Hot Pain, Cold Empathy: How personal lived experience diminishes perceptions of others’ suffering.

• In Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Emotions

Abstract

Among laypeople and social scientists alike, there is a wide-spread assumption that prior experience with pain can help understand the suffering of others and fosters cognitive empathy. In this paper I argue that although similar lived experience may increase our belief that we understand someone else’s pain, it actually reduces empathy towards others’ suffering and may hinder altruistic efforts and social action. This phenomenon can be explained through the contrast between hot (emotional) and cold (rational) cognition—a neuroscience concept that has been useful to sociologists in the past decades. For this study I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 44 participants where I asked them about personal experiences with different forms of suffering and used brief vignettes where participants had to rank severities of different pain scenarios. Participants consistently labeled the familiar pain as the less severe. Although other studies in psychology and neuroscience support the relevance of hot and cold cognition for empathy and point to the disconnect between memory of pain and empathy for pain, they have not successfully made the leap from empathy as a personal trait to a situation-dependent social emotion. A more nuanced, sociological understanding of how personal memories relate to social interactions will help avoid distorted, albeit confident, assessments of others’ suffering.

Author

• Anna Gabur, Weber State University