How much do you look down on me, Angela? Just how much?

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to no stupid questions.

Today on the show, is empathy, in fact, immoral?

We should all immediately learn to be as unemphathetic as possible, correct?

Also, what are the benefits of going where the wind may take you?

I resolve to have no resolution right now.

My goal is to not have a goal right now.

MUSIC

Stephen, I have an email here from a gentleman named Matt Wall.

Matt writes, is there a downside empathy for most of my life?

I operated on the assumption that empathy was the most important thing for making the world better.

If only people could understand other perspectives, everything would be fixed.

But lately, I've read some pretty damning research that suggests that empathy actually can make people less fair, more irrational, more biased.

A study by Paul Bloom, involving fictional wait lists for medical treatment, found that participants would move people up,

whose stories they knew at the expense of the strangers on the list.

I also learned that the hormone oxytocin, which I associate with love, is involved in occurrences of xenophobia.

So, it seems that maybe empathy can only be practically applied to an in-group at the expense of the rest of the world.

It is a very sophisticated question.

Such a good question.

I do want to clear up this research, Paul Bloom, who's a psychologist at Yale, wrote about it in a book that was about empathy.

...