[defterGoose]

Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.

[slg]

We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.

[npunt]

I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.

[hydrogen7800]

I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.

[slg]

Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:

>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation

It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.

If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.

The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.

[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy

[toomanyrichies]

I've heard it neatly summed up this way:

"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."

-Source unknown

EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.

[RickJWagner]

I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.

Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.

[slg]

> I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.

Literally from the president[1], his son[2], and his VP[3]. Do these conspiracy theories about Biden hiding his diagnosis sound sympathetic to you?

>Teslas stock decline

So you want us to be empathetic to the guy who has directly said that "The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy"?[4]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrhLWbWiPU&t=147s

[2] - https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-escalates-disgust...

[3] - https://www.13abc.com/2025/05/20/vance-questions-whether-bid...

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV_FBiHiag&t=7s

[inferiorhuman]

Time to take off your blinders? Trump accused Biden of hiding his cancer diagnosis and conservatives are running with that narrative.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1kqlri6/they_...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-mocks-jill-230953...

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5403887/trump-biden-can...

[verisimi]

You think one's political opinions determine whether someone has empathy? Wow.

[pjc50]

Other way round. Politics are downstream of whose suffering you're OK with.

[reshlo]

> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]

> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506241298341

[verisimi]

Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?

Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.

But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.

And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?

Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.

[reshlo]

> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?

Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.

> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.

No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.

[mensetmanusman]

*0.5 likelihood of reproducibility

[belorn]

The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.

In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.

[reshlo]

> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing

That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:

> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.

[belorn]

A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.

Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.

Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.

[aredox]

The cruelty is the point of Trumpism.

But right back at you: you really don't think Communists or Fascists' political leaning doesn't alter their empathy?

[stouset]

This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.

When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.

[kunzhi]

In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.

On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.