Is It OK to Feel Good During the Coronavirus Outbreak?

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It can feel selfish to feel happy while others are suffering, but constantly taking on others' pain can quickly lead to burnout. Here's how to find the middle ground.

or background. This is because we feel more empathetic toward our own"kind" than we do toward those different from us. And that’s not necessarily a good thing because, as Dr. Seuss expressed it, “a person’s a person no matter how small,” meaning every life is equally valuable. In other words, empathy can derail us from living up to what we recognize as an important value: the value of equality or fairness.Finally, empathy can make you exhibit something called"scope insensitivity.

Rationally, you should be willing to donate more as the number of endangered panda bears increases, right? That’s indeed what researchers find. , participants were willing to donate, on average, $11.67 to rescue one panda bear, and $22 to rescue four. But this happened only when information about the endangered panda bears was presented in a “dry”—that is, non-empathy-inducing—fashion: as “dots.

It is because of empathy—and the scope insensitivity it engenders—that we are often willing to donate huge amounts of time, money, or other resources to help out a single identifiable victim whose story stirs us, even as we are willing to ignore the suffering of a much large number of victims who do not evoke the same levels of empathy in us.

Does this mean empathy is always bad? No, not necessarily. When it comes to positive feelings—e.g., sharing the happiness of a colleague who has won an award, or the love that a child feels for a pet—empathy is a good thing. Empathy can also signal to others that you care for them, which is good. However, it can also lead to negative outcomes in the ways discussed above.

 

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