Comment on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 01:04:49 GMT

By the natural expression of empathy I mean the empathy we feel at gut, involuntary level when someone being in distress makes us feel bad. For example, babies crying when other babies are upset may be the first expressions of this (though it may also reflect a selfish concern that they are in a 'bad situation'). But certainly, seeing other people in pain can make us feel nauseous and distressed and we often want to help.

I wrote that socialization forces us to repress natural empathy as much as it requires us to fake it in some contexts. We feel empathy most naturally in physically immediate contexts (for example, towards a beggar on the street or towards someone in class being teased) and we are often socialized to repress or at least tone down some of this empathy, and less naturally in spatially removed contexts, in which we are socialized to further develop it.

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