Empathy’s failures is a must-read Bad Science. Summary: we punish people who harm more people less harshly than if they harm fewer people. Brilliant conclusion, too.
Empathy’s failures is a must-read Bad Science. Summary: we punish people who harm more people less harshly than if they harm fewer people. Brilliant conclusion, too.
The unexplored aspect of this is the nasty tendency in humankind to side with power. Just as theft by fountain pen appeals to the aspirationally greedy, our own cowardice, and fantasy desires to ally ourselves with whoever has the whip hand kick in against our impulse to empathy. I’m couching one Darwinian behaviour against another, I know, but I think the way the article is couched ignores this unflattering reality.
I think you are right: we find it much harder to impute real responsibility and intent to organisations, where we will all-too-rapidly pigeon hole our fellow humans. Maybe this is the empathy thing: it is hard to have a relationship with an organisation in the same way as a person. Maybe we don’t love us much but also don’t hate as much.
Your stronger point is that we instinctively lean towards power, which cannot be healthy. As you say, it can be somewhat of a risky strategy to not do so.
It is overly reductionist, but it is said that the male/female dichotomy runs along the lines of “Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.” In survival terms, and extrapolation outward to all power relationships, it’s harder to believe that unified action based on empathy could actually end up stronger than brute force.
There is also the really nasty element which we ignore: the secret feeling that people who get shat upon – inlcuding those oppressed by powerful organisations – really, actually, deserve it, and that we haven’t been shat upon because somehow we are better than they are. *that* insidious hubris is the real killer of empathy. I think it’s more powerful than the depersonalising element of the concept of large corporations.