Conservatives don’t need “studies.”
We observe human nature in the “wild” and act and think (and speak, when permitted) accordingly.
However, tiny minded liberals need “research” to figure out life.
Any normal person could have told you, based purely upon years of daily interaction, that “help-y,” “compassionate” people also tend to be impetuous, “righteously angry” hysterics.
(Google “concern troll,” for one thing.)
A paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that feelings of empathy toward a distressed person can inspire aggressive behavior. For some people, at least, feeling another’s pain is insufficient: You also experience the urge to harm the person they are in conflict or competition with. (…)
In other words, participants were, to a surprising degree, willing to inflict pain on a second person to help a distressed individual they felt empathy for. This occurred in spite of the fact that (a) both were total strangers, and (b) the second person had done absolutely nothing wrong.
The results should put a damper on what the researchers call “recent enthusiasm for interventions that involve administering caregiving-related neurohormones or empathy training.”
“Just as the self-esteem movement was not a panacea leading to happy, successful, and well-adapted children,” the researchers write, “oxytocin and/or empathy interventions may not stop problems such as bullying and other forms of aggression and violence, because aggression itself may result from empathy.”
