I’ve had several conversations with my mother who voted for Trump, and none of the conversations end well. It really all comes down to a lack of empathy. She cares about her family, but that’s about where it ends. I don’t think she is capable of seeing things from a different perspective.
I also look at workplaces, and how people just can’t get along. Again, if I had to pinpoint it, it’s a lack of empathy.
Here are a few interesting tidbits.
Psychology Today
College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new study presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students.
NPR
Nearly one quarter of all Americans reach for a bottle of Tylenol every week to take the edge off a headache, fever or toothache. Experiments suggest it might also have another effect on you. . . . We gave participants eight scenarios which described people in either physical pain or social pain. Physical pain meaning, for example, injuring the shin. Social pain would be experiencing rejection in a peer group. And we found that acetaminophen basically reduced empathy for the pain of those people.
Science Daily
When you take acetaminophen [Tylenol] to reduce your pain, you may also be decreasing your empathy for both the physical and social aches that other people experience, a new study suggests.
Pubmed
SSRIs [antidepressants] may be associated with another unwelcome clinical side effect—behavioral and affective indifference. . . .
Because this syndrome is commonly under-recognized by both patients and clinicians, we recommend advising patients who are about to embark on a course of SSRI treatment about the possibility of SSRI-induced indifference. Following the education of patients as well as their families, we suggest routine monitoring by the clinician during medication follow-up appointments.