Our schools are obsessed with teaching students empathy. For just one example, a huge focus of social and emotional learning is on teaching empathy. CASEL, one of the leaders in developing SEL curricula for schools, says that one of SEL’s core purposes is to help children “feel and show empathy for others.” In the 2021-22 school year, 76% of principals said they had an SEL curriculum in their school.
But is all of this focus on empathy actually a good thing? That’s one of the questions raised by Abigail Shrier in her new New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.
Empathy can sometimes be good, she argues, because it involves putting yourself in another person’s shoes and feeling what they feel. But the problem is that empathy is highly selective.
As Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom writes in Against Empathy, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now.” This spotlight is narrow; we can’t empathize with everyone. As Bloom notes, “you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at a time.”
“This makes us care more about [the people we empathize with],” he writes, “but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.”
Because of its narrow focus, empathy essentially spikes our tribalism. It makes us care more about our in-group at the expense of being able to care about our out-group. That’s why, as Bloom writes, it “push[es] us in the direction of parochialism and racism.”
Teaching empathy at the expense of more universal values can even lead to witch hunts and cruelty toward anyone on the outside. Shrier tells the story of Chloe (not her real name), a 15-year-old girl whose life was turned upside down after she was accused of making racist and antisemitic jokes.
Despite the fact that the jokes were hardly evidence of ill intent (she had joked with two friends about the worst Halloween costumes they could possibly wear and included “Hitler” and “slaves” on the list), school administrators publicly accused her of racist conduct. Her fellow students refused to speak with her, and friends cut her out of their lives.
Shrier suggests that the school’s obsession with teaching empathy contributed to the witch hunt. Administrators and students were so focused on defending the alleged victims of Chloe’s jokes that they dehumanized the 15-year-old girl.
So if empathy doesn’t work, what should we teach instead? Let’s start with fairness and the golden rule. While “fairness” means different things to different people, I have in mind the Merriam-Webster definition: “fair or impartial treatment: lack of favoritism toward one side or another.”
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These values encourage students to stand up for what is right regardless of whether or not they know the person who was wronged and are therefore more universal than empathy. They also cut against the grain of our tribalistic thinking by suggesting that everyone has the same equal and intrinsic rights and dignity, whether we personally care for them or not. They, therefore, represent a defense against prejudice, war, and dehumanization.
Let’s get back to teaching our children fairness rather than overemphasizing empathy before it’s too late.
Julian Adorney is a writer for the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Braver Angels media team, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization.