Empathy represses analytic thought and vice versa

I would think this leads quickly to another question people might not want to answer... Does empathy increase the probability that the actions you decide to take will reduce or increase suffering?<p>I am a fan of an old German saying: "Good intentions are the opposite of good actions."<p>Every tragedy in human history that I know of was born from good intentions. Make society stronger, make the majority happier, make people safer, make them healthier, etc. The bottom line is that good intentions have no influence on the consequences of actions. To determine what the consequences will be and whether a course of action is likely to help or hurt, we might have to abandon empathy during the discussion. Of course, we shouldn't ignore empathy when considering whether we want the consequences or not.

I misread the title as empathy encourages analytical thought, which would make sense, because in order to empathize one has to have enough analytic ability to see how another person is thinking, if that makes sense.

I have major issues with the entire article. 45 "healthy" students in an MRI is hardly solid evidence of anything. It's too small a sample to be meaningful. Presumably they were all students of "higher education" which may not represent society as a whole. Perhaps what they discovered simply represents the way the students have been educated/conditioned? What about other cultures and socio-economic groups?<p>I'm also skeptical of this kind of academic theory because it can be biased. If the theory doesn't pan out, then funding might stop. So better find data to support the theory.<p>Speaking from personal experience, I've always treated empathy as an analytic process. It simply involves additional perspectives. That's not intuition! Empathy is an extension of analysis. To claim they are mutually exclusive seems (feels?:) outrageous. It's also not consistent with other evidence that suggest that neural pathways can and will change. So why not both pathways or a hybrid pathway?<p>That leads to the duck-rabbit illusion where they say it's impossible to see both. I see both and it looks like a mutation. A quick search yields other interpretations too such as seeing neither. Seeing only the lines for what they are. (I can also see either duck or rabbit but the mutation is much cooler!)

I suppose this explains why successful marketing often involves telling a good story.

Very interesting. Perhaps the empathetic and analytic systems are parallel to Kahneman's systems 1 and 2? (1 for thinking "fast" and 2 for "slow," to oversimplify an Nobel laureate's life's work.)

This rings very true to me: I like you, so I want you to be right, to the extent that I might suspend thorough analysis of what you're saying. Conversely, if I don't like you, I might ramp up efforts to find out that you're actually wrong.<p>Look no further than politics for day-to-day demonstrations of this: Does anyone ever apply the same amount of critical rigour to "their guy" as they do to his opponent?

"<i>Eureka! Engineers aren't empathetic because they can't be Research suggests that analytic thought is impaired by empathy, just as empathy is impaired by analytical thought. Who'd have thought?"</i><p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57542754-71/eureka-engineers-arent-empathetic-because-they-cant-be/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57542754-71/eureka-enginee...</a>

One corrolary of this, if true, would be the uneven distribution of empathy will correlate with uneven distribution of analytic skill (viz: learning by doing).

Interesting but don't really see how this addresses the explanatory gap problem.

Corollary: social networks ungracefully degrade analytic ability.

House was right.