“In many cases, however, evolution actually reduces our native empathic capacity—for instance, we can contextualize our natural empathy to exclude outgroup members and rivals.”
Exactly as it should be.
Empathy is valuable in close community settings, a ‘safety net’ adaption to make the community stronger with people we keep track of to ensure we are not being exploited by people not making concomitant effort to help themselves. But it seems to me that it is destructive at wider social scales enabled by social media where we don’t or can’t have effective reputation tracking to ensure that we are not being ‘played’ for the purpose of resource extraction by people making dishonest or exaggerated representations.
In essence at larger scales the instinct towards empathy rewards dishonest, exploitative, sociopathic and narcissistic behavior in individuals, and is perhaps responsible for a lot of the deleterious aspects of social media amongst particularly more naturally or generally empathic-by-default women. Eg ‘influencers’ (and before them exploitative televangelists) cashing in on follower empathy. It also rewards misrepresentations of victimhood/suffering for attention and approval—again in absence of more in depth knowledge of the person that would exist in a smaller community—that may be a source of rapid increase in ‘social contagion’ mental health pathologies amongst particularly young women instinctually desirous of attention most easily attained by inventing of exaggerating issues in absence of other attributes that might garner attention.
In short the empathic charitable instinct that works so well in families and small groups is socially destructive and dysfunctional at scales beyond community level.
“In many cases, however, evolution actually reduces our native empathic capacity—for instance, we can contextualize our natural empathy to exclude outgroup members and rivals.”
Exactly as it should be.
Empathy is valuable in close community settings, a ‘safety net’ adaption to make the community stronger with people we keep track of to ensure we are not being exploited by people not making concomitant effort to help themselves. But it seems to me that it is destructive at wider social scales enabled by social media where we don’t or can’t have effective reputation tracking to ensure that we are not being ‘played’ for the purpose of resource extraction by people making dishonest or exaggerated representations.
In essence at larger scales the instinct towards empathy rewards dishonest, exploitative, sociopathic and narcissistic behavior in individuals, and is perhaps responsible for a lot of the deleterious aspects of social media amongst particularly more naturally or generally empathic-by-default women. Eg ‘influencers’ (and before them exploitative televangelists) cashing in on follower empathy. It also rewards misrepresentations of victimhood/suffering for attention and approval—again in absence of more in depth knowledge of the person that would exist in a smaller community—that may be a source of rapid increase in ‘social contagion’ mental health pathologies amongst particularly young women instinctually desirous of attention most easily attained by inventing of exaggerating issues in absence of other attributes that might garner attention.
In short the empathic charitable instinct that works so well in families and small groups is socially destructive and dysfunctional at scales beyond community level.