to evoke strong empathic responses. Now, the people that the participants saw were then identified as either a student from their own university, being group, or from a rival university, in this case, a sort of an out-group. Now, while participants were doing that task and making these ratings of, you know, how bad do I feel for this person, for half of them, we would, we were, would then randomly flash up a fear-inducing image.

Now, initially, these are common phobias like a spider or a snake in one study. In a later study, we sort of changed that a bit to be more threatening imagery like a knife or a gun on the screen. The other half of those pictures were then just harmless, so it could be like a cuddly toy version of a snake to keep it balanced. So these were really completely unrelated to the people in pain. The idea with this was to simulate incidental fear, like the kind you might feel, after reading a scary news story or seeing something unsettling online.

And what we found when we did that was that Thea reduced empathy, but importantly, not across the board, which was interesting to us. So specifically it reduced empathy for the out group. So participants still felt comparable levels for their own group. Their compassion to the rival group just dropped even further than usual when fear was present. Another study was done between random groups about the impact of fear on empathy. And we used arbitrary groups. So we simply said red team versus blue team, the group's completely meaningless, right?

Participants were randomly assigned to one and give it a coloured bracelet to wear. And the only indicated to the person they could see on screen was the colour of their bracelet. So there was no history, there's no rivalry, there's no real world significance to that. And yet, even in this minimal group context, we saw that same pattern. So when we induced fear, empathy for the outgroup dropped. You know, just being in a different group, even one that was made up, was enough to trigger this, what we call empathic bias under fear. Now, we looked at measuring this a couple of different ways.

We looked at self-reports, so simply asking people, you know, how bad did you feel for that person in pain? And what we found is, yeah, indeed, people would even report feeling less bad for that person. So despite the fact empathy is quite a socially desirable thing, you know, we all want to look quite empathic and compassionate to others. Even now, people were saying, you know, I didn't feel anyone near as bad for that person. Another way Richens and his fellow scientists measured this was by examining their subject's brain activity using neuroimaging techniques. We saw in brain regions that are typically associated with empathy, so medial prefrontal cortex and the interior lincia, these regions showed much, less activation. So what does that tell us? We sort of looked at all this data and concluded, really,

well, empathy isn't just automatic, right? It appears to be very context sensitive. And fear, even very subtle, unrelated fear can reshape how we perceive other people and how we interact with them and how much we care for their suffering. Whether the group is real, whether it's arbitrary, fear seems to sharpen the boundary between what's us and what's them. Those other people, could be from a different religion, political party, or socioeconomic status, or even fans of an opposing sports team. And fear that divides us, Richon says, can be weaponized. He points to historical examples where victims were dehumanized. Historically, we've seen how some of these group dynamics can have really devastating consequences. So we can look at cases like the

Holocaust in Rwanda and Darfur, you know, victims are portrayed as threatening out groups, even though, you know, we're talking about people who are often minorities and often defenseless, but what people did at the time was dehumanize them. You know, they were depicted in propaganda as insects, as vermin, as animals, which made it really easy, sad to say, for people to withdraw empathy entirely and even justify violence towards them. And the neuroscience sort of backs this up. If you see someone as less than human, it kind of activates this defensive rather than compassionate response in the brain. If you look at some quotes from the Nuremberg trials, so these are the military tribunals held after World War II.

Herman Guring, the leader of the Nazi Party at the time, said that to bring people to the bidding of leaders, you need only expose them to great danger and tell them they are being attacked. And on that, he was sadly very correct. it seems very easy to harness fear and to turn people against one another, sort of bringing in this almost automatic tendency to break ourselves into us and them and draw a sort of a line in the sand, if you like. You know, fear is such an evolutionary thing. It's something that developed very early in humans, and to be able to weaponise it is quite easy and sort of just a little bit intuitive, I think.

I mean, one of the fascinating things we've learned from neuroscience is just really how fast our brains respond to social cues, especially when it comes to people who are different from us. So within about 300 milliseconds of seeing a face, our brain will start processing whether that is part of our group or not. A specific brain signal called the P200. It's kind of an electrical spike we sometimes see that shows about 200 milliseconds. That signal, is also linked to heightened attention and vigilance. It's almost like the brain is saying, pay attention, this might be important. So it's really striking how automatic that is and how very quickly associated with, you know,

vigilance, attention, and discomfort that actually becomes. There are people who are talking about empathy being weaponized, and they talk about toxic empathy or suicidal empathy. there's a Canadian researcher who's been writing about this. What does your research mean for the understanding of that argument that empathy is undermining our thinking and sending us in bad directions? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a provocative claim, and I think it's important to impact that carefully.

I mean, from a scientific perspective, empathy is not inherently dangerous. It is selective, you know, it is context-sensitive. and sometimes biased. But the idea that empathy leads to poor decisions, the research, I think, is usually stemmed from situations where people feel emotionally overwhelmed

or where empathy is perhaps being applied unevenly. We can see that empathy's not a constant stream, right? It's more like a spotlight, I think. If we shine it on those we feel close to, on those we perceive as vulnerable, non-threatening, we don't extend it equally to everyone. So I don't think the science really supports the, idea that empathy is dangerous. Well, it shows is empathy is fragile, if anything. It's shaped by

emotion, shaped by our identities and our context. If we want to make good decisions, especially in diverse societies where we live and find ourselves, we need to understand how empathy works when it fails and then how to protect it. So research shows that when people are encouraged to see others as part of a shared identity, even a broader one like we are human beings. Empathy starts to increase. I mean, it's one of the principles behind great programs like the roots of empathy, this idea that we use shared experiences to build connection. But we live in an often starkly divided world. For writers such as Gadsad and psychologist Paul Bloom, podcaster Ali Beth Stucky, Elon Musk, and others, empathy is a zero-sum game

with us and them, winners and losers. Psychologists, Susan Lanzoni says empathy can also be faulted by some as being a particularly feminine weakness. So empathy gets a little bit feminized, which is like feeling is kind of a problem, which I think maybe Paul Bloom is sharing in a little bit. Like, feeling is dangerous. Feeling is feminized. It's not rational. It's out of control. We need principles to sort of codify feelings because feelings are. problematic. So I think the feeling you might have, like the positive feeling for a child whose trance is to be overcome by your principle that this is against the will of God. Again, that's seeing empathy is just like, oh, you feel bad, I feel bad. Okay, that's all there is to it. But Lanzoni says empathy is complex, more complex than just automatic emotions. You know,

this idea that empathy is just this kind of blind feeling that has no anchors in reality or understanding is kind of simplistic. It has an emotional component, that's for sure. But we can be very deliberate about it. We can think about it. We can reflect about it. I think the best example of this and how you can control empathy to your own advantage and the advantage actually of others comes from nursing. Michael Sloat is a moral philosopher and a professor of ethics at the University of Miami. In his book, The Ethics of Care and Empathy, he considers both personal and political morality and the role empathy should play. He agrees it's possible to apply empathy in a considered way, and he says sometimes that's important. Now, nurses often get what is called

compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue. When they are over devoted to their patients and then they run out of steam emotionally. And then they can't really do their job. Now, if a nurse doesn't realize what could happen, she could fall into that, right? And then she doesn't do her job. So if she's a caring person, she'll realize I overdid it with empathy, okay? I have to control my empathy and keep my distance to a certain extent from my patients so as to be able to budget it in a larger way and give my most by not doing too much in one direction. So that's an example where empathy can be controlled by a deliberate action by the nurse, let's say. A doctor could be in the same situation. I mean, certainly you can't just be an empathic

machine. You have to take care of yourself, too, if you're at all rational and intelligent. But, you know, some of those limits are built into empathy itself. I mean, we are not likely to have more empathy for, let's say, the sufferings of others than we have concern for our own welfare. So we could talk about a certain balance between empathy for others and self-concern. Now, there are some people whose self-concern is diminished, but not necessarily in an unhealthy way, but in their actually a morally admirable way. Think of the person, the rare person, who is willing to give their kidney, one of their kidneys, to a stranger.

That's a remarkable feat of empathy in a way. And you might say it's irrational for them to do it, but we praise the hell out of it. So I wouldn't call this toxic empathy, but it's empathy that goes against self-interest. But if somebody doesn't do that, if they say, look, I really don't want to take the chance and all that, we don't condemn them. So certain failures of empathy are not condemnable. Like if I said, look, I'm not going to be this heroic and give my kidney, we don't condemn that. But we do praise the person who's willing to go the extra empathic mile. Sloat also has a theory on empathy that goes beyond the personal.

Take pride in having discovered a way in which empathy can teach us about the world. I'm not talking about a moral role of empathy, but the fact is, most people think empathy, the most you learn from empathy is about the minds or feelings of another person. So here's an example that I came up with, which I think has convinced the profession, that empathy can actually teach you about the outer world. Let's say you have a child of four years old, and he's living with a child, his parents in a cabin in the woods. And there are some bears around that cabin, okay? And he sees how fearful his parents are when they talk about the bears. They don't mention the bears to him because

they don't want to scare him. And he's not going to go out alone anyway. But he sees and he feels their fear of the bears, right? Through his empathic understanding of how they feel, he realizes that bears are dangerous. And that's about the world. So it's possible through your parents' fears or through other people's attitudes to learn about the world outside of them. While the word empathy didn't come into our English lexicon until relatively recently, thinkers have danced around its existence for centuries. It's interesting. In the history of the human race, an explicit concept of empathy didn't exist until, you know, 40, 50 years ago. Now,

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, talked about sympathy. And sometimes he referred to sympathy in terms that actually mean empathy. And he was really talking about empathy. But he didn't have the word empathy. That word didn't exist until the 1900s, till the early 1900. Now, why all of a sudden is the human race, in my opinion, in morally catching up with what it should have been doing all through the ages? Hume did know.

Hume did see that benevolence and compassion are based in empathy. He didn't use the word. But before Hume, no one saw any of this. How much do you think it has to do with, you know, the discovery of mirror neurons and no, no, that's the great thing of it. It emerged before the mirror neurons. The mirror neurons back it all up. You see?

You know, people wondered, well, how could there be such a sense of empathy if there's no underlying biological, neurological basis? Now we've discovered it. It puts empathy on an equal footing with the four, five senses, because they will have their organs. Now, empathy has its organ. So I think it establishes empathy more strongly as a basis for whatever you want to make use of it for. Now, in my opinion, empathy plays a major role, both in moral action and in moral thinking. Okay. But it helps to have the mirror neurons to back up your pretensions in that direction. So how important is empathy personally and then more broadly

in our world? Okay. Well, you know, Now you're asking me to do some moral philosophy. Now, the rationalists think we don't need empathy to be good people and for the world to flourish. All we need is a rational acknowledgement of what our obligations are and a deep sense of it so that we act accordingly. But I'm a care ethicist. I'm a sentimentalist. I don't think rationality can do the job. So in my opinion, if we want morality, we need empathy.

And so I think moral right and wrong and moral virtue can be understood in terms of the proper kinds of empathic reactions. So I think empathy on an individual basis is a basis for being a good person, a decent human being. I think a good society will have empathy. That's what Social Security is all about. That's what welfare is all about. If the legislature, so they don't know, let the devil take the hindmost, we're not going to give them anything. They have the right of liberty and all that, but we don't have to provide for their welfare. Libertarianism says you let people be free, but you don't provide them with anything.

Let them compete with each other for the goodies of life. So in my opinion, an empathic society will be one in which people are willing to vote for people who are willing to vote for legislation that takes into account the needs of the general society. Now, I think you can go beyond that. Iris Marion Young. Young was a prominent American political theorist who passed away in two. 2006. And in one of her words very wisely points out that when we talk about the common good and being concerned about the common good, that isn't necessarily the formula for the morally

best society because the common good may not include enough help for the worst off. So to focus too much on the common good is not to focus on the very special and stringent needs of those who are worst off. So I don't think common good is the right formula. I think right formula is, but it's best for society. But it seems to me that empathy will be more compassionate about those who are suffering than about those whose lives can merely be improved. So it's built into empathy that you'll have a preference for helping the very badly off. And that, I think, is part of a good society. In the end, Sloat says empathy is the cement of the moral universe. And one last question

posed to Matt Richens, whose research at the University of Exeter shows empathy can be selective. A somewhat philosophical question for a scientist, is empathy a good thing? I think it certainly can be. I think being able to make these kind of mental gymnastics and break ourselves out of what is a very early evolutionary tendency to think in a tribal way, will kind of start to help us within these kind of more diverse societies, where there's an or two natural tendency to use automatic thinking. And in many ways, what the research tells us is that actually you can't prevent that automatic thinking from happening. If it happens within 200 milliseconds, how do you really stop that? Well, the answer is you probably don't. The answer is

more recognising that that happens, and then thinking afterwards and saying, well, actually, what do I know about this person that I'm interacting with, and how can I think differently? We all have the potential for empathy, whether it develops or shrivels. And a reassuring note to end on. Remember the American studies in college students that showed empathy had declined dramatically between 1979 and 2009? Well, an update published last year reports a notable change in the following decade, up until 2018. It says Gen Z's empathy levels are higher. almost 40% higher than recent generations before them,

almost as high as college students in the late 1970s when the research began. And some new research that will soon be published finds that despite what the critics say, empathy and reasoning do work together. In people who regularly help others, empathy is the spark that motivates their altruism. And reasoning helps them determine, where their efforts or money can have the greatest impact.

Suggesting, as Susan Lanzoni says, that empathy is not as simple as the battle currently waging would suggest. That was the conclusion to our documentary, The Battle for Empathy. It was by ideas contributor Pauline Dakin and produced by Mary Link. Technical production Sam McNulty. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas. Web Producer, Senior Producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.