I’ve also noticed this pattern and don’t have a great name for it, and perhaps no one will be surprised that I am willing to categorize this behavior in correlation with psychological development.
Kids often start off doing something like 2 (let’s call it 0) but in a way that’s very much not empathetic. Kids are then develop, often in this case it seems to be with directed training, towards 1. Adults then stay at 1 unless they find problems with it and learn to do 2. The difficulty seems to be that it’s hard to learn to do 2 without accidentally doing 0 or still doing 1 but wrapping it up in 2-style language. I suspect this reflects the complexity demands of 2 for cognitive empathy, specifically the ability to build a sufficiently complex ontology of other people that it is able to make reasonable enough predictions about the behavior of others when imposing emotional demands on them that your behavior does not end up producing outcomes that violate your preferences.
For me 1 is the kind of stuff I’m trying to “forget” in my own life so I can be filled with 2, or more properly not the 2 cluster necessarily but whatever is both compassionate and satisfies my preferences. I think the 1 strategy makes a lot of sense though if you both want to not hurt other people/make them do emotional labor and don’t have strongly predictive models of other people. Learning the 2 stuff fully requires developing fairly complex cognitive empathy.
I think it’s also worth pointing out here because I can easily see the objection being raised that this is not a male-only pattern. Although 2 stuff is more emphasized to girls than boys in Western society and girls are encouraged to feel affective empathy while boys are encouraged to not, the development of cognitive empathy seems a different skill that may be aided by affective empathy making confusion salient but does not actually play much of a role in success at 2. What 1 looks like in male-typed and female-typed behavior is slightly different but in both cases lacks the complex ontology of others’ minds necessary for 2, with female-typed behavior being perhaps more prone to masquerading as 2 and male-typed behavior more prone to being obvious not 2.
I’ve also noticed this pattern and don’t have a great name for it, and perhaps no one will be surprised that I am willing to categorize this behavior in correlation with psychological development.
Kids often start off doing something like 2 (let’s call it 0) but in a way that’s very much not empathetic. Kids are then develop, often in this case it seems to be with directed training, towards 1. Adults then stay at 1 unless they find problems with it and learn to do 2. The difficulty seems to be that it’s hard to learn to do 2 without accidentally doing 0 or still doing 1 but wrapping it up in 2-style language. I suspect this reflects the complexity demands of 2 for cognitive empathy, specifically the ability to build a sufficiently complex ontology of other people that it is able to make reasonable enough predictions about the behavior of others when imposing emotional demands on them that your behavior does not end up producing outcomes that violate your preferences.
For me 1 is the kind of stuff I’m trying to “forget” in my own life so I can be filled with 2, or more properly not the 2 cluster necessarily but whatever is both compassionate and satisfies my preferences. I think the 1 strategy makes a lot of sense though if you both want to not hurt other people/make them do emotional labor and don’t have strongly predictive models of other people. Learning the 2 stuff fully requires developing fairly complex cognitive empathy.
I think it’s also worth pointing out here because I can easily see the objection being raised that this is not a male-only pattern. Although 2 stuff is more emphasized to girls than boys in Western society and girls are encouraged to feel affective empathy while boys are encouraged to not, the development of cognitive empathy seems a different skill that may be aided by affective empathy making confusion salient but does not actually play much of a role in success at 2. What 1 looks like in male-typed and female-typed behavior is slightly different but in both cases lacks the complex ontology of others’ minds necessary for 2, with female-typed behavior being perhaps more prone to masquerading as 2 and male-typed behavior more prone to being obvious not 2.