What does it mean to have a lack of empathy? [Examples and Hypotheticals welcome]
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Imagine seeing someone cry (in tears) and genuinely wondering why, because they have no wound – why should they cry then?
See also Asperger syndrome.
Empathy is the ability to recognize what someone else is feeling and to some extent sympathize with that emotion.
People who have a hard time with empathy either can’t recognize emotions or don’t sympathize.
It can often appear to someone watching that they just don’t care about people or are self centered because in their mind, they are the only ones experiencing emotion.
Imagine, if you will, a sociopathic President, completely unable to empathize with the citizens he leads. As his sociopathic actions become more pane more dissociated from the world around him, he senses opposition to his extreme,un-American views. Instead of using empathy to understand their people’s views, he lashes out at them, calling them “losers” and “low-energy”. As he becomes increasingly isolated by his lack of empathy, he grows more and more resentful of the constraints on his behavior, eventually resorting to illegal targeted assassinations and outright lies against his critics. Make sense so far?
There are basically two ways it can work. You might have trouble telling how somebody else is feeling, or you might not care how another person is feeling.
A blind person couldn’t get visual cues from somebody’s body language that might tell them how that person is feeling. A deaf person might not be able to hear you if you were talking to them about how you’re feeling. An autistic person might have trouble understanding things like body language or tone of voice, so wouldn’t pick up those cues about how somebody is feeling. But once those people knew how you were feeling, they would care how you feel, and not want to make you feel bad.
The other way you can lack empathy is if you know how somebody else is feeling, but you don’t care. A psychopath would fall into this category. Or it might be somebody who sees the other person as undeserving of sympathy for one reason or another. Maybe you believe that that person’s problems are the result of something they did wrong. Or maybe you think that certain types of people don’t experience emotions the way you do. Or you think the other person isn’t really feeling the emotion they seem to be- that they’re faking it. Here, you know how the other person is feeling, but you don’t care if you make them feel bad.
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