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?

I am a fan of an old German saying: "Good intentions are the opposite of good actions."

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

"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?"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57542754-71/eureka-enginee...

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.

You are correct, that analytical thought is necessary to have a shot at seeing how another person is thinking... but to believe that you have seen how another person is thinking requires only intuition.

It's wrong, of course, wrong in drastic, often tragic, degrees as often as it is right (performs no better than random chance). This has been known for a long time in behavioral neuroscience. How we respond to another persons face when they are feeling different emotions is extremely inaccurate and quite useless, but we are all weak to believing that our conclusions are valid. This is why polygraphs do not work. They rely on the intuition of the examiner rather than science. So, they perform the same as random guessing. In addition to just being wrong half the time, such intuitions are easily manipulated by some people (either trained or an ability they just develop naturally).

The human mind has a great many very reliable flaws. They were probably useful for survival at some point as they seem endemic to the structure of the brain itself (and we learn more all the time about their neurophysiological origin) but almost certainly useless at best and dangerous at worst today. We certainly don't live in anything that resembles the environment our brains evolved to survive in for thousands of years. (In small extremely intimate groups on the savannah with rare intense bursts of life-or-death stress but life mostly consisting of eating, having sex, and sleeping.)

Long experienced cops believe they can tell when people are lying. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. Average people believe they can tell what someone is feeling by looking at their face. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. It's hard for many to accept that their ability to read other people is only as accurate as flipping a coin, but that's what we've got evidence for. In some ways, this is odd, since we have mirror neurons that specifically make us unconsciously mimic other people when physically close to them, and I would think this would lead to being able to understand them better, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

This is wrong. Empathy in the context of psychology is a feeling rather than a cognition. The kind of empathy you're talking about is a cognitive sort of empathy that doesn't involve a feeling process.

There is actually a distinction between bad empathy and good empathy.

Bad empathy is the type you describe: it allows you to understand other people's perspective. It can be bad because it allows you to exploit them. Think an expert salesman or a pick up artist who knows exactly how to see the world from the perspective of their victim.

Good empathy, on the other hand, includes the other as part of your feeling system. You will refuse to hurt the other because by hurting them you yourself feel bad. This is a non-logical feeling process rather than something analytical.