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Affective empathy without a strong concept of other minds can be extremely toxic.
Affective empathy without a strong concept of other minds can be extremely toxic.
Affective empathy isn't literally feeling what the other person is feeling, it's feeling how you *interpret* the other person's feelings. If you're not used to thinking outside of your own typical thought processes this can lead to a lot of assumptions that then hurt people.
Failure of theory of mind on its own is bad enough, and often leads to people assuming malice is there when it's not. It leads to people thinking others want to hurt them when they don't, and commonly leads to turning opponents into straw men at best and ignoring they're PEOPLE.
(If you have poor theory of mind and you're the sort of person who only thinks about violence when you want to hurt someone, you're more likely to assume someone revelling in fictional violence also revels in real violence, because that's what *you* would do.)
But with high affective empathy and poor theory of mind you'll get not just 'this is how I *would* feel' but 'This is how you're *making* me feel' situations, which further lead to ignoring the other person.
What's more? If you're actually feeling the emotion you're interpreting the person of having you're going to absolutely ignore their insistence that they *don't* feel that way if your theory of mind is bad.
This leads to otherwise kind people insisting that you feel bad about something you don't. Or assuming you want that hug when you're upset because *they* feel upset now and *they* want that hug, because they can't conceptualise that you are touch averse, or overstimulated.
They want desperately to help, to a point they won't take 'no' for an answer because they can't bear the thought of their friend suffering, and they are not only feeling how they interpret your emotions, but they're also feeling *theirs*, and it ends up in a feedback loop.
They then insist on hugging you to make it better, but actually make it worse, because they can't take your word on what would make you feel better - not because they want to hurt you, but because they can't conceptualise a mind that works different from theirs in this way.
Then, if you *also* have poor theory of mind, you may think 'My friend is trying to hurt me!' rather than 'my friend's heart is in the right place, but they're hurting me by accident', and then a big argument starts and now *everyone* is more upset and thinks the other is bad.
(I've been both people in this scenario, for the record! I've also seen this happen often enough and had to be the middleman who explained to both people that the both of them misinterpreted the intent (and in one case, needs) of the other.)
((Naturally taking extra time to explain to both of them what can be done differently next time, which basically can be summed up as 'Don't assume what the other person feels, intends, or needs. Sit and listen to them, and communicate how this feels'))
This and someone who has high empathy putting more stock in their own feelings than the feelings of the upset person are genuine concerns. I had to outgrow this shit slowly but painfully, and had to temper my affective empathy HARD with cognitive empathy.
(Cognitive empathy being basically theory of mind, come to think of it, since the empathizing involves actively trying to simulate the mind of another person instead of thinking solely on how *you* would feel)
And as I've said in another thread: I've been the person in the room who was toxic thanks to being overly empathetic, and in turn low in theory of mind. This is based heavily on my personal experiences as both sides of the conversation in many of these situations.
Whenever I see threads insisting that all of the world's woes would be solved by people having more empathy, and that low-empathy people are literally evil, I get my knickers in a twist because they 95% of the time mean affective empathy.
(Also, they're usually a part of the problem because their own empathy makes them misinterpret the people around them which leads to things like 'you can't have done X without being a horrible monster!' when 'X' is something you can EASILY do without being a monster.)
The world's woes won't suddenly be solved if we magically all wake up with high empathy the next day, unless that empathy is tempered REAL WELL with theory of mind, if even then.
Cause guess what?
Knowing exactly how someone feels and why doesn't mean you're going to care.
Cause guess what?
Knowing exactly how someone feels and why doesn't mean you're going to care.
