Korean J Psychosom Med.
2022 Dec;30(2):55-65. 10.22722/KJPM.2022.30.2.55.
The Empathy and Justice Contemplated From the Neuroscientific Perspective in the Age of Social Divisions and Conflicts
- Affiliations
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- 1Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Konyang University, Daejeon, Korea
- 2Konyang University Myunggok Medical Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea
- KMID: 2538667
- DOI: http://doi.org/10.22722/KJPM.2022.30.2.55
Abstract
- Although humans exist as Homo Empathicus, human society is actually constantly divided and conflicted between groups. The human empathy response is very sensitive to the justice of others, and depending on the level of others’ justice, they may feel empathy or schadenfreude to the suffering of them. However, our empathy to others’ suffering are not always fair, and have inherent limitations of ingroup-biased empathy. Depending on whether the suffering other persons belongs to an ingroup or an outgroup, we may feel biased empathy or biased schadenfreude to them without even realizing it. Recent advances in information and communication technology facilitate biased access to ingroup-related SNS or ingroup media, thereby deepening the establishment of a more biased semantic information network related groups. These processes, through interacting with the inherent limitation of empathy, can form a vicious cycle of more biased ingroup empathy and ingroup-relat-ed activities, and accelerate divisions and conflicts. This research investigated the properties and limitations of empathy by reviewing studies on the neural mechanism of empathy. By examining the relationship between empathy and justice from a neuroscientific point of view, this research tried to illuminate the modern society of di-vision and conflict in a different dimension from the classical perspective of social science.
