When we empathise we assume the worst

Good writing, dick pics, sociopaths, and anthrax

Image generated by me using Midjourney.

Understanding others is hard. Naturally we resort to heuristics or simple tricks when doing so. The easiest one is empathy, or “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”. We have ok knowledge of our own motives and feelings so we can copy and paste those onto others: how would I feel in that situation? This sort of works sometimes and it’s the basis of our theory of mind ability.¹

It’s also behind the Golden Rule. You’re encouraged from a young age by well-meaning teachers, imams, and Sesame Street characters to treat others as you would like to be treated. Then at some point you realise people aren’t like you because you’re a freak. So treating others how you want to be treated makes everyone worse off. The Golden Rule, the empathy heuristic, therefore works only in proportion to how typical you yourself are. If you are something like the median human then you can safely project your desires onto others and maybe get away with it 70% of the time. Meh. But if you are eccentric or neurodiverse or in any way unlike the majority of people around you, you’ll find that the Golden Rule and basic theory of mind is kind of entry level. I call it the Bronze Rule.

When we simply copy/paste our feelings or motivations onto others, we always assume that people share our vices and are a little less virtuous. Other people are generally worse than us and certainly no better.

What follows are some choice examples (culled from a giant list I’ve been keeping) of this lack of ability to imagine others are radically different from us and especially that they are better. There’s no particular structure here, but it gets more interesting as it goes along. There’s plenty here for anyone who thinks about others’ motivations. And I’ve never seen anyone describe this before.

We don’t believe others’ reports of mental life if it differs from ours

I’m always struck by this when people suddenly discover that others have a totally different mental landscape to themselves. Occasionally something goes viral on the Internet which reveals that other people think quite differently to oneself. A fairly recent example is the existence of an inner monologue: a literal inner voice which narrates experience as you’re having it. For some people, this is an unremarkable and ever-present feature of mental life. But many people — maybe half the population — don’t have this inner monologue. For them, whenever they heard people speak about it, they assumed it was purely figurative. Apparently, people rarely compare notes on their inner lives.

Another example is aphantasia: a lack of mental imagery. I wrote about this recently. Turns out a lot of people who are aphantasic simply assumed that other people were using terms like “mental imagery” or “mind’s eye” in a metaphorical sense. Here, people assume others are “worse” — in this context that doesn’t mean morally worse, it just means they assume others have equally or less rich mental imagery than themselves.

I keep a list of reports of subjective experiences that aren’t taken literally. Admittedly, a touch of smugness attends this list: “Sure, some people use empathy to “help” others, but I keep a list of people’s quirks, so I’m the one who’s actually attuned to others’ differences.”

But I’m routinely shocked by my own ignorance. One example was when people would say, “Thinking about that makes my head hurt!” Until recently I didn’t realise it was a literal pain or headache that people had when engaged in a certain kind of tedious or difficult mental exercise. Another example is when people say they feel more connected to their body, like when they do yoga or get a massage. I didn’t realise that some people generally don’t feel connected to their body.²

People read differently too

There’s another example that I see when I’m teaching literature. People have fundamentally different goals when reading novels. I don’t just mean that some people read for pleasure or escapism while others read for intellectual engagement. I think most people know about that difference and recognise when they’re part of one audience and not the other. A more interesting difference, one that doesn’t seem to be public, is between those who read for suspense versus those who do everything they can to avoid suspense. For people with anxiety, in particular, the idea of surprise or twists is unpleasant. They like to go to the last page of a novel to inspect the ending to avoid being blindsided by some dramatic turn of events. They prefer to rewatch or reread familiar media, because they won’t be confronted by an unsettling surprise.

And yet TV writers, film producers, novelists, people who study audience engagement, etc., all assume a uniform audience for whom surprise and suspense are synonymous with engagement.

It might be that the people who eschew suspense are a minority of the total audience, let’s say 10-15% (rough estimate based on my own informal polling of literature classes). But this is a non-trivial proportion and their existence is not widely acknowledged. Again, this suggests we don’t compare notes and typically copy/paste our own minds onto others.

Empathy might kill us all

There is a pernicious side to this general weakness in recognising difference. I call this variety Brezhnev syndrome, after reading a terrifying and excellent book called The Dead Hand. It’s account of secret Soviet weapons programs. The title refers to a Dr Strangelove-style doomsday device they rigged up so that if the leadership were all killed by an American strike, their own ICBMs would launch automatically: a so-called fail-deadly design (as opposed to fail-safe). You’re probably thinking, “Jeez that Cold War was crazy! Goddam commies. Glad we won that one,” and so on. Thing of it is, it’s still in use.

This isn’t meant to be one of my anti-nuke tirades; the reason I mention The Dead Hand is for a great example of empathy misfiring. The book also covers the Soviet biological weapons program involving full-scale anthrax factories and other deranged efforts. In 1972 the US and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to cease all development of bio weapons. The Americans adhered to it and actually dismantled their programs. The Soviets, on Brezhnev’s orders, made a public show of doing the same but continued in secret. The Americans did this assuming that the Soviets genuinely would discontinue their program; the Soviets secretly continued because they honestly believed the US would do the same.

In the case of biological weapons, it’s clear that the Soviet Union and the US mirror-imaged one another. That’s the evocative name a CIA analyst gave to this process, whereby each side in a dispute assumes the other thinks like them.

Why don’t I just use the phrase mirror-imaging to describe the general phenomenon I’m talking about? Because the mirror warps the image of the other. The important point about Brezhnev syndrome is that it assumes the worse never the better of one’s opponent or interlocutor. The Soviets assumed the US were as duplicitous as they were. Even the US assumed that the Soviets were as virtuous as them, certainly not more so.

The reason empathy might kill us all is that this kind of bad second-guessing of the enemy happened repeatedly in nuclear showdowns too, including the Cuban missile crisis. Considering that the entire doctrine of nuclear deterrence is premised on having accurate beliefs about your opponent’s beliefs, I’m convinced that it is inherently fucked. I guess this is one of my anti-nuke rants.

Brezhnev syndrome in a nutshell: others’ virtue is only ever less than or equal to ours, never greater.

My theory predicts that some people are good and assume others are good;³ some people are bad and assume others are equally bad; some people are good and arrogantly assume that others are inferior; but it is virtually unheard-of that someone is bad while thinking others are more virtuous. The cognitive dissonance of such a scenario is too great, except for the true sociopaths out there.

Do sociopaths think others are like them?

Actually, it’s an interesting question as to how sociopaths feel. One might think their theory of mind is insufficiently developed to even cognize others’ intentions to this level of specificity. But I think the Machiavellian skill of at least some sociopaths speaks eloquently to their ability to second-guess others’ motives, even and especially when they differ from the sociopath’s. For example, sociopaths can run ingenious scams, climb corporate hierarchies, and — most frequently — become successful real estate agents.

Here’s Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door:

If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naïveté of other people and their ridiculous scruples, or of their curiosity about why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others even in the service of their most important ambitions. Or they theorise that all people are the same — unscrupulous, like them — but are dishonestly playacting something mythical called “conscience.” By this latter proposition, the only straightforward and honest people in the world are themselves. They are being real in a society of phonies.

Even sociopaths have Brezhnev syndrome. They assume they’re more virtuous than others, albeit they assess others according to their own distorted sense of virtue.

Censorship requires Brezhnev syndrome

Censorship is a more widely recognised example. It’s never the censor themselves who is harmed or perverted by an offending work, only an imagined audience who are more gullible and weak-willed.

This applies beyond official censors. Anyone calling for certain shows, books, ideas to be cancelled is making an argument that more corruptible audiences will be swayed by content which didn’t sway them.

It’s not just censorship, even criticism normally involves Brezhnev syndrome. Every critical reading of a text presumes that other audiences are missing interpretive skills or knowledge the critic has. Sometimes, this is true. But the asymmetry is extreme: I have never read a professional critic or reviewer consider that others may read or view a work and extract a more savvy interpretation than what they themselves offer. I have never encountered a critic who conceded that they might have gotten more out of the work if only they were a better reader or viewer.

I’ve stumbled on amateur reviewers — on Goodreads, Amazon, etc. — who are more impressive. They admit that a book wasn’t for them, or suspect something went over their heads, or confess to not liking the message or tone while noting that others might get something more out of it, that others might appreciate aspects they could not. Bravo. These people should be world president.

Brezhnev syndrome as an involuntary disclosure or tell

The example of this which leaps to mind, was when I read Jordan Peterson‘s book, 12 Rules for Life, wherein he had a long section talking about how we all sometimes feel like destroying the world, a wish “to see the world burn”. I applaud his emotional honesty and candour. But I’ve never felt that way. And I suspect that even if I’m in a minority there, it’s a sizeable one. Peterson disclosed an ignoble thought, because he assumes everyone must feel that way sometimes and that if anybody claimed otherwise, they would be lying — it is unthinkable that others are more virtuous, more sane, more altruistic than ourselves.

Sexuality, kinks, and attraction

Mirror-imaging and Brezhnev syndrome turn up in all areas of life. But they’re especially common and easy to identify in sexual attraction. In short, people are attracted to different kinds of people, situations, fetishes, and so on. One might think that in the age of Internet pornography in which every kink, every fetish, every sub-subgenre is in public view, we might have arrived at a received opinion that people are attracted to wildly different things. But for whatever reason, we like to think of attraction as being timeless or human nature or animal instinct or something very stable and homogenous — and whatever it is that we feel we project onto others of the same sexual orientation.

I submit, as evidence, dick pics. They’re commonly written about as something that is bad form, that no woman would ever want to receive, that is simply a case of male sexual aggression or overconfidence (I’m using heteros in this example). And yet there is obviously a minority (at least) who appreciate a well-timed dick pic. It might be that the two groups of women are roughly equal in size and yet have somehow failed ever to compare notes. Although it must be that the dick pic enthusiasts are aware of the other (because of their public pronouncements), but assume that the dick pic haters cannot admit to themselves that they really do enjoy dick pics (Brezhnev syndrome). More research required.

Relatedly, I wasn’t surprised to see Jordan Peterson — I don’t know why so many examples are about him, but I do get a lot of material from his bizarre life project — tweeting about a plus size model on a magazine cover. He said he didn’t find the model attractive and no amount of “authoritarian ideology” would force him to change his mind. Again, an hilarious disclosure of his own thinking and a further disclosure that he doesn’t think anyone else could have a different view. He assumes there could not be anyone who is more “virtuous” on this front. Anybody who claims to find the model attractive must be lying in order to appear to be in favour of body positivity. Doubtless he would find it hard to explain the men lining up to date or sleep with plus size models, or the presence of thriving porn subgenres and escort services, devoted to curvaceous women and BBW. These people would, according to Peterson’s rationale, be lying and engaging in some kind of charade, their lives spent in disingenuous masturbation, only to appease the woke background culture.

It’s funnier than that. He’s also saying, in so many words, that he can’t get hot for a curvaceous woman. The regional Canadian accent, the scoutmaster posture, the ultra-sincere mythological view of life, the poignant struggle with substance abuse, the haunted-by-thoughts-of-gulags stare — and he’s basically saying, very gravely, that he would never jerk-off to a zaftig woman. Well, ecce homo.

Temperament and worldview

William James argued back in the nineteenth century that most of the great philosophers had constructed their metaphysics, their worldview, based on their own temperament. I think there’s a lot of truth in this.

Consider that for some philosophers, existence is pain, and suffering is the condition of life. They declare, from their own experience, that this is the basic truth. And there’s no shortage of third-party evidence either. But have these Eeyores never met the people for whom existence is wonder, grace, and adventure? Or even those for whom it’s an even keel, a fairly chill ride? These two groups probably have fewer members than the Eeyore one, but they certainly exist. Even some fellow philosophers have the phlegmatic, chiller disposition: Epicurus, Hume, Russell, or Dave Chalmers for a current philosopher. Admittedly I cant think of any that fit the adventurous wonder-wounded type but there are selection effects here: why stew on intellectual matters and writing dense tomes when you could live your many passions? But outside the gloomy libraries of philosophy these people exist. Yet philosophers, those whom we pay to think, have generally been unable to remember the life experience of someone unlike themselves when they sat down to write how the world is.

Who’s immune to Brezhnev syndrome?

I think the obvious answer is good writers. A healthy combination of neuroticism plus a dedication to understanding motivations, means writers accept a real range of personalities beyond their own. The authors who are known for being able to create diverse, three-dimensional characters, whose aims and understanding are orthogonal to one another, are celebrated (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, blah blah) so it must be hard. And it’s probably getting harder for writers as they’re told to write only what they know and who they are.

And writers as a species certainly aren’t immune. Inferior writers produce successive works where the protagonist is a cipher for themselves. There are a lot of TV shows — highly rated “prestige” TV shows — where there aren’t characters with fundamentally different worldviews. You can tell the showrunner simply thinks their own worldview is correct: the protagonist embodies it or comes to accept it, and other characters are either incomplete attempts at it or the pure negation of it in the form of some baddie. Lots of crime-based shows are like this. I won’t name names.

To close, here are some examples of what I consider good writing in this regard. These are TV shows where the writers created multiple worldviews within the one storyworld: Bojack, The Leftovers, Mad Men, Westworld.

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Postscript added Jan 5, 2024

I forgot to mention the big one: pain! We suck at imagining others’ level of pain. People with chronic pain are assumed to be suffering a kind of mild ongoing pain. It’s unthinkable that they’re experiencing what we would consider severe pain, but all the time. The obvious move should be to recall how much it sucks when I had temporary pain — pinched nerve, joint pain from COVID, vertigo from diving accident — and simply spend like ten seconds extrapolating that to all the time. It is trivially easy to explain this process. I almost never do it.

Endometriosis is an even better example. Forever, I guess, some women have had excruciating period pain owing to endo. Each month they’re incapacitated, bedridden for a few days and other people just assumed that they’re hysterical, so to speak. Other women have period pain and perhaps just copy/paste their own pain, whatever level it’s at, onto the sufferer.

Hunger pangs are a less extreme but ubiquitous example. I feel almost nothing if I skip a meal and don’t seem to get “hangry” but I know from others’ reports that this is a major feature of their life. Like if they try to go on a diet that involves fasting or caloric restriction, their waking experience is overwhelmed by feelings of painful hunger. But you can imagine the lack of empathy when one of these blighters says they struggle with losing weight and then people like me look at their own effortless experience with food and think, “These crybabies are so weak-willed they can’t even do this one simple trick. One thing’s for certain, they experience food just like I do, but they simply lack my moral excellence.”

1. For mavens, this is the simulation theory of theory of mind (ToM) which I believe is the basic package most of us are loaded with. Advocates of theory-theory ToM are onto something, I just think it’s an additional capacity only a minority of people acquire. And frequently people on the autism spectrum end up acquiring theory-theory, a more explicit way of modelling others’ behaviour, and thereby achieve a more subtle understanding than many neurotypicals who stick with simulation theory.

2. This lack of body awareness — lack of kinesthesia — is common among people with ADHD, people recovering from trauma, and seems to exist on a spectrum anyway.

3. My mum is a great example. She is a migrant herself and is very non-xenophobic. She assumes others must want to warmly welcome refugees to Australia. And so she has been baffled every single election cycle since she came of age.