Amid alarming levels of political polarisation, politicians, civil society, and ordinary citizens alike call for greater empathy between partisans. But is empathy really an effective tool for minimising polarisation?
Few need convincing that the American political climate is extremely polarised. The severity of polarisation in the US has come to define the last three decades of American politics; the last six years especially so. While both the Democrats’ and Republicans’ policy platforms have historically been next-door neighbours on the political spectrum, polarisation among the American public reflects much greater cleavages. Misguided feelings of resentment have shifted the locus of blame from elite decision makers to fellow citizens who identify with the out-party. [1] In other words, polarisation of the masses has outpaced polarisation of the political elite. [2]
Affective polarisation refers to the polarisation that occurs at the social – rather than policy – level. Its primary actors are individual citizens and its arena is emotional; affective polarisation measures the extent to which partisans treat each other as a stigmatised outgroup. Increases in affective polarisation have resulted in the conflation of party affiliation with social and cultural identity. [3] Democrats and Republicans have come to be associated with distinct demographics: Democrats are increasingly the party of women, urbanites, professionals, and people of colour, whereas Republican voters are disproportionately male, rural, older, white, and Christian. [4] In the United States, outgroup prejudice based on party affiliation now exceeds prejudice based on race, religion, and other historically significant social and cultural schisms. [5]
The knee-jerk response to affective polarisation is a call for greater empathy. Arlie Russell Hoschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land, for example, focuses on the deconstruction of what she terms “empathy walls”: those psychological structures that prevent us from deeply understanding someone in the out-party, and that make us “shoehorn new information into ways we already think”. [6] Hoschild’s book details the “deep story” of lower-middle class, white, Southern Americans. The deep story, in Hoschild’s words, is a “feels-as-if” story; a story that removes judgement and allows those on both sides of the political spectrum to understand the subjective prism through which the other party contemplates politics. [7] Her intended audience are Liberals: in an effort to depolarise the US, her book represents a plea directed at the Left to understand and empathise with the Right. Hoschild’s appeal to empathy does not stand alone. The Washington Post, NPR, and The Atlantic, and, notoriously, Neil Young are a few among many examples of influential publications and figures that imagine empathy as a critical ingredient in solving American polarisation. Intuitively, this makes sense: affective polarisation is fundamentally driven by people’s emotions, and an emotional problem should require emotional solutions.
However, the research on empathy as a tool for minimising polarisation yields mixed results. Simas, Clifford, and Kirkland, for example, find evidence that greater empathetic concern will actually exacerbate, rather than alleviate, affective polarisation. Their study finds that increases in empathetic capacity correlate with stronger identification with those in the in-party, and even less tolerance for those in the out-party. They also find that those who express higher levels of empathy are also more likely to express a desire to censor public expressions of outparty viewpoints, while those at the lower end of the empathy spectrum did not distinguish between inparty and outparty viewpoints. Other studies have confirmed their findings: increases in empathy are correlated with increases in schadenfreude, which refers to the feeling of pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.
These studies illuminate the psychological complexity of empathy. Empathy is a flexible, context-dependent response, which itself facilitates an increase in negative emotions such as anger or desire to punish, particularly where interactions between partisans are perceived as threatening. [8] Feelings of being threatened are pervasive in American politics. In 2016, 45% of Republicans viewed the Democrats as an existential threat to the nation and their way of life, while 41% of Democrats levelled the same accusation against their Republican counterparts. Another study finds that 70% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans describe themselves as “afraid” of the out-party. Thus, according to Simas, Clifford, and Kirkland’s findings, the American context is ripe for producing the counterproductive effects associated with increased empathy, and may only exacerbate already dire levels of polarisation. [9]
Ultimately, calls for greater empathy as a solution to affective polarisation underestimate the psychological complexity of empathetic concern. While empathetic concern is often assumed to be a universal, utilitarian good, data suggests otherwise. Empathy is nuanced, complicated, and constituted by multiple overlapping psychological processes. Those who accuse the American public of lacking empathy fail to appreciate this nuance, and likewise fail to acknowledge the potential unintended, counterproductive consequences that could arise from increases in individual citizens’ empathic faculties. In short, polarisation is not a result of a lack of empathy among the American public, but rather a product of the inherently biassed ways in which we experience empathy. [10] The imagined 1:1 correlation between an increase in empathy and a decrease in polarisation is just that – imagined.
This is not to say that we should abandon empathy entirely. Simas, Clifford, and Kirkland find that although empathy may aggravate many manifestations of affective polarisation, it may minimise at least one: social distance. Empathetic concern motivates prosocial behaviour; higher levels of empathy should increase individuals’ openness to contact or interaction with members of the out-party. To the extent that out-party contact can function to decrease polarisation and maintain national unity, empathy is still a valuable political tool. Further research shows that citizens with higher levels of empathetic capacity are more likely to participate in the political process, which bodes well for the integrity of democracy in any given country. Thus, the American public and its leaders should seek to complicate their understanding of the role of empathy in politics. Empathy alone is an insufficient solution to affective polarisation; appeals to empathy should be complemented with other persuasive tactics in order to dampen the potential negative consequences.
Hi Sophia! I really enjoyed reading your post, and while you make a convincing argument, I largely disagree with your conclusions that empathy is not a promising solution to the polarization we see in American society today (perhaps I have too much faith in people, but let me explain why). The study you rely on that finds empathetic people are biased towards the in-group has a logical solution that I don’t think undermines the solution: people are largely exposed to people in their in-group, and they want to protect their communities. As you mention later in this blog post, people feel fear or apprehension commonly towards the other party, and even feel threatened by them. When people feel threatened, an empathetic instinct is to protect. Accordingly, I would argue that empathy doesn’t necessarily condition people to feel schadenfreude, just protect their friends. I think that creating conversations among parties that focus on helping people simply get along and see one another as human can circumvent that, as well as a larger shift away from inflammatory rhetoric (how we get there is a whole different conversation).
The largest problem I see is not with the concerns you mention, but with scalability. The way I see it, empathetic connections form when you see others as human beings and relate to them, and when this happens through conversations (and even friendships!) it’s promising. I’ve personally seen it work in my life, and I’ve got faith in the solution on that individual scale, but I do agree that it’s difficult to enlarge this idea to a societal scale quickly. So I do think it’s unlikely that this is a quick solution to our complex problem, but I did want to communicate that I do seem to see more hope than you.
Hey Jackson, thanks for your comment. I think you’re right that empathy doesn’t always necessarily lead to schadenfreude, and more likely leads people to feel increased protectiveness towards members of the in-group; at least, your argument is consistent with my personal experience. I think the key takeaway from the study I mentioned isn’t that empathy is an overall harm to democracy, but rather that empathy is a more complex emotion than we typically acknowledge. What I took away from the study is that empathy can lead to BOTH increased positive feelings towards certain groups, AND increased negative feelings towards certain groups. This means that advocating for a net-increase in empathy – without nuance, without providing the appropriate tools for navigating a complex cognitive response – can produce unintended consequences.
I just read your post on empathy as a tool for discourse. You mentioned that “Americans are increasingly voting with their feelings and their lived experience rather than basing their votes off of objective facts.” I wonder: do you mean that Americans SHOULD be voting based off facts? If so, how does empathy fit into the equation? If we want Americans to rely LESS on emotion when casting their votes, why are we asking them to feel more empathy? If we want them to feel more empathetic and lead with emotion, then why are we chastising them for making “the facts” a secondary priority? I don’t mean to suggest that they’re mutually exclusive, or that there isn’t a voting strategy which integrates both emotion and fact-finding, but I’d be curious to hear how you think an adequate balance can be struck.
Hi Sophia, thanks for getting back to me! I do understand your point about the unintended consequences; it makes sense, and I do believe it. I wanted to just emphasize that the way I see it, the net would still be positive, though I follow the argument that maybe that wouldn’t be the case. To answer your latter questions, about whether or not Americans should be voting off feelings or facts, I think that the answer doesn’t really matter – regardless of what they should do in my view or yours, many Americans will continue to vote with their hearts, and we have to work with that. It would be convenient if everyone had the time and ability to analyze individual policies and choose what is better for them personally based on some numerical metric, but that won’t happen, even if it would be beneficial. I think that making facts available and digestible for the public so they can see how policies will impact them will help them integrate facts into voting, but regardless, many people will value things they feel over what these facts will tell them. I don’t think a balance is ever possible for everyone, because everyone will weigh these factors differently. However, I think that it is worth it to make reliable information available for people, so they can choose if they’re going to consider it themselves, but I also think that we should operate within the existing reality that hearts will guide many votes. The reason I think that empathy will help is that when people realize that the other side are also people, which may make people reconsider villainizing the other side, and could make people more receptive to facts.
Hey Jackson, thanks for your reply. I agree that no matter what we do people will vote emotionally and we have to be prepared to navigate that. On that subject, I wanted to bring up another point from the Hoschild book we both referenced in our blog posts.
I’d like to distinguish between the argument that affective polarisation results from a lack of empathy, versus the argument that it stems from an overdose of it – empathy fatigue. What do you think about empathy fatigue? Let’s take Hoschild’s example. In telling the deep story of the white American South, Hoschild writes: “Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve that you don’t control or agree with […] It’s not fair.” (pg 137, plus see more on this subject in the following pages). Hoschild’s book locates empathy at the root of the affective partisanship issue; people are being demanded to feel more empathetic when their tap has already run dry. To me, Hoschild’s book seems tautological, because she identifies empathy as both the problem AND the solution. What do you think?
If empathy is the root of the issue, then how is asking them to feel MORE empathetic going to be productive? It seems odd to me that in a country plagued by empathy fatigue, we think the solution is to call for more empathy. Imagine you ate too much sugar and felt sick, and someone comes and offers you chocolate. To me, this seems counterintuitive.