Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
第 39 号, 2018, 1-14

The Social Terrain of “Empathy”:
A Preliminary Consideration
Chris Oliver
Abstract
This article explores some of the ways in which“empathy”has in recent years
come to be much talked about in society at large. In scholarly discourse, empathy
is normally understood as a kind of vicarious experience of another person ’ semotional or mental state, distinct from sympathy, compassion, and other related
notions. While empathy can be understood in such terms, my interest in this article
is to consider empathy not as a category of emotional and cognitive experience as
defined in psychology and other academic disciplines, but instead as an object ofsocietal discourse that has come to be invested with meanings and signiﬁcance that
extend beyond—and at times may even conflict with—the more narrowly academic
definitions of the term. The article thus maps out some of the ways in which
empathy—speciﬁcally named as such—has been taken up and made a focal point of
discourse and practice in society, in contexts ranging from education to healthcare to
immigration.

Introduction
This article explores some of the ways in which empathy, a fundamental aspect ofhuman psychology and social interaction, has in recent years come to be much talked
about in society at large. An illustrative example is provided by the Google engineer
who made news in mid-2017 after circulating a long, point-by-point critique he had
written about the company’s diversity initiatives. One point he emphasized was thatthe company should, in his words:“De-emphasize empathy. I’ve heard several calls forincreased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understandhow and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feelinganother’s pain,”he said, was not the way to go (Conger, 2017). His anti-empathy
statement was met with rebuttals in columns in Forbes and other online publications,detailing how wrong he was about the importance of empathy in the workplace.
What initially drew my interest to the matter of“empathy”was not this Google
case but instead reading, in 2015, the comments section to an online article in a UK

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newspaper about the refugee crisis facing Europe. In one of the comments, a reader
ﬂatly stated—amid the daily stories and images of refugees from Syria and elsewhere
attempting to reach European shores on dangerously crowded boats—that we should
not be giving refugees our empathy, a perspective that I found astonishing. Even if
one is unable or unwilling to do anything to tangibly help refugees, some of whom
had lost family members or suffered other difﬁculties ﬂeeing their home countries, I
thought, why not offer our empathy? What rationale could one have for being against
empathy?
As it turns out, the anonymous person who wrote that comment and the Google
engineer are not alone in voicing anti-empathy stances, but they would appear to bea very small minority. Overwhelmingly, the more pronounced view found in society
today is that empathy—having it, learning it, in some cases even making others
aware that you are feeling empathy toward them—is a social and moral good, andas such, empathy today has come to be very much talked and written about as wellas acted upon in spheres of practice ranging from elementary schools to hospitals.
In this article, I consider some of the ways in which this is so, drawing on materials
including news articles, publications by intellectuals aimed at a broad publicaudience, and scholarly works dealing with empathy. The present study represents apreliminary mapping out of some of the social terrain of empathy, including how thenotion of empathy has been used in framing responses to refugee and other migration
issues.

Orientation: empathy and “empathy”
In recent scholarly literature on empathy, coming from a diversity of academic
disciplines including psychology, neurosciences, and philosophy, empathy is typicallyunderstood as a vicarious experience of another person’s emotional or mental state:e.g.,“cases where a person experiences an emotion that another person experiences (oris thought to experience) as a result of recognizing that emotion”(Prinz, 2012, p. 532).
In such views, empathy itself is generally not considered an emotion per se, but it
serves as an other-oriented vehicle for experiencing emotions or other mental states.
In English, the contemporary concept of empathy owes much to psychologist
Edward Titchener, who in 1909 used“ empathy ”as a translation of German
psychologist/philosopher Theodor Lipps’s notion of Einfühlung (see Young, 2012).
For Lipps, Einfühlung was a kind of spontaneous“ inner imitation”whereby“ Iobserve someone’s facial expression of affect and‘there exists within me a tendency

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to experience in myself the affect that naturally arises from that gesture’”(Young,2012, p. 161). One might, for instance, recognize in another’s facial expression alook of arrogance and spontaneously feel within oneself that very arrogance; if thearrogant look of another is directed at oneself, this may be a negative experience forthe observer, taken as denial of oneself.
While empathy thus may certainly involve the feeling of emotions within oneself,
it is not limited to emotional experiences. A distinction often drawn in academic
discourse today is between empathy as feeling what another person feels (affective
empathy) and the cognitive taking of another’s perspective so as to be able to identify
and understand what another person feels (cognitive empathy) (Shamay-Tsoory,
Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009 ; Hoffman, 2011 ). The latter is akin to a scenario
where, for instance, person A is standing outside a room looking in through awindow at person B, who is standing in the center of that same room, and person A
imaginatively places himself in the shoes of person B and“sees”the room from thevantage point of person B. In this way, empathy may be as much about the cognitive
imagining of oneself in the situation of another as it is about feeling what it is thatthe other person is feeling. Empathy is thus distinguished from sympathy, a“pro”
attitude of feeling for another person (Smith, 2011, p. 103). As Allan Young puts
it, the distinction between empathy and sympathy“is both analytical and moral—
I comprehend Zande witchcraft beliefs without wishing to promote them. Sympathy
readily blends into compassion and perhaps an impulse to improve the situation of
the observed individual”(Young, 2012, p. 162).
While empathy can be understood in such terms, my interest in this article
is to consider empathy not as a category of emotional and cognitive experience, as
defined in psychology and other academic disciplines, but instead as an object ofsocietal discourse that has come to be invested with meanings and signiﬁcance that
extend beyond—and at times may even conflict with—the more narrowly academicor“scientiﬁc”deﬁnitions of the term. This is similar to the manner in which aspectsof language, distinct from scholarly linguists’ understandings of language and its
functioning, can become invested with cultural and ideological meanings (Kroskrity,

2000; Schiefffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998). Rather than taking empathy as
merely a psychological concept, then, I am interested here in mapping out some of
the ways in which empathy—specifically named as such—has been taken up andeven made a focal point of discourse and practice in society. One speciﬁc concern isthe ways in which empathy has been given significance in contemporary debates

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over refugees and immigration, with empathy itself at times becoming an object ofcontestation.

Rising interest in “empathy”
That“empathy”has grown in social significance is suggested by the fact thatthe term has come to appear increasingly in recent years in English-language
newspapers. This can be glimpsed in the number of newspaper articles andcommentaries containing the word. As shown in Figure 1 below, for instance, there
has been a notable increase in usage of the term“empathy”in articles in the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal between 1990 and2015. The aggregate number of such articles appearing in those three publications per
year more than doubled, for instance, between 2005 and 2015, from roughly 400 toover 900 (in fact, over 1000 for three of the four years between 2013 and 2016).

Figure 1. Aggregate number of articles containing the word“empathy”in the New
1York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

1.

Figures were obtained via ProQuest database search (November 26, 2017).“Articles”here is inclusive of regularnews articles, commentaries, and other such content from the three news outlets shown in the chart.

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The Social Terrain of“Empathy”: A Preliminary Consideration

While it is beyond the aims and scope of this article to speculate as to theprobable factors contributing to this increase and how it may be linked to other,perhaps parallel developments in society (such as the“mindfulness”movement),
it should be noted that this appears not to be a narrowly American phenomenon. A
similar—if not even more pronounced—upswing in“empathy”articles is apparent in
at least some English-language news outlets based in other countries, including the2

Guardian (U.K.) and the Australian. In the ﬁve-year period spanning 2000-2004, forinstance, the Guardian published 647 such articles; in 2010-2014, the number climbed
to 2081. During the same period, the Australian saw an increase from 553 to 945.
The international dimension of this increase should perhaps not be surprising, given
the global dissemination of news content via services such as AP and UPI, but it alsosuggests that the public discourse on empathy is international in scope rather than apeculiarly American phenomenon. Indeed, some notable proponents of“empathy”hailfrom the U.K., Australia, and Canada, in addition to the U.S., as will be discussed
below. Moreover, the discourse of empathy is not limited to newspapers but extends toa variety of spheres of practice in society, some of which will be discussed below.

Empathy as a social and moral good
Despite the fact that, in more narrowly scholarly considerations, empathy ismorally neutral or even morally indifferent in the sense that imaginatively putting
oneself in the position of another does not equate to“taking sides”with that person or
advocating that person’s position, in more broadly societal discourse on empathy thisis often not the case. Indeed, empathy has come to be regarded by many as a basicsocial good—as something that is intrinsically tied to bringing about positive effects
in our relations with others. Or, contrarily, certain problems in society are sometimes
attributed to a“lack of empathy.”
One highly prominent proponent of the notion that empathy toward those inpositions of vulnerability is socially and morally good is Barack Obama, in the years
both leading up to and during his presidency. In his book The Audacity of Hope,
Obama pointedly describes empathy as being“at the heart of my moral code”(Obama,

2006, p. 66) and diagnoses America as suffering from an“empathy deficit ”thatunderlies any number of persistent problems in American society. Rather than seeing
empathy as something that is morally neutral, for Obama empathy is itself a positive
2.

Figures were retrieved from the LexisNexus Academic database (November 27, 2017).

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value that“must be acted upon”(2006, p. 68). In his 2013 commencement speech at
the historically black Morehouse College, Obama thus asked the school’s students toreﬂect and act upon their experience of knowing“what it’s like to be an outsider... tobe marginalized⋮ to feel the sting of discrimination.”Tapping into that experience,
explained Obama,“should endow you with empathy—the understanding of what it’s
like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, to know what it’s
like when you’re not born on 3rd base, thinking you hit a triple. It should give you
the ability to connect. It should give you a sense of compassion and what it means to
overcome barriers”(Obama, 2013). In Obama’s terms, as he noted in his Morehouse
speech, empathy is not simply putting oneself in another’s shoes; it is closely tied
to the expansion of one’s sense of connection to others: caring“about justice foreverybody, white, black and brown. Everybody”(Obama, 2013).
The advocating of empathy as socially and morally good has come not only fromindividuals, like Obama, but from organizations as well. A Canada-based organization
called“ Roots of Empathy ”represents one such case. Founded in 2000 , theorganization’s ambitious mission is to change the world by building“caring, peaceful,and civil societies through the development of empathy in children and adults”(Rootsof Empathy, n.d.-b). Similar to empathy as characterized by Obama, empathy here is
not merely an inner experience but something that calls for an outward response. As
stated by the organization’s founder:“Empathy is frequently defined as the ability
to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. I would add and to respond
appropriately to the feelings and perspectives of others”(Gordon & Siegel, 2005, p. 30;

emphasis added).
The program works toward instilling empathy, as such, through regularclassroom activities with elementary school children at their own school. Everyfew weeks throughout the school year, an elementary school class is visited by aneighborhood infant, the baby’s parent, and a Roots of Empathy instructor. In one
such class in a Toronto public school, for instance, a class of 18 ﬁrst-graders watched“spellbound”as the five-month-old baby in their midst struggled on the floor toreach for a toy and—after failing to get it—started to cry. As this transpired, theRoots of Empathy instructor prodded the school children,“What is he telling us?
Is he frustrated that he can’t reach the toy?... What else do you think he might befeeling? How can we tell?”(Brown, 2013). Through such experiential activities andcareful instruction, the Roots of Empathy program works to teach young children
how to identify, reﬂect upon, and talk about both their own feelings and the feelings

─6─The Social Terrain of“Empathy”: A Preliminary Considerationof others. Now carried out in a number of countries—including Canada, the U.S.,
New Zealand, England, and Germany—the Roots of Empathy program aims to raise“levels of empathy, resulting in more respectful and caring relationships and reduced

levels of bullying and aggression”in the short term, and in the long term to help
cultivate more responsible citizens (Roots of Empathy, n.d.-a). Here as well, empathy
is presented as morally charged and something to be actively promoted as a force forsocietal good.
The widespread sense of empathy as“an unalloyed good”(Bartlett, 2016) no doubt
informs a great many other ways in which empathy has been taken up in recent years
in various spheres of public discourse and action. The 2016 edited volume Fostering
Empathy Through Museums , for instance, starts from the premise that,“ [m]orethan ever, museums need to maximize their value in this troubled world”(Koster,

2016, loc. 85) and that a key vehicle for doing so is forging empathy through art,
history, civil rights, and other museums and related activities. The Doctors Without
Borders interactive exhibit“Forced From Home”attempts this by inviting the public
to“see what we see”in providing assistance to refugees and other displaced people
and thereby gain a deeper understanding of the global refugee crisis (Doctors Without
3

Borders, n.d.-a). Another endeavor, the Empathy Museum founded by Australiansociologist/philosopher Roman Krznaric (2014), takes this a step further by making
empathy the explicit focus of the museum. Said to be“the world’s first museum
dedicated to helping visitors develop the skill of putting themselves in others’ shoes”(Morris, 2015), the museum’s aptly named“A Walk in My Shoes”exhibit invites
visitors to literally put on and walk in the shoes of a stranger—e.g., a miner, a sewage
worker, a refugee—while listening through headphones to stories from that person’slife (Gardner, 2016).
Empathy has as well drawn attention in medical care, where, according to a 2014
article, it“is widely agreed upon that empathy is a good thing, and that it should be
the basis of attitudes towards patient care, or should at least play an important rolein the doctor-patient relationship”(Decety & Fotopoulou, 2015, p. 1). The authorsof that article report a“veritable tsunami”of publications dealing with empathy in3.

For younger visitors to the exhibit, an explicit aim is for students to“experience and articulate empathetic
thoughts and feelings, and gain an enhanced appreciation for the experiences of displaced people”(Doctors
Without Borders, n.d.-b).

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patient care, including how it can be taught in medical schools (2015, p. 2). Empathy
in medical practice is closely linked to caring—not merely providing treatment—andproviding“compassionate”medical care. In this vein, one physician author has called
for an“epidemic of empathy”in medical care, which would entail“a steady, relentlessincrease in the proportion of clinicians and other personnel who are clearly tuned
in to what was really happening to patients and their families”(Lee, 2014; see also2015). In such views, empathy in medical care is seen as beneﬁcial to both patientsand healthcare providers, with empathy not merely a capacity that doctors have or
do not have, to individually varying degrees, but something that they can speciﬁcallybe trained to develop (Wündrich et al., 2017). While empathy, narrowly defined,
is something that can be achieved within the interiority of the self— merely byimaginatively placing oneself in the shoes of another—what would seem to be called
for in healthcare is a kind of performative enactment of empathy whereby the patient
herself can feel that the doctor is empathizing. Empathy must be not only achieved; itmust also be demonstrated to the patient.

Empathy and immigration
Contemporary discourse on refugees and other migrants has been very muchinformed by the pervasive, though not universally accepted, notion that empathy
toward those in positions of vulnerability is socially and morally good. Amid theEuropean refugee crisis from 2015, and stories of migrant travails and tragedies
and political reactions to the growing number of people entering Europe from theMediterranean, photographs —particularly those showing the individual“humanface ”of the migrant experience — were undoubtedly key in influencing at least
initial attitudes toward the crisis by stirring up empathetic reactions as well as
commentaries invoking empathy as well. According to one AFP report, for instance,
the father of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed
up on a Turkish beach, later“called for empathy and understanding for those caught( Father,”2015).
up in the refugee crisis”“The British Red Cross has worked not only to help refugees, but has alsoendeavored to counteract negative societal attitudes toward them. For instance,
in 2015 the British Red Cross produced a film on the refugee crisis called“I am
4.

The authors’chart showing the number of publications addressing clinical empathy and teaching empathy,
between 1990 and 2015 (Decety & Fotopoulou, 2015, p. 3), has an upward trend similar to that shown in Figure
1 in the present article.

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The Social Terrain of“Empathy”: A Preliminary Consideration

a human”to help put a human face on refugees. The film and its accompanying
educational resources seek, in part, to help young people“ develop empathy forrefugees and asylum seekers who might experience the harmful effects of stigma [and]use facts to formulate more informed and respectful views on refugees and asylum
seekers”(British Red Cross, 2016). On its website, the British Red Cross provides
various downloadable teaching resources related to refugees and asylum-seekers,
aimed at part in cultivating empathy toward them. A teaching resource called“TheLong Road,”for instance, is targeted at students aged 14-19. One of its learning
objectives is for young people to“[e]mpathise with refugees and asylum seekers
through gaining deeper understanding of the reasons why people ﬂee, what they leavebehind, the difﬁculties of their journeys and uncertainty surrounding their arrivals
and future lives.”
Commentators in favor of support for refugees and other migrants have often
used the term“empathy”in an accusatory way toward those holding opposing views,
depicting anti-immigrant views and acts as a“lack”or“failure”of empathy. An
opinion piece in the Washington Post describes empathy as not only“the ability to
see through another’s eyes, to understand and value the feelings of others”but also
as“the bedrock of civil discourse and durable policy”(Von Drehle, 2017). In regard
to the political climate in the U.S. surrounding the plight of long-term U.S. residents
who were brought to the country illegally as children, the commentary finds in
Obama’s presidential successor a disturbing“lack of empathy.”In a similar tone, acommentary in the Independent ﬁnds that, disconcertingly, amid British government
cuts to subsistence payments for asylum-seekers and other such measures, empathy
has become“ an unfashionable political emotion ”(Foster, 2015 ). Even German
chancellor Angela Merkel, who all but opened her country’s doors to refugees in 2015,
came under criticism for her supposed lack of“empathy”when, during a televised
town hall-type event that year, she seemingly made a 14-year-old Palestinian girl cryby suggesting that her family would end up being deported (Dearden, 2015).
Some have argued that empathy toward refugees and other migrants is not only
desirable but necessary for properly formulating policy responses to immigration. As
Empathy Museum founder Roman Krznaric puts it,“we can never have a cogent orjust debate about the inﬂux of immigrants into the European Union until we hear thevoices of refugees squeezed onto death-trap boats in the Mediterranean”(Krznaric,

2015). In Krznaric’s view, it is not so much affective empathy that is needed here; it
is cognitive empathy. He states:“The key is‘perspective taking’—trying to imagine

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what it might be like to be‘the other’—which makes us care about the plight of thoseoutside our immediate community and treat them as human beings of equal value toourselves.”In such a view, while cognitive empathy may be taken as morally neutral
in and of itself, it is clearly seen as opening the door to other, more“pro”responses:
it prompts us to care about others and treat them as equals, not as strangers whose
lives are of lesser signiﬁcance. Empathy here is envisioned as a bonding and levelingmechanism—it involves us with others and has us do so respectfully.

Conclusion
Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has been a leading figure in arguing against
empathy. Contrary to the widespread notion that empathy is a moral and social
good, empathy in his view is in fact a poor guide for important moral decisions
that we must make. Empathy, according to Bloom, by its very nature is focused on
individuals’ predicaments and narratives and relies on our own biases toward people
we can readily identify with. Following Bloom’s line of reasoning, we might thus beprompted to revisit the widely disseminated photos of the three-year-old Syrian boy
whose dead body was found on a Turkish beach, a tragic end to one family’s attempt
to flee to Europe, and ask ourselves if the outpouring of empathy generated at thetime by those photos would have been any lesser had the boy been of a different skincolor, or been dressed in clothing less like the clothing our own children wear, orotherwise looked less like a child we might see in our own neighborhood. Even worse,
Bloom claims, the emotional pull of empathy is exploitable and can be used toward
retributive ends, even violence (Kirkpatrick & Bloom, 2016).
In the U.S., somewhat less-profound, conservative criticisms of empathy haveemerged, particularly when empathy has been perceived as something associatedwith liberalism. Indeed, conservative critics of president Obama sometimes latched
onto his“empathy”as a focal point for attack. Gary Bauer, a one-time presidential
candidate and president of a conservative advocacy NGO called“American Values,”
argued in an online commentary that Obama’s empathy is unevenly applied, tilted
in favor of the liberal causes he supports and the social groups aligned with his own
views. Conservatives, Bauer claimed, can be every bit as empathetic as Obama, butthey tend to believe that“it’s not the government’s role to be the primary dispenserof empathy”(Bauer, 2010; see also Ponnuru, 2012). Conservative U.S. congressman
Steve King depicted Obama’s“empathy”as being at odds with rationality. Following
a 2010 Obama speech calling for immigration reform, King issued a press release─ 10 ─

The Social Terrain of“Empathy”: A Preliminary Consideration

stating that Obama’s speech had been“long on emotion and empathy, and shorton rational thought,”and that, ominously, a“nation that substitutes emotion and( King,”empathy for rational thought will eventually digress into the Dark Ages”“2010). To an extent, it may be that such conservative anti-empathy derives from asense that in much of the public discourse on issues such as immigration, societal
diversity, and the socially disadvantaged,“ empathy ”essentially functions as acodeword for liberalism; advocating empathy would mean aligning oneself with liberal
positions.
There is, to be sure, no denying that in numerous spheres of social discourseand practice today empathy is a loaded term. Although in certain academic fields
a clear distinction may be drawn between empathy, sympathy, compassion, andrelated responses, in“ empathy”as a widespread sociocultural phenomenon— inelementary school classrooms, in museums, in hospitals—this is hardly the case.
Indeed, advocates of empathy in society at large often seem to want empathy to blend
into feeling for others; not just to stand in another’s shoes, but to stand with theother. Looking forward, we might recall Theodor Lipps, for whom the spontaneous“inner imitation”of Einfühlung was something that“naturally arises”; as empathy

increasingly becomes something that is explicitly taught and in the long term quite
likely becomes standardized in certain ways, it remains to be seen how it will play out
in education, healthcare, politics, and other territories of practice.

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