Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- Part I Innocent Bystander
- 2 Empathy, Its Arousal, and Prosocial Functioning
- 3 Development of Empathic Distress
- 4 Empathic Anger, Sympathy, Guilt, Feeling of Injustice
- Part II Transgression
- Part III Virtual Transgression
- Part IV Is Empathy Enough?
- Part V Empathy and Moral Principles
- Part VI Culture
- Part VII Intervention
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
4 - Empathic Anger, Sympathy, Guilt, Feeling of Injustice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- Part I Innocent Bystander
- 2 Empathy, Its Arousal, and Prosocial Functioning
- 3 Development of Empathic Distress
- 4 Empathic Anger, Sympathy, Guilt, Feeling of Injustice
- Part II Transgression
- Part III Virtual Transgression
- Part IV Is Empathy Enough?
- Part V Empathy and Moral Principles
- Part VI Culture
- Part VII Intervention
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
To recapitulate what I have covered so far, I have defined empathy as an affective response more appropriate to another's situation than one's own, described five mechanisms of empathic arousal ranging from classical conditioning to role-taking, and delineated stages in the development of empathic distress. Despite the focus on empathic affect, I have also pointed out the important contributions of cognition to the arousal and development of empathic distress and generalizing beyond the immediate situation. In this final chapter on the bystander model, affect continues to share center stage with cognition – in this case, causal attribution.
Most people make spontaneous attributions about the cause of events (Weiner, 1985), and they surely do this when observing someone in distress. Depending on the attribution, their empathic distress may be reduced, neutralized, or transformed into other empathic affects. It may be reduced or neutralized when the victim is viewed as responsible for his own plight. Humans have a tendency, when the circumstances are ambiguous, to attribute the cause of another's action (but not their own action) to his own internal dispositions: the “fundamental attribution error” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971). They also have a tendency to blame the victim for his or her own misfortune in order to support their “belief in a just world” (I'll be safe if I don't act that way) (Lerner & Miller, 1978). But given the evidence that humans tend to empathize with and help others in distress (chapter 2), it seems clear that blaming victims is not incompatible with empathy.
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- Empathy and Moral DevelopmentImplications for Caring and Justice, pp. 93 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000