Everyday Philosophy: How much empathy is too much empathy?

Anxiety is the enemy of empathy. Fear makes us egocentric; egocentric makes us blind. An amygdala/prefrontal-cortex two-step that narrows the search parameters of the pattern recognition system. Pretty soon, as anxiety climbs too high, we lose our ability to find one another.

The Buddhist teacher Matthieu Ricard calls this dilemma “empathy fatigue.” In a study of doctors and nurses, Ricard and his collaborator Tania Singer, a neuroscientist and director of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, found that those who have empathy—who identify directly with their patients’ difficulties—get burned out. Those who have

I have found that empathy, the revered and problematic cousin to altruism, is at the root of the problem.

Research shows that in practice emotional empathy amplifies and hides bias.16 Most people have more empathy for people they can relate to, people who look and sound like them, or people they already care about.