Sam Harris

There are at least two kinds of empathy.

There's the cognitive form, which is, I would argue, even a species of reason.

It's just understanding another person's point of view.

You understand...

why they're suffering or why they're happy.

You have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate.

And so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively.

And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of emotional contagion, right?

Like you feel depressed,

and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it's contagious, right?

We're so close and I'm so concerned about you and your problems become my problems and it bleeds through, right?

Now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece

and this is not really my thesis, this is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy.

The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions.

Oh boy.

And I'll give you the clear example of this, which is

We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right?

So if I tell you, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well,

This is somebody's daughter.

You see the parents distraught on television.