Empathy is defined as “co-experiencing the situation of another” and takes place in two steps, first as perspective taking and then as emotion sharing. It’s about feeling the feelings of other people. For a while now we have been inundated with the view of empathy as the key to bettering humanity. From the Instagram selfies captioned with a quote on the value of being an ‘empath’, to the philosophy of giants such as Martha Nussbaum and Steven Pinker, empathy is written about almost everywhere. But as it turns out, empathy may in fact be all (about) the rage.

Professor Fritz Breithaupt (whose latest book is forthcoming from Cornell University Press) has written extensively on the negative aspects associated with empathy. According to Breithaupt, in addition to the Empathy-Altrusim Hypothesis which links empathy with positive prosocial behavior, empathy can also give rise to negative behavior.

Together with Breithaupt, a few critical voices have emerged arguing that empathy does not necessarily support ethically correct decisions. Paul Bloom, a professor at Yale and author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, characterizes empathy as “a means of focusing attention for a short time on an individual fate while neglecting the larger picture, long-term solutions, and large numbers of people. We help the person who draws attention to herself or himself for only a brief period.” This is known as the spotlight effect as it typically draws one’s attention to a particular scene or person. In this way, empathy is capable of manipulation as our judgment may be obscured by those who are good at drawing empathy to him or herself. This happens frequently when we have to listen to multiple sides of the drama played out in our friendship circles, but similarly it applies on a greater scale as “people are willing to donate time and money to one hungry child in a commercial, but will not be moved by the fate of thousands suffering from famine or civil war”. Our moral outrage is reserved for certain situations and can often be achieved by manipulation.

Empathy can also deepen divides rather than bridge them. Breithaupt explains, “In general, when someone is drawn to empathize with people, this can lead him or her to agree with their opinions, share their emotions, and adopt their viewpoints… If the empathizer adopts some of the preferences of the target of his empathy, it is likely that aversions towards the other side are also adopted.” Thus, the us-them divide is reinforced by empathy which inherently is about vicariously sharing a perspective of another. The other party will inevitably appear as unlikeable, unfair, undesirable, wrong, or bad on that basis that “the stronger one feels for one’s chosen side and the stronger the empathy, the more negative the other side appears to be.” Harboring this aversion for our empathy target’s competitor also triggers a strong urge for revenge and aggression.

In 2014, psychologists Anneke Buffone and Michael Poulin hypothesized that empathy would lead to aggression on behalf of an empathy target. They divided test participants into two groups and each group was given an essay written by a student. The first group’s essay was authored by a student who wrote “I’ve never been this low on funds and it really scares me”. The second group’s essay was written by a student also under financial strain but was not in distress regarding it, writing, “I’ve never been this low on funds but it doesn’t really bother me”.

The participants were then told that the student they had just read about was about to enter a math competition (with some other unknown person) and that the participants could decide how much hot sauce the competitor would have to consume. The participants whose student indicated that she was in distress chose to give more hot sauce to her competitor. The competitor in no way contributed to the student’s distress, but nonetheless became the target of aggression leading the researchers to conclude that “empathy could facilitate aggression any time such aggression is instrumental to helping or benefiting the empathy target, independent of whether or not such acts of aggression are just or morally sound”.

This could take place from the playground to large-scale aggression and crimes perpetrated by gang members and terrorists.

It is true that people, situations and perspectives are (thankfully) capable of change. Let’s say I am a perspective-taker who is eager to empathize with you. When your perspective changes, does my one-sided empathy continue? Likely, yes.

So what then of the case where empathy has been elicited via unethical means or even through an elaborate (or no so elaborate) hoax? Social media is becoming the vehicle for polarization to thrive under the guise of empathy and together with the spotlight effect, we are heading towards what Meghan Daum describes as a “devastating sort of moral riddle”.

Daum recently wrote a piece on the idea of groupfeel explaining, “If groupthink is what happens when people pick and choose their facts, groupfeel what happens when there aren’t enough facts to work with and we substitute emotion for logic and write off reality as a technicality”.

Another negative aspect is what Stanley Cavell calls “vampirism” and empathic vampirism refers to “the process of sharing another’s experience and making it one’s own over time, without concern for the other’s long-term welfare as an independent being”. In other words, the empathizer is appropriating the experience of another and is in a sense an ‘imperialistic empathizer’. The empathizer is emboldened and lives vicariously through others, one example may be the exploitation of the misery of others to advance one’s own agenda. Another example is that of the helicopter parent who sucks their child’s freedom by steering the child to do or refrain from doing certain things in an attempt to live vicariously through them. The child is simply a medium for the parent’s experience.

Empathic vampirism is selfish and so is sadistic empathy which, in its basic form, means that “an empathic observer enjoys the pain or suffering of another”. Somehow the damaging experience of another is transformed into a positive feeling for the empathizer. This of course could lead to creating hardship or harm for another simply to be able to empathize with their suffering. It is possible that psychopaths fall into the category of sadistic empathy. Traditionally, psychopaths have been understood to lack empathy, but Breithaupt points out that new brain-imaging studies show that emphatic patterns are exhibited by psychopaths, rendering the core difference as “not the lack of empathic capacity, but rather the propensity to use it and not to block it”.

It’s true that the argument for sadistic empathy is the most difficult to believe and watching the Ted Bundy tapes may indicate that whatever that is, it is certainly not empathy. It does, however raise an important point. The general assumption is that by empathizing, the target of our empathy is benefited and yes, there are numerous instances where this is exactly what happens. But empathy is also rewarding for the empathizer.

Filtered empathy refers to the way that the empathizer identifies as being the (real or imaginary) “helper”. From the point of view of the empathizer/helper, “the person in need only comes into view as a person-in-need, as someone who is a person insofar as he or she motivates action by the helper. Thus, this form of empathy can be called indirect, mediated, or filtered”. This is a version of the savior complex and the problems occur when the target of empathy fails to validate or thank the helper who in turn may resent, reject or mistreat the target. In other words, for the empathizer, the ‘victim’ is not allowed to be anything other than a victim.

So do we give up on empathy altogether?

Of course not. Empathy is what makes us human and this is not a rally cry to become dismissive, robotic or apathetic to other people and their suffering. But self-awareness also requires us to take cognizance of the dark side of empathy and the murky waters that lie ahead when conscious reasoning is replaced by relying on an emotional attachment to empathy as the only guide and indicator in making moral judgments.