Very Bad Wizards Episode 104: Smelling Salts for Morality: Our Top 3 Movies About Empathy (with Paul Bloom)
Dec 14, 2016
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Empathy Can Enable Cruelty
- Cognitive empathy can be incredibly detailed and manipulative without involving compassion.
- Hannibal Lecter exemplifies how understanding others' minds can be used for evil purposes.
Knowing Others' Minds Enables Harm
- Understanding others’ feelings can be weaponized for cruelty rather than kindness.
- Sadism may entail highly developed cognitive empathy used to cause intentional pain.
Empathy Can Cause Burnout
- Nurses in burn centers sometimes avoid prolonged patient discomfort to escape empathic burnout.
- Empathy overload can lead to quicker burnout and diminished job performance in caregiving roles.