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Question about empathy

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
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20,284
that is not what I meant by lowest common denominator, I'm not disagreeing just the reasoning is wrong

The demographics of teen and tween were quite recently created to make money.

And until recently the middle class imitated the upper class, and the lower class imitate the middle class.

But Americans love revolution, and never cease to talk about it and extoll it, so how natural for them to turn class in its head and get us all to imitate the lower classes, and even worse, to get us all to imitate the teens and tweens.

So now we all want to be tweens with street cred.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
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Yeah, the New Age the Illuminati, the Dictionary... whatever. (That last Americanism was inserted especially for you.)

You defeated the Japanese with torpedoes and now you are defeating us with Americanisms.
 

OrangeAppled

Sugar Hiccup
Joined
Mar 20, 2009
Messages
7,626
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
4w5
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Yes, I think it's possible. Empathy can be an intellectual identification with what someone else is feeling, not necessarily feeling & expressing the same emotion as them at that moment.

I can empathize with someone by grasping the basic experience they are going through. In the OP's scenario, that would be "loss". I may not have lost a child, but I grasp "pain from loss".

It does seem related to type to find empathic thinking more natural than others. That Dario Nardi experiment (not a valid scientific "study", I know) suggests xNFPs use this thinking the most. I experience it as grasping the essence of someone intuitively, without knowing all their details or having experienced what they have, and simulating that within myself to identify how they would feel in their situation or how an emotion is experienced for them, as opposed to how I would feel or how I experience an emotion. This makes my personal experience less important than the ability to understand who they are & how they feel. Because even if I have experienced something similar, my feeling & emotional reaction might be quite different. It's like every person is a different internal context for experience, and empathizing is grasping that context as much as the experience & resulting emotions in themselves.

I DO notice that people who are very literal can struggle with empathy when it's not something they're personally familiar with though. I think deeper empathy definitely has to be learned for many.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
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Look, when we do empathy training, first of all it feels unnatural and artificial and we can't see the point of it, but as we keep practising the scales of empathy, we start to take it for granted, then there comes an ah-ha moment when we get it. It's like learning to play the piano or learning to read, there comes a moment in our practice when we understand what it all means.

And what stands in the way of playing the piano or reading or empathy is simply practice.

And who wants to do the hard work of practice when the New Age says we have no need of hard work because we are naturally empathic.
 
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