The link between empathy and openmindedness

[Chrisd]

On 24-1-2024 at 3:53 PM, Carl-Richard said:

@Schizophonia Wouldn't you say being sensitive to threats to the ego would be more accurately described by neuroticism (proneness to negative emotions, emotional instability?). If anything, a certain level of neuroticism may make you more prone to investigate a variety of different ideas because of the rapidly changing mental state, and being prone to threats could make you more prone to analyzing things in general (and also the way you analyze things could be particularly thorough). It could certainly make you more receptible to other people's emotional state as well.

That's a very positive way to think about neuroticism. I tend to think of it as a blockage to proper analysis. When I'm in a state of agitation the stress gets in the way of being able to think clearly. Maybe agitation isn't the same thing as neuroticism.

Edited January 31 by Chrisd

[Chrisd]

Are you saying in empathy it's also necessary to be openminded? I think this is really interesting, you can't be empathic without considering your own viewpoints to be potentially flawed.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Chrisd said:

That's a very positive way to think about neuroticism. I tend to think of it as a blockage to proper analysis. When I'm in a state of agitation the stress gets in the way of being able to think clearly. Maybe agitation isn't the same thing as neuroticism.

There are many ways to talk about neuroticism. You can talk about it in a Freudian sense (psychic conflict), in a Big 5 personality sense (emotional instability, negative emotion), or maybe in your sense.

Maybe most relevant to your sense, in the Big 5 sense, neurotics tend to analyze things in a way that skews heavily towards catastrophizing or worst-case scenario thinking, whether it's about what is going to happen in the future, or about something that happened in the past, or their self-image, etc. Basically, a lot of negative thinking.

They also tend to experience a lot of hesitation and struggle with uncertainty, exactly because they tend to fixate on the potential negative outcomes of decisions involving uncertainty and paralyze themselves ("Should I do this or should I do that? I'm not sure! This decision is so hard, there is so much at stake!"), which also ties into the Freudian sense of the word (inner conflict).

Also, inherent to emotional instability (or "lability") is the tendency for the mind to rapidly change its state and therefore also thoughts, which in itself could increase the potential for conflict (more thoughts = more potential for inner conflict). And when the thoughts tend to be negative, then you can easily see how that could create a lot of inner conflict.

So while you can define the word in different ways, you can also find places where the definitions overlap. Definitions are only ever starting points to any investigation. Where you end up is usually much greater than where you start.

Edited January 31 by Carl-Richard

[Osaid]

This was very simply exemplified to me when I was talking to some guy about animals a long time ago.

I talked about how pigs are intelligent and similar to dogs and he literally said something like "something that can fall over in a ditch isn't the same as a dog." (the context was about some video of a pig stuck in a ditch, and him saying that pigs are stupid so he deserves to eat them)

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Chrisd said:

Are you saying in empathy it's also necessary to be openminded? I think this is really interesting, you can't be empathic without considering your own viewpoints to be potentially flawed.

Empathy is by definition a state of expanding your experience to include someone else's experience, so yes, it's openmindedness in that sense. But like I concluded above with neuroticism, openmindedness can have many definitions. People who like to investigate many different ideas can be openminded in that sense but also be emotionally or socially stunted in various ways. There are many ways the mind can dissociate itself into these intricately contracted niches. That's simply survival.

Edited January 31 by Carl-Richard

[Yimpa]

Open mindedness is something I still struggle due to being raised in a very conservative upbringing. I suppose I should be open minded to viewing my upbringing more as a gift rather than a curse. It allows me to have a reference experience of what it’s like to live in a very narrow and rigid perspective and what it’s like to be free of that. I can’t wait to see where I’ll be 5-10 years from now.

[bebotalk]

On 22/01/2024 at 6:18 PM, Carl-Richard said:

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=e-Research

(It's an undergraduate article, but at least this passage is well-written).

I think this makes a lot of sense. If you're talking to someone who comes off as unreasonably rude, who doesn't seem to care about your opinion, who scoffs at your arguments, who says you're stupid, etc., then it's probably not just that they don't care about your feelings, but it's likely that they're actually not able to put themselves in your shoes. Hence, they don't just lack empathy, but also openmindedness.

Again, I think this makes a lot of sense. What do you think? ()

 

Here is some other research on the topic:

• "Similar Personality Patterns Are Associated with Empathy in Four Different Countries"
• "Associations between Medical Student Empathy and Personality: A Multi-Institutional Study"
• "Empathy and big five personality model in medical students and its relationship to gender and specialty preference: a cross-sectional study" 
• "Relationship between empathy and the big five personality traits in a sample of Spanish adolescents"
• "Associations between empathy and big five personality traits among Chinese undergraduate medical students"

The two are correlated, yes.