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ABSTRACT
Empathy is usually seen as a prosocial and morally positive influence on behaviour. This article provides an overview of cases of negative acts motivated by empathy. It includes discussions of polarizations that are fueled by side-taking and empathy, selfish forms of empathy (such as sadistic empathy, vampirism, and helicopter parenting), and filtered empathy (using identification with a third person as a medium to have empathy with another). The definition of empathy used is to co-experience the situation of another.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philipp Kanske and Kai Wiegandt for their dedicated and enthusiastic work, which brought together a diverse group of researchers and artists for the symposium ‘The Fascination with the Unknown: The Other’ in Leipzig (November 2016). Furthermore, I owe Michael Bryant and the anonymous reviewer gratitude for their thoughtful comments on this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Fritz Breithaupt (PhD. Johns Hopkins University, 1997) is provost professor at Indiana University Bloomington and teaches in Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science. His latest book, Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), is forthcoming in an improved version in 2018 as The Dark Sides of Empathy at Cornell UP. His lab, the Experimental Humanities Lab www.experiementalhumanities.com, focuses on the study of narratives. He is a frequent contributor to the press, including Die Zeit and Philosophie Magazin.