Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children.

I’m back again to preach to you ad nauseum today, hypothetical newborn baby! I’m here once again to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. My intentions are honorable. I’m here to spare you some suffering, but based on today’s topic I am concerned that you might be better off leaning these lessons on your own, much as I did. BTW, you can find all fifteen lessons in one easy link.

You were born into a complex adaptive system. Yes, you do have exquisite powers of perception and memory but they are often no match for the complexity of your environment. Hence, the law of unintended consequences: You will often find that your well-intended actions will result in outcomes that are not the ones you intended or foresaw. The result will often be disappointing. We have a saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Sometimes, though, you do something and it turns out wildly better than you could ever have hoped. When that happens, you might be tempted to claim that you knew it all along, but that would often be an illustration of the “hindsight bias.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

To illustrate how things can go unexpectedly awry, I will start by referring to the work of Paul Bloom, who wrote a 2016 book titled: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. He defines “empathy” as follows: “Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.” He further describes empathy as “a spotlight directing attention and aid to where it’s needed.”  According to Bloom, empathy is an emotion, not a good tool for moral decision-making. “Compassion,” on the other hand, is feeling concern or compassion for someone. Bloom contrasts empathy with “rational compassion,” which can productively be used to “make decisions based on considerations of cost and benefits.” Empathy, by contrast, has no such protective limitations, meaning that empathy often leads to ill-considered policies.

Empathy is biased, myopic, and innumerate. It often leads to bad decision-making, prejudice and social dysfunction because it extrapolates from a present-moment emotion-inducing episode–it creates an entire policy that will bind widely-varying future actions without first doing a detailed cost-benefit analysis. To set policy by reference to empathy is to craft policy based on a subjective standard (what some people are feeling at the moment) rather on an objective standard (what will work best for the varying kinds of cases that will arise in the future for typical people). Most importantly, empathy fails to consider the future cost of adopting an emotion-based policy. What are we giving up to indulge in policy based on a present feel-good moment? Bloom argues that we should set policy based on “rational compassion,” which can only be derived with some detachment from the present emotions and an objective analytically-based concern (considering the way the policy will effect hypothetical reasonable people). Only by using rational compassion will we promote real-life human flourishing.

Bloom’s approach overlaps substantially with the “Veil of Ignorance” hypothetical of philosopher John Rawls, a theory that deserves a short detour. If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like? In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned:

But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.

In Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls offered a thought experiment known as “the Veil of Ignorance.” His “Veil of Ignorance” helps us to temporarily remove ourselves from the equation as we test our own ideas for fairness. Shane Parrish of Farnam Street Blog explains:

Behind the Veil of Ignorance, no one knows who they are. They lack clues as to their class, their privileges, their disadvantages, or even their personality. They exist as an impartial group, tasked with designing a new society with its own conception of justice.

As a thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance is powerful because our usual opinions regarding what is just and unjust are informed by our own experiences. We are shaped by our race, gender, class, education, appearance, sexuality, career, family, and so on. On the other side of the Veil of Ignorance, none of that exists. Technically, the resulting society should be a fair one.

Here is the version of Philosopher Michael Shermer:

The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.

— Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

The law of unexpected consequences dovetails with the fact that all of us are doomed to be over-confident with regard to the validity and reliability of our state of knowledge because we are forced to judge literally everything by our laughably parochial existences. Paltry Humans! That was the topic in the previous chapter. The passage of time clouds our predictions even further. Even if you’re earnestly intending to do kind act, it’s difficult to see what’s really going to happen. Is it good or bad? This can get complicated fast. Maybe it seemed like a good outcome initially. Four years later, however, it was clearly the worst thing you ever did. “Damn! Why did I take that job? It seemed like a sure thing, but it has now wrecked my life!” Whether something was a good decision depends on when you take your evaluative snap shot.

I’ll offer one more detour. We leave most of the most important decisions in our lives to five-year old (and four, seven . . . etc) children. That young woefully ignorant child will decide our early path in life regarding many things of critical importance, including whether to take reading seriously, how to view community and whether to take care of his or her body. I’ve often thought of the following quote in this context: “The child is father of the man.”  Along those same lines, how well did the five-year old version of you make those important decisions now that you are an adult who can look back? It really matters, because many of the things we do are path dependent on early decisions and habits. For a light-hearted illustration on path dependence, see this explanation for the relationship between the design of the space shuttle and the width of the horse’s ass. 

I want to end with a description of a severe modern-day dysfunction caused by good intentions and empathy. All parents try to protect their children and spare them pain (remember how I opened this chapter?). Some parents have over-done this, however. This problem of coddled children has gotten dramatically out of hand over the past decade. When she noticed this problem, Lenore Skenazy (a parent) founded the non-profit: Let Grow, which encourages us to raise “free range” children. Here is Let Grow’s Mission Statement:

When Adults Step Back, Kids Step Up

At Let Grow, we believe today’s kids are smarter, safer and stronger than our culture gives them credit for.

Treating them as physically and emotionally fragile is bad for their future — and ours.

Let Grow counters the culture of overprotection. We aim to future-proof our kids and our country.

This problem of coddled children has now shown up at the college level, including at many of our highest-priced and prestigious colleges, where students often claim that they cannot cope with people who challenge their world views, even slightly. Many students see offensive ideas (even barely offensive ideas) as a form of “violence.” Many of the spineless college administrators are taking over for the spineless parents and they continue to coddle these adult-sized toddlers, protecting them from being insulted or having hurt feelings by being confronted with ideas that challenge them. Even though college is a place where students are supposed to be confronted with challenging and offensive ideas. Many of these adult-sized children have now graduated to our other major sense-making institutions (such as news media) and it’s not a pretty picture. This sad situation at college is happening at the same time as skyrocketing rates of anxiety, self-cutting and suicide, especially by teenaged girls. 

[Video “Jonathan Haidt: The Three Terrible Ideas Weakening Gen Z and Damaging Universities and Democracies,” added June 22, 2022]

Into the mix stepped psychologist Jonathan Haidt and attorney Greg Lukianoff (head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) with their much-needed book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2019). Here is the intro to the book from The Codding website: 

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. How did this happen?

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Haidt and Lukianoff have also diagnosed America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. One of my biggest take-homes from Coddling of the American Mind is that our most visible and powerful sense-making institutions (universities and media outlets) have allowed the proven healing therapy of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to be turned upside down and used as a weapon for indoctrinating our children and young adults to ever-higher levels of cognitive dysfunction. Although we should sometimes trust our feelings, that is often not a good idea. When our feelings are substantially misleading us, we might need psychotherapy, such as CBT, which has been repeatedly proven to help people who have the following cognitive distortions:

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE
FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”

The good intentions of over-protecting children has been teaching many teenagers and young adults that they should do the opposite of CBT and this has caused millions of young people to become emotionally disabled. Coddling teaches our children and young adults to engage in these behaviors and thought processes rather than avoiding these things. The results are increasingly obvious and dysfunctional for all of us. Hence the sub-title to Coddling: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”

So there we have it: Exhibit A for the proposition that empathy not only can misguide us but it can be dangerous to the health of humans and societies.

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[Added 2022.03.11]

From The Atlantic: “The Coddling of the American Mind ‘Is Speeding Up,'” by Julie Beck.

Three years later, political polarization has only increased, as has anxiety among young people. And unrest on college campuses continues. “Everything’s speeding up,” Lukianoff says. Haidt and Lukianoff recently published a book, also titled The Coddling of the American Mind, where they go into more detail about the three “Great Untruths” they believe are behind free-speech controversies at America’s universities:

I spoke to Lukianoff about what’s changed since the publication of his Atlantic cover story, how parenting contributes to students’ expectations for their education, and the increasingly blurred lines between engaging with ideas and endorsing them.

Many more resources here, including articles and videos by and about Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling article and book.