Empathy for Trump voters? No, thanks.

There is a bitter debate going on among those of us on the losing side of the 2016 election, and it’s been heating up in the weeks since Trump took office. It has to do with empathy. Some are calling for more empathy for Trump voters, asking for a deep dive into their motivations and needs, arguing that those who fought against Trump should try to step into the shoes of those who supported him — to share their feelings.

Others angrily reject this proposal. The headline of an article at Slate reads, “They don’t deserve your empathy,” and the author, Jamelle Bouie, writes, “All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters — who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes — is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.” Save your empathy for those whom Trump has maligned, such as immigrants and Muslims.

The argument recurs virtually every time a newspaper sends out a correspondent to harvest the opinions of hardcore Trump voters — and discovers they are pleased with the refugee ban, the press bashing, the outrage of the week.

I side with the empathy bashers. This may not be a surprise, given that I just wrote a book called Against Empathy, exploring the dark side of this aspect of our natures. I focus on emotional empathy — the act of experiencing the world as you believe others do. This can be a force for good — it can act as a spotlight, drawing our attention to those in pain — but it has serious design flaws when it comes to moral judgment. It is biased, tribal, and innumerate; it favors the close over the far, the one over the many. It leads to shortsighted and unfair decisions that make the world worse.

And it can make us cruel. I finished writing my book during the 2016 presidential campaign and observed how this sort of empathy has been weaponized by Trump, as when — following the lead of Ann Coulter in her book Adios, America — he exploited our empathic feelings toward victims of rape and assault to build hatred toward undocumented immigrants.

When it comes to policy decisions, I argue that we are better off putting aside empathy and employing a combination of rational deliberation and a more distanced compassion.

A further problem with empathy is that it can wear you out. Empathy comes in various types and different degrees, but full-on emotional empathy — of the “I feel your pain” sort — is exhausting. It’s a major cause of burnout, leading compassionate and capable doctors, nurses, and first responders to struggle in their professions.

Laboratory studies in which subjects are trained to feel empathy for others find that the experience often leaves them unhappy and withdrawn. (This is in sharp contrast with the effects of “compassion training,” in which subjects are trained to feel love for others but not to share their feelings — this sort of training leaves people in an energized and positive state and ready to help.)

All of this brings us back to the concerns of Bouie and others — given limited time and resources, it’s not clear why you would devote so much emotional work on behalf of someone you are opposed to. Better to reserve your empathy for those you love and who are at risk.

Finally, empathy might be morally corrosive. When you empathize with someone, you take on their interests and are more inclined to help them. If you are working very hard to stop the Trump administration from doing what the president’s supporters most want him to do, empathy is probably not a productive path.

I think, however, that the goals of the pro-empathy advocates are the right ones — it’s just that empathy is the wrong way to attain them. What we actually need more of is understanding.

This isn’t just a verbal distinction. Empathy and understanding are two separate psychological processes, embodied in distinct (though overlapping) parts of the brain. Empathy, in the sense of emotional empathy, activates the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, while understanding is more related to the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits just behind the forehead. You can have understanding without empathy, without any sharing of their experiences — literally or through an act of imagination — when you use the remarkably simple and effective method of asking people questions and listening closely to what they say.

Importantly, understanding doesn’t involve approval. Empathy often does, which is why the pro-empathy crowd often makes its case by saying that Trump voters aren’t all that bad: They are motivated by economic concerns, frustrated with the current system, and angry at being abandoned by those in power; many had voted for Barack Obama and would have likely voted for Bernie Sanders; and so on. Empathy demands such emotional investment that this kind of defensiveness is almost inevitable. If it turns out that a Trump voter was motivated by racism, empathy is a much harder sell.

But unlike empathy, understanding is value-neutral. It can be used when trying to be a more effective teacher or better parent, and is valuable when trying to negotiate outcomes that are mutually beneficial. Yet it’s also the tool of the poker player, the military general, the confidence artist, and the political operative.

If you’re still not convinced of the distinction between understanding and empathy, consider the successful psychopath. There are individuals who are very good at figuring out how other people’s minds work but who lack any empathic connections; the suffering of others doesn’t bother them one bit.

For the rest of us non-psychopaths, however — blessed with normal sentiments and kindness — understanding does have some moral consequences. It doesn’t sway us as much as empathy, but still, there is something about the act of trying to make sense of the thoughts and actions of others that makes it easier to humanize them. Among other things, it leads to the insight that if you were in their position, with their beliefs and background, you would have done the same thing. (How could it be otherwise?)

Understanding thereby serves as an antidote to what the psychologist Roy Baumeister calls “the myth of pure evil”: the idea that bad actors are alien from us; they are cruel, driven by malevolence, desiring 
suffering as an end to itself. We do bad things reluctantly, because we are forced to, because we have ultimate good ends in mind. They do it because they like it.

Baumeister notes that this is rarely true. Few people see themselves as villains, and the worst things are done by people who sincerely believe they are in the right. And the more you understand someone, the more this becomes clear.

For some, such humanization is a step too far. As a country, we’ve been here before — in a far, far more extreme context. Recall the 9/11 attacks. Here, there was no debate over whether the terrorists were monstrous — it’s not as if half the country was pro-terrorist and the other half was anti-terrorist. But there was a similar debate over where the line between empathy and understanding falls (even if it wasn’t conducted using those terms).

Many were eager to explore the terrorists’ mental states, trying to figure out why they did what they did, what role religious belief played, economic factors, and so on. Others were repelled by this, insisting that the mass murders were motivated by evil, pure and simple, and any explanation of more depth than “they hate our freedoms” is unpatriotic, even taboo. Empathy was off the table, but so was any attempt at understanding.

This was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. We should seek to understand those we disagree with, even those we hate — perhaps especially those we hate. (It should go without saying that what applies to Trump opponents also applies to Trump supporters, many of whom see support for Hillary Clinton as driven by malign motives. They too should seek to understand their political opposites.)

Jettisoning empathy and working on understanding does not lead us to moral relativism; you can appreciate why something was done and still see it as mistaken or cruel. (We can do this even when we reflect our own actions.) Understanding doesn’t involve selling your soul. But knowing the minds of others is an achievement of huge pragmatic importance — among other things, it helps win elections. And some humanizing of your opponents is never a fully bad thing, especially when you have to share the country with them.

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen professor of psychology at Yale University and the author of five books, including, most recently, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Find him on Twitter @paulbloomatyale.

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