From the APA’s “Journal of Experimental Psychology”:
“Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs” (2019)
(Abstract) or (Full Text PDF)
Further reading on this subject:
“How resource sharing resists scarcity: the role of cognitive empathy and its neurobiological mechanisms” (2022)
“Empathy moderates the relationship between cognitive load and prosocial behaviour” (2023)
“Cognitive load and moral decision-making in moral dilemmas under virtual reality: the role of empathy for pain” (2025)
(Abstract)
“The Influence of Cognitive Load on Empathy and Intention in Response to Infant Crying” (2016)
There’s a growing body of research from behavioral neuroscience which indicate that wealth, power, and privilege have a deleterious effect on the brain. People with high-socioeconomic status often:
- Have reduced empathy and compassion.
- Have a diminished ability to see from someone else’s perspective.
- Have low impulse control.
- Have an extreme sense of entitlement.
- Have a hoarding disorder.
- Have a dangerously high tolerance for risk.
When you don’t need to cooperate with other people to survive, they become irrelevant to you. When you’re in charge, you can behave very badly and people will still be polite and respectful toward you. Instead of reciprocity, it’s a formalized double standard. When you have status, you’re given excessive credibility, and rarely hear the very ordinary push-back from others most of us are accustomed to, instead you receive flattery and praise and your ideas are taken seriously by default.
Humans have a strong need for egalitarianism; without it our brains malfunction and turn us into the worst versions of ourselves.
Some sources:
Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years
Does power corrupt? An fMRI study on the effect of power and social value orientation on inequity aversion.
Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention
The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement
Hoarding Disorder: It’s More Than Just an Obsession - Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners
On the evolution of hoarding, risk-taking, and wealth distribution in nonhuman and human populations
Thank you! Needed this so badly!
Well, if you have empathy, you usually aren’t successful (at least in the last ~20 years).
Aren’t successful according to capitalistic ideals. People with empathy are often successful by better measures
you aren’t rewarded by the oligarchs we give all our resources to, in return for the occasional table scrap, climate change, and the possible end of the species. which is what we’ve trained to see as ‘success’.
you can still be successful.
But die of starvation and a shitload of other things.
I know it’s bad to dehumanize people, but sometimes I can’t help myself when we’re talking about a person who completely lacks empathy. It’s like they walk and talk exactly like a person does, but they’re missing something essential.
Perfectly said. My ex was a legit psychopath and they are not like us.
We were adopting a cat. On the form it says “reasons you would get rid of the cat” shit you not this dude starts writing biting, clawing, yelling like genuinely asnwering what he would do.
Had to stop him and say but not say “act like a human”.
The word psychopath comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul, and pathos, meaning suffering. So in Greek, psychopath means suffering soul.
What a shit name.
Fortunately, English speaking doctors invented a better name. Antisocial personality disorder.
Damn that fits him even better.
Dude was assaulted multiple times by a professor causing him to drop out and forever associate his passion with SA.
Truly a tragic existence for a piece of garbage.
they do genuinely seem to have a pretty bad time, but the reactions to ‘bad’ are all different and very frequently not okay.
it turns out suffering is not a virtue, and only an excuse when it’s topical.
I vote we take away the power of the word psychopath by using it to refer to ALL mental illnesses and disorders. And if someone says psychopath when they mean ASPD, we tell them to speak English.
But psychopath has a very negative connotation, as it should.
No it shouldn’t, it’s a shit name. It means suffering soul. If we mean people with ASPD, let’s speak English.
Tolerance of intolerance is contradictory.
There is no defense for intolerance.
You aren’t arguably human if you have no empathy.
Uncanny valley
Look how far we’ve come in health care. There are hot 95 year olds in my area. People live to 70/80/90/100. We’ve eradicated diseases and almost cured cancer until America abandoned science. Sorry about your family, thoughts and prayers and ribbons and crowdfunding.
A huge portion of the population is part of this. It’s not just nurses (who are hospitals) and doctors, but everyone from porters to trauma leads (if they aren’t fired by DOGE). From bystanders calling 911 to pharmacological researchers. Study participants to search and rescuers with wives in labour.
It’s our crowning achievement. Especially since we blew the information revolution by giving it to our bully lords.
Are there people involved in care with primarily selfish motivation? Of course. But we built this on empathy. It runs on empathy (and caffeine). Billions care for you because they have empathy.
It’s not our flaw. It’s our feature. It’s a deficiency to lack empathy. A deficiency of humanity.
Studies show again and again that people tend to attribute their wins to skill and ability even in a completely rigged game. Likewise, they tend to do the opposite when looking at their fellow man: “they got lucky, while I worked my ass off to get here”.
When wealth is regarded as a proof of skill and enterprising spirit, poverty must perforce be the opposite of that. And once you start regarding lack of wealth as a moral failing, true empathy dies on the vine.
Human civilizations arose and grew because of human cooperation and organization
Not through the will of one man or a small group of people
You can claim kings, emperors, divine rulers, czars and god men who led entire groups of people … but it was masses of people cooperating with another that made it all possible.
We may be disillusioned, distracted, manipulated, controlled, coerced and taken advantage of … but it is still and will always be masses of people that make our world possible.
Even those leaders are just avatars of the shared humanity they lead and represent, they persist only as a creation of a shared culture and by permission of those people whether or everyone involved is cognizant of the fact.
The masses create everything, even those leaders because nothing exists in a vacuum
I love the African philosophy of ubuntu: ‘I am who I am, because of who we all are’
Wait, is THAT the origin of the name of a specific variant of Linux?
It is indeed!
Neat!
Excellent summary. It’s not just Musk that doesn’t understand empathy — it’s ALL the tech bros.
I remember talking to a coworker at a tech startup once. He was leaving to go work for some like military intelligence spy company. I was like, “But what if they have you work on something fucked up, like spying on innocent people, or sending drones to kill people?” He was like, big shrug, the pay is good.
Some people just don’t care about other people. He was nice to people he knew, when it didn’t really cost him anything.
Our society isn’t really set up to discourage that kind of worldview. That kind of selfish person typically thrives.
It’s all powerful people. Many studies show that social power affects the brain, suppressing empathy centers.
As you get more wealth, status or fame, your brain becomes less capable of empathy and closer to the brain of a psychopath.
As long as we have hierarchies, we will be ruled by villains.
It’s a lot of people
Empathy is the cornerstone of a successful society.
By helping people who needs it, society as a whole will grow stronger.
Lack of empathy only causes cracks to form and will sooner or later ruin any society built from it.
Musk has once again shown himself to be an utter idiot.
I think empathy is misunderstood. Especially this notion that having empathy is a proxy for being a good person.
Consider the sadist. You cannot enjoy someone’s suffering if you can’t recognize it. Being manipulative would also be difficult without a grasp of someone’s inner life. A confidence artist must be an empath. A “cold read” psychic must be uniquely empathetic.
In 1921 Hitler gave a speech where he promised to put Jewish people into camps to see “how they like it”. (he was upset about WWI German POWs and blamed Jewish people for their long internment). So Hitler did recognize Jewish people as human and capable of suffering; that was the point.
There’s a big difference between academically knowing how a person feels–in a disconnected way–and actually being able to relate to that feeling as if you were experiencing it yourself.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of another person.
You’re right that it’s trivial to find examples of bad people who understand the emotions and feelings of others, but it’s a lot harder to be a bad person when you can share those emotions and feelings yourself.
Like being mean to an NPC in a video game
I know rationally they are just a bunch of pixels and code, but as soon as they have plausible human dialogue, and I say something mean, and they act hurt… something triggers in my brain and I feel that hurt. And I immediately want to stop
I literally struggle to be mean to a bunch of pixels, just because they mimick a living creature. It’s also interesting because often it promotes a sort of dissonance, “I know this isn’t real… and yet I cannot help but feel what they feel… Even though they feel nothing”
something triggers in my brain and I feel that hurt
Are you familiar with mirror neurons? We are social beings. We are built from the ground up to feel each others pain.
Yes indeed. Mirror neurons are directly related to empathy I believe
