Study: A culture of "competitive victimhood" makes people less, not more, empathetic to others.

Via Instapundit:  "Competition over collective victimhood recognition: When perceived lack of recognition for past victimization is associated with negative attitudes towards another victimized group"

Abstract

Groups that perceive themselves as victims can engage in “competitive victimhood.” We propose that, in some societal circumstances, this competition bears on the recognition of past sufferings—rather than on their relative severity—fostering negative intergroup attitudes. Three studies are presented. Study 1, a survey among Sub-Saharan African immigrants in Belgium (N = 127), showed that a sense of collective victimhood was associated with more secondary anti-Semitism. This effect was mediated by a sense of lack of victimhood recognition, then by the belief that this lack of recognition was due to that of Jews' victimhood, but not by competition over the severity of the sufferings. Study 2 replicated this mediation model among Muslim immigrants (N = 125). Study 3 experimentally demonstrated the negative effect of the unequal recognition of groups' victimhood on intergroup attitudes in a fictional situation involving psychology students (N = 183). Overall, these studies provide evidence that struggle for victimhood recognition can foster intergroup conflict.

In the last decades, Western societies have witnessed a growing tendency of minority groups to profile themselves as victims in order to obtain more societal recognition (Moscovici & Pérez, 2009). Members of these minorities have publicly expressed negative attitudes towards other minorities, although the latter were not responsible for their past victimization. For example, Khalid Muhammad, from the Nation of Islam, stated that “The black Holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-called Jew Holocaust” (Muhammad, 1994, cited by Benn Michaels, 2006, p. 290), and “I say you call yourself Goldstein, Silverstein, and Rubinstein because you're stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the earth” (Baltimore, 1994, cited by Anti-Defamation League, 2013). Dieudonné, a French humorist of African descent, declared that the recognition devoted to Jews for the Holocaust prevented him from denouncing the victimization of Blacks during slavery and colonialism (2005, February 17). He was recently convicted for anti-Semitism in Belgium (Wauters, 2015). This phenomenon was described and analyzed by sociologists (e.g., Chaumont, 1997), philosophers (Ricoeur, 2007), and philologists (Rothberg, 2009; Todorov, 1996, 1998), who framed it in terms of competition over symbolic recognition. So far, this phenomenon has not been systematically researched by social psychologists.

Social psychological research (e.g., Bar-Tal & Antebi, 1992; Wohl & Branscombe, 2008) has shown that sharing a sense of collective victimhood can negatively impact intergroup relations. Moreover, group members can experience competitive victimhood, defined as “a belief in having suffered more than the out-group” (Noor, Brown, & Prentice, 2008, p. 481), which impedes post-conflict intergroup forgiveness. However, so far, this research has mainly focused on relations between former enemies, or between former victims and their perpetrators. And competitive victimhood has mainly been understood as bearing on the severity of their respective sufferings. The situation described earlier does not fit this description. In this paper, we argue that groups can compete over their respective victimhood even when they are not held responsible for each other's victimization. However, in such situations, the competition bears on the recognition of their victim status, over and above the severity of their respective sufferings. In turn, this competition over collective victimhood recognition can be associated with negative intergroup attitudes. Finally, in order to understand these societal situations, they should be framed as involving at least three entities: the two groups that compete over the recognition of their victimhood, and a third entity—for example, “society,” the government, or the international community—that has the power of granting or denying recognition.

(Link to more)

"The Dangers of Empathy"

"It can distract us from rational thought and meaningful compassion."

[R]esearchers studying the brain can actually see how the various centers controlling certain feelings light up when we observe or imagine the experiences of others. “If you feel bad for someone who is bored, that’s sympathy,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his brave and brilliant new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, “but if you feel bored, that’s empathy.”

Bloom, a liberal transplant from Canada, distrusts empathy because empathy is like a drug. It distorts our perspective, causing us to get all worked up about an individual or group. He compares it to a spotlight that illuminates a specific person or group, plunging everything and everyone else into darkness.

“When some people think about empathy, they think about kindness. I think about war,” Bloom writes. He’s got a point. Look at the Middle East today. Sunni nations empathize with the plight of suffering Sunnis, and that empathy causes them to further hate and demonize Shiites. Many people around the world empathize with the Palestinians, blinding them to the legitimate concerns of Israelis. And vice versa.

Adolf Hitler was a master of empathy — for ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, Austria, and elsewhere. The cause of nationalist empathy for the German tribe triggered profound moral blindness for the plight, and even the humanity, of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.

Again, Bloom is a squishy liberal by his own account, but he’s also a leading scholar of how the mind actually works, not how we wish it would work.

Human beings are naturally inclined to sympathize and empathize with people like them. There has never been a society where people didn’t give priority to helping family and friends over strangers. This tends to blind us “to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with,” writes Bloom. “Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism.”

Look at the intractable debate over the phrase “black lives matter.” The slogan itself is a kind of spotlight, argue supporters, highlighting the legitimate complaints of African Americans. But it also blinds them to why others respond to the term by saying “all lives matter.”

I don’t go as far as Bloom in detesting empathy.

Link to the whole article.

"Forget Cat Videos: YouTube is Powered by Schadenfreude"

Acculturated:  Acting out in public means always having to say you’re sorry — at least if your actions are captured on video and posted online. (video at the link)....

She got drunk; she had a public tantrum. She launched an unprovoked attack on a man who was just trying to do his job. It’s hard not to sympathize with those who argue that this form of digilante justice offers swift, sure punishment to the entitled and badly behaved. We’ve replaced the public stocks in the town square with YouTube video shaming, a harsh but effective form of justice.

Ramkissoon at least had the opportunity to try to redeem herself by offering a nationally broadcast apology (she appeared on Good Morning America and declared, “I’m ashamed”; one imagines that had she not been a privileged medical resident, she’d have been giving that interview from the county jail, not across a table from George Stephanopoulus, but no matter).

And yet, those of us who film and watch these meltdowns aren’t entirely without fault either. YouTube is powered by schadenfreude, and ours is an era that has embraced a new voyeuristic bystander effect that encourages us to watch the shameful acts of others while reassuring ourselves that we would never do such a thing.

Perhaps we wouldn’t, but let he who has never had a bad day and said regrettable things in public cast the first stone.

Ramkissoon will soon fade from public memory, to be replaced by the next rude person unfortunate enough to have his or her behavior captured by a phone. But what shouldn’t fade is this question: Is this the kind of justice we want to encourage, one that rejects empathy for immediacy and forgiveness for shaming?

"Oliver Sacks and the Art of Choosing Empathy Over Vengeance"

"An existential lesson gleaned from a brush with death and foolishness."

I was riding along Sunset Boulevard at a leisurely pace, enjoying the weather — it was a perfect spring day — and minding my own business. Seeing a car behind me in my driving mirror, I motioned the driver to overtake me. He accelerated, but when he was parallel with me, he suddenly veered towards me, making me swerve to avoid a collision. It didn’t occur to me that this was deliberate; I thought the driver was probably drunk or incompetent. Having overtaken me, the car then slowed down. I slowed, too, until he motioned me to pass him. As I did so, he swung into the middle of the road, and I avoided being sideswiped by the narrowest margin. This time there was no mistaking his intent.

I have never started a fight. I have never attacked anyone unless I have been attacked first. But this second, potentially murderous attack enraged me, and I resolved to retaliate. I kept a hundred yards or more behind the car, just out of his line of sight, but prepared to leap forward if he was forced to stop at a traffic light. This happened when we got to Westwood Boulevard. Noiselessly — my bike was virtually silent — I stole up on the driver’s side, intending to break a window or score the paintwork on his car as I drew level with him. But the window was open on the driver’s side, and seeing this, I thrust my fist through the open window, grabbed his nose, and twisted it with all my might; he let out a yell, and his face was all bloody when I let go. He was too shocked to do anything, and I rode on, feeling I had done no more than his attempt on my life had warranted.

"Shortly after this heart-stopping encounter, Dr. Sacks found himself in a strikingly similar incident while driving to San Francisco on a desert road. An aggressive driver suddenly appeared onto the empty expanse and, moving at 90 mph, deliberately forced the motorcycle off the road."

By a sort of miracle, I managed to hold the bike upright, throwing up a huge cloud of dust, and regained the road. My attacker was now a couple of hundred yards ahead. Rage more than fear was my chief reaction, and I snatched a monopod from the luggage rack (I was very keen on landscape photography at the time and always traveled with camera, tripod, monopod, etc., lashed to the bike). I waved it round and round my head, like the mad colonel astride the bomb in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove. I must have looked crazy — and dangerous — for the car accelerated. I accelerated too, and pushing the engine as much as I could, I started to overtake it. The driver tried to throw me off by driving erratically, suddenly slowing, or switching from side to side of the empty road, and when that failed, he took a sudden side road in the small town of Coalinga — a mistake, because he got into a maze of smaller roads with me on his tail and finally got trapped in a cul-de-sac. I leapt off the bike (all 260 pounds of me) and rushed towards the trapped car, waving the monopod. Inside the car I saw two teenage couples, four terrified people, but when I saw their youth, their helplessness, their fear, my fist opened and the monopod fell out of my hand.

I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the monopod, walked back to the bike, and motioned them on. We had all, I think, had the fright of our lives, felt the nearness of death, in our foolish, potentially fatal duel.

“It is what I call poverty pornography,”

“They said they wanted to see how we are living,” Ms. Matshega said. “Can you imagine?”

The Hewitts moved into the shack for the month of August as an experiment in radical empathy. Could a white middle-class South African family make it on $10 a day in the kind of living conditions that millions of black South Africans endure every day? “It is one thing to know from an academic perspective what divides us,” said Mr. Hewitt, who also blogged about the experience. “But what is it like to actually live it?”

In most countries, a family slumming it for a month would hardly be news, but in South Africa, where deep racial divides strike at the core of the nation’s identity, the Hewitts’ experiment made headlines and spurred heated debate.

While some people praised the Hewitts, others where not so welcoming of their experiment.

But their experiment also poked at some of South Africa’s sorest spots. Were they white slum tourists who had come to gawk at black poverty? Was this simply a publicity stunt, aimed at getting a book or movie deal — or worse still, a reality television show?

And even if their motives were noble, did they inadvertently confirm what many here suspect: black poverty gets little notice until a white person experiences and highlights it?

Some critics took to Twitter with outright nasty, even violent responses."You know what? Hope the paraffin stove falls over and you people burn in that shack. Bye!” tweeted someone going by the handle @Keratilwe.

The Hewitts, in their own words...

So we're causing some major upsets.... We are trying to understand and have empathy. Don't want to make a mockery of life in the townships
— Ena & Julian (@mamelodi4amonth) July 31, 2013

New York Times

Video of the Hewitts explaining themselves after "read more"