Why do normal people lack empathy?

@del diablo

Not all those on the spectrum have trouble with empathy(I mean they may be a higher chance but I have no data), like in the general population there are those who misread signs and signals from people.

Socialisation probably plays a part, such as if you've had an active social life you might be better equipped to empathise. From personal experience I'd say 'mental maturity' is connected to empathy, as in young adults/teens it seems a lot less present.

edited 22nd Apr '11 4:39:03 PM by IanExMachina

Can't find any graphs or tables off of google, but here's some articles:

Cognitive Empathy

College students might less empathic.

While children are more empathic.

And holy crap, Yahoo Answer has a decent answer. Excuse me as I go check the temperature of Hell.

Anyway, there could be a lot of factors in play, but from what I've read in those articles and in the past, there's two major things that decide how empathetic a person is:

1. If they had a good childhood full of friends and very caring parents, they're more likely to have empathy while children with less friends and, um, not so good parents are less empathetic.
2. There is some correlation between empathy and intelligence, though people still argue about the causation. Can't say I have much to talk about there since I'm not too versed in that area.

Would that not mean that "empthy" is not "understanding another person" but rather "common quicks within a community, universal outside of community", and where the hell do people pick up thinking the second one are correct?

Those studies don't seem to be dealing with empathy as defined by the OP. He's using the word somewhat oddly.

"common quicks"?

Um, what does that even mean?

At a guess quirks, as it makes sense in context of the sentence. (Empathy being the ability to understand common quirks in your social group?)

edited 22nd Apr '11 4:56:30 PM by IanExMachina

Also, empathy doesn't mean what you think it does, at all. It has nothing to do with understanding people's emotions via body language or whatever. It has to do with projecting yourself into other people's positions and caring about how they might feel. Thus, when you make someone upset you feel bad. That's what empathy means.

edited 22nd Apr '11 5:01:29 PM by Clarste

Not sure who you're addressing there Clarste, but I'm going by the second definition here, which is to say, being able to understand and sympathize with another person without having experienced their same position.

edited 22nd Apr '11 5:06:19 PM by Usht

I was adressing del diablo, who seems to think it means fluency in reading body language.

Clarste; Not a problem if I define it as something else first. Got a better word describing the meaning?

Fluency in reading body language.

While I do agree that unusual usage of words is completely acceptable if they're defined beforehand, it seems there was some confusion as irrelevant studies were linked so I decided to clear it up for future readers of this thread.

edited 22nd Apr '11 6:10:52 PM by Clarste

In answer to the thread title: I have no idea - I'm not normal and I suspect that I don't know any normal people.

And I'm saying this on the message board of an online community of people who routinely analyse various media to identify how various tropes are used/averted/inverted/subverted/converted/diverted/deconstructed/lampshaded/cel-shaded etc - which "normal" people probably don't do (if they actually exist at all)

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:11:08 PM by Wolf1066

I wouldn't call myself normal, but I have always found myself strangely lacking in human empathy to the point that it takes a surprisingly large amount of intellectual effort to view others as important and loved individuals in their own right and not simple objects to be used for my own amusement.

I'm not proud of this.

edited 23rd Apr '11 4:44:23 AM by joeyjojo

This one has very little empathy and is almost incapable of understanding people unless they tell her their feelings directly and explicitly, which causes her no end of trouble in social interactions. But then again, this one does not consider herself entirely normal.

As for the reason, this one suspects that it was a result of a rather messed up socialisation, but exactly where it went wrong, this one cannot tell. Been that way as early as in kindergarten.

I am on the autism spectrum, and sometimes I think that I am not entirely empathic myself, though I try. (Except for a phase I went through a couple of years ago when I deemed it stupid or some nonsense.) I think this manifests itself in my historically one-sided definition of friendship, for instance (which I have only recently broken).

And I don't understand the title either. (I tend to take "normal" people as meaning most people)

Combo Breaking:

If we are still going by the "Fluency in reading body language." definition I feel I'm not lacking in empathy. I have no idea about normal, I'd say my outlook isn't too estranged to those of my peers so maybe.

With the other definitions that involve understanding other's emotions/inner experience I'd still say I am able to be empathic.

edited 23rd Apr '11 1:42:30 PM by IanExMachina

Because we're pack animals. People outside our monkeysphere is not particularly relevant, that's how we're wired, that's how we roll.

Perhaps because empathy is a feeling your body can switch off or switch on when appropriate, like anger, love, and surprise? Just because people don't empathise 24/7, doesn't mean they never do.

I find empathy, and by extension guilt, to be social strengths but technical weaknesses, one reason is that I believe self-preservation should come first, then self-profit from the situation, and then how others would fare because of your actions, another reason is, and I'll admit I'm kinda pushing it here, is that, in TV programs, a character would do something dubious, profit greatly, but then their conscience gets the better of him/her, and they reverse their action, causing them to lose that profit and and in some cases end up worse off. one example would be the character fessing up to a crime like taking a tramp's £10 note when no-one's looking, something that I would do without caring, even if that tramp needed it for food, and I needed it for a game, Self-profit->His needs in my opinion.

Yes

But we're rational, thinking beings. We should override our natural instincts with reasoning and strive to have compassion for humanity as a whole.

There are limit of what rationality can achieve. Transcending emotion is very difficult.

worldwide compassion is eventually will be achieved through communication technology and spread of worldwide culture. people have creater larger and larger herd through history (clan > tribe > city-states > nation), eventually it will encompass the whole world.

I think there are two major possibilities here.

One is that OP misrepresents empathy as a special power, and of course with that definition, it's going to be very hard to come by. Add in the fact that OP has admitted to being autistic, and that autistic people often believe that they have a special power, and it also makes sense that OP would state that he has this special power that he has misnamed as empathy.

Or it's this, wherein OP, not being able to understand empathy himself, is both unable to empathise and unable to know that he is unable to empathise.

Empathy isn't about somehow perfectly reading a person's motives and feelings in the blink of an eye. It's not emotional osmosis. It involves perception of the emotional situation of another person, based on outward signals, and exploration of that situation from a hypothetical inside perspective, in such a way that, when successful, it allows for ease of understanding and communication, and better relations in general. Of course, being perception based, it is very much fallible.