《外刊精读》同理心具有意想不到的负面作用

The surprising downsides of empathy 同理心具有意想不到的负面作用 By Richard Fisher Empathy is a fundamentally squishy term. 归根结底，同理心是一个很模糊的说法。 Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, defines empathy specifically as the act of stepping into someone's mind to experience their feelings - and it's this that he takes issue with. 保罗·布鲁姆是一位任职于耶鲁大学的心理学家。他把同理心明确地定义为“思人之所思，感人之所感”，而这正是他所反对的。 People are much more likely to open their hearts - or wallets - when there is a visible beneficiary whose pain could be alleviated. The charity that campaigns with a single story of a named, suffering child may win more donations compared with the charity that deploys statistics describing 1,000 anonymous children. 如果人们能看到一位受益人的痛苦得到缓解，那他们就更可能爱心流露、慷慨解囊。同样是慈善机构，一家机构的宣传讲述的是一个有名有姓的孩子如何受苦，而另一家则使用数据来呈现1000个匿名孩子的状况，前者可能会赢得更多的捐款。 There's nothing wrong with using personal stories to raise awareness of a worthy cause, of course, but the identifiable victim effect does nonetheless siphon billions of dollars away from where it could do more good for a greater number of people. 用个体的故事来提升人们对一项重要议题的关注自然无可厚非。但“可识别受害者效应”确实让一些机构轻松收纳了数十亿美元，而这些钱本可以为更多人做更多好事。 The research suggests that we ought to start making a clearer distinction between empathy and its apparent synonym: "compassion". To be compassionate, it does not mean you have to share somebody's feelings. It is more about the idea of extending kindness towards others. 研究显示，我们应该将同理心与其显而易见的近义词“同情心”进行明确区分。有同情心，并不意味着你必须感同身受，其重点更多地在于给他人以善意。 Bloom uses the example of an adult comforting a child who is terrified of a small, barking dog. The adult doesn't need to feel the child's fear to help. "There can be compassion for the child, a desire to make his or her distress go away, without any shared experience or empathic distress," he writes. 布鲁姆用成年人安慰被小狗狂吠吓坏的孩子为例进行了说明。要帮助这个孩子，这位成人无须亲身体会孩子的恐惧。他写道：“对这个孩子可以抱有同情，或者一种想要消除他（她）痛苦的愿望，其中无须含有任何共同经历，或因共情而产生的心理不适。”