Summary: The Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, were convicted of murdering their parents and attempted to claim abuse as a defense, but their actions showed clear premeditation. Despite their guilt, many people today empathize with them, viewing them as victims rather than criminals. This case highlights how excessive empathy can cloud judgment and lead to misguided perceptions of justice.
The most important of these myths is “blank-slatism”, a model of people as “blank slates” who have little to no inherent nature, but are shaped largely by culture. Under this view, people only become criminals due to negative experiences such as abuse or poverty, so a core part of any criminal case becomes identifying the trauma that produced the criminal. This is a seductive view for social scientists because it means anyone can be “fixed” through exposure to the right environment. Further, this view encourages empathy because it’s easier and more rational to empathize with others if we’re all fundamentally the same person, differentiated only by experience.
The trouble is, we’re not. Blank-slatism has been resoundingly disproven by decades of twin studies. It’s also disproven by common sense; (View Highlight)
Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them. (View Highlight)
Empathy produces fiction in the mind because it’s ultimately a form of imagination. The fact that movies and literature can easily make us empathize with fictional characters shows how easily our empathy can be hacked. (View Highlight)
those who empathize with one side’s pain often wish to inflict even greater pain on the other. One might even say empathy is a major cause of sadism in the world. (View Highlight)
empathy doesn’t work as a moral or judicial guide. Far from making us good, it makes us gullible, biased, dishonest, cruel, and unjust. If we wish to know who’s right and wrong, guilty and innocent, we should spend less time trying to inhabit other people’s heads, and make more use of our own. (View Highlight)