By DARYL CAMERON, MICHAEL INZLICHT and WILLIAM A. CUNNINGHAM
ONE death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic.
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You’ve probably heard this saying
before. It is thought to capture an unfortunate truth about empathy: While a
single crying child or injured puppy tugs at our heartstrings, large numbers of
suffering people, as in epidemics, earthquakes and genocides, do not inspire a
comparable reaction.
Studies have repeatedly confirmed
this. It’s a troubling finding because, as recentresearch
has demonstrated, many of us believe that if more lives are at stake, we will —
and should — feel more empathy (i.e., vicariously share others’ experiences) and
do more to help.
Not only does empathy seem to fail
when it is needed most, but it also appears to play favorites. Recentstudies
have shown that our empathy is dampened or constrained when it comes to people
of different races, nationalities or creeds. These results suggest that empathy
is a limited resource, like a fossil fuel, which we cannot extend indefinitely
or to everyone.
What, then, is the relationship
between empathy and morality? Traditionally, empathy has been seen as a force
for moral good, motivating virtuous deeds. Yet a growing chorus of critics,
inspired by findings like those above, depict empathy as a source of moral
failure. In the words of the psychologist Paul Bloom, empathy is a “parochial,
narrow-minded” emotion — one that “will have to yield to reason if humanity is
to survive.”
We disagree.
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While we concede that the exercise
of empathy is, in practice, often far too limited in scope, we dispute the idea
that this shortcoming is inherent, a permanent flaw in the emotion itself.
Inspired by a competing body of recent research, we believe that empathy is a
choice that we make whether to extend ourselves to others. The “limits”
to our empathy are merely apparent, and can change, sometimes drastically,
depending on what we want to feel.
Two decades ago, the psychologist
Daniel Batson and colleagues conducted a study that showed
that if people expected their empathy to cost them significant money or time,
they would avoid situations that they believed would trigger it. More recently,
one of us, Daryl Cameron, along with the psychologist Keith Payne, conducted an experiment
to see if similar motivational factors could explain why we seem more empathetic
to single victims than to large numbers of them.