Empathy in Polarized Democracies

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III: The Trouble with Facts: Reimagining the Role of Information in Democracy

Abstract

Wahl’s paper explores how the communities within which people interpret information shape what they do with the information they encounter, with particular attention to the cultivation of “imaginative empathy,” or the inclination to imagine the suffering of another. Drawing on in-depth interviews with university students who participated in dialogue across political divides, Wahl argues that among other functions, interpretive communities shape which information is dramatized into an imagined first-person experience. Whose suffering do we learn of but pass by, and with whose suffering do we enter into in an imagined experience that dramatizes moral and emotional stakes? Due to the way in which interpretive communities cultivate imagined empathy, Wahl argues, at issue in political divides is often not whether one agrees with a set of facts or principles but rather whether someone has been led to care about something or someone else more. It is often a matter of caring more about someone or something else, than it is about failing to see the principle underlying a position. This makes dialogue limited in its persuasive power. However it also means that dialogue can deepen the commitments of people who have already strained to imagine the experiences to which their interpretive communities have directed them, as well as, in keeping with the hope of theorists such as Danielle Allen, begin to imagine the inner lives of people outside their circle of concern.

Author

• Rachel Lee Wahl, University of Virginia