Emotional Gaslighting and Affective Empathy

ABSTRACT

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that undermines a target’s confidence in their own cognitive faculties. Different forms of gaslighting can be distinguished according to whether they undermine a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions, perceptions, memory, or reasoning abilities. I focus on ‘emotional gaslighting’, which undermines a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions and corresponding evaluative judgments. While emotional gaslighting rarely occurs in isolation, it is often an important part of an overall gaslighting strategy. This is because emotions can help us to understand the evaluative aspects of our situation and thus put us in a position to protest wrongs, which is a context in which gaslighting frequently occurs. I argue that affective empathy constitutes an important antidote to emotional gaslighting. Affective empathy can lead to endorsement of a target’s emotional reaction as appropriate to their situation and agreement with the corresponding evaluative judgment. When it leads to endorsement, affective empathy can counteract the effects of emotional gaslighting because it reassures a target in their ability to make evaluative judgments based on their emotional reactions. Because of its opposing effects, affective empathy with the victim thus constitutes an important intervention to emotional gaslighting on the part of third parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaslighting
• emotions
• empathy
• affective empathy
• epistemic injustice
• endorsement

Acknowledgments

Work on this paper was made possible by the DFG/AHRC-Project “How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy” (DFG RO 1063/3-1). For helpful comments on earlier versions, I thank Daniel Sharp, audience members at the 96^th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association at the University of St. Andrews, in particular, Claire Kirwin, Uku Tooming, Lizzy Ventham, and Christiana Werner, and one anonymous referee.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky raises a version of this question as a desideratum for future research at the end of his article on second-order gaslighting (Catapang Podosky 2021, 224).

² I am using ‘gaslighting’ as a ‘success term’, denoting activities that in fact lead a target to lower their confidence in their cognitive capacities. This still allows one to identify activities that aim at undermining this confidence without succeeding as ‘attempts at gaslighting’.

³ Gaslighting has also been discussed as a purely structural phenomenon, i.e. as the effect of non-personal entities, such as practices, institutions, or images (Pohlhaus 2020). In this paper, I focus on gaslighting as an interpersonal phenomenon.

⁴ While gaslighting constitutes a form of epistemic injustice, it thus does not constitute a form of what Miranda Fricker calls ‘discriminatory epistemic injustice’, which is by definition unintentional (Fricker 2017).

⁵ This is reflected by the following lyrics of the song ‘Gaslighter’ by The Chicks: ‘You think it’s justifiable, I think it’s pretty cruel – And you know you lie best when you lie to you’.

⁶ Similar difficulties of delineation arise in the context of discussions of manipulation in general (see Coons and Weber 2014). We can thus distinguish a ‘broad’ and a ‘narrow’ notion of gaslighting. On a broad understanding, gaslighting is mainly identified via its effect – an unjustified lowering of confidence. While the recent popularity of the term 'gaslighting' suggests that the term is useful, some also worry that it is being used too widely. In the context of the philosophical debate, the aim to capture structural cases of gaslighting and the tendency to think of gaslighting as a kind of testimonial injustice also support a broader understanding. In this paper, I will assume a narrower understanding of gaslighting, which conceptualizes gaslighting as a (more or less) intentional form of manipulation taking place between two people. However, because my argument focuses on countering the effects of gaslighting, it will be compatible with a wider understanding of gaslighting.

⁷ Emotions are often conceived as mere bodily feelings that are apt to disrupt rather than contribute to the well-functioning of our cognitive capacities. While this sort of view has a long history in Western epistemology (see e.g. Jaggar 1989, 151 f), it has recently been challenged by a growing interest in the positive epistemic potential of emotions (see e.g. Brun, Doğuoğlu, and Kuenzle 2008).

⁸ The most salient alternative to this way of thinking about the epistemic role of emotions is the view that emotions directly justify evaluative judgments in much the same way as sensory perceptions justify empirical judgments (see Silva 2021). This view is associated with ‘perceptual’ theories of emotions, according to which emotions are perceptual experiences of value (see e.g. Döring 2007; Tappolet 2016). For the purposes of this paper, I will rely on Brady’s view of the epistemic role of emotions because it is less controversial. Perceptual theorists can agree that emotions have this sort of epistemic role as well. However, my argument will be compatible with more demanding accounts of the epistemic role of emotions.

⁹ So-called ‘outlaw emotions’, i.e. emotions that conflict with ‘dominant perceptions and values’ (Jaggar 1989, 166) can enable us to make these judgments even in contexts where we would have initially assessed the situation differently (see also Silva 2021).

¹⁰ This is reflected by the many examples of gaslighting discussed by Kate Abramson as well as Cynthia A. Stark (Abramson 2014; Stark 2019).

¹¹ My argument focuses on emotional gaslighting. In the following, I will use the term ‘gaslighting’ mainly to refer to emotional gaslighting. However, some of the points I make will apply to gaslighting in general.

¹² ‘Cognitive empathy’ is often used to refer to ‘simulationist’ approaches to ‘mindreading’ (see e.g. Heal 2003; Goldman 2006). Whether my notion of affective empathy coincides with simulationist approaches to mindreading depends on the details of how to conceive of simulating emotions that are beyond the scope of this paper.

¹³ Christoph Jäger and Eva Bänninger-Huber have recently explored the case of ‘meta-emotions’, i.e. emotions that are directed at other emotions (Jäger and Bänninger-Huber 2015). Another prominent example of such second-order mental states is Harry G. Frankfurt’s notion of ‘second-order desires’, i.e. desires that are directed at other desires (Frankfurt 1971). Jäger and Bänninger-Huber argue that not only second-order desires but also meta-emotions matter for agency and psychic harmony. I agree and want to further generalize the claim: whether an agent endorses or critically distances themselves from their first-order mental state of any kind can be a matter of different kinds of second-order mental states.

¹⁴ My argument focuses on affective empathy. In the following, I will use the term ‘empathy’ mainly to refer to affective empathy. However, some of the points I make apply to empathy in general, i.e. to the imaginative recreation of others’ affective as well as non-affective mental states.

¹⁵ This is the main focus of discussions of empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. In this context, ‘simulation’ or ‘perspective-taking’ is discussed as a form of ‘mindreading’ that enables us to ascribe mental states to others even though their minds are not directly accessible to us.

¹⁶ On the view of emotions and empathy I have been developing, this presupposes that we come to endorse their emotions as appropriate to their situation and thereby come to accept the evaluative judgment that corresponds to the emotional experience.

¹⁷ One of the most prominent theories in this field is C. Daniel Batson’s ‘empathy-altruism hypothesis’ (Batson 2011). From the point of view of the philosophy of empathy, the trouble with this account is that Batson’s notion of ‘empathic concern’ seems to blend aspects of empathy and sympathy.

¹⁸ Monika Betzler stresses that empathy is best understood as a dynamic exchange between two people, which makes use of information-seeking, feedback, dialogue, and adjustment, rather than as a mental state of the empathizer (Betzler 2019, 140–42). Although my notion of empathy is wider, in what follows, I will focus on cases of empathy in which there is such an interaction.

¹⁹ For the purposes of this paper, I will not take a stance on whether empathy plays a foundational role of morality but focus on the work of those who emphasize the relational value of empathy. I take the view that empathy has a special interpersonal function that is morally significant to be at least prima facie compatible with the view that it can play a more foundational role for morality.

²⁰ Song also uses the notion of acknowledgement in the sense I use it here (Song 2015, 447).

²¹ In a similar vein, Monika Betzler has pointed out that empathy conveys to a target that their emotional reactions are warranted and can thus enhance self-trust as well as self-esteem (Betzler 2019, 146f).

²² The notions of acknowledgement and reassurance have not always been clearly distinguished or used in the same way in the literature. For instance, Monika Betzler and Simon Keller use the notion of ‘acknowledgment’ in the way I use ‘reassurance’, i.e. as requiring endorsement (Betzler and Keller 2021, 11).

²³ In a similar vein, Andrew D. Spear compares the epistemic situation of the ‘gaslightee’ with the situation of a person engaged in a peer disagreement (Spear 2019).

²⁴ Kate Abramson discusses grief and depression that can be part of the final stage of gaslighting as appropriate responses that can also be the first step in a process of recovery (Abramson 2014, 23 f).

²⁵ If we followed perceptual theorists in thinking that emotions are perceptions of value, the analogy would be even more stringent. However, on most views that ascribe a cognitive role to emotions, it is apt to say that emotions involve a picture of or a way of seeing the world.

²⁶ This raises the question whether empathy is a virtue. Heather Battaly has argued that it is not (Battaly 2011). However, this question is beyond the scope of this paper.