(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A recently published study indicates that right-leaning people may ultimately be more humanitarian and “empathetic” in their outlook than leftists, conservative commentator Chris Brady wrote for Glenn Beck’s website.
According to the study, titled “Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals: Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment,” conservative-leaning people tend to be more sensitive to the humanity of their political opponents, even those that they strongly disagree with.
Researchers, led by the University of Queensland’s James Casey, understood empathy to mean “sympathy for and understanding of another person’s suffering, with an aim to reduce that suffering,” a trait that they argue has the capacity to “bridge political divides.”
With that definition in mind, they found that “conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives,” meaning that those on the left tended to sow political division.
Empathy, according to researchers, has some link to a lack of clear-cut moral convictions.
The reason for the left’s lack of empathy, researchers therefore speculated, is the “harsher moral judgments” that they tend to pass on others, particularly their conservative opponents who stand in the way of perceived moral progress.
Despite conclusions being somewhat favorable for conservative empathy, however, researchers were quick to qualify their findings by noting that leftists may have good reasons for passing harsh judgment on conservatives.
“We have argued that much of the difference in empathy is because of differences in perceptions of harm caused by the opponent’s political group,” they wrote, noting that leftist concerns may not be “unfounded or without reason,” because a “victimized group may have good reason to be upset at another group that has harmed them.”
Thus, they concluded, the Left may be justified in its current moral crusade, because victims have the right to feel hurt, even if “the perpetrator group is sometimes sympathetic and benevolent.”
