A New Look at Empathy

Three years ago I wrote a blog piece about empathy.
https://crucibleofthought.com/how-i-learned-empathy/
This issue seems to be arising again in the popular discussion, as it seems to do cyclically on social media. Given that I’m three years further along my journey of rethinking my faith and politics, my understanding of this topic has deepened and hopefully matured, and it seemed reasonable to revisit the topic.

If you haven’t read that earlier blog post, I would recommend starting there. I don’t disagree with anything I wrote three years ago (which is actually a bit surprising to me). But there’s some new information – maybe some nuance – that I can add to what I wrote in 2021. And this analysis comes with a specific call to action.

To summarize my former article as I begin: I was mourning the fact that conservative Christians were decrying empathy as a sin, and I made the counter-case that empathy was deeply lacking in many Christian circles.

What I’ve found now while researching empathy is that our political views often are strongly biased by our inherent empathy. But it’s not as simple as some claim, that conservatives lack empathy while liberals have too much. Rather, it seems that almost everyone HAS empathy; their politics become a matter of how people allow their empathy to operate, and on behalf of which humans and groups.

So with that summary, let’s get into it.

I’ll readily admit here at the outset that I’m not a psychologist. I’m an engineer, and I tend to approach things very rationally, from a cause-and-effect, mechanical, rule-based standpoint. But because of that training and experience, I want to understand why things work. So I’ve approached this topic from that perspective: what’s going on, why, and what can we learn from the information.

At the core, empathy is about the ability to sense or perceive other people’s internal responses to situations: in short, identifying with their emotions.

Rather than starting with a simplistic dictionary definition, let’s review some quotes from various scholarly papers about empathy.

The concept of empathy was first introduced by aestheticians in the mid-19th century. They used the German word “Einfühlung” to describe the emotional “knowing” of a work of art from within, by feeling an emotional resonance with the work of art. At the end of the 19th century, the psychologist Theodore Lipps expanded this concept to mean “feeling one’s way into the experience of another” by theorizing that inner imitation of the actions of others played a critical role in eliciting empathy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

A novel study showed that the expression, “I feel your pain,” is much more than just a figure of speech. Sixteen female volunteers had brain scans performed while they received painful electric shocks to their hands. While they received the shock, a well-defined “pain matrix” was activated in their brains. Afterward, they received a signal that their spouses were receiving similar shocks. This activated a similar (but not entire) pain matrix in the females’ brains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

Empathy is a factor that draws individuals to helping professions and plays a critical role in understanding the nuances of others’ experiences. Empathy is a complex capability enabling individuals to understand and feel the emotional states of others, resulting in compassionate behavior. Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others. Compassion is a tender response to the perception of another’s suffering. Compassion cannot exist without empathy, as they are part of the same perception and response continuum that moves human beings from observation to action.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

Obviously, empathy plays a large role as the glue in our societal fabrics, giving people a reason to care how others around them feel.

If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds. As the Dali Lama so succinctly stated, “Love and compassion are necessities not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

A societal breakdown in empathy can have devastating consequences. Dave Grossman’s 2014 book “On Killing” discusses how military training deliberately conditions soldiers to suppress their sense of empathy, making it easier to kill fellow humans.
https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society-ebook/dp/B00J90F8W2
and the review goes on to note that “Contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques and, Grossman argues, is responsible for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young.“

I’d go further and say that the push in the conservative religious and political movements to talk down the value of empathy is the source for a lot of the fascist, controlling, legalistic discussion on the right wing these days. It allows people to dispassionately consider abusing others in all sorts of ways, with no regard for their human responses to being abused. One might even say that it’s attempting to create a society of sociopaths, although without realizing that’s what it’s doing.

There are two important concepts to establish at the outset here.

First, the amount and kind of empathy we have naturally varies widely from person to person, and it’s a function of brain morphology. The Anterior Insula is a large contributor to empathy, because it’s involved with processing our own body’s sensations, and this region of the brain is activated by seeing other people’s experiences and then comparing them to our own. The Anterior Cingulate Cortex is the part of the brain that integrates emotional and cognitive information, so it ties our rational thought together with our emotional responses. The Temporoparietal Junction is associated with perspective-taking, allowing us to abstract ourselves from our experiences, but also to recognize others’ perspectives. All three of these regions of the brain, working together when we experience a situation, create a set of internal sensations we experience as an empathetic response.
https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2012/researchers-identify-area-of-the-brain-that-processes-empathy

Second, there are two key types of empathy: emotional (also called affective) empathy, and cognitive (also called perspective taking) empathy. Emotional empathy lets us directly experience others’ emotional or physical responses ourselves: it results in an internal emotional response similar to that being experienced by another person or group of people. Cognitive empathy lets us rationally assess others’ situations in light of their experiences: it results in an intellectual understanding of their emotional responses.
https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-and-emotional-empathy-4582389

So right away, we can see that “empathy” is a bigger, more complex topic than merely “feeling someone else’s pain.”

Given its deep ties to brain structure and processing, it should be clear that there are many aspects of empathy that are both inherent and unique to each human. However, as with any other brain activity, it can also be learned: empathetic responses can be either strengthened or weakened over time. This ability for the brain to reshape its responses is called neuroplasticity.

“Teaching empathy and compassion has become a big focus among progressive schools. These studies suggest that perhaps kindness doesn’t need to be taught anew as much as supported more continuously from an early age. Children’s empathy seems inborn, a gift that is ours as a society to lose depending on how we react to these earliest overtures.”
https://www.developmentalscience.com/blog/2012/12/02/is-empathy-learned-or-are-we-born-with-it

There are wonderful stories in the studies that describe how the youngest children – well before learning to talk – can recognize pain in their parents or playmates, and attempt to reach out and soothe that pain in their infantile ways.

For some time now, it has been theorized – and then studied – that people’s political leanings are strongly tied to their ability to experience empathy. The common idea has been that liberals are inherently more empathetic, while conservatives are less empathetic. This article, for example, details one of the first attempts to map neural activity as a function of political persuasion:

we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering. The findings revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band ‘empathy response’ in the temporal–parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group. In addition to this dichotomous division, the neural response was parametrically associated with both self-reported political inclination and right-wing ideological values. This is the first study to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10281241/

Other studies suggested similar trends:

A survey-based study “found that on average, liberals vs conservatives had more tendency to feel empathy and felt more empathy toward others, and” … “they had more willingness to help others. This result was in line with a study” (that) “found a higher desire in leftists vs rightists to support humanitarian policies.” Another study is found to “convincingly argue that stronger empathic insight motivates people to support egalitarian policies and contribute toward improving the welfare of others.” But beyond the survey-based studies, a 2023 studyin in Finland using brain imaging under specific empathy-inducing situations showed a very clear difference in brain response between leftists/liberals and rightists/conservatives, and “supports the observation that leftists vs rightists might respond more empathetically to others’ suffering.“
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10281241/

A 2022 American study published in Discover Social Science and Health showed that “political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles. We also find that this association is partially mediated by lower levels of empathy, higher levels of authoritarian beliefs, and lower levels of perceived pandemic threat.“
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9400002/

As Salon noted in reporting on this article,

“The idea that conservatives are inherently less empathetic feels like a case that easily builds itself. You mean to say that people who brought you ‘F**k your feelings’ might not care about … your feelings? That checks out. Plenty of research into the phenomenon in the last few years seems to back that up. A 2018 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that asked ‘Are Liberals and Conservatives Equally Motivated to Feel Empathy Toward Others?’ concluded that ‘On average and across samples, liberals wanted to feel more empathy and experienced more empathy than conservatives did.'”
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/16/do-conservatives-really-have-an-empathy-deficit-this-is-what-social-science-says/

However, this common and widely-touted idea of liberal/empathetic versus conservative/unempathetic has proven to be too simplistic upon deeper study; with the complexities of both the brain’s processing of emotions, and the two types of empathy, plus the human brain’s neuroplasticity, such a simplistic assessment is insufficient to explain the two main branches of politics. After all, many people cross the aisle and switch parties.

It turns out that empathetic responses in our brains are specifically limited, probably for our own emotional safety:

This is the first neuroimaging study to demonstrate that we actually do feel the pain of others, but only in an attenuated form (10). Attenuation makes it possible to empathize but not become overwhelmed with another’s personal distress. Our own distress would likely render us less helpful. Indeed, there is a balance between empathy leading to helping or distancing behaviors due to personal distress.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

Also, WHO we empathetically identify with has been found to depend on who they are:

A cardinal feature of empathy is that it usually helps connect people to others. Because of the evolutionary development of this brain-based capacity, affective empathy, or emotional sharing, most easily occurs among members of the same “tribe”. Individuals tend to have the most empathy for others who look or act like them, for others who have suffered in a similar way, or for those who share a common goal. We see these biases play out repeatedly in communities, schools, sports teams, and religious communities. The truth of the matter is that empathy is not always an equal opportunity benefactor. … Because of this evolutionary bias, cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences. … Important research on empathy and altruism has demonstrated that enhancing perspective taking, the capacity to see a person’s situation from his or her point of view, coupled with enhanced value being placed on the welfare of those who are unfamiliar can override bias.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

In an interesting study, Batson explored the relationship of perspective-taking to valuing a person who is in need. Perspective taking is a well-known precursor to empathic concern. In the first experiment, both perspective taking and valuing were variables and each increased empathic concern independently. In second experiment, valuing the person in need was the only independent variable. Interestingly, increases in valuing the other person increased perspective taking and also increased empathic concern which, in turn, increased helping. We can conclude from these experiments that valuing a person in need is an important, and largely overlooked, variable and precursor of feeling empathy for that person.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/

I’ll take a very brief detour here and note that phrases like “perspective taking” and “valuing a person in need” sound like modern versions of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, where a person deliberately reaches across a cultural divide to assist someone they saw in need of help; it comports with the general Gospel emphasis on taking the good news far beyond our own borders of comfort and tribe.

A 2019 article in Nature notes that

liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation.” In 2006, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama bemoaned the country’s “empathy deficit,” telling college graduates, “I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.” In 2012, Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney said, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.” The distinction between Obama and Romney captures the distinct worldviews of American political liberals and conservatives, respectively. Romney prioritized the family unit, whereas Obama highlighted the planet broadly. This difference in parochialism versus universalism became exacerbated during the 2016 presidential election, with one article noting, “Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016,” contrasting the more parochial Republican candidate with the more universalist Democratic candidate. Others have characterized the Trump administration’s policy decisions as battles between nationalists (typified by parochialism) and globalists (typified by universalism).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0

Penn State psychologist C. Daryl Cameron’s 2013 article “Can You Run Out of Empathy?” discusses an article by Paul Bloom in New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/20/the-baby-in-the-well) arguing that empathy is a bad thing, leading people to make poor social and political decisions based on feelings instead of facts, partly because it’s impossible to care for large enough numbers of people to make a necessary difference, and because the amount of empathy we each have is limited, and thus wasting it on out-group people takes it away from our own social and family groups. Cameron instead argues that “current research outright contradicts his points. In fact, the science says we can expand our empathic bandwidth and sensitize ourselves to situations with large numbers of strangers. The problem isn’t with empathy itself. Instead, it’s how people handle their empathy that matters.” In particular, Cameron argues (based on his own department’s research) that any lack of empathy is self-selected; people deliberately restrict their empathy in most cases due to the perceived cost of having to respond to difficult situations that are harming others. They do not believe they can do enough, or they don’t have enough resources to make a difference, so they suppress their empathy and limit it to situations within their own tribe.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/run_out_of_empathy

Cameron argues in another article that

“we can actually expand our compassion bandwidth without hurting ourselves. As the science of compassion develops, we can find empirically supported ways to cultivate and sustain compassion when it is needed the most.”
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_increase_your_compassion_bandwidth

Interestingly, some studies show that conservatives are not necessarily less empathetic than liberals – but they have chosen to regulate the empathy in situations where they believe it conflicts with their preferred government policy. In the article “Compassionate Policy Support: The Interplay of Empathy and Ideology” the authors note that

“conservatives high in empathic ability are less compassionate than less empathic conservatives towards someone in need of government assistance and less supportive of a range of government social welfare policies. This compassion gap between liberals and conservatives high in empathic ability only occurs when a needy individual requires government but not charitable assistance. When empathic ability and ideological principles clash, conservatives high in empathic ability seem to suppress and excessively down regulate their compassion. In contrast, when charities provide assistance to a needy individual, conservatives high in empathic ability have no need to suppress empathy and express greater compassion than less empathic conservatives.”
https://stanleyfeldman.site44.com/Feldman,%20Huddy,%20Wronski,%20Lown_Empathy.pdf

Penn State psychologist C. Daryl Cameron’s 2013 paper “Deconstructing Empathy: A motivational framework for the apparent limits of empathy” argues that

“Scientific and popular arguments against empathy reflect a misguided essentialism: they mistake our own choices to avoid empathy for intrinsic features of empathy itself, treating empathy as a biased emotion in dualistic conflict with reason. We suggest that empathy is a rational decision, even if its rationality is bounded, as in many decisions in everyday life. Empathy may only be limited if we choose to avoid pursuing empathic goals.”
https://files.osf.io/v1/resources/d99bp/providers/osfstorage/58cd268f594d9001fa8abe60t

So if we summarize all these concepts, what I have learned is that empathy, the ability to perceive and identify with others’ emotions, has both emotional and cognitive aspects, tends to favor emotional aspects in liberals and cognitive aspects in conservatives, but can be trained and adjusted, especially as people actively consider whether the people they are considering are worthy of their empathy and resulting compassion.

So with this new awareness about empathy, I come to the point where I want to understand myself better, and my own relationship with empathy.

In researching about empathy, one other thing I encountered was the connection between autism and empathy. For a long time, people understood autism to include a significant lack of empathy. However, more recent studies have shown that (a) autism can be widely varied, and (b) many autistic people do not LACK empathy – if anything, they have TOO MUCH of it, and they compensate by walling themselves off from situations which might trigger the distressing emotions of encountering other people’s emotional pain – thus it appears to the uneducated observer as if they don’t have empathy. Instead, the empathy forces them to avoid normal human interactions, as a form of self-preservation.
https://psychcentral.com/autism/autism-and-empathy
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/autism-and-empathy

In particular, there are really two kinds of empathy in play: emotional empathy, and cognitive empathy (also called perspective taking). Emotional empathy is the ability to share and understand another person’s emotions, while cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective or mental state.
https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-and-emotional-empathy-4582389
An autistic person may have an excess of emotional empathy, leading to uncontrollable and overwhelming experiences.

In the last few years, I’ve realized that I personally have some amount of Austistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It runs in my family, and is well-evident in several family members, and diagnosed in several of the younger generation (really, it was not well understood and typically was undiagnosed in older generations, so it’s not something for which I was ever evaluated). What I learned about myself through counseling and a lot of introspection is that for most of my life, I was deeply uncomfortable in empathy-demanding situations. For example, for as long as I can remember, I have absolutely hated most television sitcoms. I never understood why, but now I see that it is precisely because most sitcoms base their humor on someone’s discomfort. Consider for example Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory: most of the humor is at the expense of Sheldon’s inability to interact in a neurotypical way with his peers. Those people lucky enough to be neurotypical find such behavior hilarious. But I realize that I identified so strongly with Sheldon while watching that show that I was incredibly uncomfortable. So my coping method was to avoid such shows, lest I literally emotionally suffer along with the fictional character who was the butt of the humor.

In essence, what I learned was that over time I had deliberately and carefully walled off my ability to perceive other people’s emotions, so that their pain would be invisible to me and I could cope with life around uncomfortable people. Of course, this had life-altering effects on my human interactions.

But in beginning to heal from such brokenness, I found myself suddenly aware of other people’s pain (and joy) once again. My emotional empathy began to return.

And along with it, I was forced to reconsider my social and political positions – which had for years been focused on purely intellectual assessments of how people would be affected. I was making decisions without any ability to consider how they would feel about the situation.

In the language of my studies above, I had suppressed my emotional empathy, and studiously developed a cognitive empathy. And this fit very neatly into a conservative model.

As my politics have shifted, I’ve learned that the conservative Christian mantra of “tough love” applies politically too. Fundamentally, it posits, decisions about how to treat someone, or discipline them, must be made absent the emotional impact it may have. When one considers welfare, for example, the conservative will often assess that welfare is foundationally bad, because it teaches the recipients dependency on someone else, and will result in a long-term harm. The short-term benefits of lifegiving care will lead to long-term death, in that view, and thus the overall process is harmful. Another excellent example is insisting that a rape victim must not abort a pregnancy; the feelings of the woman and the life-long effects on her welfare and family are totally secondary to what they perceive as a fully human child that would be murdered. Similar thinking is applied across all social and political decisions. And conservatives pride themselves on making the hard choices for the good of all society, even if they cause deep emotional harm. In other words, there is a cognitive empathy, but little emotional empathy is allowed to enter the discussion.

Perhaps there is no clearer example of this than the signs that appeared in 2020 during the Trump reelection campaign, proudly proclaiming “F*ck Your Feelings.” This slogan exploded across the right wing, found on Trump-supporting T-shirts, bumper stickers, campaign signs, even a few billboards overlooking major highways, often accompanied by images of a raised middle finger. Songs were even written with that title.

While I never would have uttered that slogan, in my Republican days I absolutely would have vibed with the idea. Feelings should never enter into policy decision-making, I would have proudly proclaimed. And this comports with the data about the more-empathetic conservatives: they deliberately choose when or when not to express that empathy as compassion.

This observation about myself deeply interests me, especially when tied to my ASD tendencies and my long-suppressed emotional empathy, because at the exact same time, one thing about myself of which I was deeply proud was my very studied awareness of the effects of my choices on other people – at least, some of my choices. My parents very carefully taught me to pay close attention to being polite. Things like holding a door for someone, or hurrying across the lane in the parking lot so a driver didn’t have to wait for me, were very deeply ingrained into me, along with the message that the consideration was for how people felt about my choices. And I was VERY aware when some people did not do those same things that I considered absolutely essential.

So in some real sense, I lived a life of conflict between a dearth of emotional empathy, and a keen (and perhaps proud) awareness of cognitive aspects of empathy.

My conclusion about this matter has been that I never actually had emotional empathy for the people for whom I held the door. I simply was taught to think about how they MIGHT feel, but without any ability to actually perceive it. In essence, I had intentionally developed a strong cognitive empathy to make up for my nearly-total lack of emotional empathy.

The problem with this state of affairs is that my perception of other people’s emotional response was purely MY OWN MENTAL PROJECTION. I made assumptions, often unfounded in reality, about how my actions would affect them, and there was absolutely no emotive sensors, no feedback loop that let me compare my mental model to what actually happened in them. It led me to be unconsciously arrogant, that I knew best what was needed in each situation.

As a simple example, I’m now aware that some women are actually bothered when men hold the door for them. When I first found out about that, it offended me deeply – I was more interested in my own “right” answer that they’re just hateful feminists, than in bothering to understand WHY they were bothered, and what might be done about it.

So when I finally began to heal from my lifetime history of emotional woundings, and my long-suppressed emotional empathy began to awaken, I found myself shaken to the core as I was forced to confront the drastic differences between my cognitive assumptions about the effects of my political policies on people, and the emotional realities of how people were actually affected. It wasn’t just about how people FELT: I think a well-developed empathy gives people the ability to see much deeper into the realities of policy choices, precisely because they’re not free to ignore negative effects. When we lock ourselves out of empathy as a political tool, we are inherently free to focus only on the good effects of a policy, and never really deeply consider the negative effects. But using a well-rounded empathy both cognitive AND emotional, we cannot ignore the negative effects, even if those effects are not just a matter of how the affected people FEEL.

And all of this discussion applies equally to religion. For example, when today I carefully consider purity culture, I’ve been forced to admit that there are some deeply harmful aspects, and I perceive that they strongly outweigh the positive aspects. But before the healing of my empathy, I would have insisted that all that stuff was just empathetic nonsense; the True and Right things about purity culture didn’t care how people felt about sex and pleasure and self-determination; they needed to get their feelings into line with Truth. But once empathy enters the picture, I’m forced to confront a whole slew of negative effects – real, practical, non-feeling-based effects that I was unwilling to consider because I believed them to only be a matter of how people felt.

In other words, there is significant irony that having emotional empathy lets me consider non-emotional effects more thoroughly and intelligently.

And the deeper into my religious upbringing I dig, and the closer I look at conservative Christian principles, the more I see that an awful lot of that culture studiously ignores the lived experiences of people, in favor of an insistence that the truth is unconcerned with anything internal to humans. They insist that truth is completely unsubjective, completely independent of how we feel about anything. But I don’t get that sense now when I read the Bible; there are too many complexities, too many times when Bible characters make really strange decisions for their own welfare and are not criticized for it. So I have to conclude that my former lack of emotional empathy kept me from seeing the totality of the truth in the Bible – I was too determined to keep my mind abstracted from any emotional considerations.

In a nutshell, a lack of emotional empathy, or critically a personal (and often politically-driven) choice to ignore our empathetic responses, walls us off from a massive portion of the real effects of our policies and doctrines on real humans who must cope with them. It prevents us from making decisions that take into account not just the intellectual mind, but also the emotional soul of humans. And I don’t think it’s possible to make good policies, or to truly understand God’s heart for humans, without considering the entire human being – mind and heart and soul.

So let me end with a response to the refrain I’ve heard periodically on social media, that “empathy is a sin” and must be suppressed for the good of wise policy-making: Nonsense. Rather, please recognize that almost all of us DO have empathy, both emotional and cognitive, and it WILL affect our policy choices. Based on everything I’m learning about empathy, we DO have a choice, and that choice is who we apply that empathy to, not whether we will have it.

Thus, the really important thing is to consider who we perceive as our neighbor, who we view as part of our tribe. If we focus on only allowing our empathy to apply to just our immediate family and those in our faith community, we will very likely miss many opportunities to fulfill Jesus’ call to spread the gospel and salvation (both spiritual AND the very practical earthly kind) to the entire world, and especially among those we would ordinarily think of as our enemies, as our culture’s Samaritan “aliens” and “others.” Based on my reading of Jesus’ words, our “tribe” needs to include far more people than we’re usually taught by our political parties and our churches. If we want to show our world something that is shockingly different, that makes others look at us and ask why we love so richly and freely, then the best way is to expand our sense of who’s in our tribe, so that our empathy can help us identify with even more humans, and spread Jesus’ love that much wider.

And our other choice is whether or not we train away our empathy. I’d suggest, as I noted above, that the great irony is that having more emotional empathy (and to a wider tribe) actually improves our ability to make proper choices based on our cognitive empathy.

So let’s stop the nonsense of “empathy is sin.” It just isn’t; it is a deeply valuable tool that God gave us to help us love one another more fully and wisely.