Female Empathy

A proposed revision

I believe the community’s common understanding of female empathy may need revision. This is for two reasons:

1. Studies consistently show that women score roughly the same as men on empathy studies that include both clinically recognized varieties

2. The current understanding of female solipsism makes explaining women’s ability to function normally in society without exhibiting overly anti-social traits difficult if general solipsism truly excludes the possibility of empathy

It is important to note that studies are dealing with average people, and the average male, who will be a DELTA, is generally not very empathetic. However, even with our SSH knowledge, we cannot draw clear conclusions about how empathetic women might be by comparing it to the male scores due to a lack of behavioral profile data (SSH or otherwise) of both male and female participants.

Some definitions:
- Cognitive empathy: the ability to understand another’s mental perspective
- Affective empathy: the ability to share in another’s emotional state

I will actually be arguing for the primacy of cognitive empathy because its’ definition most clearly aligns with our community’s definition as given by Vox:

“Empathy is correctly perceiving the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives.”

Therefore, we can see that what is called affective empathy and the insights it brings into the emotional and mental states of others may be enabled and recognized by one’s cognitive capacity, but may not actually be empathy itself. For our purposes this will be the case. Moreover, while Vox defines empathy as perceiving, there is an unclear relationship between cognition and perception. I would argue that the highly empathetic may perceive and cognize information so quickly that the process of empathy may feel like an integrated perception rather than two distinct processes with cognition happening after perception. Whatever the exact case may be, I will be using Vox’s definition to critique the current understanding of female solipsism and empathy as follows:

If:

1. Female solipsism excludes any possibility of empathy

2. Female solipsism is not mutable

Then it is unreasonable to hold that:

• Women can recognize basic emotional states like happiness and sadness in other people at all

Even if we suppose that women are say, projecting their own happiness onto another person who happens to be smiling, it is clear that women still recognize that someone is smiling. If this were not the case and the woman’s emotional projection and the other person’s emotional state were purely coincidental, this would mean that women are functionally severely autistic and unable to process any emotional cues at all. This complete non-empathy would be observable but is not. This would be true whether this happens through pure perception and/or cognition or involves any affective components.

To reconcile the observable reality of basic female social functioning along with their apparent solipsism and the various data found in studies, I propose that the issue here is not entirely with intrinsic empathetic capacity, but a lack of empathetic imperative. In other words, it is not entirely that women lack empathetic capacity or even neccesarily have greatly reduced capacity compared to most men, it is that they do not have the motivation to apply and recognize their empathetic insights.

Empathetic Imperative:
The extrinsic and/or intrinsic motivation to recognize and apply empathetic insights

The reasons for this lack of imperative are unknown, however the most likely causes are probably:

• Lack of biological or instinctual drive

• Lack of same-sex social pressure

Using this new term of empathetic imperative, we can better understand how women may be scoring as high or higher than men across so many studies given their observable egocentric tendencies. Because the studies are specifically asking women to apply some level of emotional recognition, we can assume that the tests are themselves raising their empathetic imperative.

“I wonder what is making me feel so happy today…”

As well, there is still room to assume that female empathetic capacity is reduced compared to men’s, if their egocentric tendencies are inhibiting the insights they glean from affective states. For example, a woman might become sad because someone else around her is sad, but this doesn’t mean she will recognize her own, new state of sadness as resulting from someone else. This would be consistent with past insights about solipsism and my new empathetic imperative explanation.

Lastly, given that Vox states that solipsism is immutable, the term may have to be revised or discarded.