Empathy has a genetic component, men have lower empathy on average, but the genetic component is not responsible for men having lower average empathy. What then?

Phantombiceps · 2022-02-22T15:00:43+00:00

I am not a psychologist. But here’s my 2 cents.

My guess is that empathy can be bad news, as in, an out of control, immaterial, immediate, simulated form of caring. Basically, you feel the other person’s pain, maybe even project your impression of their pain onto them and feel that, and that’s it. Basically just an intense cathartic and short lived mood where you identify with pain and feel it.

This could explain why both empathetic and non empathetic people may paradoxically appear to act cruelly.

Compassion, by contrast to empathy, might be the ability to sort of mediate or frame empathetic feelings you have, and hold them in your mind. Rather than feeling them all at once, you also intellectualize some portion of them. This could be why compassion seems to last longer, and to lead to practical action to alleviate or consider suffering, rather than just identifying with it.

Edit: also if empathy is just a feeling of identification, it can roll. So i cry for you as i hear your story, then i suddenly get a call from your enemy with his/her story of suffering at your hands- and my empathy rolls to them. I switch sides and strike you.

DandyDoge5 · 2022-02-23T01:17:51+00:00

Why are people making it seem as if their conclusion is that men "are" less empathetic like as if it's some determinant thing...

All i see is that they find men to be lower in empathy on average. Obviously this comes down to social conditioning and exposure.

MathematicianNo4277 · 2022-02-22T12:07:00+00:00

I would have published this in r/malestudies but it seems to be abandoned.

My guess would be that those who receive shall give. Empathy is largely learned by following the example of people being empathetic to you. Boys get less empathy, so they learn less empathy. Just an unsupported hypothesis.

I'm more interested in what you guys and gals here think of it.

Pantusu · 2022-02-24T04:52:59+00:00

Hoo boy. For those who follow such things, Simon Baron-Cohen is not entirely well-regarded. It's also worth stating that psychology, while unquestionably useful, is still several steps removed from actual quantifiable data. What IS quantifiable is basically transcribed into comparative analysis, which brings all the problems of observer-dependent implicit biases to any models derived therefrom. You have to take leaps of logic, and the distance traveled is subjective.

Regardless, this is fairly old at this point, but here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-017-0082-6

BloomingBrains · 2022-02-22T23:31:23+00:00

I'd wager that men and women don't really have that much different levels of empathy. The reason for the perceived difference most likely arises from the way in which they are measuring empathy.

Remember, women generally show more emotion than they feel and men show less emotion than they feel. That has already been proven by science. So if they aren't actually looking at brain scans and they are just measuring, say, people's outwards reactions to things, then its going to seem like women are more empathetic than they really are, while men will seem less so.

Men and women also generally show empathy in different ways. Men are generally problem-solvers and women are generally talkers. This is part of the reason people say mental health is heavily biased towards women--most therapists are women and they use what they know works for them. I.E. "talk therapy", and it isn't very effective for most men.

So chances are if a guy is trying to solve someone's problem, that means he actually cares enough about it to do so. Yet its a common cliche at this point for wives/girlfriends/etc. to complain that their partner is trying to fix everything instead of just listening. So if anyone researching empathy is going to approach their work with the same mindset, there's obviously going to be a disconnect in how "empathy" is defined, and that surely skews the results.

RockmanXX · 2022-02-22T16:23:12+00:00

men have lower empathy on average

And yet for absolutely NO DISCERNIBLE REASON, majority of the people who put their lives in danger to save others are Men! Wow, i guess you can be a selfless hero without any empathy?

Don't let the trash bin of history hit your legs on the way out, Pseudo Scientists!

hottake_toothache · 2022-02-22T14:01:39+00:00

Measure women's level of empathy for men, and then tell me that they are more empathic. BS.

Skirt_Douglas · 2022-02-22T17:25:22+00:00

I don’t really know much about EQ, but I’m not really willing to just buy into it being the be all end all empirical measurement of empathy, for the same reasons I’m skeptical of IQ.

Title	Empathy has a genetic component, men have lower empathy on average, but the genetic component is not responsible for men having lower average empathy. What then?
Author	MathematicianNo4277
Upvotes	22
Comments	39
Date	February 22, 2022 12:03 PM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/sylzmy/empathy_has_a_genetic_component_men_have_lower/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/empathy-has-a-genetic-component-men-have-lower.1103539 https://theredarchive.com/post/1103539

Comments