contact with members of the opposite party.
But that’s only a start. Simply reporting that
one is high in empathic concern—either through
a psychological test or on social media—is simply
not enough, especially when we are ideologically
blinded to see the suffering of those whose politi-
cal views are different than ours. The only way
out of this mess is to not treat political affiliation
as a zero-sum game. That requires seeking out
stories of suffering from as many different walks
of life as possible.
I remain optimistic that we can get past this
but only if we can broaden our spotlight of em-
pathic concern to extend to as many members
of the human race as humanly possible.
*Vice versa, those who score low on psycho-
logical tests of empathic empathy aren’t always
callous. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it
does seem that if you look really closely at the
lives of those who we often treat as “monsters” or
“evil,” you see that they actually did show quite a
bit of empathy toward members of their perceived
in-group (albeit in some cases that in-group may
have been indeed quite a small circle).
† Even though there was a positive relation
between empathic concern and liberalism, they
found no evidence of an interaction between em-
pathic concern and partisan identity. Interestingly,
while empathic concern was correlated with the
more general personality traits of agreeableness
and openness to experience, none of their conclu-
sions changed after controlling for those broader
dimensions of personality.
OPINION