Following the 2020 George Floyd incident in Minneapolis and the emergence of Black Lives Matter-inspired criminal justice reform, a movement swept across many of America’s big cities, treating violent felons more as victims of a corrupt system deserving forgiveness than dangerous criminals needing confinement, even if they tend to reoffend once back on the streets.
Today, as protests continue to condemn Israel in support of Palestinians in the Gaza conflict, progressive entities such as LGBT groups proclaim support for Hamas forces enforcing Islamic sharia teachings that would outlaw their lifestyles, often upon threat of death.
In both cases, the left-leaning mindset expressing sympathy for repressed classes simultaneously supports possible threats to their safety or that of their families and friends. While this might be the ultimate expression of selfless compassion, could a possibly dangerous level of empathy be the result of political competition — a product of a positive feedback circuit working to “outsympathize” other competitive ideals?
The term “toxic empathy” gained public notice with the publication of Allie Beth Stuckey’s 2024 book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. The work explores the idea of empathy as the highest virtue, while the author proposes that empathy became a tool of manipulation by “left-wing activists who bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving,” often at the cost of supporting bad actors unworthy of second or third chances.
Stuckey did not respond to a request for an interview, but a call to the University of Chicago unveiled the biological roots of empathy, toxic or otherwise.
Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology on the Chicago campus. Mason says the concept of empathy is shared by all mammals, and she explores it at its most basic levels by studying rats and how they respond to the conditions of their fellows.
“The definition of empathy that I use is a communication of the experience between two individuals,” Mason said. “One individual can understand that another individual is suffering, is unhappy, is in distress, and that’s empathy. It’s a neutral term.”
For Mason and her research, empathy happens automatically as a reflex, while compassion is a feeling. Then, acting on either empathy or compassion is a choice.
“One person could react to another’s distress by trying to help them,” she explained. “Another person could react by trying to exploit it and torture them, perhaps knowing what buttons to push to make their lives miserable. So, empathy can be used in simplistic terms of good or bad.”
In terms of political or performative compassion, she suggested that such expressions can be a way of confirming competitive group affiliations — a brand of selective sympathy in place of empathy. Once rats have time to form their packs, studies show they’re more likely to assist fellow members than outsiders.
“This selective helping of members of the ‘in-group’ and not helping ‘out-groups’ is evolutionarily advantageous as helping is resource-depleting,” she said. “The wiring ends up promoting help for the in-group, but not for the out-group.”
In terms of dangerous levels of compassion capable of making some sociopolitical problems worse, Mason believes that how people mentally process their empathic response gives rise to collective policies and the possible development of self-harming levels of compassion in groups, almost like a contagion.
Mason’s rodents offer some insights. When a rat is trapped in test conditions away from its pack, Mason reports that about a quarter to a third of the other rats don’t help because they are so distressed by the trapped rat’s predicament that they are immobilized in inaction.
“These highly distressed rats cannot dial down their own distress enough to act in an other-oriented fashion,” she explained. “The same ‘wires’ operate differently in the presence or absence of personal distress. For such reasons, I would say that there are reactions that are so heavily favored that they become automatic within a given group context. That’s the thing about empathy: There’s very little quality control.”
Michael J. Poulin studies stress, coping, prosocial engagement, and responding to adversity at the University of Buffalo’s Department of Psychology. His work concurs with Mason’s definition of empathy, but he suggested that the phenomenon of compassion for those who could do additional harm could be deceptive or disingenuous.
“It strikes me that this question [of toxic compassion] blurs together the concept of empathy, which is feeling and/or responding to another person’s emotional state, and the concept of virtue signaling or trying to appear that one has empathy,” Poulin said.
Poulin set the idea of dangerous sympathy more in the realm of group behavior and politicization than empathy or the psychological need to demonstrate performative compassion.
“This is definitely more about the need to fit in with a political identity than it is about narcissism,” he explained. “There is plenty of narcissism to go around in all political camps, but the questions of who deserves empathy, and of how much displaying empathy is something valuable, are issues that have become identified with particular political ideologies.”
Poulin added that, while empathy is a primitive common response, emotional influence can create blind spots inherent to allegiance to an identity. Such feelings can introduce contradictions and illogical extensions of compassion.
“Emotions are often intensifiers, whether we’re talking about empathy for those who are suffering, righteous anger on behalf of those we think are wronged, or disgust at those we perceive violate the ‘right’ way of doing things,” he said. “I’m not sure I’d look for the root cause of blind spots in the emotions themselves, but more in terms of their partial application, such as empathy or anger on behalf of some, but not others.”
Among the rats, Mason sees as much danger in a lack of compassion when confronted with an empathic response as there could be with misplaced or performative sympathy.
“There’s a moment in the Passover Seder where one says, ‘And Pharaoh hardened his heart,” Mason said. “It shows feeling empathy for another is an automatic, but to resist those feelings is the action.”
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Mason used another example of someone passing homeless people on the street. To feel something for them is not a choice, but failing to give assistance, whether out of indecision or a willing lack of compassion, is an action. The decision to avoid helping them takes some conscious effort — a great deal for some and less for others. Helping homeless people also requires a choice and effort, alongside the risk that one could offer aid to extend the homeless predicament.
“We’re not rats,” Mason said. “We have this extra bit of cortex, and we get to think. We get to ‘mentalize’ the difference between empathy and compassion. That’s the difference between your first reaction to a situation and the reaction that you actually act upon or express. Sometimes the easiest expressions are anger or overreaction that can do more harm than good.”
John Scott Lewinski is a writer based in Milwaukee.
